But then one of my favorite actors, Liam Neeson, whom I haven’t seen in ages, showed up in Taken, and I bit the bullet (heh, heh). He compelled me to buy a movie ticket for the first time since my 13-year-old daughter and I went to see Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 last summer.

Neeson looked older, frayed around the edges, but still commanding and handsome in that offbeat way of his. He manages to convey what might have been pages of dialogue without opening his mouth. And there’s quite a lot to convey: He plays a once-estranged father, trying his damndest to renew his relationship with his teenage daughter. Just as he thinks he’s making progress, the girl falls prey to sex traffickers who kidnap her on a trip to Paris.

I admit some of the plot made me queasy: Father desperate to rescue the helpless, virginal daughter, but then I remembered the facts. Sex trafficking is not fiction. It’s a massive problem all over the globe, and I respect the attention Taken brings to it, whether it was intentional or not.

For more information on sex trafficking (or, more precisely, girls and young women being “taken” and sold into sexual slavery) and what you can do about it, check out Equality Now. It’s a valuable organization, and it needs us all to speak up.

Email or write your senator (and if you’re not sure who she is, you can find out easily by clicking here) and let her know that you want her to do everything possible to end the trafficking of human beings.

To learn more, go to the Huffington Post and The New York Times, both of which published articles about trafficking last July.

Oh, and see Taken. It’s 91 minutes of sheer excitement.

When we succeed, everyone succeeds.

The Huffington Post features a thought-provoking column by C. Nicole Mason, the Executive Director of the Women of Color Policy Network, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

She writes:

In a vulnerable and weak economy, women and single-women heads of households are hit hardest. They tend to earn less and have fewer assets than their male counterparts. And single mothers and their families are more likely to live in poverty than any other demographic group in the United States.

What should be done? How can we make the stimulus package a little more pink?”

Read the full column (and the interesting discussion that follows) here.

She provides some pretty wild examples, and I can’t decide which one I dislike most. It’s gotta be a tie between the ad for Dolce & Gabbana and the one for the car.

What do you think? I think that if someone wants my money, insulting me is not the way to get it.

December 2008 Vogue cover via HuffingtonPost.com

Ever since Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt divorced, Jen’s been promoted in the media as a loser in love, the girl who can’t keep a guy, the man-repellent of the new millenium, and so on. Which comes as a surprise to most of the men we know, who consider Jen not only approachable, friendly, funny, and “nice” but dead sexy.

Men love Jennifer Aniston.

But if you believe what you see on TV, the poor dear is so desperately lonely she’s trying to line herself up a seat at Courteney Cox and David Arquette’s Christmas table.

Let’s get this out of the way: We resent the implication that there is something deficient about the woman Brad Pitt left for Angelina Jolie. More important, we resent the implication that she had it coming, as some in the media have suggested, because she was unwilling to bear his offspring.

Furthermore, it irked us that Angelina Jolie initially reported that nothing went on between her and Brad on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, where they met. But it really irked us a couple of weeks ago when she bragged to the New York Times about her children, “Not a lot of people get to see a movie where their parents fell in love.”

Ugh.

We’re also kind of sick of how the media have elevated Angelina and Brad to sainthood. Yes, it’s wonderful that Angie and Brad have love in their hearts for all those children, but why doesn’t that love extend to other humans, particularly Jennifer Aniston?

Well, the Huffington Post reports that Jen has broken her silence about Angelina’s parents-in-love quote in the December issue of Vogue.

You go, Jen!

As for Brad, I may be alone in this, but I took Edward Norton for the cute guy in Fight Club (Edward Norton really is a pretty cute guy). And, as for Angelina, she probably shouldn’t get too comfortable.

Because what a person will do with you, he’ll do to you.

-Terry Hernon MacDonald

Love her or hate her, she raises a lot of interesting points. We’d love to hear your perspective, so feel free to leave a comment.