Great

Increase in aid to Israel

We can give billions to Israel, but we can't afford to give health care to kids, or anyone, for that matter.

Washington is reportedly preparing a package of major arms sales to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states because of concerns over Iran's nuclear programme.

Saudi Arabia, I heard a third of the insurgents in Iraq are from there, and come to think of it, weren't most of the 9/11 hijackers from there?

Where I state the obvious because it was on my mind

Characterizing "god" as a man is a way to "other" women. And by other, I don't just mean, "not like me", I mean "nothing like men, not even like the creator of the universe, just some thing that I can't understand because I don't want to listen and accept women as my equals." And its been that way since the advent of the monotheistic religion that was the precursor to the religion that has consumed a third of the world. I wish I could lament the advent of monotheism, especially this terrible strain, without being compared to genocidal meglomaniacs. I don't want to kill anyone, I just want people to think about things a little bit.

GROW UP, AMERICA

It took me a while before I could watch the "I have a crush on Obama" video with the Obama "girl". I wasn't sure about what I would see. I thought it was cute, but I wasn't sure about it. Then I saw Hot for Hill, and was sickened by the fact that this group had to have another lithe model sing to the female candidate. Embracing homosexuality, my ASS. Any idiot can tell that it is just another way to look at skinny, scantily clad young women prance around. Why not have a man with a crush on Hillary? Because having crushes are for submissive members of society, and men are not submissive, not even when in contact with famous people. Why have out female icons gotten smaller and smaller over the years as women in real life have gained more power? Sut Jhally (sp) claims that it is so men still feel superior to women in some way, and I agree. Furthermore, Hot for Hill embraces homosexuality in the same way that two straight girls, goaded into making out for Girls Gone Wild does. If this group really wanted to embrace homosexuality, they would have a guy singing for Obama.

So today, I had the utter misfortune of seeing the Obama "Girls" and the Giuliani "Girls" pillow fighting in Manhattan when I was at the gym. They looked clearly disinterested, but the MSNBC commentator decided to forgo any shred of journalistic integrity he might have had [but he worked for MSNBC, so that he had any is questionable] and "panted" after showing the clip. I wanted to vomit all over the elliptical machine.

Time to Blame Women Again

Working mom's are responsible for childhood obesity. They just couldn't say that homes with two parents that work outside the home are responsible - no, because women aren't devoting their entire lives to pandering to their child, obesity rates rise. It is all women's fault.

Actually, the notion that families with both adults working outsode the home, especially before a child enters school, being more likely to have obese or overweight children is more or less a no brainer. Less direct parental supervision may lead to over eating, and it might also lead to a feeling of abandonment that is quickly filled by food. But jesus christ, I thought we were past this "working moms ruining kids" bullshit, especially from the BBC.

Guys being defensive about feminism

Here is a conversational post from FinallyFeminism101 that explains how a man might fight getting defensive on a feminist blog

Here come the progressive politics

This blog post about one of the biggest roadblocks to Israeli-Palestinian peace, from AlterNet's blog feeds, was very, very interesting.

Ha ha ha ha ha. They come RIGHT OUT AND SAY IT! We can do it, but we don't want anyone doing it to us. Wow.

How Macho are You Now?

Long ago, doctors used to not treat prostate cancer right away because it was a slow growing cancer. In this environment, my grandpa got prostate cancer. But later, in about 1987, they reexamined the cancer and found that it had spread. It spread to his testicles. The doctors had to remove his prostate and his testicles. He lived for 12 more years after that, if you can call that living. I only learned this last November, when my dad told me, because he just learned. He had also just been diagnosed with prostate cancer and had his prostate removed in January. He talks about it all the time, and I'm really glad.

According to the BBC, men don't want to get checked for prostate cancer because they are worried that it isn't "macho." Just a bit of how our idiotic gender norms harm everyone.

In a related story, we are first led to believe that having daughters leads to prostate cancer, then told that the results are inconclusive, but not until the end of the story. The media just can't seem to help itself when it comes to the birth of girls and negative consequences. Then again, maybe I'm just sensitive. I wouldn't be if so many places in the world didn't see the birth of a girl as a disappointment.

Apologies

On a grand scale, I don't understand why we have a society set up that is so mean to women. I guess I understand why it is, what I don't get is why it has to be that way. I've come to believe that men really hate, or at least, resent women - deep down, males have a jealousy developed before they were able to consciously understand the jealousy. Then, during adulthood, we begin to want to pass our genetic material on, and for women, it is easier to be sure we’re doing it. We can be 100% sure that our kids – the ones to which we give birth – have our genetic material. Men don’t have that luxury, and I’m terribly sorry about that, but I’m tired of being punished for it.

I’m so sorry that men will never get to give birth, I’m sorry that they feel like they don’t contribute to the reproductive process. What I don’t understand is why they can’t seem to get over it. Things developed in the unconscious mind and instinct to reproduce are hard to get over, I guess. But the extent to which men will go gets very ridiculous. When men finally realized their contribution in the form of sperm, some ignored the obvious similarities between offspring and their mothers and decided that ALL of the genetic material came from the men, and women were simply carriers. Freud even developed the idiotic concept of “penis envy”, ignoring the very obvious implications of society on gender roles.

Maybe this makes me a man-hater, but really, why shouldn’t I hate men? Give me a good reason to not hate the gender that has shown me nothing but their own insecurity, the needless oppression of my gender, and hatred for something I can’t help – my uterus. My hatred of one gender is based on how that gender treats me. Men’s hatred of women is precisely because of what our bodies can do. My response is this: get the fuck over yourselves. You’ll never be able to give birth or breastfeed. We don’t think less of you because of it. If we do think less of you, it is because you can't seem to get over it.

Please note that I hve decided not to use the term "sexist" and have instead decided to just use men. I don't yet have a big readership, and I highly doubt that I have any male readers, but I know that men tend to get defensive about this kind of thing. I don't see this post as anything other than some musings and statements of realities.

If, as a man, you feel the need to be defensive, remember that actions speak much louder than words. It is also a little pointless for you to feel defensive about something you can't help. I don't imagine that you can control your subconcious feelings of insecurity over the inability to be 100% sure that you've passed on your genetic material. I do expect you to be able to understand these feelings and control your behavior. This is called maturity.

Sub-concious Inferiority Complex

Here is another part of my "evolution of sexism" theory. This part is pretty hypothetical, and just the result of what I know about young childhoodand psychology.

Young boys develop a jealousy of their mothers, to some extent, and of girls. They do this before they can consciously understand the jealousy. Males claim that they wouldn’t want to give birth, but really, men’s contribution to life is hard to understand, especially at an early stage of life. Our own species didn't understand it until relatively recently.

I remember, as a young child, simulating birth with my mother, hiding under her shirt, then coming out. I cannot imagine that little boys didn’t do something similar, and I cannot imagine that it doesn’t have an effect on young male brains to know that they will never, ever be able to create life in the same way.

So the unconscious mind developed a slight jealousy, as it often does, and started postulating about how men were better than women in order to make up for what seemed like a disparity. As young men developed consciousness, they forgot the root of the presumptions, but still held on to them, and then projected them onto the women and girls around them.

It would be hard to convince me that this doesn't actually happen, since it makes sense and I'm not sure how one would create an experiement to disprove this hypothesis. I mean, we've had the experiment happening all around us for millenia, and this just seems to be the result. So maybe it isn't so much a hypothesis as an interpretation. But there are definitely other, perhaps stronger factors at play in sexism, the strongest of which being the insecurity with paternity.

Goodness, it has been a while

It has been 8 whole days since my last post - far too long. I have been in a bit of an emotional slump, and Rock is busy preparing for the bar. But as I feel someone alienated from my [now] old political forum. I would like to extend the scope of this blog to progressive politics in general, but still with a decidely feminist bent.

Speaking of feminism, I heard a sound bite on NPR this morning, that "dog fighting is no worse than legal abortion"

I assume that it is something about Michael Vick's dog fighting thing. First of all, what I think is more reprehensible than dog fighting were the cruel punishments of dogs that lost. One of which was to wet down a dog (which was needlessly identified as female, did that really need to be pointed out?) and electrocute it. Cruel, horrible, and UTTERLY POINTLESS.

As for if it is no better or worse than abortion. The human body rejects certain fetuses, biologically. It can be traumatizing, not to mention frustrating, especially for those having trouble concieving in the first place. Call me cold and cruel all you want, but we need to remember that mistakes happen. MISTAKES HAPPEN, even in biology.

So how does this relate to abortion? Well, miscarriages are, basically, abortions by one's own body, and for very good reasons - maybe your body isn't ready for a baby yet, maybe it never will be, maybe it has passed that time [my mother had a miscarriage in her 40s]. Maybe the baby hasn't been formed right. For whatever reason, the body aborted the baby. Abortions are what happens when the unconcious human processes can't detect any problems, but the concious human process can. Maybe a woman is not financially stable to even reliably support herself, maybe she is not at a point in her life when she could give the best care to herself for 9 months of pregnancy. Why is this such a problem? Well, duh, women are the ones best able to know when the pregnancy isn't right, and men get uptight when women have control over anything. Well, not "men" (though traditionally, that has been the case), just sexists.

In the Namib Dessert, one of the most arrid deserts in the world, a culture of people evolved that could only support a certain number of dependents. If a woman got pregnant and gave birth to a kid it couldn't support, after birth, the mother would quickly and quietly kill the newborn infant. This was a normal and accepted practice. I'm not sure if the practice still happens, but as with much in Africa, it probably still does.

So many like to paint the decision to have an abortion as frivolous, but, damn, it couldn't be further from the truth. Just another smear tactic from sexists who are afraid when women make decisions on their own.

So is legal abortion like dog fighting? Is legal abortion like an activity to starve and abuse animals so as to make them angry? Is the decision to not bring a baby into the world that one cannot or will not support adequately (even during pregnancy) the same as getting enjoyment out of dogs brutally killing each other? The answer should be apparent.

Talking

Published retroactively

Today's Luann comic kind of irritated me, because it was about women talking more than men. The feminist blogs said it best - that society promotes that stereotype of women talking too much and being annoying to shame women into talking even less. I, frankly, don't know how we can really say that men talk less when it is they who are all over the media. Women, on an individual level, might talk more, but men write more, and their ideas are the ones that get out there. So maybe I want men to shut the hell up. Well, maybe it is only certain men. I think one factor in women talking more is that we know that sometimes, people aren't listening, and by people, I mean the men - the sexist men - that don't think women are people, and therefore don't listen. So those poor women in relationships with those sexists need to say more to be able to get through to those asshats.

In the Luann comic, the mom is just talking in stream-of-concouisness style, and she is talking about something she did. Whereas, during the same time, the dad probably sat on the couch watching golf or something. So, in reality, maybe it is just that women actually have things to say. And really, do men talk about important things? That sexist asshat at work only talked about music and movies, because that was all he knew. I remember a time in high school, my sophomore year, when I was sitting with some girls from my junior high. They were overhearing some guys talking about some technical thing - computers, video games, whatnot - and one said "jeez, don't they have lives they can talk about?" I felt very conflicted about this statement, because I didn't particularly like these women, and I didn't think the guys' conversation meant they were losers, but it was an interesting comment, that I obviously still remember.

Now, in the human society, generalizations do not work all of the time. You can't look at one woman and assume everything about her simply because she is a woman. Intelligent people understand this, but still use generalizations because they reflect basic trends. As I said in an earlier post, as women go through puberty, they begin to focus more on interpersonal relationships, but not all of us do this. I didn't, neither did my friend C, neither did Entomologista. But because women focus on relationships so much, and lose interest for abstractions, men seem to fill the void of women talking about those things. But interpersonal relationships change every day, and abstractions remain the same. After a while, maybe people run out of things to say about a video game, movie, or sporting event, whereas it is hard to run out of things to say about an ongoing relationship.

As for me, my talking is definitely learned from my father first and his mother second. My dad talks a lot, and my mother said that her father was a big talker as well. She said she thinks that is part of why she was attracted to my dad. When my family goes somewhere, it is usually Mom, my sister and I that want to leave first, and we have to often go get Dad out of a conversation with some person and tell him we're all leaving, NOW. He once got in trouble with a couple of farmers for telling one farmer a story about another farmer that he didn't realize was intended to be private. I often describe his mother as a woman who would talk to "anyone, anywhere, about anything, at any time", and really, my dad and I learned this exact trait.

Overall, humanity is a social species, and we like to share our experiences. Some of us talk more than others, and we all talk about different things. Some of those things might just be more interesting and may necessitate more talking than other things. And really, it is rediculous to assume that guys don't talk about relationships either. Some might not, and maybe it is because they don't necessarily have relationships (those guys back in high school didn't).

There was a recent study that said that when young girls talk about relationships, it hurts them, whereas the same is not true for young boys (and I mean junior high age). I crtainly hope someone thought to ask what else each group talked about. In every woman's experience, she knows that women are often not encouraged to talk about certain things, like abstractions. Even our toys from childhood are belittled. We recently had that Transformers movie, but could you imagine a movie about My Little Pony being recieved in the same way? And it isn't because girls' toys cannot be made "cool". I seem to remember a Rainbow Bright movie I used to watch that seemed very cool. Granted, my adult mind might not be nearly as impressed, but themes in the movie could be rewritten and made very interesting. But in our society, little boys are just young people, but little girls are still inferior and weak. Maybe that is why girls growing out of that stage don't talk about that kind of thing, and instead obsess over relationships to the point that is harmful. Just some thoughts.

Picking My Battles

Published retroactively

Generally, I avoid Alternet's comments. The commenters are, by and large, complete idiots - conservative, sexist, and hateful trolls. But, for some reason, I wanted to read the comments for Inside Fox's Latest Anti-Feminist Reality Show. The show is obviously a stupid ploy, a sexist, patronizing view of a completely made-up world. No one should watch it, and I hope that the participants feel much the same way the cast of Manos: The Hands of Fate did after its release.

But first, there were only three comments, all incredibly stupid. Then later, I checked and saw 11 comments. A couple were intelligent, pointing out that this reactionary television crap was a diatribe against Hillary Clinton, and one was the epitomy of idiocy. Some brainless twit argued that feminists think that men are sub-human and that we blame 99% of problems on men. Sigh - the first part doesn't even need commentary, as for the second part..... A. it is more "the patriarchy" and B. uh, who has been calling the shots for the past several milleniums? What a dumbass. I wish someone would reply to that comment to say, "you're a complete idiot". Why don't I?

Why don't I? Is it because I don't want to get caught in the idiocy of the Alternet comment trolls? Yes. Would it even matter? Inaction bothers me, but so does too much action in inappropriate places. I was tempted to take the t-shirt pricing post down because I didn't want to seem like I was putting so much importance on what is one small part of the battle. That is why I made a seperate post about apathy rather than just updating the t-shirt post. And what action is appropriate? I have no desire for any of the t-shirts on sale for that comic, yet, so writing a letter seems premature. I won't be linking to the comic, but since I've hidden my site from the robots, that won't make a large influence. I could link the comic and advise my (few) readers to not purchase shirts, but I think in the end, I'd rather write a letter and speak to the proprieter individually.

You're only young once

I'm so glad that my parents lived first before having kids. They were 30 and 31 when they got married, and my mother was 34 when I was born. I'm the older of two kids.

Approximately 750,000 American women between the ages of 15 and 19 get pregnant each year. Of course some of these young women come to adore and enjoy their roles as mothers, but they had the rest of their lives for that. The opportunity to be independent, focused on self-improvement and intellectual discovery, and career-driven without complications, has been lost.

It is inexcusable that television networks, one of the best public sites for widespread education about safer sex, is acting coy at the cost of these young women's fullest lives. Until all women understand their reproductive choices, none of us can be sure that we are benefiting from the full range of gifts -- intellectual, spiritual, and otherwise -- that one half of the population has to offer.

Fox and CBS Refuse To Air Condom Ads

Apathy is bad

At the end of Sicko, the words "Do Something" appeared on the screen. Many have accused our generation of apathy. It isn't exactly a fair accusation, however, because more than ever before, we're overworked and strapped with debt. But that doesn't give us a right to throw up our hands and say "oh well."

Margaret Mead once said,

Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

My mother says "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." Back in March, Kaiser was going to charge me $140 for 3 months of birth control medication, but I complained to the doctor - rather, I demanded a different prescription, and he knocked $110 off the price. Lily Tomlin once said,

I always wondered why somebody doesn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.

Things don't change overnight, nor do they happen by themselves. When you see sexism somewhere, say something, do something.