An Odd Post

Odd how some posts are much harder to write than others, just as running a marathon is harder than walking to the corner store. I'm not talking about the research that goes into some posts, though of course that takes time and energy, but about the sheer difficulty of some topics. They are like slippery eels you try to catch with numb fingers from the water, and yet you can see them all the time, quite clearly. Except that they are no longer where you saw them last when you make yet another weary attempt to catch them.

Some are slippery because they are complicated and many-layered and sneaky with the millennia of experience at avoiding the writer's traps. Others are slippery because they have been carefully oiled and buttered in the popular culture and in the heads of powerful numbskulls so that to show you the eel herself is almost impossible. You will also see the butter and the oil. In terms of feminist writing, for instance, any writing in the popular media brings out the hordes who tell us that men used to hunt and be warriors and bring home the food while women kept house in the cave, and that's why feminism is doomed. And to explain that none of that is actually a scientific argument amounts to trying to remove the oil and butter with just your wet hands. It can be done, but it takes a book, and numbskulls don't read books in the first place.

Yet other topics are exhausting because they are packed with pain and suffering, and to know that at least some will take the results of any writing as an open invitation to participate in an intellectual game of debate (are women capable of equality?) makes even the thought of touching on those topics torture. And just try to write about feminism without getting into those areas. Where my right to be regarded a human being with equal rights and respect is something one debates! It boggles the mind, it does. Isn't it great that I'm a goddess so I don't have to face that situation, ever? Mmm.

I'm going to take a walk and then I will write on either the confusion between sexuality and porn and how that confusion really is bad for women's lives or what is wrong with women who either quit working to stay at home or who don't quit working even though they should. On second thoughts, I think I'm going to write about recipes.