As I wrote in Part I, in failing to just accept that, on the curve of “femininity,” most people with XX chromosomes (otherwise known as girls and women) will cluster somewhere that does involve wearing skirts but probably doesn’t involve spending two hours a day on makeup (and that people far to each side of that clustering are no less female than those within it), we have unintentionally made womanhood smaller. Hence, if the first problem with “girl power” is... Read more

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I had an issue of the magazine “Girls Life” that featured those original “girl power” icons, the Spice Girls. One of the pop stars (I can’t recall which) was quoted in the story saying, “Feminism has become a dirty word. Girl power is a nineties way of saying it.” Why, in the 1990’s, had feminism become a “dirty word?” Because of sustained and ultimately successful push back against the “burn your bra”... Read more

My husband and I will be married ten years this December. We have three kids (two of them old enough not to go to bed so early on the weekends anymore), two careers, an old house, and various sports allegiances that suck up most of our television-viewing time. Hence, we don’t often carve out the necessary hours for watching non-kid-friendly movies. Several years ago, we made a pact that, when we have time to view a whole film, we will... Read more

We are at the dawn of a modern dark age that is counterintuitively reliant on advancing technology. For the renaissance to come, we must each recognize and reject the forces pulling us away from one another, and away from the truth. Fides et Ratio Saint John Paul II begins his 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, with these words: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” As the late pope,... Read more