Friday Femme Fatale: Chick Flicks, Glass Ceilings & Afghanistan

After a two-week hiatus from Friday Femme Fatale, I am back in action. I hope you will pardon the absence - France was calling my name. This week covers a lot of different issues from work-life balance for women to chick flicks and all-female social networks. Enjoy.

To start, Families and Work released an important new study showing how gender roles are starting to see a 'conflict' shift in work-life balance. USA Today reports on the study:

Women in two-earner couples are contributing more to family income, but it's the men who are feeling more conflicted over the work-life balance, according to a survey of 3,500 workers released today....Up until the past decade, "men weren't doing enough to add stress to their lives," he says. Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz shares how she successfully fought breast cancer and vowed to warn younger women about the risks this week as well:

'I wanted to be able to not just stand up and say, `I'm a breast cancer survivor.' . . . I wanted to find a gap and try to fill it,'' said Wasserman Schultz, 42.

In the past year, she underwent seven major surgeries, including a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, while balancing motherhood, Congress and her roles as a chief fundraiser for House Democrats and a political surrogate, first for Hillary Clinton and then for Barack Obama.

CARE2 is sponsoring a petition to End "Corrective" Rape of Lesbians in South Africa based on a new ActionAid report that describes the shocking rise of "corrective" rape in South Africa - in which South African lesbians are being raped in an effort to "cure" them of their sexual orientation. Support groups in Cape Town say they see 10 new cases of "corrective" rape every week. And it's even more widespread around the rest of the country.

In other disturbing news, Hamid Karzai signs law 'legalizing rape in marriage'.  The UN says the law, which has not been publicly released, legalizes rape in marriage and prevents women from leaving the house without permission.

In more positive news, Madama Ambi shares a vision for the feminist movement and calls for a needs-based women's media network driven by user interactivity. 

Additionally, Melissa Silverstein ponders the idea of the Chick Flick over at WMC and the love/hate relationships that women have with the genre. This comes on the heels of the announcement about the sequel to the Sex and the City movie to arrive in theaters on May 28, 2010.  

In recent decades, the women's film landscape has slowly and steadily been usurped by the chick flick, and its dominance makes no one happy. Unlike the films in previous periods, the genre seems to have some sort of embedded kryptonite that repels men.  These films regularly have female ticket buyers at 60 and sometimes even 70 percent of the audience on opening weekend.  Still, the economics of Hollywood don't favor these films, which tend always to be referred to as counter programming.  They are smaller (few, if any explosions), which translates into smaller budgets for marketing and advertising, which in turn guarantees lower box office.  Thus few movies about women break out from the pack, although 2008 had some important exceptions including Sex & the City and Twilight, which both opened with blockbuster numbers.  Even the record-setting Mamma Mia! which has grossed a half a BILLION dollars worldwide, didn't open big here in the United States. Its staying power propelled it into the top 15 grossing films of the year.

Things are not equal in Hollywood and the current incarnation of the chick flick reflects that gender disparity by favoring films with sexist and regressive images of women.  Yes, women have become executives at all levels of the industry-heads of production and even running studios-yet for all those individual successes, women are still woefully underrepresented in all facets of the film business.  

Women Grow Business shares a guest post by Mary Conley Eggert with the provocative title, Earnings Expansion (or erosion): Are You Creating Your Own Glass Ceiling? The recommendation I saw from her mini-study as most relevant was:

Our compensation ‘ceiling’ is what we make it.
John’s study and my experience suggest to me that our salary or compensation ceiling is what we make it. The key to earning what we are worth is knowing what we are worth (and communicating that in a way that others see the value and are willing to pay it).

Meanwhile, AllFacebook reports on the new social network called Her Hot Spot, which is "dubbed a one-stop shop for information, education and entertainment, where women can read, write and discuss issues that are important to them openly and honestly."

Finally, the "Spread the Word to End the Word" campaign by the Special Olympics achieved major success this week with over 10,000 pledges signed to end the r-word. Thanks to help from the Feminist Community, among others, this campaign really took off - and even got some special tweets from key influencers such as  John Mayer (@JohnCMayer), the mascot of the Chicago Tribune (@ColonelTribune), a FOX5 news broadcaster (@levansfox5) as well as the author of Queen Bees & Wannbees, Rosalind Wiseman (@RosalindWiseman).

Oh and one final thought - thank god it's Friday.