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 …
Category: gender issues
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 …
Nov 06 2012
I’m too drunk. No I’m not.
According to the Canadian Criminal Code, (self-induced) intoxication is no defence against charges of assault (33.1): if you’re drunk, you’re still able to form the general intent to commit said assault. And yet, with regard to the sub-category of sexual assault, belief that someone is consenting is cancelled if that someone is intoxicated (273.1(2)): if …
Oct 29 2012
A Little Less Evolved
Sometimes I wonder whether men have a defective chromosome: the Y was supposed to be an X, but somehow it ended up missing something – a case of stunted growth, or arrested development. This defective chromosome, uniquely characteristic of the human male, causes them to be a little lower on the evolutionary scale, a little …
Oct 04 2012
Why isn’t being a soldier more like being a mother?
Motherhood is unfair to women in a way fatherhood most definitely is not. Not only are there the physical risks (pregnancy and childbirth puts a woman at risk for nausea, fatigue, backaches, headaches, skin rashes, changes in her sense of smell and taste, chemical imbalances, high blood pressure, diabetes, anemia, embolism, changes in vision, stroke, …
Sep 14 2012
Kept Women (and Men)
There is something objectionable about a perfectly-capable-of-working adult being ‘kept’ by another adult. It seems to me the epitome of laziness and immaturity to be supported by someone else, to have someone else pay your way through life. But, I suppose, if someone wants to pay someone else’s way, if a man wants to ‘keep’ …
Aug 03 2012
Basketball, Gymnastics, Hopscotch, and Double Dutch
The neat thing about television coverage of the Olympics is that women’s events are shown a lot. Often within close temporal proximity to men’s events. Comparison is inevitable. And interesting. Consider basketball. Men’s basketball isn’t even a sport anymore. The guys are simply too big. Give me a ball small enough to hold upside-down with …
Jun 14 2012
Games for Girls (Seriously? In 2012?)
Okay, so I went to bored.com, clicked on Games, then clicked on Girls. Mostly because I was irritated that there even was a separate section for Girls (and surprised there wasn’t a separate section for Blacks)—alongside Popular, Animations, Stickman, Shooting, Escape, Puzzle, Action, Skill, Walkthru’s, Mobile, and More. Why do girls need a separate section? …
fiction
