Courtney Macavinta, a feminist author and founder of the teen empowerment organization Respect RX is spearheading leadership summits for women who want to become leaders in helping girls around self-esteem issues!  There are three trainings–called Respect Rally Leader Trainings–on the west coast in April: one in San Jose, CA, one in Portland, OR, and one in Los Angeles, CA. Details below!

Are you a:
• girl service provider
• school staff member
• student activities director
• youth organization
• parent
• girl conference planner
• prevention agency

Who wants to:
…teach girls about self-respect?
…show girls how to create mutual respect in relationships?
…break the cycle of and prevent alcohol, tobacco and drug abuse, eating disorders, bullying, pregnancy, STDs, high-school dropout or dating violence among teens?
…foster self-respecting choices among teen girls?
…develop girls as leaders who spread respect for all?
…host an annual interactive girl conference that’s coupled with a respect-building curriculum for your organization?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you’re ready to attend a Respect Rally Leader Training!

Click here to view more details

Check out this great interview that I just did with Lauren Baratz-Logsted of Teen Fiction Cafe: http://www.teenfictioncafe.blogspot.com/

Seriously, I can’t give enough praise for KMS hair products and Aveda hair products… although obviously our interview covered a lot more about the Supergirls than just their shiny tresses!

Just for you-know-what’s and giggles, I feel like sharing some of my favorite quotes and passages from books. Check ‘em out; feel free to click on the links to see exactly where the quotes are from. What are some of your favorite sayings or passages?

“Science, you say, will save us. Science, I say, has destroyed us… The promises of science have not been kept. Promises of efficiency and simplicity have bred nothing but pollution and chaos. We are a fractured and frantic species moving down a path of destruction… The language of science comes with no signposts about good and bad…. We ask not why you will not govern yourselves, but how can you? Your world moves so fast that if you stop even for an instant to consider the implications of your actions, someone more efficient will whip past you in a blur.” (Dan Brown)

“… Have you thought of the fellow on the other side of [the fire]? The finicky, critical husband looking through his art books on mythical Greece. What worship has HE ever known? Real worship! Without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that… I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity. The old story of bluster, and do bugger-all… While I sit there… a freaky boy tries to conjure the reality!… Then in the morning, I put away my books on the cultural shelf, close up the kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproductive statue of Dionysus for luck–and go off to hospital to treat him for insanity!” (Peter Shaffer, Equus)

“On her kitchen table she set out the joint, a pack of matches, and a saucer. She positioned a chair in front of them and turned off all but one light. She had a cassette marked DANCE that had been broken for five years. Training her desk light on it, she opened it up and spliced out the mangled stretch with Scotch Magic tape and nail scissors.  The dope tasted like April in college; like the music on the tape. She danced… her arms and legs mixing the last faint banks of smoke into a haze. She thought she was crying when “Beast of Burden” played, but when she opened her eyes there were no tears and it seemed that she’d only imagined it.  Outside the kitchen window she lay down on the wet, sloping shingles. They were made of real slate.” (Jonathan Franzen)

“‘What’s life for?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.’” (Jonathan Franzen)

“Oh, Oscar! When will you learn that there is no such thing as free shrimp!?” (Arrested Development)

“Then when you wake up one day about forty years old and you say, ‘My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there.’ And you don’t feel very different from what you’ve always felt. And there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s a hoax. It was a hoax! A dreadful hoax! They made you miss everything.  We thought life by analogy was a journey, was a pilgrimage which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is or maybe heaven, after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and there was supposed to be singing and dancing while the music was being played. (Alan Watts)

One of my friends sent me this funny video knowing that I’d appreciate it, given my embarrassing love of music by teen stars like Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, and Selena Gomez.

I’ve been feeling ambivalent about how Disney “engineers” teen stars.  Lately, I’ve been having trouble watching “Hannah Montana” or listening to Selena Gomez and not feeling guilty about participating in these teen girls being turned into brands and sort of, dare I say, exploited by Disney?  I used to joke about my immature taste in music being innocuous, but I personally think the Vanity Fair photoshoot with Miley Cyrus over the summer was a pretty creepy situation (it really seemed like it boiled down to adults who should know better than to take advantage of a girl too young to be able to spot when people are going to use her to sell magazines) and we’ve seen what has happened to Lindsay Lohan, probably the oldest of the actors who were Disney stars during my lifetime.

What’s your take? Do you think Disney interacts with its young stars in an ethical way, or is there a conversation to be had here about how Disney can promote teen stars without commanding their identities? (again, exhibit a: Lindsay Lohan)

For irony’s sake, check out my new favorite song by Demi Lovato:

After some serious thinking, I’ve decided that I’m going to start asking myself “What would Maureen Dowd do?” and “What would Liz Lemon do?” I think that about covers my role model deficit for now.

(As a person of faith, every now and then I channel Jesus for advice and support, but I don’t think Jesus ever had to deal with the blogosphere and constant anxiety over his hair)

While I’m on the topic of Maureen Dowd, Liz Lemon, and other things tangentially feminist, there is a really interesting article in the Daily Beast that discusses the new cover of Ms. Check it out!

I just saw this YouTube video (not appropriate for work) and I think it’s positively hysterical; the kids in the video all go to the high school I graduated from, and actually, part of it is shot in my HS alma mater.  I feel a little creepy posting this, but I think it’s really clever, actually really well-edited, and a jumping-off point for a rather important sociological discussion.  (Plus, the song sounds vaguely like one of my favorite songs, “One Year, Six Months.”).

Given the 5-10 “enlarge your penis” spam e-mails I get a day, I’ve been thinking more and more lately about men’s anxiety over their penis size.  The logical segway would be to compare this anxiety with the stress women have about their weight.  After all, if we were going with society’s rather limiting constructs of gender, bigger penises make men more masculine and being skinny and smaller makes women more feminine.  Both genders’ size anxiety is something they can do virtually nothing about (given that 99% of diets fail, and cosmetic surgery to “remedy” both anxieties are limited to people of very elevated socioeconomic status).  It’s interesting that both the ads for penis enlargement pills for men and diet pills for women both come from the angle of “Do it to please the opposite sex!” which I think implies that these sizes issues would be a much smaller problem if people weren’t hardwired to do everything possible to entice the opposite sex.  And it’s also interesting–and COMPLETELY FRUSTRATING–that the second one checks of which gender she or he is on Facebook, Facebook users are bombarded with sidebar ads for diet pills and penis enlargment pills, respectively.

Anyway, enjoy this funny video.

Between August of 2006 and March of 2008, whenever I had an ethical, professional, or even personal question, I asked myself, “What would Eliot Spitzer do?”  I was positively in love with Eliot Spitzer.  He gave me an award when I was in high school for my feminist activism and for those two and a half years, he was probably my favorite man in New York.  I so admired how he stood up for people who were underprivileged even though he came from a place of great personal privilege and how he always stood for doing what was right. I also really liked watching him give speeches; he had such an electrifying energy and he just made me feel like I was part of something big and important (like New York State)!  This is completely embarrassing, but for awhile I had his picture hanging above my desk, and he consistently reminded me on hard days why I remained a feminist, a progessive, and a writer, when all of these things can honestly be rather difficult sometimes!

Needless to say, my admiration of Eliot Spitzer came crashing down last March and it became very clear that he actually stood for none of the things that I thought he did.  And I haven’t quite found a new role model to take his place.  I really love J.K. Rowling, but she seems to stay out of the public spotlight and doesn’t explicitly touch on political topics in her writing (although I would argue that the later Harry Potter books, particularly the fifth one, are very overt protests of what happens when governments are given too much power and they have major religious and spiritual themes).  I totally look up to Carrie Bradshaw, and I often find myself thinking, “What would Carrie Bradshaw do?” but Carrie Bradshaw isn’t a good person for a gal to model herself after, because frankly, as stylish and empowered as Carrie is, she is also somewhat of an overgrown adolescent.

As I prepare for my book to be published and to enter the spotlight in a very new way, I need a new role model, for professional, ethical, and style purposes (you have to admit, Eliot Spitzer did have style).  Any suggestions?  Who are your role models, career-wise, ethics-wise, or otherwise?

I have no idea while I’m not better at blogging.  I’m on Twitter all day and I’m really good at updating it, so I have no clue while I can’t devote myself to a social media site devoted to… me! (aka this blog)

So, for now on, I’m going to blog way more often.  Or at least try.

I’m really pleased to announce that I’m in the process of setting up a blog book tour for Supergirls Speak Out to build some momentum around the book.  I have really great blogs so far on the schedule, and when I have the whole month of March lined up, I’ll post my schedule here. I got the idea to do a virtual book tour from Rachel Kramer Bussel, a fabulous author and probably the queen of do-it-yourself book publicity.

What are some of your favorite blogs to read?