Suzanne Braun Levine,
Huff/Post50
The actress Julianne Moore recently sounded off about celebrity magazines. “They encourage young women and some middle-aged women to be interested in somebody else’s narrative rather than their own,” she told Moremagazine. “I don’t want my daughter or her friends to be interested in Jessica Simpson. I want them to be interested in what’s happening in their own lives.” The message goes way beyond pop culture.
When I think about my own daughter and all the other “young women” who are the theme of this International Women’s Day, I realize that I want to take Moore’s message a step further: There are situations when resistance takes more than choosing to ignore a magazine story and more than the actions of any one woman. The contraceptive furor of recent weeks highlights the forces that are trying to impose another narrative — theirs — on us.