Monday, July 24, 2006

Waffling



I have a strong need to write a waffling post, but you don't have to read it. I'm working on a post on divorce in wingnuttia, and I'm bogged down with statistical problems. You'd think that someone, somewhere had done a proper study of divorce which looks at the effect of fundamentalist religions, and by "proper" I mean one which controls for income, education and all the other variables which affect divorce rates. I'm pretty sure that such a study exists, but it's not available for free on the Google. The only ones I find lump all types of religion today, from "go to church twice a year" to "go every night and twice on Sundays", and that confuses the issue, though I did find the abstract of one study which looks promising, but it's behind a pretty expensive paywall.

The nice thing about blogging is that I don't have to necessarily spend the rest of this existence looking for the facts or running my own regression analyses. But I don't like not knowing, and I don't like theorizing if the facts actually are out there.

Which brings me to my next complaint: Why am I, a generalist Renaissance goddess, the only one who seems to be blogging on these issues? Or, come to that, on so many other issues such as the so-called gender war in our schools? Where are all the liberal specialists? Now, I specialize in general babbling but most people do not. Why aren't they setting up specialist blogs so that I could just link to all their hard work and spend the rest of my day in pure enjoyment?

Is it for the same reason I held my trap shut for many a year? That I thought someone else knew better? It took a serious corruption of my low self-esteem genes to get going with this blog. If that's the reason, please join me gals and guys. If I can do it, anyone can.

Writing feminism sometimes feels almost as lonely, and if I couldn't read the wonderful blogs in my blogroll on this topic I'd feel like a lone wolf howling at the moon, wishing that there was a pack for me somewhere on the other side of the mountain. The establishment media caters for every kind of lunatic thinking these days, except for my type of lunacy. If I wrote more about the shaving of the pubic area and the best way to get married quickly I'd have it made. But I'm not hungry enough yet.

See how this turned out all about me? Sigh. I have many incarnations to go before I will come out of the chrysalis.