PERFORMANCE: Circus Finelli shares the stage with evil-puppet superstar, Blinky Winky, in Blinky Winky's Presidential Fundraiser, which combines a live cartoon band performance with comedy, circus, and acrobatics: "Accordions, steel-bodied strings, stand-up bass, and exotic percussion contraptions will fill the air with sounds of Eastern Europe, old-time America, and original Circus tunes." (8 p.m., El Rio, 3158 Mission Street)

STORYTELLING: Porchlight returns to the S.F. International Film Festival with Porchlight: True Stories from the Frontiers of International Filmmaking, featuring film industry-themed stories told by guest storytellers with accompanying video clips, including Tom Barbash, Mario de la Vega, Lorelei Lee (cowriter of SFIFF 2012 film Cherry) and the duo of Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri. (9:15 p.m., Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post Street)

DISCUSSION: The University of San Francisco (USF) and the African American Arts and Cultural Center present The State of Black San Francisco, the second in a three-part series of discussions amongst community leaders focusing on urban education, housing, jobs, and the criminal justice system. (5:30 to 7:30 p.m., African American Art & Culture Complex, 762 Fulton Street)

Last week, SFist launched this series under the title "Week In Women," but we've decided to keep the theme open to accommodate other issues that don't directly involve gender on occasion. In this series, we aim to empower women and men to work together to create change in their communities.

"What?!" was our shocked realization* that the Equal Rights Amendment, which is often referred to as the Women’s Equality Amendment nowadays, still hasn't passed. Our lack of memory on this matter made us feel akin to those Twitter users who didn't know the sinking of the Titanic was a real event. The amendment, which simply states the below text, has been three states short of ratification since 1982.

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

This makes the below quote from suffragist Alice Paul, who introduced the amendment for the first time in 1923, incredibly poignant:

If we keep on this way they will be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the 1848 Convention without being much further advanced in equal rights than we are. . . . If we had not concentrated on the Federal Amendment we should be working today for suffrage. . . . We shall not be safe until the principle of equal rights is written into the framework of our government.

It's been 164 years and counting since the 1848 Convention, and the the term "War on Women" is a trending topic at this very moment. Any efforts in relation to the women's movement ring hollow when we still don't have equal rights under the Constitution. Like many progressive causes, the women's movement needs much more unity and better marketing savvy in order to get this message to the masses.

Case in point, with regard to SFist's research about Equal Pay Day last week, which encompassed a couple of hours of navigating the rapidly growing online documentation of "The War on Women," it took us forever to absorb the fact that Equal Pay Day signified the day of the year, April 17, 2012, that the majority of women had finally earned the same amount of income that their male counterparts had earned in 2011. The cause's organizers should have been bombarding us with that point, which is very effective once you know the symbolism.

Friend of SFist, Kate Bryant, director of The Pay Gap who created the video we featured last week, attended the Equal Pay Day event in D.C. last Tuesday and also lamented the cause's ineffective marketing efforts:

I was really disappointed with the actual equal pay day event I went to DC for. There were maybe 30 people tops and I'm guessing half of them were staff and some were from a briefing I'd gone to earlier that day. They promoted the idea of wearing red (to show how far in the red they are) and only a handful of people did (me included). They couldn't even get their own staff to wear red!?! Laura came too, and we thought they could be selling red t-shirts and engaging passersby and having it be much more educational than it was. Or maybe it was overshadowed (literally) by the discovery flying to the museum.

Luckily for the women's equality movement at large, the acclaimed documentary Miss Representation has reinvigorated the national gender roles debate. SFist attended a screening of the film last week, along with a Q&A with director and former San Francisco first lady Jennifer Siebel Newsom. In addition to the glaring evidence that advertising revenue and the deregulation of television companies have ultimately created a very distorted perception of gender as a result of its representation in the mainstream media, the take-away message of the event was that all factions of the women's movement need to unite in order to bring about real change in our communities.

As Seibel Newsom noted at the Q&A, she didn't set out to do anything more than create and distribute the film (who has the time?), but the overwhelming demand for a cause with a clear message that offers concrete solutions persuaded her to develop educational programming surrounding the film. She's been committed to flying across the country to host screenings and Q&As at local high schools and community centers, and her team has developed guides for educating kids at various grade levels. Seibel Newsom spoke of parents across the country who've successfully prompted their local politicians to advocate for their communities' needs. She said she's currently working on a second documentary that focuses on empowering boys in the same vein as Miss Representation.

Host a screening of Miss Representation in your town! Also, be sure to check out the film's overwhelming list of statistics.

*Editor's Note: Yes, we learned about the ERA in school, and yes, the headline and intro is kind of a half-joke referencing the movement's lack of cohesiveness. Women might have come a long way in some regards, but decades of apathy have given us all a false sense of security, of which the current political climate has made us painfully aware.