3 Article from The Guardian

Lost youth: Turning young girls into sex symbols
Last Halloween, a five-year-old girl showed up at my doorstep wearing a tube top, miniskirt, platform shoes and eye shadow. The outfit projected a rather tawdry sexuality. "I'm a Bratz!" the tot piped up proudly, a look-alike doll clutched in her chubby fist. I had a dizzying flashback to an image of a child prostitute I had seen in Cambodia, in a disturbingly similar outfit.
I was startled, but perhaps I should not have been. In recent years, the sexy little girl has become insistently present in the media – from 15-year-old Miley Cyrus photographed draped in a sheet for Vanity Fair to websites "counting down" to the day that child stars, such as Emma Watson, reach the age of consent. And, of course, there was Britney Spears, aged 16, prancing around in school uniform and pigtails in her first music video. Their allure is that of "Lolita" – very young and very provocative.
Lolita has become shorthand for a prematurely sexual girl – one who, by legal definition, is outlawed from sexual activity. The Lolitas of our time are defined as deliberate sexual provocateurs, luring adults into wickedness and transgressing moral and legal codes. But the original Lolita – the 12-year-old protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov's novel – was rather different; a powerless victim of her predatory stepfather.
Like many pre-adolescent girls, she is sexually curious, but has no control over the abusive relationship. Yet it is as though the very fact of her sexuality has made her into a fantasy, rather than the novel's sexually abused and tragic figure. She is eagerly invoked in the media as a sign of how licentious little girls can be. "Bring back school uniforms for little Lolitas!" demands the Daily Telegraph in an article condemning contemporary sexy schoolgirl fashions, while Tokyo's Daily Yomiuri refers to "the Lolita-like sex appeal" of preteen Japanese anime characters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/sep/18/lost-youth-young-girls

Observer survey reveals gender barrier stopping women reaching the top
The male stranglehold on power in the upper echelons of British business is laid bare today in new research commissioned by the Observer. Women occupy just 34 of the 970 executive director positions at companies in the FTSE 350 index, according to a survey by the Co-operative Asset Management.
When it comes to non-executive director posts – which do not involve any management power – woman fare slightly better, but still occupy only 204 of the 1,772 jobs available.
In the most senior positions of all, women's representation is stuck in the single digits. Leaders such as Baroness Sarah Hogg, chair of venture capitalist 3i, and Dame Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of media group Pearson, remain in a tiny minority.
Only four chairmanships are held by women, equivalent to 1.3% of the total, and just nine women serve as chief executives, or 3%.
No fewer than 132 of the companies surveyed, including Barclays Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland, are men-only zones, without a single woman at board level.
Overall, female representation stands at just 8.8%, taking both non-executive and executive directorships into account. This feeble showing is despite the fact that more than nine out of 10 companies in the survey claim to have an equal opportunities policy.
Harriet Harman, Leader of the House of Commons and minister for women and equalities, this weekend asked for the full background to the research in order to consider its findings with the Department for Business.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/aug/23/women-business-harriet-harman-equality

Just dont call them chick flicks
John Ford once said that no woman could be a good film director because she couldn't throw a straight left to the jaw. A woman, Ford implied, could never get an unruly crew to stick to a schedule and a budget. It's possible that the film industry still thinks the way he did, for half a century later only 7% of directors are female.
Many of these women must have screened their work at Edinburgh this year. In a burst of what could be called disproportional representation, 12.5% of the features on show here were by women directors. Edinburgh has a history of such hospitality: in 1972, it included a groundbreaking women's section. It must also have helped that the festival's new director is female, though Hannah McGill insists she actively tried "to not know anything biographical about the director" when viewing films. Still, with the odds stacked against them, it seems right to pay attention to women film-makers, and the Edinburgh film festival provided a good opportunity to assess the current state of women's film.
Of the women directors on show this year, Julie Delpy's work as an actress gives her the highest profile. Delpy has not only written and directed the acerbic comedy Two Days in Paris, but also stars in it, as a highly strung photographer named Marion, bringing her American boyfriend home to Paris for the first time. Delpy says she knew that she'd have more chance of getting a solo project funded if she didn't stray too far from the template set by Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in which she delivered charming performances opposite Ethan Hawke.
If Linklater's lovebirds had stayed together for a couple of years, moved to New York, developed a bewildering range of neuroses and returned for a European vacation, they might resemble the central couple in Two Days in Paris. Delpy gleefully describes her film as a "horror film for macho guys" - referring to Marion's ingenious way of humiliating the male member: she loves to take pictures of naked men with helium balloons tied to their penises. And Marion launches more than one hilarious diatribe against the male ego. Though Delpy shies away from the label, her father told her: "I am so proud of you. You made a true feminist movie."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/aug/31/edinburghfilmfestival2007.festivals