In and Around the Button This Week: Feminism, Yay!

It sucks that we only get two days off for fall break, but those two days tend to blur with the end of the previous week, resulting in two abbreviated weeks of classes, and, for one night only, a "This Week at Penn" post that starts on a Thursday rather than a day of the week closer to the week's beginning. Coincidentally, or maybe because we just fail to realize how biased we are, each of the following events pertain to feminism.  Hooray!

Today at 5 p.m., Katha Pollitt will speak about "Gender, the Election, and Learning to Drive" in Houston Hall's Class of '49 auditorium.  Aside from being the mother of one of The Notebook Girls, Pollitt is famous for having written about webstalking her ex back in 2004, when webstalking took a lot more finesse than it does in our MySpace/Facebook/Tumblr-ocracy.  Our hope is that tonight she will say some amusing things about Sarah Palin.

Tomorrow (Friday the 17th) at 6:45, the Carriage House will screen A Powerful Noise, a documentary about trailblazing womenfolk in Mali, Vietnam and Bosnia. Also, there will be food!

And finally, Monday the 20th will bring us the treat that is Naomi Wolf speaking at the National Constitution Center downtown for the low, low price of $7 (for students). We tend to associate Wolf with a) being the author of a book we tried and failed to read in 9th grade and b) having accused famous literary scholar Harold Bloom of sexually harrassing her at Yale, but apparently she is also quite the political commentator. Here's to democracy!