Blasting the media as an "engine of falsification," feminist columnist Katha Pollitt spoke her mind April 11 in a lecture at Carl Becker House, "The 'Opt-Out' Revolution and Other Media Myths About Women."

The Irik Sevin Fellow in Residence at Becker House, Pollitt is known for her sharp and provocative analyses of popular culture and politics. Her biweekly column in The Nation has been described by the Washington Post as "the best place to go for original thinking on the left."

Speaking to an audience composed mainly of women, Pollitt countered Lisa Belkin's assertion in her 2003 New York Times Magazine cover story, "The Opt-Out Revolution," that more and more women are leaving demanding careers to tend to their families because they realize that there's more to life than work, work, work.

She refuted Belkin's conclusion, "Why don't women run the world? Maybe it's because they don't want to," by pointing first to the unrepresentative nature of the women Belkin interviewed.

"Is an Ivy League college, Princeton in this case, supposed to stand in for all women?" Pollitt asked. "Most of the women featured in the article were privileged white women, married to even wealthier husbands."

According to Pollitt, when the job market sours, people with options tend to leave the workforce because they can't advance or get a better job, while others simply give up on finding work.

Delivering a scathing indictment of child-care policies, clashing work and school schedules and complicated tax systems, she said, "We have here a system that almost seems to penalize working mothers by making their lives stressful." The conditions that force a woman to quit the workforce are "obscured by the media" as a return of female-oriented choices toward domestic tranquility.

Men, she added, are also affected by problems in the economy: If men could afford the same choice of "opting out," given the nature of the economy, they would probably take it, too.

In her signature witty style, Pollitt argued that that feminism is not about "giving birth on Friday and returning to work on Monday. ... It relates to the idea of a balance between work and family -- for both sexes, a more flexible and less hierarchical workplace, of child care as a task for both parents and for society as a whole."

The talk was followed by a house dinner at Becker House, where Pollitt interacted with students and other guests.

Graduate student Kanika Arora is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.