Bitches Brew: Women Make Gains in the Beer World:

When the women we know belly-up to a bar, they’re more likely to order a pint of beer than a glass of wine or a frilly cocktail. We’re suckers for Surly’s CynicAle and Fulton’s Sweet Child of Vine, both from the rollicking Minneapolis beer-brewing scene. Still, drinking and brewing beer continue to be viewed as primarily male territory.

As it turns out, this split of the sexes is all wrong, says Bitch magazine’s Celena Cipriaso: Women have brewed beer since Babylonian times and female brewers permeate world folklore. Historian Alan D. Eames reinforces the depths of women’s claims on beer, explaining, “From its very inception some 8,000 years ago, every ancient society’s beer-creation myth tells the same story: The drink was a gift from a female deity to the women of that community.”

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Midwives Take On the World’s Most Dangerous Country for Women: Imagine that you are nine months pregnant and have to drive seven hours to reach the nearest hospital. You have never seen an obstetrician or midwife for prenatal care and emergency health services are miles out of reach. This is the situation in parts of Afghanistan, where the maternal mortality rate is the highest in the world.

As of 2008, it was estimated that 1 in 11 Afghan women die in childbirth. (In Greece, the country with the lowest maternal mortality rate, the statistic is 1 in 31,800.) With a fertility rate of 6.62 children per mother, the life expectancy for women in Afghanistan—recently ranked “the most dangerous country for women” by the Thomson Reuters Foundation—is less than 48 years.

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New York fashion photographer David Jay is seeking to update the face of breast cancer awareness from frothy pink to strikingly honest pictures of the women scarred by mastectomy surgery. His message: “Breast cancer is not a pink ribbon.”

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Utne Reader’s mission is to bring our readers the best of the alternative press: independent, excellent magazines and journals and websites. You might not think that would include a site called The Frisky and billed as “Celebrity gossip, relationship advice, sex tips and more for real women everywhere!” But under the candy-pink veneer hides a true feminist heartbeat and genuine reporting about women’s issues.

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Should We Mourn the Death of Chick-Lit? (via The Guardian)

Point, Elizabeth Day: I don’t mourn the end of chick-lit, not because I don’t admire it when it’s done well but because the term has lost all meaning. It has become a catch-all label for a generic mass of pink-jacketed books with hand-illustrated covers depicting stilettos and Martini glasses.

Counterpoint, Tasmina Perry: I think it’s because we’re women. You don’t get David Nicholls isn’t name-checked in close proximity to the words chick-lit, even though One Day’s Emma Morley could hardly ever find a boyfriend. We write unapologetically commercial fiction with the aim of entertaining our readers, not winning Pulitzer prizes. And it’s not so much the publishers who are guilty of pigeonholing us (come on, one of Jodi’s books had toy soldiers on the front cover) but the public at large. After all, “chick-lit” trips off the tongue a lot more neatly than “women’s commercial fiction” when you’re describing what you read on your sun-lounger.

In a small, plainly decorated room in Lenexa, Kansas, 26-year-old Crystal Renaud logs on to a free video-chat site. She sits at her desk and peers over her black-rimmed glasses, which reflect the dull blue glare of the computer monitor. Meanwhile, in homes scattered around the United States, five other women are staring into their webcams as well. As their faces pop up around Renaud on all their screens, they begin the 6th week of a 12-week pornography addiction recovery group for women called No Stones.

The No Stones recovery group is part of an organization called Dirty Girls Ministries that Renaud launched in 2009 after suffering from her own self-described pornography addiction. She says she wanted to help other women recover from their X-rated fixations by connecting with them online and holding meetings at her local church. But her use of the terms porn and addiction may be misleading. The growing group of 100-plus members who participate in the forums say that they masturbate or view porn—which they define as including erotica and romance novels—twice a week or less. For most of us, that would hardly be considered excessive. But to Renaud, it indicates an epidemic of addiction, one that can be treated by helping women stay “clean” of masturbation. Keep reading …

(Image by Linda Zacks)

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You’ve heard us talk about rising printing and mailing costs, and most recently, the liquidation of Borders bookstores across the country has dealt a huge blow to the newsstand and publishing industries, and independent magazines like Bitch don’t escape the impact.

We need 1,500 subscriptions ordered by August 8. This campaign is not about staving off a short-term crisis; it’s about the future of Bitch’s oldest, and to many, dearest program. If you want Bitch to stay in print, subscribe, renew, give a gift, or become a sustainer today. We need to hear from you.

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