The Sighs of Silent Struggles. Or Echidne News.

The headline has enough hissing for a snake goddess blog and it's bad enough to please me now.

I have spent days and days on two very long posts which have responded to my attention by becoming knottier and twistier and harder.  It's disheartening to be so tired that you are not quite sure if your eyes have rolled across the room and if your fingers have worn down to stumps from typing and yet realize that you have nothing ready for posting.

And when you go to sleep the theories and evidence and difficult questions dance polka in your brain and stick their forked tongues out.

These are the silent struggles.  These are goddess-world problems.  Disappointing, of course, especially for my large and thirsty audience, but not life-altering.

Just kidding.

I have bread crumbs and cake crumbs (and yogurt, probably) under the keys in my computer keyboard.  They cause me to get multiple ffffs and tttts and colons.  Extensive cleaning has not fixed the problem.  Should I buy one of those little gadgets that is supposed to snap out the keys?

Any alternative to those?  A fork?

I have the Tactile Pro keyboard, because it's ergonomically the best I have found (better than the ergonomic keyboards for me), so the keys in theory come out.

Women's Jobs And Men's Jobs Affect The Gender Gap in Wages

Here's an old example about one of the many ways in which occupations can become segregated by sex:

Disney Rejection Letter to a Woman, 1938 pic.twitter.com/PLwosc5vzo

— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPix) March 30, 2018

I have written a piece about how economists have tried to explain why women would still, in 2018,  crowd into lower-paying female-dominated jobs. 

Reproductive No-Choice News

Kentucky's Republicans are passing new laws about abortion:

The Kentucky House of Representatives passed legislation on Tuesday to ban a common abortion procedure from the 11th week of pregnancy, in what would be one of the strictest abortion limits in the United States.
The bill, which was approved by the state Senate last week, will now go for approval to Governor Matt Bevin, a Republican who has described himself as "100 percent pro-life."
Officials at Bevin's office could not immediately be reached for comment.
The House voted 75-13 in favor of the measure. It previously passed a similar version of the measure but had to approve changes the Senate made. Both bodies are controlled by Republicans.

Mississippi Republicans also passed a new law restricting abortion:

Saying that he was “saving the unborn,” Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed into law on Monday a measure that would ban almost all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Abortion rights supporters called it the earliest abortion ban in the country, and said it was an unconstitutional restriction that defied years of federal court precedent over the limits states may impose on abortion providers.

The only abortion clinic in the state quickly filed a complaint in federal court to block the law.

The bill, labeled the Gestational Age Act, was passed overwhelmingly by both chambers of the Republican-controlled State Legislature this month.

And in Poland the very conservative party in power is introducing further abortion restrictions:

Lawmakers from the governing Law and Justice party, who have previously tried to ban all abortions, are making a renewed push to outlaw them, even when the fetus is sure to die in infancy.

The government dropped the earlier bill after it set off nationwide protests in 2016. Lawmakers revised the legislation to make it less harsh, including dropping criminal penalties for women who have abortions, and the new version has once again stirred women in Poland to take to the streets.

Yes, Polish women have taken to the streets to protest the new proposal.  But the lawmakers will keep proposing more and more restrictions.  The process is similar in the States, too: the house is demolished plank by plank, window by window, and door by door.

As I have often written before, the existence of proper birth control and legal abortion is fundamental for women's equality with men: 

Someone must take care of children, over a very long span of years, someone must feed and clothe them.  But conservatives are not interested in solving those questions in some more egalitarian form or in subsidies for those who have children or in programs which help women to return to the labor force after staying out of it to take care of children.  Indeed, from the conservative angle the wombs are a socialized space while children, once born, are someone's private concern.