Watch this video about a performance piece by Sarah Hughes.

Over the span of more than 10 years, Hughes has traveled the globe documenting people in one outfit in which they feel safe and comfortable and one in which they feel sexy. The photographs are accompanied by audio interviews in which predominately women, and some men, answer questions about themselves and what makes them feel safe, sexy, vulnerable and powerful. Hughes has taken the project to Canada, Sweden, Brazil, South Africa and Swaziland.

This is definitely true for me personally.

The public is increasingly going to Wikipedia as a research source: According to a recent Pew survey, the percentage of all American adults who use the site to look for information increased to 42 percent in May 2010, from 25 percent in February 2007. This translates to 53 percent of adults who regularly use the Internet.

What I don’t do is contribute to wikis. Why?
I don’t consider myself “the expert” on much of anything and even if I did, I’m not sure I’d have the patience to sit down and clean up everybody else’s misinformation. I am constantly AMAZED at how much time my C. will spend “telling people on the internet that they are wrong.” The same people, over and over again. I am convinced a lot of insomniac men sit around in their underwear at night, talking (typing) shiz to one another. I would rather read than yell at my computer – call me crazy.

Do you contribute? Because now I’m thinking that more of us ladies should do so.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

Consider and discuss:

…. the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

Our recession has been around long enough for left and right-leaning thinktanks to collaborate on papers on topic.

I thought this one from the American Center for Progress and the Hamilton Foundation was worth skimming through.

And for the second time in less than 6 months, the Atlantic has a cover that’s screaming how men are becoming obsolete.

The phenomenal growth of women-owned businesses has made headlines for three decades—women consistently have been launching new enterprises at twice the rate of men, and their growth rates of employment and revenue have outpaced the economy.

So, it is dismaying to see that, despite all this progress, on average, women-owned business are still small compared with businesses owned by men. And while the gap has narrowed, as of 2008—the latest year for which numbers are available—the average revenues of majority women-owned businesses were still only 27% of the average of majority men-owned businesses.

More lefty liberals writing about their friends from the New York Times.

Fascinating – read it here.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

Modern American marriage was the subject of this article in the Christian Science Monitor this week. Some interesting stats contained within:

Only 50 or 60 percent of Americans say that adultery would be an automatic deal breaker for their marriage, says Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington who has written many books on sex, love, and relationships; a decade ago that number was closer to 90 percent.

“Every study I know shows 85 percent of people or more saying that nonmonogamy is wrong in every instance,” Ms. Schwartz says. “But people also feel that you should eat three nutritious meals a day low in sugar and high in calcium.”

To this day, marriage is still intertwined with the country’s mores and laws. Everything from tax law to health insurance is affected by one’s marital status. Unlike in many European countries, where unmarried couples live and raise children together, marriage in the US is considered a more serious, valued, and adult relationship than other sorts of partnerships. Unlike in most developed countries, too, the US government has spent more than $100 million on promoting marriage.

Vocab word for the day: quasquicentennial

Another example of magazine attempts to more deeply connect readers with advertisers.

Good Housekeeping magazine will pay tribute to the achievements of women who have inspired, informed, educated, captivated and sometimes infuriated Americans during the last 125 years.

The show, called “Shine On,” is scheduled for one performance, on April 12. The subtitle is “Celebrating 125 Years of Women Making Their Mark.”

“Shine On” is to be composed of performances, including musical numbers, and video tributes. The women to be saluted will include Susan B. Anthony, Madonna, Dorothy Parker, Sally Ride, Martha Stewart and Diane von Furstenberg.

It is being staged to raise money to build the first permanent location in Washington for the National Women’s History Museum.

“It seems superficial in a recessionary time to celebrate for celebration’s sake,” Ms. Haegele said, adding that Good Housekeeping will donate about 600 tickets to organizations that benefit women and girls. Maybelline will also make what she described as “a sizable contribution” to the museum.

The nation’s unemployment rate is hovering at 10.6 percent, but direct-sales companies like Tupperware, Avon, and Mary Kay are thriving and continue to draw in new salespeople.
Mary Kay has seen a 22 percent increase in global sales consultants between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009.
Tupperware, thanks in large part to a strong expansion into global markets, saw a surge in sales reps internationally two years ago, from 1,851,450 in 2007 to 2,275,934 in 2008, and continued to see growth in 2009.
Likewise, Avon’s ranks have swelled from 5.8 million total sales reps in 2008 to 6.4 million in 2009.

For some of today’s direct-sales consultants, selling plastic wares, makeup, and other home accessories is not a hobby. It’s a significant source of income, say direct-sales firms. “Our early consultants came from a group of women who had a pretty good life—their husbands were in construction or contracting and doing well. They did this for fun, but when things turned [economically], it became the big job of the household,” says Orville Thompson, CEO of Scentsy, a wickless-candle company that began direct sales in 2005.

What will our families’ economic structure look like in 5 years, 20 years, when I’m old and gray? All Americans (citizens of most of the world?) think about these things more frequently than we ever thought possible, I’m sure.

As planners/strategists/what-are-we-calling-ourselves-these-days, it’s our job to do it a bit more thoughtfully, perhaps with a bit of detachment even.

Before the Great Recession whirled into our lives, girls were already attending and graduating from university at higher rates. In something like 30% of dual income households, the ladies were already bringing home the larger paycheck.

With this in mind, one of the more interesting threads to ponder (to my potted mind) is what, if any, changes will occur within male-female relations as a result of mens diminished earning capacity. Will we all finally GET BEYOND money as equaling power in a relationship? Will “the gold-digger” varietal of our species veer towards extinction? (fingers crossed, small prayer, nod and done!)

A bit of fodder for the mental hamster wheel, my pretties:

Read this phenomenal Atlantic piece on how today’s economic situation will change the future of manhood.

Last Friday, the Labor Department released payroll information and yep, it’s official, more women are working in the US than men. This blog post in the NYT digs into the data.

And then head over to a University of Chicago professor’s article that pulls apart some of the data surrounding government entitlement payments by generation. It’s sure to make the senior set uncomfortable. There aren’t any comments up as of my posting here, but I imagine there will be in short order.

Application videos are no longer just for Elle Woods!
And further documentation that teen girls are a super-engine of content creation on the web.

This year Tufts University, for the first time, officially accepted short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application.
About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.

For a number of colleges, this is the year of the video, what with Yale’s 16-minute YouTube offering, “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” a spoof of “High School Musical,” and “Reading Season,” a musical by admissions counselors at the University of Delaware.

Even without prompting, admissions officials say, a growing number of students submit videos. Maria Laskaris, the dean of admissions at Dartmouth, noticed the trend last year, and said this year had brought even more videos, mostly showcasing music, theater or dance talents.

For Tufts, the videos have been a delightful way to get to know the applicants.

“At heart, this is all about a conversation between a kid and an admissions officer,” Mr. Coffin said. “You see their floppy hair and their messy bedrooms and you get a sense of who they are. We have a lot of information about applicants, but the videos let them share their voice.”

Videos are genuinely optional, he said, so not having one does not count against a student — and a bad video would not hurt their admission chances “unless there was something really disgusting.”

To his surprise, about 60 percent of the videos are from women, and two-thirds are from financial-aid applicants, easing concern that the video option might help the already-advantaged affluent applicants.