The Equal Rights Amendment has been re-Introduced in Congress. Rock on. Here’s hoping that (1) it actually gets through this time, (2) it doesn’t paralyze NOW into a one-issue group for the next several years, and (3) Phyllis Schlafly stays in her cave for the duration. The ACLU‘s heavy-handed self-congratulations patting itself on the back over its feminist record is rather hypocritical, but that is another post entirely….

While trying to find a webbed version of FAIR‘s excellent expose of the Boston Globe’s hypocrisy on the David Horowitz saga (they blasted student editors for censoring Horowitz–a feat that is, in fact, impossible, as I have remarked before … and then they themselves refused an ad from an environmental group which criticized Staples), I accidentally stumbled across a great essay of FAIR‘s Women’s Desk back from 1993, Erasing Rape: Media Hype an Attack on Sexual-Assault Research. It’s a skillful refutation of Katie Roiphe’s hatchet job on Mary Koss’s research on acquaintence rape… nothing much new for those of us who have kept track of the research on sexual violence for a while, but definitely a good summary of the criticisms Roiphe (and nearly everyone else who objects to the Koss research) uses, and the reasons why these criticisms are full of it.

Letters in response to Battle of the Celebrity Gender Theorists have injected a note of sanity into Salon.com’s on-going love-fest for the antifeminist media creation, Christina Hoff Sommers. The Hear Hear! Award goes to the following letter:

Well, well, what have we here? Salon participating in the media phenomenon of giving prominence to the female anti-feminist who labels gender-based academic pursuits as frivolous and lacking in scientific rigor. How about equal space for a reply?

— Susan Saylor

Salon, of course, responded to this challenge by not providing equal space. Their top article is an Arts & Entertainment piece about radio and their top article in Life is an article about vasectomies.