Oh, what excitement we’re having for a slow August! (One of my editors, frustrated that no one would return his calls, once called these two weeks “the dead of summer.”) First we learned that Representative Todd Akin believes women have magical powers to repel a rapist's sperm from our uteri—and the underlying ideas that, as Lindsay Beyerstein yesterday delineated so crisply, "forcible rape is the only real rape" and "women habitually lie about rape," which she notes are two sides of the same coin.

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women  By Elisabeth Badinter, Metropolitan Books, 224 pages, $25.00

Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting  By Pamela Druckerman, Penguin Press, 304 pages, $25.95

Don’t smoke or drink while pregnant. Breast-feed for a year, if possible (it almost never is). Buy organic. Read to your little one every day. Don’t work full time unless you have to, line up the right schools, and if you can’t manage everything on this list, try not to wreck your kids’ fragile psyches with the guilt unleashed by your failure.

Yesterday, Dave Weigel's assessmnt of the politics behind legislative attacks on reproductive rights was on target until it went very awry. According to Weigel, House Democratic leadership sees anti-abortion extremism -- attempts to redefine rape or allow hospitals to deny women life-saving abortions -- as a political liability for Republicans, especially given that independent voters are more interested in the economy than in turning back to the culture wars. Fair enough, but Weigel’s piece takes a strange turn by protraying the pushback from women’s advocates as political theater, rather than as a serious response to attacks on women’s rights.

David Leonhardt devotes his column today to the motherhood problem in the workplace. He cites research showing that many of the differences in earnings and promotion between women and men stems from women taking time off -- or moving to a part-time schedule -- for family reasons. On the other hand, women without children earn almost as much and do almost as well as men (though there's still a difference).

Courtney Martin writes that this International Women's Day, we should look at gender inequality in our own communities. Each day this week on TAPPED we will run a profile of an organization doing exactly that.

COLOR, the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights, is barely a decade old but is already breaking new ground in Colorado. Their success in the 2008 election was a testament to their innovation, when they helped defeat a slate of ballot initiatives that would have meant setbacks in reproductive rights, worker’s rights, and minority achievement.