One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women. I always write about women who are marginalized, who have no means or resources and somehow manage to get out of those situations with incredible strength - and that is more important than anything.
Marilyn Monroe Productions was the first female-owned production company in Hollywood. She paved the way for women in Hollywood, and every single woman owes something to her for that, whether they agree with her image or not.
Women are running companies, serving as the human resource director of companies, and helping employees solve problems. Women are doctors, lawyers, teachers, sales managers, marketers. They handle problems in the workplace by day and manage their families by night.
As a little girl growing up in a small farming town in Michigan, my idols were women like Marlene Dietrich and Rita Hayworth.
There's nothing new about fashionable women borrowing from men's style; just think of Marlene Dietrich, Brigitte Bardot, or Diane Keaton.
I took a job as a reporter in India, where I lived with several married couples, which got me interested in why some marriages work and others fail. Back home, many women of my generation were also putting off marriage or not getting married at all, which only led me to more questions.
Social Security makes up a much larger share of total retirement income for unmarried women and minorities than it does for married couples, unmarried men and whites.
Why in almost all societies have married women specialized in bearing and rearing children and in certain agricultural activities, whereas married men have done most of the fighting and market work?
I certainly know women who had children, quit their jobs, and still have full-time nannies. That's who these women are: Even to the detriment of their own relationship with their kids, they want to appear perfect Martha Stewart moms.
Shania Twain and Martina McBride and all these wonderful women were saying that it's awesome to be a woman, and it's awesome to be a confident woman. Obviously, I could never compare myself to them, and I want to be my own thing, but I think that message is what I want to say as an artist.
I think women do have that fatal streak to them that's partly because it's been romanticized, the martyr complex - 'Look what you did to me!'
Why should women not be a martyr for her cause?
As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.
Too often, older women are seen as victims, but I know lots of formidable women who have marvellous jobs as well as a full erotic life, and children and friends and family.
Fortunately, when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister, she banned public whipping of women - banned whipping of women, period, which is a marvelous thing she did.
When I was three years old, a nanny took me shopping and I saw large cut-outs of Mary Poppins in the store and yelled, 'That's mummy!' These women walked by and said, 'Oh how cute. That little girl thinks that Mary Poppins is her mum.'
What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
Imagine, a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000. It's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.
Abortion opponents know full well that the public would not abide putting women in prison en masse. Politically, it's more palatable to portray them as irrational, ignorant, and childlike, perhaps even temporarily insane.
The few bright meteors in man's intellectual horizon could well be matched by women, were she allowed to occupy the same elevated position.
