Marriage, by its very (traditional) definition, is a sexist affair: it involves one of each sex, one male and one female. And I suppose this is because, traditionally, the purpose of marriage was family: to start a family, to have and raise children. This view is fraught with questionable assumptions, glaring inconsistencies, and blatant errors. …
Category: gender issues
Mar 29 2013
Redundant Women
I just read an article about the Brontes that mentioned “redundant women”. Apparently in 19thC Britain, there was such a male/female ‘imbalance’ in the population that about 500,000 women would remain unmarried. They were called “redundant” women and one of the big questions of the day was what to do with them. Geezus.
Mar 25 2013
Freakonomics Indeed
I remember when I first read Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, in which they present an astounding connection between access to abortion and crime: twenty years after Roe v. Wade, the U.S. crime rate dropped. Astounding indeed. That men are so surprised by that! I mean, just how clueless are you guys? About the power, the …
Mar 20 2013
Whose Violence?
I initially wrote this piece in the mid-1990s. It was published in Philosophy Now in 1999 when I was a columnist there. Ten years later, in 2010, I posted it at my other blog; it seemed required. Another three years later, I’m posting it again, here, because the people in power in mainstream media apparently …
Mar 13 2013
Pretty Frickin’ Amazing.
Check out this video, “Pretty” by Katie Makkai: Pretty – Katie Makkai
Mar 09 2013
“And son? Take care of your mom while I’m gone.”
Excuse me? I don’t need a child to take care of me. I know, he might reply, I’m just trying to – trying to what? Teach him to be a man? Teach him that grown women need looking after? And that he, as the one with the penis, is just the person to do it?
Feb 06 2013
On Excluding MtFs from a Radfem Site
As soon as I discovered I Blame the Patriarchy, I thought “I have found the mothership.” Alas, almost immediately, it powered down. Since I loved the discussion as much as Twisty’s brilliant posts, I decided to set up a new island for the blametariat: Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist. Unfortunately, unwittingly, I declared, in addition …
Jan 24 2013
A Man Shaken by a Bomb
I picked up a sci-fi novel the other day at a used bookstore. The jacket said it was set after a nuclear war and written by someone who’d rubbed shoulders with a lot of military people. Well, I figured it’d be interesting to see what they imagined life’d be like after a nuclear war. (The …
Dec 21 2012
Rules of Combat
Why are there rules of combat? Rules apply to civil interactions and games. Combat is neither. Rules give the impression of fairness, decency, civility. They thus make war permissible. But if war is really about defending your loved ones, wouldn’t you do whatever is necessary? Wouldn’t you ‘fight dirty’ if that’s what it takes? Rules …
Dec 13 2012
The Waiting-for-the-Elevator Thing
So I’m sure this has happened at least once to every woman. You’re standing in front of an elevator, waiting for it, and a man comes up and presses one of the buttons. Oh is that what those are for? I saw the two buttons, one with an upward-pointing arrow and one with a downward-pointing …
fiction
