I recently read The Fourth Procedure by Stanley Pottinger, in which, during a surgical procedure, a man is given a uterus containing a fertilized egg. He is enraged when he finds out, afraid that if it becomes public knowledge he’ll be a laughingstock. Turns out he’s right. But I don’t get it. What’s so funny …
Category: men
Apr 07 2013
King of the Castle
Octavia Butler got it right in Xenogenesis when the aliens identified one of our fatal flaws as that of being hierarchy-driven (they fixed us with a bit of genetic engineering) – but she failed to associate the flaw predominantly with males. And Steven Goldberg got it right in Why Men Rule when he explained that …
Apr 02 2013
Why Do Men Spit? (and women don’t)
Is it physiological? Do males produce a larger amount of saliva? Even so, why the need to spit it out? Why not just swallow it? Would that remind them of swallowing semen? Which is female, effeminate, gay? (I’ll ignore for the moment the assumption that all, or even most, women swallow semen.) But no, that …
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 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 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 21 2013
Population Growth (i.e., rape)
I am amazed at the number of population growth analyses that mention rape. So far I’ve read, let me see…none. And if they don’t even mention rape, they sure as hell can’t consider it a major causal factor. Do people really believe that millions of women want to be pregnant for five to ten years? …
fiction
