When Andi Zeisler graduated from college in 1996 and looked around at her pop culture-infused world, she and friend Lisa Jervis decided they needed to do something about the negative image of women that permeated the media.

Together, they created "bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture," which started as a small online 'zine. Ten years later, it has expanded into a quarterly, nationally distributed print magazine with an accompanying Web site. The magazine has become known for its keen analysis of ad campaigns, sitcoms, movies and other news and entertainment media, and how those media portray women.

"We have always a strong activist flavor and we always have a few pages of activist resources on various topics that need attention from everyone and that often fly under the mainstream radar," Zeisler said Thursday during a presentation at the Oregon State University Women's Center.

The magazine's headquarters are in Oakland, Calif., but will be moving to Portland by the end of the year. Zeisler is on tour promoting an anthology of essays from the magazine, called "bitchfest."

The name of the magazine has at times been controversial, but Zeisler said women are often called "bitch" when they are speaking up or not backing down from something important to them, and therefore, was an appropriate word to reclaim from its negative connotations.

During her talk at OSU, Zeisler hit upon some problems she sees in current media portrayals of women - in television, advertising and politics - and why pop culture is a critical locus of feminist activism and feminist thought.

"The Egyptians had Isis and Osiris. The Greeks had Homer. The Elizabethans had Shakespeare. We have 'American Idol,' 'US Weekly' and Angelina Jolie," Zeisler said.

In 1996, the fare wasn't much better for a couple of recent college graduates with a strong interest in pop culture.

"We were prime targets for movies, TV, ads, newscasts and glossy magazines, all of which fell over themselves telling us how to dress, what to eat, where to work, where to go after work, whom to lust after and how to lust period."

Over the past decade, the magazine has analyzed violence against women in films, how female politicians are portrayed in the news, and how often feminism is measured not by real women doing real work, but by how many men Carrie Bradshaw slept with on "Sex and the City."

"Loving pop culture comes at a price," Zeisler said. "And for most women, that price is a deep sense of betrayal at being told that the lives we're shown on screen, in books and in advertising are accurate and charmingly quirky reflections of our own."

A post-feminist movement that claims that the women's movement achieved all its goals and that current feminists are just whining and demanding hasn't helped the situation.

"We continue to find it both amazing and enraging that such simple concepts of equality and autonomy continue to freak people out so much," Zeisler said.

Zeisler addressed corporate media ownership, product placement and the popularity of reality shows and their roles in the covering, or lack thereof, of feminist issues. Marketing to female consumers can be especially frustrating, Zeisler said, citing an example from the 2004 elections when an effort to get women to vote included passing out nail files and lipsticks with vote-positive messages inscribed on them.

"What this all adds up to, is if the personal is political, as that famous phrase goes, the pop is even more so," Zeisler said. "Media is a public gauge of attitudes about everything from abortion to poverty to political power."

For more information, go to www.bitchmagazine.com.

Theresa Hogue is features reporter for the Gazette-Times. She can be reached by e-mail at theresa.hogue@lee.net or by phone at 758-9526.