When you’re wearing high heels, the last thing you want to do is walk a long distance from your parking space to the store. Well, frankly, the last thing you want to do is walk at all, which is kind of impossible. But the city of Seoul in South Korea is all over this one with its Women Friendly Seoul Project, a plan to turn the city in a more heel-friendly place. Sounds pretty awesome, huh?

The city plans to paint close to 5,000 public parking spaces pink to reserve them for women. Other measures are being taken as well to improve the overall quality of life for women in the city. The program will pave streets to make them more high-heel friendly, improve lighting, build additional women’s public restrooms, create safe parks for women, add more public day-care centers, and expand an already-existing women’s taxi service. By 2010, the city’s transformation into a so-called women-friendly haven will be complete.

While these improvements may help reduce the frustration of everyday inconveniences for women in Seoul, they will probably not foster gender equality, which is a hot-button issue in South Korea that the government has had limited success in addressing. In fact, these efforts just might undermine women’s attempts to compete in a male-dominated society. Read More »

If you haven’t heard about the man with the missing pants yet, you must have been living under a rock; it’s been all over the television for days.

But for all those rock-dwellers, otherwise known as people with actual lives (psshhh whatever), here’s the quick overview.

Man, Judge Roy L. Pearson to be exact, (doesn’t it sound like a soap opera name?) gives pair of pants to his local dry cleaners, owned by the kind Chung family. (Can you tell I’ve already picked my side?) Anyway, Pearson doesn’t get his pants back, sues family for $54 million. That about sums it up.

Now, I don’t even know where to begin trying to pick apart this mess. For one, the man is a judge, you think he of all people would be against manipulating the American legal system, right? Well, not so much.

Pearson claims that because he no longer wants to use his neighborhood dry cleaner he’s going to need $15,000 every weekend for 10 years to rent a car and go to a further cleaner. He also threw in $2.5 million to cover the emotional stress he had to endure over those poor, poor pants.

This one time, in sixth grade my mom accidentally shrunk my favorite pair of stone-washed Limited Too jeans in the dryer and I cried for a week, so I totally know where he’s coming from. (WHAT?) Read More »