Now, this might look like crass self-promotion, but it isn't. It's pure information. There's an interesting competition for the week's best new blog post. It's at New Blog Showcase, and anyone with a blog that's registered with the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem can vote for their favorite new blog by linking to a specific post in the showcase between Tuesday and Sunday! As long as the link is still there on Sunday night, the vote counts.

For example, if I was interested in voting for my December 4 blog Sigh, I'd first go here to register my blog (if I hadn't done that already), and then I'd link to my favorite Echidne blog by using this on my own blog. So simple, isn't it? And of course purely hypothetical.....

If The Shoe Fits...

Would you like someone to bite chunks off you? No? Neither would I. But many people, most of them female, seem to want just that. Now it's the feet that are going to be chopped smaller or padded taller. Gardiner Harris writes about this in a New York Times article titled "If Shoe Won't Fit, Fix the Foot? Popular Surgery Raises Concern".

The reason for this surgery, according to Harris, is the desire for better 'toe cleavage' (!) or the yearning to continue wearing high heels even after the feet have decisively said no to that. The article notes:
Foot fashion and function have, of course, long been in conflict. Chinese girls' feet were bound to shorten them by bending the toes backward. High heels have been fashionable in the United States for decades, even though they can cause not only serious foot problems but knee, pelvic, back, shoulder and even jaw pain.

Walking in high heels means walking on the balls of the feet, as if tiptoeing through life. Why would anybody wish to undergo surgery for that end? The answer, according to one of the orthopedists interviewed in the article is simple:
"Take your average woman and give her heels instead of flats, and she'll suddenly get whistles on the street," Dr. Levine said. "I do everything I can to get them back into their shoes."

Take a bite off here, add a bit more over there, and suddenly, voila! you are desirable.

Or maybe just socially acceptable. Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) also consists of taking chunks off women, or rather young girls. This practise makes them more marriageworthy in the cultures that embrace FGM, but it may cause serious lifelong health problems, not to mention a permanent reduction in the woman's ability to enjoy sex. On the other hand, some types of FGM are said to enhance the man's sexual enjoyment.

Are women born with all sorts of extraneous bits that need to be cut off? The answer isn't that simple. If it was, we wouldn't be able to explain why so many women have breast enhancement surgery. It seems that the Powers That Be have just misdesigned women, and surgery is needed to put them right. Right for what?

Twenty years ago in Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions Gloria Steinem used the saying: "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?" to argue for societal changes that would better accommodate women's everyday lives. It seems that the foot is more easily altered than the shoe, after all.

Postscript:
1. There are some good news on the FGM front.
2. To avert all the criticism I can see forthcoming, here is my confession: Yes, it's true that I have no feet and have never worn shoes.
3. The comments were down on 12/8/03. My apologies.
4. After I posted this, I found several good blogs on the same topic. Check out Pen-Elayne
and Ms. musings for a start.

Bored? Try these sites:

1. The lemonade game. It will train you into a good capitalist.
2. The industrious clock. Makes you feel good about not working that hard.
3. The poop counter. Keeps things in perspective
4. The guy on the ropes. You can make him do silly things or collapse. Good for release of aggressive feelings.
5. Mr. Picassohead. For the artistically inclined. Plus you can check out the gallery for my latest work of art!
Thanks to posters on the ms. site for most of these.

Great News From the Voting Front

What an exciting year 2004 will be! I am going to vote! Yes, Echidne of the snakes, a goddess of no known domicile, is going to cast her first ever vote for the president of the United States!

This will require voter fraud, but that's doable. The United States has a long history of voter fraud. A New York City election in 1844 had 135 percent of the eligible voters turn out. One additional goddess-vote is chickenfeed compared to that.

It is also chickenfeed compared to what happened in Boone County, Indiana, where the e-vote machines counted a total of 144,000 cast votes. From around 19,000 registered voters.

So what with actual human voter fraud and all the problems I can foresee with the e-vote machines that leave no paper trail behind, nobody is going to waste time or money looking for one criminal goddess.

This is how I can become a voter: I found out that illegal aliens and permanent residents in the United States sometimes do vote, because the federal law doesn't require the voters to prove their identities, and the current practise is not to inquire after the eager voter's citizenship status. I'm very excited about this. Imagine: I'm going to experience the American democracy in person, I'm going to affect world events directly!

Well, not much, of course. One vote doesn't matter very much. But it's the principle that counts here. We should all be as involved in democracy as Walden O'Dell. Not only is he a major fundraiser for the Republican party, but he is also the CEO of Diebold, a firm that produces many of the e-mail machines that will be used in the 2004 elections. Walden has gotten a lot of undeserved flack for supposedly saying that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year."

So what do these critics want? First they complain about the inertia of the average American who rarely bothers to step into the voting booth. Then when someone throws himself whole-heartedly into voting, they don't like that either. Sheesh.

I'm with Walden on this one.

Deep Thought for the day:

A country which makes chocolate chip cookies the size of cow pats can't be all bad.
(On the U.S.)

Sigh.

I was taking a nap on a beautiful mountain top when Green Mamba slithered in. Green Mamba is the bane of my life, a pain-in-the-butt sort of snake. He is an atheist and doesn't believe in me. His current campaign is to attack my top half in every possible way (for those still living in ignorance: I'm a half-woman, half-snake, and the woman is the top half). He had a newspaper between his fangs. He wanted me to read an article a British journalist called Rod Liddle had written: "Women Who Won't".

Sigh. So I read it. Quite a funny lad he is, our Rod. According to him bourgeois women in the U.K. are stopping to work in droves. The evidence? Anecdotal. The reason? Largely laziness.

Actually, this is what he said:

I rang the Equal Opportunities Commission and said to them, 'Look, women still aren't going to work full-time. Maybe it isn't discrimination in the workplace, sexist attitudes in the home and an unequal distribution of domestic labour, ignorance of pension rights, childcare problems or a deep-rooted, culturally determined socialisation which makes women stay at home. Maybe it's just that women are inherently bone-idle right down to the tips of their lovely little fingers. Why don't you do a study on that?'

Ouch! Rod also gives some additional reasons for this presumed flight of women from the labor market. These are Nanny Envy, Mummy Guilt and the Yummy Mummy syndrome. Nanny envy has to do with the fear that nannies become the real love objects of the children they care for. Mummy guilt is the-same-old-same-old belief about how everything not right with a child's life is due to the mother's failings. The Yummy Mummy syndrome is news to me, though. Rod tells us that it is the envy working mothers feel about the beautiful bodies of mothers who supposedly stay at home, but who are really out being massaged by Mediterranean-looking men all day long. Evidently none of these syndromes are capable of infecting men.

A lot of envy and guilt here, though. Could it be that Rod himself is a little envious of all these women he imagines as parasites living off their hard-working spouses or partners? Hmmm. Could it be that he is asking himself why he wasn't able to pull it off? Could it be that he is beginning to question his own smartness?

Not to worry, Rod. Staying at home isn't all that you cracked it up to be. For one thing, household chores consist of vastly more stuff than taking out the garbage/rubbish; the only chore you mentioned. Especially when small children are involved. ( I have a personal plea to insert here: If any woman in the U.K. is actually doing Rod's chores for him, could she please stop for six months? Just completely stop? Thank you. Then ask him to rewrite this article.) For another, staying at home with small children can be mind-dumbingly boring for some personalities.

Staying at home also cuts the woman's old-age pension and her future salary expectations, should she return to the labor market. Staying at home makes her vulnerable to the consequences of divorce. For this reason staying at home reduces her chances to have an egalitarian marriage.

So it's ok, Rod. You're probably not missing out on much by continuing to write articles like this one rather than by spending your days being massaged by some handsome, brooding Mediterranean.

What's really interesting about this article is how it shows that certain types of women are always fair game in the media. Replace the term 'women' in the article's main claim by 'blacks', for example, and what would happen to the publication chances of the resulting fable? It's quite ok to attack women in the media, as long as they are educated women, or married to wealthy men or women with careers. (Rod is not a lone warrior in this field; The Atlantic Monthly's Kathleen Flanagan is doing a marvelous job in similar smearing. Though she wants these women to be housewives, whereas Rod wants them out and working. Go figure.) Although every population group probably has about the same share of slackers and lazybones, not every population group gets exposed to similar scrutiny.

Now, if I was as mean-spirited as Rod, I could have written a counterarticle about the reasons men go out to work: they are all criminals to the tips of their lovely fingertips, and going out into the world allows them to satisfy this instinct much more thoroughly than staying at home, where the only opportunities consist of domestic violence and harassment. It could have been very funny, don't you think? But I'm not mean-spirited, whatever Green Mamba might mutter, and sometimes that severely hampers my creativity. Sigh.

Pre-Christmas Politics

Christmas has come a little early for the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries. The new Medicare bill left them gifts of 17 billion and 12 billion of extra annual profits, respectively, tied with a pretty ribbon and with a card promising no federal reimportation of cheaper drugs from Canada. The government also made an early New Year's promise of never ever using its formidable buying power to actually affect the market prices. Imagine that, using pressure to lower prices in the market! This from the editorial of the Nation magazine on December 15, 2003.

So who's been nasty, who's been nice? I leave it to others to judge, but nasty is what the future might look for many elderly patients who rely on Medicare to finance their health care expenses. The reason is the privatization steps that are built into the new bill.

Why is privatization nasty here? Think about this: in most health insurance the buyer pays the price of the insurance policy, its premium, before getting sick. These premia are the revenues of the insurance company. Its profits are then found by subtracting its costs from these revenues. The costs largely consist of the health care expenses of the buyers when they get sick. So to earn the largest possible profits, what would the company do?

Clearly, it would try to have the premia as large as possible and the costs as small as possible. The premia are difficult to raise, especially if other companies don't follow suit. But cutting costs is much easier. Usually lowering costs is seen as a good thing. Health insurance is trickier, though. While making treatments efficient at lower cost is a great idea, costs can also be lowered in two other ways which are not at all nice, yet are very likely to affect the Medicare patients.

These ways are: 1. cut back on the amount of treatment covered, and 2. try to keep out customers who can be predicted to be expensive to treat. Remember, the revenues are pretty much collected from the customers before they are sick? So profits are maximized if existing customers can be given less care and/or customers are carefully preselected.

It's the second method that's likely to lurk in the Christmas stocking of many future Medicare patients. Private health insurers will enter the Medicare market and offer policies which will be carefully designed to attract the healthiest elderly customers and those with larger incomes. This 'cherry picking' will leave the federal program with all the 'rejects': those too poor and/or sick to attract the private companies. And then the Mr. and Ms. Scrooges will start wondering why such a 'special interest' program is funded at all. But then that's the point of the whole exercize.

I want this Santa to get stuck in the chimney flue.

I've been reading The Ancient Near East, edited by James B. Pritchard, 1958.

What this book tells us is (1) that swimming is a most useful skill and (2) that children have always whined to their parents.

(1) From the Code of Hammurabi:

If a seignior (a man of the higher classes or a free man) brought a charge of sorcery against another seignior, but has not proved it, the one against whom the charge of sorcery was brought, upon going to the river, shall throw himself into the river, and if the river has then overpowered him, his accuser shall take over his estate...

(2) From the Akkadian letters:

A Boy to His Mother

Speak to Zinu: Thus Iddin-Sin. May Shamash, Marduk and Ilabrat for my sake forever keep you well. Gentlemen's clothes improve year by year. You are the one making my clothes cheaper year by year. By cheapening and scrimping on my clothes you have become rich. While wool was being consumed in our house like bread, you were the one making my clothes cheaper. The son of Adad-imminam, whose father is only an underling to my father, has received two new garments, but you keep getting upset over just one garment for me. Whereas you gave birth to me, his mother acquired him by adoption, but whereas his mother loves him, you do not love me.

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I've also been reading One Good Thing, a blog by a woman with two little children and a most unusual job. A job in which the term 'tripod' takes quite a novel meaning. Check it out.

The Fundamentalist Problem

The big problem with religious fundamentalists is their wishy-washiness. They simply aren't fundamental enough. The average Christian fundamentalist, for example, may think he* is doing pretty well in obeying his holy book as a word-by-word instructions manual for life today, but is he really succeeding?

At first glance it might seem so. He can proudly point out that his disapproval of homosexuality and nonsubmissive wives are justified by literal biblical interpretations. He can remind us that Paul and Timothy didn't like women who preach so why should he? And if he is very brave, he can even note that the Bible doesn't condemn slavery. All in all, he comes across as a real fundamental kind of guy.

Hogwash, say I. Doesn't the good book tell us to remove the beam from our own eye before we go hunting for specks elsewhere? And this is where the Christian fundamentalist fails dismally. Have you ever met an American fundamentalist who owns just one outfit? Yet this is clearly the most extensive wardrobe the Bible allows a literal believer (Luke 3:11).

And what about the camel and eye of the needle (Mark 10:24)? How come do we hear about so many fundamentalist millionaires? Don't they want to go to heaven? Or are they all secretly breeding miniature camels with their millions?

This won't do. A real fundamentalist must interpret all his holy texts literally. As one fundamentalist lady millionaire said, if we start picking and choosing, who's to know what is right? Granted, some of the texts seem to contradict each other, but that is only a problem for others of lesser faith. A true fundamentalist won't let such trivialities stand in the way of finding the truth.

Neither should he pick-and-choose among the ten commandments, especially if he wishes them to become the law of the land. Once they are prominently posted in all schoolhouses, even the smallest pagan child can tell when a fundamentalist breaks one of them. No more bearing false witness and getting away with it, then.

Suppose, for example, that a fundamentalist accused the U.N. of a secret plot to violently overtake this great country of ours. If he failed to prove his accusations, his words would brand him as a violator of the ninth (or, according to some, the eighth) commandment, a mere sinner no better than anybody else. And how could he then demand that others repent before it is too late?

The wishy-washiness of the Christian fundamentalists worries me deeply. What will be the lot of our poor misguided fundamentalist brethren who eagerly condemn the ways of the world, yet fail to obey the literal truth of the scriptures in their own lives? Could it be that they will be Left Behind?
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*I call the fundamentalist a 'he' rather than a 's/he', because this seems more fundamentalish. Of course, it is taken as understood that 'the fundamentalist 'also embraces women.

You Can't Have It All

This doesn't apply to goddesses, of course. Who does it apply to, though? Everybody else?

Note that the 'you' in this statement is almost always a woman. Does this imply that men can have it all or are they somehow more realistic in their desires? Here it helps to remember that 'you can't have it all' is normally used to advise women who try to combine having children with having a career, so one interpretation of the truism is that women can't have both successful children and a successful career. Men clearly can. Another interpretation is that it is impossible to be a full-time parent and a full-time worker. This could be true if 'full-time' means 24/7, but then nobody can be full-time anything based on this definition.

The 'can't' means that the 'you' in the statement is unable to 'have it all'. Is this because it is literally impossible (as in 24/7 parenting and full-time work) or because the society is trying to make it impossible (as in the difficulty of combining work and family without access to good, reasonably priced daycare and career paths which allow some part-time work and leaves of absence without terminating the path)? To test these explanations, mentally substitute 'shouldn't' for 'can't' and note if the real meaning changes. If it doesn't, the second explanation applies.

And what is the 'all' you can't have? It might range from being in two places at the same time to having both children and a career during one lifetime. So whether 'you can't have it all' is a useful reminder of life's realities or a lie depends on its exact meaning. But note that in some sense you might 'need it all': both food and water, both work and love. Anyone who asks you to choose between these really doesn't deserve 'to have it all.'
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But you, my dear (fictitional?) readers, can have it all! Athena gave me a hand and now you can talk back to at least one minor divinity.

Today's quote comes from Rose Macaulay: Mystery at Geneva (1923):

All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humor, of honor, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men.

The more things change...

A Book Review

For the insomniacs who like to stay that way I recommend this book: It can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. It was originally published in 1935 as a response to the increasing fascism in Europe. According to the back cover of my Signet Classic edition, "This book remains a warning about the fragility of democracy, juxtaposing hilarious satire with a blow-by-blow description of a president saving the country from welfare cheaters, sex, crime, and a liberal press by becoming a dictator."

This president, one Berzelius Windrip, has written a Mein Kampf -type book called Zero Hour - Over the Top. Here is president Windrip in his own words:

"I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but frankly holler right out that we've got to change our system a lot, maybe even change the whole Constitution (but change it legally, and not by violence) to bring it up from the horseback-and-corduroy-road epoch to automobile-and-cement-highway period of today. The Executive has got to have a freer hand and to be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates."

Interesting, isn't it? Windrip is legally elected but slowly turns the American democracy into a fascist state. People do ultimately rise up, but

"... there the revolt halted, because in the America, which had so warmly praised itself for its "widespread popular free education," there had been so very little education, widespread, popular, free or anything else, that most people did not know what they wanted - indeed knew about so few things to want at all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking only literate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who regarded teaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay as insurance-selling or embalming or waiting on table. Most Americans had learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen people by the Americans, and this time done the job much better, so that we were the richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living; that depressions were but passing headaches and that labor unions must not concern themselves with anything except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, must not set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that, though foreigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics were really so simple that any village attorney or any clerk in the office of a metropolitan sheriff was quite adequately trained for them."

"Politics were really so simple that any village attorney was quite adequately trained for them." And probably any bodybuilder or movie star... The book also has the foremother of Concerned Women of America, and an airplane is used as a fatal weapon. Good stuff for those of us who like to teeter on the narrow edge between outright insanity and intentional ignorance.

Oh, Baby!

Imagine yourself as not yet existing (behind the Rawlsian 'veil of ignorance' if you wish). Imagine that you can choose the sex you are going to be born into, but nothing else about your forthcoming life. Would you choose to be born a girl?

Not very likely. Pure statistical odds would mean that you'd probably be born in one of those countries where the birth of a girl can be a family disaster. It's kind of hard to grow up into a confident and productive human being if your very existence is a misfortune. If you're allowed to grow up, that is.

Life is a crapshoot, anyway, and being born poor is pretty bad. But being born a poor girl baby in a country such as India is a calamity. In India, a traditionally patrilinear society, sons are important both as workers and as the future caretakers of their parents in old age. Daughters, on the other hand, are to be married off to some other family. On top of that, their marriagibility depends on providing a dowry. So the birth of yet another daughter to a poor family is no cause for rejoicing. Not another pair of hands to guarantee a safe old age for the parents, but another dowry to scrape together.

India is of course not the only country that doesn't value daughters as much as sons. China is famous for its strong preference for sons, and most countries show this preference to at least some degree.

Even the western world, it seems. Several recent studies suggest that marriages where all the children are daughters are more likely to end than marriages where all the children are sons and that parents invest more wealth in their male children. The differences these studies find are very small and may not reflect an actual parental preference for sons. But if they do reflect this, and if the reason for preferring sons is in their value as manual laborers and old age insurance policies, these differences shouldn't exist at all in post-industrialized countries with functioning pension systems. If anything, one might have predicted a slight preference for daughters, given that it is largely the daughters who provide informal nursing care to aging parents.

Steven E. Landsburg gives his take on these study findings in a column fetchingly entitled:
Oh, No: It's a Girl! Do Daughters Cause Divorce? Landsburg argues that boys hold shaky marriages together not because the parents deem the effects of a divorce to be worse for sons than for daughters, but because boys actually make marriages better. Better than daughters, that is. Why? Landsburg seems to think that it might have something to do with playing catch, among other things. He concludes by noting that :

Years ago on the schoolyard, we used to chant that girls are good but boys are better. It looks like our parents agreed with us.

Who are the 'we' in this statement? None of the several women I checked with had chanted this particular song in the schoolyard. And how can Mr. Landsburg speak on behalf of both mothers and fathers? As far as I know, these studies allow us to draw no conclusions about how much parents agree in their preferences.

I think that those mothers and/or fathers who prefer sons over daughters do so because the society on the whole exhibits the same preference. The advantages to having sons in India are obvious, but the reasons underlying these advantages are much less so. Why did most countries adopt a patrilinear system of inheritance? Why did most societies decide to marry their daughters away from the homes of their birth and not their sons? Why has it been until recently that only sons can carry on the family name? Why are dowries (payments from the bride's family) more common than bride prices (payments to the bride's family)? These are the essential mysteries.

And what about the current consequences of the strong preference for sons in countries such as India and China? Sex selective abortions and infanticide of girls have distorted the sex ratios to such an extent that the outcome might be a society with a large segment of eternal bachelors. China already may have around thirty million men who will never have a chance to marry, and many regions of India are facing a similar dilemma, with only 800-900 girls being born for every 1,000 boys.

To be honest, I could care less about this consequence. If the best argument against the preference for sons is to point out that someone must produce future wives for these sons, we haven't advanced very far. Besides, this problem can be easily solved through the use of polyandry, serial or not. Polyandry works, I should know.

Sons will be preferred over daughters in societies where men are privileged over women. It's as simple as that. The more equal the social valuation of women and men, the smaller the observed preference for sons.

Postscript: 1. I ran this text through the Gender Genie. The results:
Words: 830

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 986
Male Score: 2121

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

I guess they don't have a category for goddesses.

2. If you are interested in learning more about this topic, a poster named Le Chat Noir on the ms. boards has searched the web for you.

Post-Feminism

I keep reading that this is the post-feminist era. Feminism is so passe, so seventies. Fashionable people don't wear it anymore.

But what do they wear instead? What is post-feminism? After some serious thinking and studying (also apparently passe concepts), I have come up with these definitions of post-feminism, all in use:

1. Post-feminism means that the old-time, somewhat grungy feminists won their fights, and that women now enjoy full equality with men and no longer need to go grungy.

2. No. Post-feminism means that the strident sisterhood of the seventies lost. Women are not equal to men, nor do 'real' women wish for equality. A beautiful womanhood is quite sufficient for them, thank you very much.

3. The deconstructionists believe that there is no such concept as 'woman', never mind 'women's rights'. This makes feminism 'problematized'. We live in post-feminist times in the same manner as we might be said to live in post-modern times. I must admit that this manner looks pretty fuzzy to me.

4. Post-feminism means that feminism lost, not because it wasn't needed, but because it was somehow blamed for the double-shift of employed women: first do your paid work, then do the chores at home. Hmmm. Seems like anti-feminist propaganda to me. As far as I know, there isn't any feminist rulebook that bans men from doing their share of chores at home.

5. Feminism is dead as a movement even though it might still be needed, because the trouble to organize is too much considering the slight gains it might reap in the current political climate. This is post-feminism as lethargy and indifference. Or whatever.

No doubt other definitions could be invented. This muddle of meanings explains why I am filled with fury when I read or hear a flippant reference to 'outdated' feminism. I have no idea what it means. Sometimes I suspect that neither do the utterers.

So do we actually live in post-feminist times? Should we? You tell me. Not even a goddess can answer this one.

Happy Thanksgiving to everybody who celebrates this American holiday. Others can be thankful for the fact that they don't: no need to clean for weeks, pick up ancient relatives from airports, stock the larder with weird foods without which Cousin Charlotte would pine away, cook a dead bird bigger than the oven or pretend that sweet potatoes can masquerade as a dessert. No need to overeat or to watch American football. So be thankful, all and one.

In honor of thanksgiving, then, here's a blog on an American house.



Designing the Absurd

Is life meant to be absurd and design to follow suit? My house is full of examples that suggest this: The door knobs, for example. They are round glass balls. If you wanted to design a door handle that looks as it would work but doesn't, you'd make it a round glass ball. This keeps people housebound if they have wet hands, carry anything bulky or heavy, or suffer from arthritis. The glass also makes the knob impossible to repair when turning it no longer turns the lock.

The sash windows of my house may have been designed by M. Guillotine during his lunch breaks. The upper pane normally doesn't move at all, but when the ropes that support it break, it comes down faster than a guillotine blade. Usually when I am stretching my neck out of the window in order to wash the upper glass from the outside.

These inventions are ancient, but more modern design works hardly better. The shower head in my bathroom is good for quick showers in the morning. It is worthless for anything else, being embedded in the wall. Shower heads should be detachable. Anyone disagreeing with this has never cleaned a bathtub or a large, nervous dog in it. Both jobs need rinsing which needs detachable shower heads. The lack of one forces me to use a large saucepan. As a consequence, I always have dogs with saucepan phobias.

Saucepans are no good for rinsing remote controls, microwave keypads or computer keyboards. Nothing is good for rinsing or cleaning these, although an extended leave of absence from work and a ton of tweezers and toothpicks might make a slight difference. As most people have better things to do with the rest of their lives, such equipment is often sold in colors and textures which look already grimy. That way cleaning doesn't seem necessary until it is far too late.

A case might be made in defense of each of these features I malign. There is no such defense for the American electric sockets, no reason whatsoever for making them look like miniature copies of Edward Munch's 'The Scream'; a painting from hell. This is what stares back from baseboards all over the U.S., normally attached to the wall roughly diagonally. No wonder that mental health problems grow increasingly common. The only place where these sockets should be allowed is in dentists' waiting rooms. But that wouldn't satisfy the laws of absurdity.

On Naming Things

Fetuses are now called unborn children. I like the logic behind this innovation; from now on I shall call living adults undead corpses. And for breakfast I will no longer order fried eggs but fried unborn chickens.

Pornography Goes Mainstream

Did I ever mention that retired gods and goddesses may sometimes take human form? Aphrodite has chosen to become an eighty-year old widow living in Florida. She adores Mickey Mouse, neon pink golf carts and polyester pant suits. She was really fed up with her long reign as a sex goddess, and wanted a more active life. I stopped by recently. We had a ball.

She took me to this new Viennese tearoom for women. They served exquisite little pastries, and the place was packed with 'dite's cronies. After we were served our cappuccinos, the waitress told us to help ourselves to all the tidbits on the center table. Can you believe this? The cakes and pastries were daintily arranged on the reclining still form of a gorgeous naked man? He was a real cupcake!

I reached out for a canape in his left armpit and watched his pupils dilate. His eyes moved to point at the large painted sign which warned against any bodily interference with the 'model'. So we could only look, not touch. And look we did.

I asked the waitress if the tearoom had had any problems with meninists protesting against their use of a male platter. She laughed and said that all publicity was good publicity. Besides, everybody knew that meninists had no sense of humor. We all agreed that we really respected and admired men, especially this lovely studmuffin!

When we were replete with cakes and the platter covered but with crumbs, 'dite took me back to her condo to watch some daytime soaps. I kept nodding off on the couch until she turned the channel to Oprah's show. The day's topic was "Getting in Touch with Your Inner Erection". It seemed to consist of some man flogging his book on 'bagel dancing'. The gyrations and contortions around a bagel suspended from a string in the ceiling were supposed to make men fit and better in the marital bed. I started feeling slight bouts of indigestion. I'm not a prude, as any of you may check on the Google, but this was just getting to be too much.

Men are people, too, after all. What was going on? Had 'dite interfered with earth's essential vibrational frequency? She adamantly denied having anything to do with these sexxee developments among men. Supposedly men had just collectively decided that titillating women was sex-positive and healthy. As proof 'dite mentioned a newspaper article about men's athletic wear stores in Paris. To drum up more business, these stores had hired coaches to teach men how to remove their jockstraps in an alluring fashion. One young man was quoted as saying that he had never before really understood how important it was to remove the football socks before rather than afterwards. The store had hung up framed sayings supposedly by Simone de Beauvoir: "The high time of the day on the sports fields is not when a man suits up but when he takes it all off for his woman."

I did mention to Aphrodite that according to the article there had been protests by some men's groups outside the store. She waved this detail away with her tennis-braceleted arm and pointed out an ad in a magazine I was leafing through as further proof of the same trend in sexual liberation. The ad was selling sweatshop-free underwear for men, but the pictures were extremely revealing crotch shots from below.

"Sort of pornographic, don't you think?" I asked. She nodded. "Porn has gone mainstream now. Care for a round of golf?"

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I have slightly played with the truth in recounting this story. If you insist on the more politically correct but boring facts, here they are: Sushi served on a naked female, pole-dancing on Oprah, Parisian strip-tease lessons for women who buy underwear and American Apparel's ad for women's panties.

An interesting postscript:1. Folks in Seattle decided to alter the world to match my story better. That's the power of goddesses for you. See naked men as doughnut platters. 2. Daniel sent me this. It is a Swedish revision story of pornography going mainstream. In actual pictures. "Ombytta roller" means swopped sex roles. Just keep clicking on "mer sex"! I bet Aphrodite is behind this one, too.

Women and Terrorism

The BBC's World Program asked listeners to send in their definitions of a 'terrorist'. The answers were what one expected, ranging from the definition of a terrorist as someone who targets civilians to someone who is called George W. Bush. But one definition really stood out:"One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist."

These are men who define terrorism. Terrorism is something that might bring them freedom or terror. But for women? Granted, there are women terrorists, and women do experience the effects of terrorist activity as much as men do. But are there freedom fighters for women? Do terrorists ever work for women's causes?

I can't think of a single cause like that. The early British suffragettes came the closest, but even they stopped their violence at property or their own bodies. If freedom fighters ever fought for women, it was most likely in the sense that they fought for the right of previously oppressed men to have free access to their 'own' women or to bar other men from such access. Some women must have benefited from such movements, but this was not the intended effect.

Iraq is an interesting example. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqi women first gained additional freedoms and rights. More women attended the university and there were women in his government. Later, some of these gains for women were sacrificed when Saddam courted the religious muslims and launched an islamization program. Yet women in Iraq are still more literate than in any other Arab country.

The liberation of Iraq may change this. The new freedom fighters there want an Islamic society. Some want obligatory veiling, and there are arguments about whether education is a good thing for women under Islam. The lawlessness makes going out into a major adventure for women, and there are news about kidnapping and rape. So who there is fighting for the women? Who really cares about the fact that women are the majority of the Iraqi population, with something like ten percent representation in the Provisional Council?

The answer is that very few people care about women. The status of women in Iraq is low, and determined by both traditional culture and certain ways of reading the Islamic law and the Koran. Who are outsiders to decide that things should be different for them? Yet outsiders decided that other things in Iraq were unacceptable, however much they, too, were based on tradition and religious precedent. Women just don't matter, very much.

Women don't matter awfully much in the greater terrorist wars, either. Their importance is as symbols: symbols of western decadence as the semi-naked women cavorting on our tv screens in the west, symbols of eastern backwardness as the totally shrouded shapes cowering in the corners of their hidden rooms in the east. Or as reversed symbols: the independent, self-confident western woman vs. the modest, pure eastern woman. Yet it's all about symbols.

In the wars of terrorism most real women are in the middle, in the mined no-man's land where they are possible victims for both sides. The war goes on over their heads and sometimes through their bodies. They are the ultimate definition of collateral damage.

Most women don't think this way, you might say. That's probably true. It's hard to get much constructive thinking going when the media bombard you with one false message after another, when daily life is enough to pull you down, when to realize that you ARE collateral damage would demolish your whole world view. So yes, most women don't think this way.

That's the unfair thing about being a goddess. We goddesses see through the smoke and fog and scraps of flying bombs right through to the truth. Sometimes.

Abstinence

Abstinence is the policy of the current U.S. government, when it comes to social ills such as Aids and teenage pregnancy. I think that it's a wonderful idea; it should be a lifelong vow for all its proponents. Maybe that way the U.S. would some day get a sensible government.

Don't get me wrong. I think that abstinence is a valid choice in sexuality, and it has many benefits. But it is a very difficult choice, and to imply that it isn't is cruel. Now, I wasn't much for abstinence as you may have noticed. My children (and what a bunch they are!) were fathered by all sorts of creatures. It was fun, on the whole.

And that's the problem with abstinence; you need to abstain from sex to achieve it, and sex is fun. Eating is also fun, and look at the size of the people in this country. "Just say no". Yessss, but... The spirit may be willing, yet the flesh is, as ever, weak.

History is a good teacher about the possibilities of abstinence in sex among the general population. Abstinence doesn't win very many contests here, I am afraid. People are created to be sexual creatures, and fighting that is fighting a basic instinct. At least the government should admit that this is true.

Children are too young for sex, in my divine opinion. They don't need it to complicate growing up, which is hard enough as it is. It's a good idea to encourage children and teenagers not to engage in sex too early. But to tell the vast populations of AIDs sufferers in Africa that abstinence is the best policy? To spend one third of the U.S. new funding on AIDS there on abstinence education? Or to try to make American schools stay silent about contraception? Whom do these policies benefit?

In some African countries it is believed that making love to a virgin can cure AIDS. In many African countries women have very little or no choice about whether to engage in sex or not. How can they be abstinent even if they wish to? In some Sub-Saharan countries the number of condoms in circulation is enough for one condom per man per year. Are all the men there going to have sex only once a year? I doubt it. I'm old and I have seen it all, but I have never seen abstinence work on any widespread scale.

And what about the teenagers who don't receive contraceptive information at school? What if they decide to have sex anyway? What if they have parents who believe in 'abstinence only' policies, too? What will happen to these children?

An interesting twist in the abstinence discussion is the return of the bridal gift thinking: the idea that a woman gives her virginity to her husband when she marries. She has saved it for him until then. It's not clear what he has saved for her, if anything.

In any case, the bride is supposed to say, on the wedding night:"Look, hon! See what I've got here! It's all unused and unopened, and all for you!" How nice. Especially as it stops any sexual comparisons of the groom with prior boyfriends and reinforces the idea that a woman's virginity is her most valuable attribute, yet not really hers. If I had a virginity to save, I'd save it for me, not any future beau I might glue my divine eye on.

If the 'abstinence only' policy wasn't so tragic in its likely consequences, it would be a rather fun spectacle to watch. We goddesses do get bored over the millennia, and at least these repeated human follies give us something to write about.

A postscript: It seems that the Bush administration applies the principle of abstinence to auditing the books of faith-based organizations receiving funds from the government, but lapses in this quite inexplicably when it comes to organization which advocate contraceptive education in addition to sexual abstinence.

On Social Critics

I think that I have finally found my dream career. For many years I grieved over the fact that since I was a goddess, they didn't also let me be the oracle of Delphi. (Oracles of Delphi were ancient Greek prophetesses who are famous for their nonergonomic work environment. This consisted of a cave to receive petitioners in, a tripod to sit on and noxious vapors to inhale.) The most imbecile utterances of an oracle used to be listened to with great reverence, but she still wasn't held responsible for the negative consequences of carrying them out in practice. She was always seen as right. This was the role I was born for, not the job of some lowly snake goddess.

Well, something almost as good as the oracle's job has been created in the last few years: the occupation of a cultural critic. Anybody can become one, or so it seems to me. A background in some of the social sciences might be desirable but doesn't seem to be a formal requirement. Knowledge of statistics is certainly not required. Neither are cultural critics held to the boring, limiting rules of "proper" research protocols. No need to worry about the difference between correlation and causation. No need to qualify any conclusions not based on empirical evidence. No need to avoid sweeping generalizations, naive simplifications and biased interpretations. What bliss!

This job was made for me. I can profess to the world all my pet peeves, and as long as there is smoke and vapors of pseudoscience the world will listen. I can take the word "culture" and make it a monolithic concept loaded with any adjectives I currently hate, and condemn vast groups of people with just a few well-framed sentences. I can choose any historical period I like, cut out the parts of it I dislike (say, petty wars) and remake the rest into a Rudyard Kipling "JustSo" story. And people will actually pay attention to me!

Why wasn't this job invented earlier, instead of the boring jobs of researchers? They could have avoided years of tedious study, analysis and mental discipline. More importantly, their academic writing would have immensely benefited from the freedom to dispense with the antiquated rules that all evidence should be considered and that alternative theories must not suppressed. And think of the stylistic improvements that would have been possible by being able to get rid of all those annoying little qualifiers: "some people", "sometimes", "one of the many reasons"...

Still, better late than never, both for me and the researchers. Cultural criticism, here I come! My tripod is on order, the noxious vapors are arriving by UPS next Monday and the cave facsimile in my study is nearly complete. All that is now missing are the adulators.