There are many new segments of women emerging today, largely because the definition of “having it all” is changing: It is becoming self-defined rather than society-defined. Women are accepting, even embracing their imperfections and limitations as they realize that trying to be everything to everyone all at once is both unrealistic and unnecessary in a post-feminist world.

The follow are some emerging trends for women, some of which are outlined in Next Now:

Among the other emerging trends in Turkey: 

East Meets West: Elements of European culture are working their way into Turkey as it continues to seek entry into the European Union. This will raise new questions of assimilation, given the practical realities of an aging continent trying to determine whether to admit a younger newcomer. 

Modern Islam’s Secular Home: Turkey has become the secular face of modern Islam, but as waves of strict religious observance sweep through the Islamic world, Muslims are increasingly feeling the need to affirm and proclaim their religious affiliation. The relationships between the various streams of Islam, and between Muslims and the non-Islamic world, are now crucial issues for Europeans. And coming to terms with the problems of cohabitation and finding solutions palatable to both Muslims and non-Muslims alike will be a matter of urgency in Turkey, as well as all of Europe.   

Brand Turkey: Which country boasts the city voted European Culture Capital of 2010, a wonderful climate and a seamless blend of history and modernity that makes for a Back to the Future-type experience? The answer is Turkey, but it's done a nice job keeping these attributes a secret thus far. Look for Turkey to start brushing up its image and create a brand for itself in the coming years.   

These trends are poised to shatter cultural norms, redefining once-hallowed ground such as family, religion and marriage, to name only a few. When we look back a year from now, we’ll ask, “Have we gone too tabloid?”

Arranged Marriages: Many Westerners respond with resistance and a strong cry against this idea, but consider ABC’s wildly popular primetime show The Bachelor: Each season a bachelor is given the opportunity to select a mate from a prescreened group of eager partners—essentially an arranged marriage. As we become ever more time-poor, watch as singles turn to their extended families to make a match and to specialized services that arrange partnerships online.

Family Reunions Around Dad’s Donor Sperm: It’s Roots Revisited, 21st-century style, as people born of donated sperm track down their half-brothers and -sisters. Those conceived through donor insemination are looking to develop closeness and commonality via their DI siblings; it’s a way to combat the feeling that, as they sometimes say themselves, they’re “half-adopted” or “lopsided.”

Unstrategic Alliances: It all began with those most awkward of best buddies: 41 and 42, namely, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And we’re seeing more odd couples and couplings every day: Brooke Shields blessing Tom Cruise, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham. “Unstrategic” may be something of a misnomer, however: In the age of Brand Me, there’s little that garners more press attention than an unlikely and inexplicable partnership.

The Price Is Righteous: Despite the bad press generated by the indiscretions of religious leaders such as evangelical minister Ted Haggard and myriad Catholic priests, expect the business of religion to boom in 2007. For corporations, churches will become just one more distribution channel, with worshippers serving as word-of-mouth promoters for everything from approved books and movies—like this season’s The Nativity Story—to almost any goods and services. Just take a look at Chrysler’s sponsorship of Patti LaBelle’s 14 city tour of urban mega-churches this past November.

Missing Children: European couples aren’t breeding as they used to: Today, the average woman in the EU gives birth to just 1.48 children. At the start of the last century, one person in four on the globe lived in Europe; now it’s only one in 10. That means the next generation will be too small to fund the continent’s traditionally generous social welfare programs.

Brand Sluts: A term first heard in the blogosphere to mean an obsession with consumerism but adapted and popularized by Marian in 2005 as a way to define consumers who flit from one brand to the next with no sense of fidelity to any of them. While the connotation is negative, brand sluts are, in fact, savvy consumers; 2007 will see more of us get smart and refuse to “grow old with” any single brand.

Today more than ever, we are what we eat. However the thought is served up—plain and unadorned or garnished with wit—“You are what you eat” is proving true on many levels. On the most superficial level, people have always identified other nationalities with distinctive foods. On a deeper level, cultures are often strongly influenced by their predominant foods. And we now understand that “You are what you eat” applies at a cellular level as well.

Among other emerging food and beverage trends:

Gastroporn: It’s one of the ironies of modern life that cooking shows and books are so popular when much of the time we eat fast food on the move or settle down in front of the TV with a microwaved frozen dinner. The preparing, cooking, tasting and eating of food have become voyeuristic pleasures separated from physical reality.

Personalized Diets. The demise of one-note diets is inevitable. We’ve seen a backlash against Atkins as people re-embrace healthy carbs and start to query any diet that suggests butter, cream and unlimited red meat are the smart way to eat. Beyond that, there’s a growing belief that there’s no such thing as a diet that’s right for everyone. Personalization—whether based on lifestyle, ethnicity, blood type or something else—will become an important component of diet programs.

New Delicacies: Foods unfamiliar to everyday shoppers, like Greek yogurt, jicama from Mexico, Japanese sushi rice and Portuguese peri-peri sauces, will be front and center in the gourmet groceries that spring up in new developments. There, trendy shoppers will visit tasting bars and attend cooking classes. The continent most likely to emerge as hot in such shops? Asia. Watch also for African specialties like injera, the soft Ethiopian bread that also serves as an eating utensil.

Organic Grazing: The days of sitting at a table and lingering over three square meals are long gone for most people. Modern lifestyles mean fragmented schedules with meals eaten on the run. In response, the snacking and grazing culture is growing. Organic snack-food sales increased 30 percent in 2003, making snacks the second-fastest-growing organic segment after meat and poultry, according to a survey for the Organic Trade Association.

Global Gastronomy Meets the Mainstream: As we travel more expansively and watch more food shows that introduce us to international cooking, our tastes are going global. The proverbial melting pot is giving way to a literal stew of new flavors and tastes. Watch as more packaged and frozen ethnic meals mingle with frozen fries and pizza.

New Emphasis on Local and Fresh: “Organic” has been the focus of some of the most nutritionally aware for the last few decades, but now it’s moving into the mainstream. So today’s leading-edge consumers are turning their attention to local sourcing. Buying products locally is increasingly seen as one of the best ways to ensure that one’s food is truly fresh—picked not long before consumption.

The War for Young Palates: In virtually every country in which convenience foods and sugary snacks and soft drinks are sold—that is, in most developed countries and many developing countries too—the war for young palates is shaping up to be long and hard fought. Children can be picky eaters, but they love food that’s sweet, brightly colored, presented in fun formats and marketed with fun advertising. Plus, they are masters of pester power. In the short term, this means easy feeding for parents and irresistible profits for food marketers; in the longer term, it means heavy costs for treating the effects of obesity, such as diabetes. The clamor is growing to regulate junk-food marketing aimed at children. Will we see other nations adopt the U.K.’s tight restrictions on advertising to kids?

Premium-Drink Bars: As premium and super-premium spirits gain widespread appeal and acceptance, especially among younger people, bars will pop up to promote various brands, serving only one spirit and organized around the experience of that drink and its mixers. They’ll be short-lived but have serious talkability while they’re on the scene.

Adultescence—Many young people are settling at the crossroads between autonomous living and relying on the ’rents. It’s happened quietly and it’s here to stay, says David Morrison of Twentysomething Inc., who identified this growing demographic, also sometimes termed “kidults.”

Alpha Moms—The new face of motherhood: a well-informed, strong, decision-making multitasker who wields great personal and consumer power. The modern mom is confident and in control. There’s an Alpha Mom cable channel, and NBC aired a pilot titled Alpha Mom for its 2006-07 season.

Brand Sluts—A term first heard in the blogosphere to mean an obsession with consumerism but adapted and popularized by Marian Salzman in 2005 as a way to define consumers who flit from one brand to the next with no sense of fidelity to any one of them. While the connotation is negative, brand sluts are in fact savvy consumers.

Gastroporn—Preparing, cooking, tasting and eating food have become voyeuristic pleasures separated from physical reality and carried out by experts who go through the moves with practiced ease.

Microgeneration—Believers in personal sustainability are increasingly generating their own energy, by way of solar panels and miniature wind turbines installed in the home. Another aspect of the sustainability movement involves growing one’s own produce, a trend that has taken off in the U.K. with mini-allotments in urban areas.

Peerents—Parents are increasingly treating their kids more like peers. “Peerents,” a term coined by Schuyler Brown of Skyelab, work through issues with their children and share experiences candidly in a form of collaborative parenting.

Truth Lite—It’s the shoulder-shrugging way people shrink from accountability, cloud the truth and dance around the facts. Living in a culture of rampant lies and half-truths creates uncertainty, anxiety and cynicism. Greater demand for the whole truth will see accusations of “truth lite” leveled at politicians, the media and brands.

What are some recent catchphrases that have caught your attention?

Among the other trends in family and bonding outlined in Next Now:

Arranged Marriages: Many Westerners respond with resistance and a strong cry against this idea, but consider ABC’s wildly popular primetime show The Bachelor: Each season a bachelor is given the opportunity to select a mate from a prescreened group of eager partners—essentially an arranged marriage. As we become ever more time-poor, watch as singles turn to their extended families to make a match and to specialized services that arrange partnerships online.

Chinese-American Adoptees Trace Their Roots: A subculture is emerging that includes play groups and support groups, as well as tours to China. More parents are working to preserve their children’s heritage and help them assimilate at the same time via networks and support groups. And some parents are using these networks to find biological siblings among other adoptive families, with help from DNA registries and online tools.

Family Reunions Around Dad’s Donor Sperm: It’s Roots Revisited, 21st-century style, as people born of donated sperm track down their half-brothers and -sisters. Those conceived through donor insemination are looking to develop closeness and commonality via their DI siblings; it’s a way to combat the feeling that, as they sometimes say themselves, they’re “half-adopted” or “lopsided.”

Back to School at Home: As Michelle Conlin writes in Business Week, home-schooling is “no longer the bailiwick of religious fundamentalists or neo-hippies looking to get off the cultural grid.” A range of today’s parents are concerned that outdated educational standards are keeping their kids behind in a competitive international landscape. One incentive: The Internet and networking groups now provide these students and their parents with avenues for social interaction.

Reunions Become Big Business: Both reunions and weddings are big events laden with emotion and hopes. If everything works out as intended, a couple has only one wedding in their lifetime but a load of reunions. And as families extend and disperse, connections with our academic communities will help offer both a network and a sense of belonging.

Greetings From Ave Maria: America is living out a values-based culture war, and people will continue to use religion to define how and even where they live. One example is the development of Ave Maria in Florida, set to open in 2007. Established by Domino’s Pizza founder Tom Monaghan, the community will be centered around a Catholic University, with its residents living together under strict Catholic principles.

Unstrategic Alliances: It all began with those most awkward of best buddies: 41 and 42, namely, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And we’re seeing more odd couples and couplings every day: Brooke Shields blessing Tom Cruise, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham. “Unstrategic” may be something of a misnomer, however: In the age of Brand Me, there’s little that garners more press attention than an unlikely and inexplicable partnership.

 

Among the other emerging entertainment trends outlined in Next Now:

Technology Keeps Transforming Entertainment: Very little entertainment isn’t technology-enabled and forward-thinking. It’s the triumph of technology as entertainment. For young people especially, the two are almost synonymous; the majority of the U.S. teen market uses a computer, goes online, plays video games and uses a digital camera. Besides providing diversions, new technologies have changed our notions of what entertainment can be. For one thing, it’s there on demand, with the possibility of quality entertainment where, when and how we want it. And it’s made all kinds of interests and hobbies more accessible to more people.

Entertainment Platforms Proliferate: Consumers are becoming less dependent on—and less loyal to—any single media type. That’s largely because with so many options available for entertainment, people get what they need when they need it from whatever media source is most suitable at the moment. We’re turning into brand and media “sluts.”

The Engaged User: For daily entertainment, consumers are now strongly responding to those brands that encourage creativity and participation and give them the freedom of intercommunication. As we become editors of incoming information, we’re increasingly independent: We no longer live preprogrammed lives with predetermined playlists or editorial opinions. The world is now our remote control. We want to engage, interact and manipulate it to create our own media environment.

Entertainment Choices Create Unique Identities: The rise of “pick and mix” entertainment options is giving us a greater sense of control over our identities: People can’t be pigeonholed by their entertainment choices when those choices are so eclectic.

Sharing as Entertainment: The next stage of the self-expression revolution is focused on that which can be shared. Online creative expression, found in blogs, video-sharing sites, photo galleries and DIY music, is a form of individual entertainment, but the experience is complete only when it’s shared with friends and peers. Sharing the details of one’s personal life has become a major source of entertainment via reality TV; social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have made the experience digital. WiFi allows users to network and converge all within their own personal space, without having to leave the couch or backyard.

“Zoning Out” and “Me Time” as Entertainment: With leisure time becoming so precious in our time-scarce culture, just zoning out is becoming a form of entertainment all its own. Much of today’s youth participate in “binge chilling,” or going back and forth from doing a lot at once to doing absolutely nothing. Entertainment now has as much to do with being switched off as it has with being switched on.

This Tube Is MyTube: More of us will start creating entertainment using formats such as blogs or publicly posted video clips as today’s technology makes it easy for amateurs to express themselves at minimal expense or risk. And it’s not just for fun or, sometimes, profit: Because they cannot be easily reined in, these forms of online media are becoming increasingly vital forums in countries where free speech is repressed.

Here are the two items that we find much more intriguing:

First, the analysis of new Census figures confirming the trend of several decades that is finally seeing married couples start to become a minority in America. "Singletons" (whom we’ve written about extensively) are certainly one factor. And the number of cohabitating, unmarried same-sex couples continues to explode (and presumably, as stigma continues to fade, the reported numbers become more accurate). But the biggest impact is the "normalization" of unmarried cohabitation and the waning desire for children, owing to sheer cost as well as other considerations. A full 5 percent of the population are opposite-sex cohabitators; some of them will ultimately take the plunge, but they are "test-driving" the relationship, at a time when the divorce rate continues to climb at an unprecedentedly fast pace. The actual number of married couples may be higher than ever at the moment, but these new trends suggest profound changes for our economy—from housing to workforce to marketing and media.

In a related Census finding—according to a new book, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life—despite the surge of working mothers in the workplace, mothers are spending at least as much time with their children as they did 40 years ago. How do they do it? Fathers pitching in on household responsibilities, time-shifting household duties to breaks in the workday, sacrificing personal time and spending less time on cleaning and cooking—FMCG makers, take note!

The second item is another surprising emergence of a minority: Commuters on Metro North Railroad (the line that connects Westchester and Connecticut to Manhattan), traveling from suburb to city in the morning and reverse in the evening, now account for less than 50 percent of the total number of riders. Again, "conventional" commuters exist in numbers, but new users and new commutation patterns are changing the game. Most significant is reverse and intra-suburban commuting to new commercial centers such as White Plains, New York, and Stamford, Connecticut (these suburban centers have actually posted faster job growth than New York City for several decades). Furthermore, a full third of riders are now traveling during off-peak hours for reasons other than work (shopping, theater, etc.), compared with just 25 percent in 1984. The times are a-changin’ indeed.

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The Indian IT juggernaut: Everyone from 60 Minutes to Tom Friedman has reported on the emergence of a microeconomy based on outsourced IT infrastructure, design, manufacture and service in India. With a population of over 1 billion and a compensation system that is fractional of that in the West, it seems there is an endless train of bright, young, English-speaking and eager-to-work Indian talent. So, how can this train be derailed? According to Somini Sengupta in The New York Times, the issue is the sheer number, and competence, of engineers turned out by the Indian educational system. With the number of jobs expected to double in the next four years, commerce seems to be taking the problem into its own hands, offering faculty training and additional in-house training to recent graduates. What’s most interesting, however, is a movement afoot to have industry directly invest in the educational infrastructure itself (currently prohibited to all but nonprofits). Can you say "Infosys University"?

An interesting postscript is a recent trend among American graduates to migrate to India, to partake of the spoils of the boom—not to fill the labor gap discussed above but to help Indian companies extend their global reach and recognition with "local faces in local places."

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In the issue of the The New York Times (October 17, 2006) that leads with news of Wal-Mart’s latest venture in China (the acquisition of Taiwanese chain Trust Mark), John Tierney’s op-ed piece puts Wal-Mart, the latest Nobel Peace Prize, the global economy and world poverty in an interesting perspective. While lauding the efforts of Nobel winner Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus (the bank offers micro loans, usually less than $150, enabling locals to start small businesses), Tierney suggests that poverty-stricken villagers could more quickly change their fortunes by getting a job in a factory—and it’s likely that said factory is making products for the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart. Of course, the idea has its detractors: those who suggest that it creates more sweatshop jobs—the counterargument being that $2-a-day jobs materially improve life in many parts of the world; and those who bemoan the continued loss of American factory work to cheap labor abroad—countered by the idea that the net-net effect of buying Wal-Mart goods at lower prices is positive to the American worker. Sam Walton for Nobel?