• Gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee made a bold move when he suggested that the state’s Investments Board could put more pension fund money into Washington businesses. Now, Inslee’s backed off that a little.
• Remember suburban sprawl? Now, at least in apartment construction, almost all the region’s new development is in Seattle.
• Meanwhile in the suburbs, local small businesses are among the enterprises learning what they can do with abandoned big-box retail spaces.
• The now-shuttered Columbia City Cinema is a mess. The building, and the finances behind it.
• Nationally, Mark Sumner insists there is no federal fiscal crisis, only a trumped-up right wing power play.
• The group United for a Fair Economy has a chart of 11 different “Things the Wealthiest Americans Can Buy for the U.S. (that most families can’t afford for themselves!).” For instance, the nation’s richest 400 households could pay off the whole country’s credit card debts.
• The Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal continues to obsess pundits everywhere. At The Observer (the Sunday-only sister paper to The Guardian, the left-leaning U.K. daily that broke much of the scandal’s details), Henry Porter claims that, at least in Brit domestic politics, “the door has shut on Murdoch.”
• And an unsigned piece in The Times of India sums up the standard operating procedure at Murdoch’s UK tabloids, even without their ickiest invasions of privacy, as “exploiting the pornography of sorrow.” A lot of U.S. media could be similarly accused.
• We close for today with Roger Ebert righteously snarking against rewritten “easy reading” versions of The Great Gatsby (possibly created for adult ESL classes):

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process.

As mentioned previously here, Rupert Murdoch’s UK Sunday-only tabloid News of the World has printed its final edition. This final wraparound cover says it all. It calls itself “the world’s greatest newspaper” (a title also self-imposed in the past by the Chicago Tribune), while a background montage depicts dozens of screaming scandal headlines that have, and had, nothing to do with news.

And guess what? The last issue just happens to include a (stereotype-heavy) Seattle travel story.

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?

• Local business promoters have prepared an “infographic” hawking Seattle as the best place to start a hi-tech company.
• First, Sonic Boom Records said it would close its recently moved Capitol Hill branch. Now Everyday Music says high rents are forcing it out of its own site on the Hill. The store says it will move, somewhere.
• Seattle Goodwill tried several times over the past 12 years to redevelop its Rainier Valley campus. One scheme would have razed its beautiful mega thrift store for a Target. With the collapse of that and other concepts, Goodwill is finally going ahead with a limited plan to build a new job training complex.
• Alex Carson explains why “Seattle Mariners baseball is like an Elvis Costello album.” An album Carson hasn’t actually heard.
• In more tragic baseball news, a fan at a Texas Rangers game leaned over a railing to catch a ball and fell over.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna spoke to Young Republicans in Bellevue, and tried to have a Democratic Party operative kicked out of the room, even calling police.
• Meanwhile, a national “Christian Left” group bought ad space on Facebook for a quite inoffensive little message. Facebook pulled the ad after conservatives complained.
• A Portland judge approved a bankruptcy plan for the Northwest Jesuits. It sets aside more than $150 million for past victims of abusive priests.
• Meanwhile, a Centers for Disease Control report claims more than half of us had harrowing childhoods, “featuring abusive or troubled family members or parents who were absent due to separation or divorce.” In other news, Leave It to Beaver was never real.

The scandal at News of the World, one of Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid papers, got so damning that Murdoch killed the paper, in hopes of saving the rest of his British media empire (and its cozy relations to top politicians).

The Sunday-only NOTW harkens back to 1843. It was one of the English-speaking world’s first true mass-market papers. From the start, it was heavy on scandal, gossip, gory crime, sports, and as much sex as censorship laws of the time allowed.

When I first found it at out-of-town newspaper stands in the 1980s, NOTW was a tentacle of the Murdoch octopus (and had been since 1969). It was big at the time on fun sex stories, such as “Cheeky Memoirs of the Wedding Photographers.”

This was around the time of Joe Jackson’s song “Sunday Papers,” about NOTW and its tabloid brethren.

In recent years, NOTW’s circulation dropped, from almost 9 million in its pre-Murdoch 1950s to under 3 million. The paper’s editors were ever on the prowl for the latest and dirtiest dirt on public figures. With daily tabloids (such as Murdoch’s Sun) and websites after the same dirt, NOTW went to extremes to get its own, exclusive dirt.

That led to the hacking of cell phones.

First, they tapped the phones of actors and soccer players.

Then the phones of politicians.

Then the phones of violent-crime victims and their families.

That was the last straw. Even Murdoch’s pet politicians turned against him.

It could just be that Murdoch has other agendas behind closing the paper, besides saving PR face.

After dumping this separate Sunday paper with its separate staff, he could theoretically re-enter the market later with a Sunday edition of The Sun, which could be relatively cheaper to produce and would share a single “brand.”

But for now, the enemies of right-wing sleaze media throughout the world can consider this at least a momentary victory.

UPDATE #1: The Economist notes a larger possible reason behind Murdoch’s extreme UK damage control. He’s trying to expand his holdings in satellite TV over there, a move that requires governmental approval. That business is far more profitable than all his UK print businesses combined.

UPDATE #2: Commentator Alison Frankel has another potential underlying reason for the Murdoch machination. She thinks Murdoch could transfer all of NOTW’s assets to a liquidation agent, who could destroy incriminating evidence.

UPDATE #3: Several U.S.-based commentators, including Will Bunch and John Nichols, insist (rightly, I believe) that Murdoch’s Fox “News” Channel is just as harmful to politics and society here as Murdoch’s papers are to politics and society across the pond. But neither Bunch nor Nichols seems to know what to do about it.

Back to the old grind. The lovely old grind.

• The former Wash. state prison boss admitted he’d quit because he’d been caught in a Tumwater motel with a female subordinate. Insert your own “subordinate” (or “Tumwater”) jokes here.
• The advocacy group Transportation for Washington explains just why public transit financing in this state is in such a mess. (Hint: It’s the dependence on sales taxes.) The group’s also got a handy list of public hearings in King County where you can support a one-time car tab surtax, so Metro can avoid draconian service cuts.
• Ex-NYT columnist Frank Rich debuts in New York mag bemoaning “Obama’s Original Sin,” which, in Rich’s eyes, was to accept big campaign bucks from the Wall St. fat cats.
• Meanwhile, some Columbia U. politics-as-horse-race wonk wonders “What If the Republicans Lose in 2012?” I suspect they will lose, and resume shrinking into regional status, with the “centrist” Democrats becoming the new Party of Business (and perhaps the only party capable of fielding an Electoral College-winnable Presidential campaign for some time).
• A Daily Kos diarist sends along word of a breakthrough in fuel cell technology for motor vehicles. Fuel cells, as you recall from the hype two or three oil crises ago, turn simple hydrogen gas (refineable from many cheap sources)  and oxygen into energy. But they need “catalysts” to undertake this transformation. Up ’til now, those had to be made from costly platinum. But earlier this year, researchers at the (more recently fire-threatened) Los Alamos labs said they’d figured out a system using a far cheaper combo of carbon, iron, and cobalt. Of course, cheaper-running, zero-emissions cars would still be cars, promoting land-killing sprawl and long lonely commutes.

Back in the alleged good old days of American journalism, chain-owned newspapers would often be ordered by corporate HQ to run the same chainwide stories. (The Hearst papers were particularly notorious for this.)

Now, the Arizona-born company calling itself Village Voice Media has just done this at its papers, including Seattle Weekly.

They’re running the same expose piece, entitled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.” It’s an attack on Ashton Kutcher’s “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” PR campaign, which claims “100,000 to 300,000” underage girls are trapped in street prostitution in the U.S. every year.

In contrast, the article claims the real number, while unknowable, is probably much, much smaller. The big number, says the story, comes from a highly flawed academic research piece about kids “at risk” for becoming hookers, a figure that pretty much includes the entire teen populations of U.S./Mexico border towns.

A sidebar item acknowledges a VVM corporate interest in combating anti-sex-work scare campaigns. The fear mongers pressured Craigslist to stop running (unpaid) online sex-work ads, and are now setting their rhetorical gunsights on providers of (paid) sex-work ads, including VVM and its Backpage.com site.

To summarize, the article’s “good news” is: A lot fewer girls (and boys) are underage hookers than you might think. If you hire an escort, you and she/he are breaking some laws, but most likely statutory rape isn’t one of them.

The bad news remains: There still are some minors trapped in underage hooking, even if they’re a lot rarer than Kutcher and co. claim. In Seattle we had our own highly publicized pimping scandal last year, involving a few young-adult males and perhaps a dozen underage females.

(I happen to believe escorting and other sex work should be legal, and regulated. When it is, it will be much easier for law enforcement and social workers to find underage participants, divert them into other lives (perhaps in supervised group homes), and to prosecute any madames or pimps employing them.)

•

UPDATE #1: As if right on cue, Mayor McGinn and police Lt. Eric Sano held a press briefing on Friday denouncing VVM’s Backpage.com and supporting Kutcher’s PR drive against it. Sano claimed “there have been four documented cases of child prostitution openly advertised on Backpage.com.” Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely, while not directly involved with Backpage’s operations, insists the site’s staff does all it can to reject and/or remove ads offering erotic services by under-18s.

UPDATE #2: Elsewhere in that company, the Village Voice itself has cut 60 percent of its staff in recent years. The New York weekly’s remaining employees threatened to go on strike this past week over wage and benefit cuts. Now comes word the strike may have been averted.

UPDATE #3: John Spangenthal-Lee at SeattleCrime.com said on July 5 that the VVM article was wrong about Seattle Police records concerning juvenile prostitution arrests. Spangenthal-Lee claims there were about twice as many such arrests in 2007-2009 than the article counted. Seattle Weekly managing editor Caleb Hannan, whose staff supplied research for the chainwide VVM article, told Publicola they got their numbers from the SPD.

UPDATE #4: The Sex Workers Outreach Project, an organization supporting legal and civil rights for sex workers, issued a statement “responding” to the VVM story. The statement approves of the article’s reality-checking regarding the extent of the situation. But SWOP goes on to state the real issue here isn’t Kutcher vs. VVM and Backpage.com:

…There are three overlapping issues here: the trafficking of youth into the sex industry, the service needs of youth with experience trading sex for survival and the rights of consenting adult sex workers.

UPDATE #5: Ryan Hodgson pointed me in the direction of a Seattle Weekly item from last October. It seems that before the Kutcher Krusade or the chainwide VVM counterattack, SW editors publicized the FBI’s claim that Seattle was “Ranked Worst City in U.S. for Child Prostitution.”

Seattle loses a major community institution this week, quietly.

SCAN TV (Seattle Community Access Network), the nonprofit that’s operated the city’s public access cable channel for more than a decade, closes up shop. SCAN declined to bid on another contract to run the channel, after penny pinching city bureaucrats slashed the funding for its operation.

The Seattle Community College District’s SCCtv agreed to take over the channel at the vastly reduced funding level. The new iteration of the access channel, renamed Seattle Community Media, starts Friday. For the first few weeks, as SCM gets its technical infrastructure together, programming will be limited to rerun episodes of shows supplied by existing SCAN citizen producers.

With the change comes the closing of the access studio on N. 98th Street east of Aurora. Starting in 1983 (when Group W Cable opened it as a condition of its city cable contract), the Northwest Access and Production Center’s modest 30-by-40-foot main studio hosted an astounding array of artisanal TV. Citizens signed up for time slots, took training classes on the gear, and created all-volunteer productions, some quite elaborate.

That room was known as the “big studio.” There was also the “small studio,” a walk-in closet with one camera and a control console; producers strove to stretch that room’s capabilities, even producing musical variety shows (albeit starring very small combos).

SCM will reinstall the SCAN equipment on the North Seattle Community College campus, just a few blocks east of the old site. This means producers will still be able to make multi-camera, studio-based TV shows, as well as single camcorder, field-based video footage.

But nothing on the new SCM channel will be cablecast live.

That means (1) no call-in segments, and (2) no in-studio surprises. In-studio mistakes, yes, but no surprises.

•

At the access channel’s peak of popularity in the mid 1990s, a Seattle Times feature story described its panoply of programming.

There was music of every conceivable genre, including some of the earliest footage of Soundgarden and other future “Seattle scene” stars (and should-have-been stars).

There were ethnic cultural programs ranging from Chinese to Somali.

There were single-issue discussion and monologue shows advocating everything from gun rights to alternative medicine.

There were preachers of every theological stripe, including UFO religions and atheism.

There was the Rev. Bruce Howard, a music teacher who created (and successively re-created) his own spiritual discipline, evolving from fire and brimstone to (relatively) happy folk singing. (No, I don’t know whatever happened to him.)

There was Philip Craft’s Political Playhouse, in which the sometimes naked host offered up interviews and comedy skits expressing his flavor of radicalism (politicians = bad, marijuana = good). Craft later moved to L.A. and helped make a low budget film based on his experiences, Anarchy TV.

Another lefty political show, Deface the Nation, had a vegan cooking spinoff series called All You Can Stomach.

There was the drag queen cooking show Queen’s Kitchen and its sequel Love, Laverne (a live sitcom).

There were other home brewed comedy ventures such as Bend My Ear Seattle (with hosts Chardmo and Johnny 99 and house band Hot Dog Water), The Make Josh Famous Half-Hour of Garbage, and Gavin’s Hawse (with Gavin Guss, later of the neo-pop band Tube Top and now a solo singer-songwriter).

There was Richard Lee’s Kurt Cobain Was Murdered, in which the steadily crazier looking and sounding Lee reiterated, week after week for years, his specious conspiracy theories. Lee eventually ran for mayor in 2001, showing up at a debate with a beard and in a dress.

There was deadpan comic MC Spud Goodman, one of the two access stars who graduated to “real” TV, hosting bizarre skits and local bands for four years on channels 22 and 13.

There was the other later-made-it-big guy, serious public affairs interviewer C.R. Douglas, who took his insightful chats with local political leaders to the city-owned Seattle Channel (retiring earlier this year).

And there was the call-in show Bong Hit Championships (did what it said on the tin).

•

In 1999, the access channel had already begun to fade from public awareness. That’s when the city engineered the creation of SCAN, and put the new nonprofit group charge of the channel.

One reason was to remove Comcast AT&T (which, through mergers, wound up with most of Seattle’s cable subscriptions, which would soon after be sold to Comcast) from the responsibility to enforce limits on the channel’s “free speech” policies.

Producers were forbidden from airing commercials or soliciting money on the air. Otherwise, pretty much any content was permitted. Officially, programming wasn’t supposed to violate federal “obscenity” guidelines.

But with a no-prescreening policy in effect, some producers dared to sneak stuff past. Michael Aviaz’s Mike Hunt TV and T.J. Williamson’s Fulfilling Your Fantasies included uncensored excerpts from hardcore porn videos. Aviaz’s show ran off and on for nine years, getting kicked off for good in 2006. Williamson stopped submitting X-rated shows, but continued to program non-controversial travelogue videos under the name Adventure TV.

•

One of the ’90s access stars, monologuist-painter Shannon (Goddess Kring) Kringen, is still on the channel today (though no longer prancing naked on camera).

So are a trio of long-running musical shows, Music Inner City, D’Maurice & Armageddon, and Blues To Dos.

This week’s final SCAN schedule includes much the same range of fare the access channel had in its heyday, albeit without some of the edgier fare.

There’s even a madcap comedy-variety show, The VonHummer Hour.

It’s imported from Portland.

•

The ultimate question should not be, “How could the city defund SCAN?”

It should rather be, “Why was so little done to defend it?”

One reason: In a 200-channel cable TV landscape, this one little unadvertised analog channel lost what local prominence it had.

Another reason: With YouTube and podcasts and video blog posts, a scheduled cable channel is a relatively inconvenient way to distribute and view indie video. And the ol’ WWW in general is a handier way to disseminate niche-audience messages and entertainments (albeit a harder place to find them).

Still, there’s something very invigorating, even democratizing, about people making their own TV and making it available to the whole community to view in real time.

With the right support, SCM could bring that spirit back.

•

UPDATE: Seattle Community Media has now taken over the channel. The schedule of programs is the same as the final SCAN schedule. The only difference so far is the promos between programs. One of them is a sped-up video of a short drive from the old SCAN building to the NSCC campus, where a small staff stands in wait to proclaim “Welcome to Seattle Community Media.”

• Buzzfeed compares/contrasts“Actual News Headlines Vs. Fox News Headlines.” Hilarity ensues.
• Gene Weingarten rejects the idea that all of us have to “brand” ourselves.
• On a similar note, Zacqary Adam Green insists that musicians, artists, writers, teachers, etc. should not view themselves as mere “content creators”:

If you are a maker of things, a disseminator of knowledge, or anyone who contributes to the collective intellectual output of human beings, do not accept the notion that your work is less significant than a house, a chair, a piece of electronic equipment, or a rock. Do not allow yourself to be labeled as a mere “content creator.” Have more dignity than that.

I cannot allow June 2011 to fade into history without noting a personal anniversary.

Twenty five years ago this month, yr. humble scribe sat in a brick walled room at the old 66 Bell art studios. I typed up a roundup of little notes and comments on an NEC electronic typewriter for publication in a tiny monthly tabloid called ArtsFocus.

With that, the MISCadventure of my life had begun.

There was no World Wide Web at the time. There were dial-up, text-only bulletin board systems, a few of which I was on. All the sociopathic behaviors you see online today, I saw then.

Seattle then was not, as some now claim, a backwards fishing village out in the wilderness. There was a lot of business going about, a lot of culture, and a lot of livin’. The nouveau riche takeover was just getting underway, so there were still a lot of affordable housing situations and cheap DIY spaces like 66 Bell.

Sub Pop, and the acts it championed, were just barely underway.

I was then, as now, struggling to fit into a world I’d never made. Struggling to find renumerative work. Struggling to make sense of things.

I’d already developed a taste for mass media history. One of my favorite aspects of my UW communications major had been poring through the old newspapers, magazines, mass market books, catalogs, and other ephemera. Later, I’d found a store on 13th Ave. on Capitol Hill that specialized in old magazines, paperbacks, and posters. Its signage included one window placcard announcing “MISC. ITEMS.”

One of my favorite newspaper tropes was the “three dot” column. One person, multiple topics, with any one item ranging from a sentence fragment to the full 750-word space. Emmett Watson and future city councilmember Jean Godden had been doing that here, but it was a dying art form.

Everybody else in the media at the time seemed to be advocating “depth.” I was fascinated by breadth, by the interplay and hidden connections among all sorts of different things.

Thus, MISC, the column. Then the one-sheet newsletter, the Stranger feature, the spots in Tablet and the Belltown Messenger, and, since 1995, this very web presence.

Some people claim MISCmedia was “the first blog.” I certainly wasn’t that term, or anything like it, at the time. I just called it an “online column.”

Now, the blog format, in all its ever-evolving permutations and mutations, has become one of the world’s primary methods of communicating. Its offspring, the “tweet,” is reteaching the value of brevity.

And I’m again in search of a steady income.

This department hasn’t been updated in a while. During those past months, the SeaTimes has pretty much stabilized at a probably unprofitable level.

Circulation dropped another 5 percent in the past year.

The paper’s Wednesday and Friday editorial sections have gone back to single pages.

Actual “this happened yesterday” news items are decreasing, especially early in the week, in favor of prewritten features (easier to plan and to budget for).

Display advertising in the daily paper continues to be nearly nonexistent, with the four page Fry’s section on Fridays as the only consistent exception. If not for that, the paid obits, and the car and real-estate ads on Friday and Saturday, the daily SeaTimes would essentially exist (as a business venture) only as a wraparound for the Bartell’s and supermarket inserts.

The Sunday paper still has 30 to 40 pages of ads, not counting the inserts. And now the Sunday TV section (12 full-page equivalents with almost no ads) is gone. It’s been replaced by something called TV Weekly, a separate listings magazine for which subscribers have to pay extra.

And the paper’s planning to vacate its handsome 1930 art deco HQ on Fairview Ave. by the end of the year. Remaining employees will move into the nearby 1000 Denny (née Seattle Furniture Mart) building, which the company has sold and partly leased back. The historic-landmark SeaTimes building dates back to when almost all newspapers had their newsrooms and printing presses on the same site. (The SeaTimes is now printed at an increasingly under-capacity facility out in Mill Creek.) The old building will be mothballed pending a development scheme; such a plan would need city Landmarks Board approval.

In past installments of this department, I’d speculated that the Blethen family’s final endgame might be to turn the paper into an even smaller nonprofit operation, designed to live on the kind support of corporate benefactors. Now, as David Goldstein speculates on the basis of a recent editorial, the Blethens could be contemplating just such a scenario, and may be pushing for Federal help to make it so.

• I’ve ranted here in the past about certain dot-coms whose whole reason for being is verbal content, but which refuse to pay their writers. Turns out that even “content mill” dot-coms that do pay their writers work them to death. Lots of unpaid overtime, high quotas, short schedules, no pretense of quality, everything search-engine-optimized to smithereens. And the results didn’t even work fiscally, as recounted by “an AOL content slave.”
• Non-news of the day: Ebooks don’t need printers but they still need editors.
• The Brave New Films dudes have a handy dandy guide to the Koch Bros.’ moves behind the scenes of the right wing opinion machine; while Mr Jon Stewart lists a few dozen Fox News lies.
• As you know, I don’t like it whenever a woman brands “men,” as a singular collective entity, as “potential rapists.” I also don’t like it when a man does much the same thing—as a convoluted explanation of/justification for sexual assault. This man, whom I sorry to say shares my birth date, is the real Dilbert.
• Daily Kos has uncovered a Congressmember who loves Green Lantern and is willing to admit it.

After word slowly leaked out that the situation at Fukushima is, or at least was, direr than officials originally acknowledged, the fringier-fringy “news” sites are spreading unsubstantiated scare stories about the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska, a site recently surrounded by floodwaters. Here’s a more plausible report of what’s going on there, from an unofficial but knowledgeable source.

…and Sherman Alexie defends writers’ right to depict these hells, both realistically and metaphorically.

A Forbes.com story about lawyer/author/TV pundit Lisa Bloom asks the musical question,

How did women go from caring about the Equal Pay Act and Title IX to celebu-tainment and Botox, and what can we do about it?

Whenever I read such all encompassing remarks about “women,” I always respond, at least to myself: WHICH women?

There have always been women who translated their personal concerns and needs into society-wide issues.

And there have always been women who consumed escapist entertainment.

And, yes, there have even been those who did both.