As Baltimore writer Sheri Venema reacquainted herself with her mother’s quaint church cookbook, she pondered “a time when a woman became a suffix to her husband” — once her baking was done, she realized much more.

The recipe for Steamed Cranberry Pudding did not speak to me at first. The directions seemed too cryptic: Waxed paper? Tin cans? Also, the tattered cookbook in which I found the recipe originated in the long-ago kitchens of women in my childhood church, and it seemed laden with dishes predictable and dull.

Tuna Noodle Casserole.

Miracle Cheese Cake (lemon Jell-O with cream cheese and sugar).

Oven Barbecue (Spam, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce).

Typed on a manual typewriter and then Xeroxed and bound with cheap plastic coil, the cookbooks were sold to raise money for a church society. My copy long ago lost its red cover. I sometimes took it out of its protective Ziploc bag to find a cookie recipe, but mostly I felt superior to this little book with its stains and misspellings. Clearly it came from a time when cream of mushroom soup and oleo ruled every kitchen in my neighborhood, and I had walked away from the Midwestern housewifery prescribed in its pages. I owned a wok and a Silver Palate cookbook. I made my own hummus.  Read More →

Baltimore Fishbowl columnist and University of Baltimore professor Marion Winik reviewed for Newsday the controversial new book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Read an excerpt, below:

LEAN IN: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg. Alfred A. Knopf, 228 pp., $24.95.

Rarely has the publication of a book been met with such a volley of snark and countersnark as “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” a business advice book by Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Noticeably arm’s-length coverage by Jodi Kantorin The New York Times kicked off weeks of hoopla and vitriol in the blogosphere. Critics, many of whom had not read the book, which was published Tuesday, accused Sandberg of overreaching; of being elitist, anti-motherhood and anti-feminist; of not adequately representing poor, minority and non-heterosexual women; and, finally, of wearing Louboutin and Prada. Others rushed quickly to decry what seemed like knee-jerk feminist posturing or plain old hating the rich. Read More →

photo courtesy of Amanda King

In which University of Baltimore Asst. Prof. and Bohemian Rhapsody Columnist Marion Winik blows our antiquated minds.

I was in seventh grade when the New Jersey public school system changed the dress code. The girls of Ocean Township wore pants to school for the first time that year, 1970. At which point I put on a pair of Lee jeans, a black leotard and a plaid flannel shirt from the Army-Navy store and pretty much didn’t change until I graduated from high school. Read More →

photo by Casey McKeel

“I CAN’T FORGET WHAT HAPPENED, BUT NO ONE ELSE REMEMBERS,” read the giant red letters floating in the reflecting pool beneath DC’s Washington Monument.  “I’ve never seen anything like that floating in the reflecting pool and I’ve lived in or around DC my whole life,” an observer noted.  “So I was very drawn to it.  It was a beautiful message and it was a haunting message.” The words, written by a survivor of sexual assault, were displayed in DC by  FORCE, the Baltimore-based feminist activist group (who you may remember for their awesome Victoria’s Secret prank back in December). Although their installation was temporary, it was part of a push to create a national memorial for survivors of rape and abuse on the National Mall.

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Remember FORCE, the Baltimore group that pranked Victoria’s Secret a few months ago? Well, they’re up to more status-quo-disrupting shenanigans — this time in Washington, D.C. According to organizer Rebecca Nagle, the group is “carrying 44 giant, red styrofoam letters to the national mall in DC to write the poem ‘I CAN’T FORGET WHAT HAPPENED BUT NO ONE ELSE REMEMBERS.’  The action is a call to create a national memorial to survivors of rape and abuse.” The action is set to happen at 2 p.m.; follow along on Twitter or Facebook, and stay tuned for photos of the event here on Baltimore Fishbowl tomorrow.

Something incredible happened at the BFB this week: Our top story, Baltimore Feminists Prank Victoria’s Secret, received over 400,000 hits!  We have been glued to our analytics, watching our numbers rise.  How to explain the traffic?  The story caught fire on Facebook (it has had over 85,000 likes and over 10, 000 shares)  and Twitter (2,000+ tweets) and moved onto college campuses around the country (we could see the domain names — U of Wisconsin, Yale, the Claremont Colleges, Hopkins, among many others — on our analytics).  The 240+ comments we received also drew many views, as readers shared opinions on modern feminism.  

Baltimore Feminists Prank Victoria Secret and Start an Internet Revolution by Rachel Monroe

Cafe Hon’s Recurring Nightmare by Robert O’Brien

The Land of Pleasant Living: Total Makeover on a Rockland Contemporary by Cynthia McIntyre

Mega Money for Maryland Arts by The Eds.

Grinch Feet Ice Cold in the Snow by Christine Grillo

Last week, the internet was shocked and pleased to learn that Victoria’s Secret had launched a new line of consent-themed underwear. Instead of a thong reading “SURE THING,” these panties said things like “NO MEANS NO” and “ASK FIRST.” Even more exciting, they were modeled by a beaming curvy woman of color. “I’m the first person to go on a tirade about how much I hate VS, but this is awesome,” wrote one blogger — a sentiment that echoed throughout the Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter-sphere. Pretty shortly, though, the campaign was revealed as a sophisticated hoax perpetrated by a group of radical Baltimore feminists. BFB asked Baltimore residents Hannah Brancato and Rebecca Nagle about their intentions, future plans — and the angry reaction from Victoria’s Secret:

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Adrienne Rich, a poet and essayist born in Baltimore in 1929, who won the National Book Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and more, died today in her home in Santa Cruz, California.

Her father was a pathologist and professor at Johns Hopkins; her mother was a concert pianist.  Rich went to Roland Park Country School, which she described as a “good old fashioned girls school [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned.” Rich went to  Radcliffe College, where her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the poet W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

Rich was best known as a feminist and advocate of women’s rights, which she wrote about in her poetry and prose. She also wrote antiwar poetry and took up the causes of the marginalized and underprivileged.

Remember when Fox News’ Sean Hannity put together an all-male faith panel to discuss — of all things — women’s birth control coverage? Do you remember the next day when the House Oversight Committee heard the testimony of only men on that selfsame topic? Well surely you’ll forgive filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom for somehow getting the impression that even in 2012 women are disempowered in the United States.

Actually, it’s more than just a sneaking suspicion. The United States ranks 90th in the world for women in national legislatures, and women hold only three percent of “clout positions” in mainstream media. Newsom’s documentary Miss Representation explores the of media representations in disempowering women, leaving us with not only a disgraceful lack of women in power positions, but with a society in which 65 percent of women and girls exhibit some class of eating disorder.

You have two chances to catch the acclaimed film in Baltimore. It will be screened as part of the WOW-Baltimore festival on Friday, March 2 at 11:15 a.m. at the Meyerhoff. It will also screen on Tuesday, March 6 at 8:30 p.m. at the UM Carey School of Law, Room 106E, where it will be followed by a panel discussion. Panelists include: Dr. Erika Falk, author of Women for President: Media Bias in Nine Campaigns; Jayne Miller, award-winning journalist and lead investigative reporter at WBAL-TV; and Dr. Georgia Sorenson, visiting professor of leadership studies, UM Carey Law.

Dear Sara,

In online dating, who pays for dinner when you finally meet?

First, let’s define what a date is and is not.

Ours is a culture in which many a 20-something will admit to never having been out on a single traditional date. Meeting someone in a bar, where one might express interest in buying you a drink, is both an act of old fashioned gentility, and new-fashioned, crude efficiency, depending on the manner in which the gift is offered. Dinner might not come into the picture until you’ve already become lovers. Or perhaps you’ve met a friend of a friend at a party and are hitting it off with them, ending the party with a kiss or more. That’s not a date either.

One of the appeals of online dating is that it feels ironically old fashioned once the laptops have been left at home and you find yourself sitting across a table, peering into the pupils of a would-be beautiful stranger. The most common phrase on the average online dating profile is “I’m tired of the bar scene.” Without the internet, it’s really difficult to date traditionally. It requires the right environment; it requires both men and women to ditch the unwritten social systems we have established for ourselves by default, and actively approach someone with the intent of asking them to dinner, a movie, or on a walk around town. In other words, a date is a formal expression, the enactment of a specific activity bound by a specific time and place, involving just the two of you.

That said, dating culture is so very much all over the map, there are no official rules as to who pays for dinner. I have met a few girls who insist that men should pay because “it’s how they were raised.” When they describe it as such, they insist on adopting the sense of it being a class issue, not a patriarchal one (which is the same thing if you think about it). A few men of the same breed have also stated that they could “never let a woman pay for dinner.” But I find this attitude hardly complimentary to the female sex: It stinks of the utterly average, princess-laden, Disney Store consumerist, little-girl upbringing, rather than those of American would-be debutantes. Real ladies have something in their purses other than lipstick.

I went on a date once with a man who insisted that the woman “at least blow smoke up his ass,” explaining he prefers that she offer to pay though he has no intention of allowing it. I replied that when I offer to pay, it is because I intend to pay. It was our first date, and we nearly fought about it. I didn’t like the image he was painting, of the girl who disingenuously offers to pay merely because she is expected to offer. Feminism is about, among other things, not raising little girls to say “yes” when they mean “no” or vice versa. This starts at the dinner table.

Oh, a relevant side note: The link between established couples fighting about money, and divorce rates, is well documented. In certain cases, these people no doubt got married under certain assumptions about money that didn’t pan out for either party. If a man pays for a woman’s dinner, on a primitive, evolutionary level, she’s more likely to assume that he’ll continue paying for anything else she might need, and in the worst case, build the entire relationship on that foundation. So the next time you split the check on an awesome first date, you’re not only adding to the health of the overall relationship at that time, but to the health of the relationship, potentially 10 years down the line.

Personally, I always offer to pay precisely my share, and I always mean it when I do, except under certain circumstances. When a man makes a thousand times what I make to the effect that it would make me feel ridiculous to offer, I let him pay. When a man ordered so many more drinks than I, and the check cannot be split evenly, I let him pay if he offers. If he declares he is paying for dinner in a respectful, nonthreatening way that doesn’t make the quills on my feminist crest flare up, I will let him. This doesn’t mean that I expect men to figure out how I want them to ask. I am merely confessing that I can be seduced into it by the right attitude. These men have powers of gentility which are the same whether they are offering to pay for a male friend or a female friend. In this case, the man has made me so comfortable with his presence in general, and treated me as his guest so genuinely throughout the entire dinner, that he manages to convey the sense that paying really is his pleasure. It doesn’t happen very often. (And again, that’s quite all right — among other reasons: I think men ought to be able to date without having to double their dining out budget to accommodate it.)

In closing, splitting the bill down the middle is a safe, comfortable and democratic dating method, and if and when it comes to it, if he gets a bit pushy later that night outside your door, you’ll have that extra bit of self-respect leftover. Incidentally, I’ve never heard of a man who felt pressured to have sex with a woman because she bought him a bowl of pho two hours prior. Anyway, please be aware of the culture you live in and how easy it is to fall into unpleasant role-playing. I know too many girls with a fragile sense of self-respect. The fact sometimes is, when he pays, there is an expectation-elephant in the room that wasn’t there when the date began. If you don’t have the Princess Power to remain fixed to your post-date evening plans regardless of who pays, you’d best pay for your own dinner.

That said, I have read about many women who are using dating as a way to eat in this economy, which blows my mind. If you have the cheek to do this regularly, I suspect you also have the cheek to make sure it has no effect upon your sex life. Otherwise, please go fetch yourself a package of ramen noodles while I donate another $15 to Planned Parenthood.

Got a dating-related question? Write to: saralynn@baltimorefishbowl.com.