Women's Educational Media is currently in post-production on the latest film in the Respect For All Project, Straightlaced. Straightlaced features diverse teenagers talking with breathtaking honesty about gender performance expectations and the homophobia at the heart of it all. With candid interviews with over 50 teens, Straightlaced gives voice to young people on all points on the gender role spectrum who choose to either adhere to, or resist, traditional gender role expectations.

One lesson we should not take away from the Imus debacle is how great it was that CBS pulled the plug on Imus once General Motors, American Express, Sprint Nextel, GlaxoSmithKline, TD Ameritrade, and Ditech.com threatened to yank their corporate sponsorships. Although the corporate cards may have been played in the public's favor in this case, the recent dance of the corporate initials, in which GM pulls the strings and CBS jumps, is nothing to celebrate. For each rare instance when media conglomerates swat down a bigot, there are dozens and dozens of examples when a different kind of censorship occurs.

In February 2007, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and author David Steinman jointly released lab results at a press conference showing the presence of a hidden carcinogen, 1,4-Dioxane, in children's bath products. The chemical is a byproduct of manufacturing and therefore does not appear on product labels. The public response was overwhelming and built over time: within two months Campaign staff fielded hundreds of phone calls and e-mails from concerned parents all over the United States, many of whom had called the manufacturers whose products were tested. All of the parents wanted to know how they could find safer products for their kids. The press release was posted on blogs and circulated via e-mail, as well as reported in the media and the Campaign sent an action alert to subscribers detailing how to find safer products. One short-term result was a letter from one of the companies whose products were tested, Johnson & Johnson, confirming that it was no longer selling two of the products found to contain the carcinogen. For the long-term, this story highlighted the failings within the FDA to adequately protect the public from known carcinogens in personal care products, even this vulnerable population.

As part of their mission to help transform the role of corporations in society by building the capacity of BEN members in their corporate campaign work, BEN has launched new trainings for campaigners this year. The Web Advocacy for Campaigners Training took place in May in San Francisco and they were pleased to offer an event that campaigners found very valuable. BEN contracted with David Taylor of Radical Designs and Allen Gunn of Aspiration to tailor their advocacy training to marketplace advocates.