NOW’s EqualiTEA, the Unconventional Women forum being put on by a variety of organizations, including The White House Project and the Women’s Campaign Forum, and the EMILY’s List reception, just to name a few, are places for progressive, activist women to gather and start planning the next phase of their political lives and agendas.

The Women’s Media Center is also presenting their report called, “From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry and the Press in the 2008 Election,” and apparently we need it, and not just for the guys who insisted on giving Hillary Clinton short shrift during the presidential campaign.

In an article called Hillary Clinton Fans Tough to Woo, Christy Hoppe of the Dallas-Morning News wrote about the increased number of women’s gatherings in Denver, referring to them as an “estrogen-fest.”

An estrogen-fest.

Is that supposed to make us think about hundreds of hormonal women creating a ruckus like a bunch of sorority girls? Because I hardly think it’s the right turn of a phrase to describe gatherings with the likes of Senator Hillary Clinton, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the scores of other high-profile Democratic women, especially when one Clinton almost became the party’s presidential nominee.

Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you read anything written about a political event populated by men called a “testosterone-fest?”

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The fact that the media, women members included, continue to write about gatherings presented and attended by women — especially political women — in derogatory and dismissive terms like this one never ceases to amaze me. I guess that’s my problem. I should be used to it by now.

But if we can’t even get other women to stop describing serious women and serious events with a vocabulary that can only diminish and mock us, how will we ever get the likes of Chris Matthews, Tucker Carlson, or the whole team at Fox News to stop referring to us as “bitchy” and “castrating?”

If any of you run into Christy Hoppe at the DNC, let her know I’d like to have a word with her. I just hope that she doesn’t run into Gloria Steinem or Nancy Pelosi first. That just won’t be pretty.

It’s about me and my fellow MOMocrats and my sister. It’s about my mother and my aunts and my daughter. It’s about mothers and friends and women who haven’t even become the next generation of leaders, yet.

Of course, as the Women’s Media Center rightly points out in its new video called Sexism Sells, But We’re Not Buying It Anymore, we’ve been focusing on the wrong thing. The MSM doesn’t limit its use of terms like “soppy,” “bitchy,” “castrating,” “nagging,” or “Wicked Witch of the West” to Hillary.

The most famous and infamous TV pundits aren’t reserving their ‘looks are everything’ moments to talk of Hillary’s cleavage or wrinkles. There are no limits. We are all fair game.

I have no doubt that, as usual, in response to this sort of challenge to how women are treated in the news media, there will be many who rush to say that we aren’t the targets. That it really is about Hillary Clinton.

As my grandfather used to say, do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?

But don’t take it from me. Take a few minutes and watch the video. Then tell me with a straight face that I’m doing the wrong thing by not letting my second-grader watch any television news “analysis.”

I am so lucky to be able to learn from these other amazing women!

As a girl growing up on a farm in the 1970s, I was a bit different from my girlfriends.

From a relatively early age, I was addicted to the politics of the nation over those of high school. Instead of watching Happy Days, I was glued to the Watergate coverage during the summer of 1974. I eagerly anticipated the arrival of my weekly issue of Time Magazine more than picking up Seventeen at the drug store.

My life, as I have lived it, is in no small measure a result of the Ms. Generation.

I watched in awe as Gloria Steinem led the way, along with so many others, to make it easier for me as a girl on the verge of college to have more options for my life than her generation had when they were teens. I felt she was fighting the fight for me and I was grateful. It gave me confidence that my impractical decision (as some in my family called it) to major in political science would help me fight the fight for any daughters I might eventually have.

So when Gloria Steinem, or her organization, calls, how can you not answer?

Progressive voices are getting short shrift in our media world full of O’Reillys and Limbaughs and Coulters. Sure, we’ve got Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington, but I’m afraid they’re vastly outnumbered. So the Women’s Media Center has put out the call to progressive women’s voices to change that.

Bloggers, activists, academics, and policy experts are going to give a collective voice to the issues that are important to us – to make sure that the Fox News opinions aren’t the only ones out there. Don’t worry, we’re not talking about the flame-throwing kind. We don’t need anymore firefights.

So, as part of that, I spent the weekend with a room full of some of the smartest and most articulate women who are already advocating on issues like immigration, engaging the “youth” vote, and policies that are truly friendly for all families.

One of the biggest things I came away with is that so many of us already have the essential tools to be effective advocates for the issues we’re passionate about – we’re smart, we’re well-versed in current events, we have causes that are important to us AND we have blogs!

But as useful as this blogosphere is, unless and until we can get our faces and voices and writing in the main stream media, our issues will continue to get pushed to the bottom of the priority list in favor of the ones who making more noise – or whose noise is getting the attention.

So we’re going to try and hope that in this incredibly important election year, we can get the candidates and voters to pay more attention to issues like health care for everyone, getting more voters to turn out (though things seem to be going pretty well on that front at the moment), toning down the rhetoric on immigration, and many other important issues.

It’s time to stop being ignored by making a planned and well thought out effort.

Coordinated and targeted. I’m hoping we’ll keep going after November.

Plus, the icing on the cake? I got to meet Gloria Steinem!

And for the girl who embraced the “Ms.” label while her high school girlfriends were planning their weddings — for the woman I am now who has always looked to the fights that Steinem fought and the ideals she has talked about — it just doesn’t get any better than that.