Yet Another Instance of Hatred Towards Women by Ultra-Ortodox Jews

We keep being told that Israel needs to be supported over Palestine because if Palestinians are ever granted independence, their treatment of women will be barbaric. That is undoubtedly true. Israel's attitude to women, however, is just as hateful and demeaning. The gall of the Haredim woman-haters is such as to allow them to erase female leaders from press release photos. 

This is how the photo initially looked

And this is the sanitized version
with the images of Hillary Clinton and Audrey Thomason
photoshopped out

I don't want to hear anybody come here to screech about the so-called religious sensibilities of the nasty freakazoids who insulted women in this way. If they find the photo hurtful to their fanatical feelings, they could have avoided publishing it altogether. However, in our Western Civilization women now play an important role in all areas of existence. It is extremely insulting to have our reality that we worked hard to create being manipulated in this way to satisfy a bunch of miserable woman-haters.

Today, on the anniversary of the USSR's victory over the Nazi Germany, I want to remind my Jewish brothers and sisters that a very short time ago somebody also found their very existence insulting and attempted to erase them all from existence. 

20 Ways to Become Known as a Male Chauvinist (Plus Bonus Points)

I've read this great post titled "25 ways to tokenize or alienate a non-white person around you" and was inspired to make a similar list for male chauvinists. (To read the entire post, press the Read More button.)

1. If a female colleague mentions that she likes to cook, praise her for that exuberantly and tell her how nice it is to see that some women still know how to do that. For extra points, ask her to cook something for you since your girlfriend wouldn't be able to boil an egg if she tried.

2. Inform every woman you meet that women only like men who treat them horribly while nice guys like you cannot get laid no matter how hard they try. For extra points, ask her to prove you wrong by having sex with you.

3. Ask every woman you meet if she has a baby, and if she says she doesn't, ask her when she is planning to have one. Then inform her that her biological clock is ticking and she might miss her chance. For extra points, make tick-tock sounds whenever you meet her.

4. When you meet a woman in a professional setting, immediately ask her if she is married or if she has a boyfriend. If she answers in the negative, show surprise and ask her why not. For extra points, tell her you will set her up with one of your friends.

5. Whenever you see a female co-worker eat, ask her whether she is on a diet and if she says she isn't, tell her you heard that WeightWatchers produced really amazing results. For extra points, start leaving WeightWatchers flyers on her desk.

6. If you know a woman who has children, ask her who stays with her babies while she spends her entire day at work. For extra points, offer to bring her statistics about high depression rates among children of working mothers.

7. Ask your female co-worker whether she thinks she would have been hired for this job if she was male. For extra points, give her a little speech about reverse discrimination.

8. If you hear that somebody has been sexually assaulted, immediately inquire what the victim was wearing and whether she had been drinking prior to being assaulted. For extra points, tell everybody about this article you read that suggested that women who dressed provocatively and went out alone attracted rapists.

9. If a woman says she is a feminist, tell her that she doesn't look like a lesbian. For extra points, ask her what made her hate men so much.

10. Refer to your female colleagues as "girls." For extra points, address them as "sweetie" or "honey."

11. If  your female co-worker disagrees with you about anything, ask her if it's her time of the month. For extra points, inform everybody around that she is sensitive today and shouldn't be approached.

12. Tell women that you are afraid to express yourself honestly because they might get emotional. For extra points, always bring a pack of Kleenex into meetings and distribute them to your female colleagues.

13. If a woman begins to say something, interrupt her and finish her thought. For extra points, tell her that you are just trying to help.

14. Inform everybody that as a result of evolution, women are monogamous because they need to snag and retain a provider and men are polygamous because they need to spread the seed. For extra points, distribute articles and blog posts on the subject to everybody you know.

15. Keep telling everybody you meet that you are a real gentleman, which is why you always open doors for women and offer them the best seat. For extra points, make a big show of rushing to open a door for a woman.

16. Tell everybody that women are the better half of humanity, which is why they need to be sheltered and protected from life's troubles by men. For extra points, give examples from your personal life demonstrating your credentials as a savior of damsels in distress.

17. If a female co-worker tells you she is pregnant, roll your eyes and tell everybody that you know this would happen. For extra points, walk around looking all dejected and share with everybody how worried you are about the pregnant colleague's incapacity to perform her duties correctly.

18. If a woman you know is planning to give birth, ask her about the method of delivery she chose. Criticize her choice and explain to her how she is wrong and how her method is dangerous to her and the baby. For extra points, send her information on other delivery options.

19. If you see a pregnant woman, stop her and give her advice as to what she should or shouldn't eat or drink during her pregnancy. For extra points, berate her for not taking good care of her unborn baby.

20. If a woman gets promoted, is awarded tenure or finds a great job, say "Well, we all know why that happened." For extra points, tell everybody how you will never get a similar promotion or find such a good job because nowadays men get passed over in favor of women because everybody is afraid of the PC police.

Misogyny Flares Up at University of Waterloo in Canada

For some reason, today everybody is sending me links about instances of misogyny in Canada. Look at this poster that somebody plastered over the faces of female candidates for student government:

This wasn't all. The following mass email was next sent in the name of the university's president:

When a bad idea comes to this Earth it always hides behind The Shield of Vulnerability. This way it is immune from being attacked in the open. Radioactive Technology was hiding behind the vulnerable looking mask of Marie Curie and this is why no one caught it in advance. They figured that if a female was pushing it then it was harmless. They figured wrong. The truth is that overeducated women are truly dangerous. If they don't know right from wrong they will nuke the whole Planet and call it the latest fashion from Holt Renfrew. This is the truth. The world is in trouble today because the higher moral intelligence of men is not in charge anymore. How long will you let this continue? The choice is in your hands. I didn't leave posters on your campus because I am a fool. I left them because I am your father who is concerned about where your education is ultimately going. You are being taught the virtues of gender equality when gender equality is nowhere in the Orginial Plan of Creation. Queen Elizabeth is leading you astray and charging you big money for this evil favour. When you graduate from here you will have a degree but no real intelligence. This is the truth.

Before you dismiss this as an innocent student prank, let me remind you of the Montreal massacre where 14 women were killed by a criminal who was unhappy with the fact that many women were attending an engineering program. 

Thank you, dear colleague, for sending me the link!

Dorothy Seymour

I'm sorry for posting so much, people. I often resolve to stop inundating people with posts so often but there are so many things going on everywhere that are worth commenting on that I just can't help myself. This is a story that was brought to my attention by reader Patrick whose controversial comments we all appreciate. Thanks, Patrick!

The baseball lovers among us must have surely heard about Harold Seymour's seminal studies of this sport. I know nothing about baseball but even I have heard his name and know of his importance to the writing of baseball's history. Now it turns out that much of the research for all of the books and most of the writing for the last one had been done my Seymour's wife Dorothy, his life partner of 30 years whom he refused to acknowledge as a co-author. 

Dorothy contributed a lot to Harold's career from the moment they married. She was helpful in helping him get through the writing of his doctoral dissertation:

As a good '50s wife, she typed the 632-page dissertation in which Seymour traced baseball from a childhood pursuit of boys into a full-fledged business and American cultural centerpiece. Cornell University awarded him his doctorate in 1956, and the dissertation helped launch sports history as a legitimate scholarly pursuit. It grew into his first baseball history book, published in 1960.Dr. Seymour's wife knows now that she probably contributed more to that dissertation than the academic world would consider appropriate. In the preface, Seymour acknowledged "the help of numerous individuals and organizations."He did not mention Dorothy.

Everybody knows that being the partner of a person in the throes of writing a doctoral dissertation is very hard. Those of who who suffered through the process of researching, writing, revising and going nuts over the dissertation know how much we owe to those people who were by our side and put up with us in the process. Seymour, however, felt nothing similar. A wife for him was not as person. She was a convenient object who was supposed to produce and shut up.


The most frequent argument male chauvinists use to disparage women is that the entirety of human civilization was created by men while women just sat there twiddling their thumbs and sometimes managing to look pretty which only served to distract men from their all-important endeavors. I wonder how many of the great works of literature and scientific advances owe their existence to the silenced wives who toiled in the background and whose input was never recognized.

Montreal Massacre

Today is the 21st anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. In case you don't know about it, on December 6, 1989, Marc Lépine killed 14 women and wounded 13 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Lépine couldn't deal with the growing presence of women in the public life of Quebec. He was especially bothered by their presence at the Polytechnique, which formerly was a bastion of male exclusivity. Lépine applied to the École Polytechnique but was rejected. So he decided to take revenge on women, whom he decided to blame for that. Curiously, he had applied to the Canadian Armed Forces before and had also been rejected, which, however, didn't make him want to kill soldiers and army officials in revenge.

This is what Lépine wrote in his suicide note:

Please note that if I am committing suicide today ... it is not for economic reasons ... but for political reasons. For I have decided to send Ad Patres [Latin: "to the fathers"] the feminists who have ruined my life. ... The feminists always have a talent for enraging me. They want to retain the advantages of being women ... while trying to grab those of men. ... They are so opportunistic that they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can.

The incredibly clumsy language of the message suggests that instead of blaming feminists for his failure Lépine should have looked at his grave intellectual limitations. But as any male chauvinist, this murderer never took any responsibility for his own failings. Instead, he decided to use a very old and trusted patriarchal trick of blaming women for every problem under the sun. So he armed himself with a rifle and went into the Polytechnique insearch of women to kill:

On the evening of December 6, 1989, shortly after 5 o'clock on the penultimate day of classes before the Christmas holidays, Lépine carried a concealed Sturm Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle into the École Polytechnique. His first female victim, Maryse Laganiere, was killed in a corridor. He then proceeded to Room 303, a classroom which held 10 women students and 48 men, along with a male professor. Firing two shots into the ceiling and shouting, "I want the women. I hate feminists!," Lépine enacted a gendercidal ritual . . . Separating the men from the women, he expelled the men at gunpoint, lined up the remaining women students against the wall, and began to fire. Six women died; the others were injured, but survived.

Responding to the massacre, Montreal Men Against Sexism wrote a statement with which it is hard to disagree:

Men kill women and children as a proprietary, vengeful and terrorist act. They do so with the support of a sexist society and judicial system. As pro-feminist men, we try to reveal and to end this continuing massacre, which will go on as long as we do not end sexism and sexist violence, along with all of men's alibis for them.

Giving Advice to Women

I'm preparing this completely new course for the Fall semester. It's the kind of a course that has never been taught not only at my university but also at any other university where I worked. It's going to be completely innovative and contain a number of very original activites that I worked on all summer. In short, I am very proud of this course and can't wait to start teaching it. When some of my male colleagues heard about it, they immediately started offering me detailed advice on how to teach this course. The funny thing is that only one of them is even remotely related to language teaching. The others have never taught anything resembling this course in their entire lives. The unwanted advice I received was copious and delivered in very sanctimonious tones.

Women regularly receive tons of unsolicited advice from people we barely know or from complete strangers. How many times, while walking down the street or waiting at a bus-stop, was I admonished to smile, lose weight, quit smoking, stop drinking so much coffee, stop reading while I walk, and avoid fast food? When my sister was pregnant, scores of strangers would stop her everywhere she went and bombard her with advice on what she needs to eat and do and how she should prepare to give birth. When I would mention my sister's pregnancy to people I know, they also asked me to give her lists of advice from them.

I've asked many of my male friends whether they receive unsolicited advice regularly. From their confused reaction to the question I gathered that this advice-giving frenzy is mostly reserved for women. Patriarchal societies infantilize women through a multitude of strategies. Women, of course, often consent to this infantilization and even welcome it because it liberates us from many unwelcome responsibilities. As a result, we end up with the societally accepted image of a woman as a perennially childish, helpless creature who needs to be offered aid with every aspect of her life.

Reproductive Coercion: Who's to Blame?

One of the most persistent myths that women-haters love to spread is about women surreptitiously getting pregnant in order to keep men in their lives and get access to their money. It has always been obvious to anybody with an ounce of common sense that this is nothing but a ridiculous chauvinistic myth. Research demonstrates that it's men who engineer unwanted pregnancies. Lynn Harris analyzes this phenomenon in her incisive article "When Teen Pregnancy Is No Accident":

Two new studies have quantified what advocates for young women’s health have observed for years: the striking frequency with which it is in fact young men who try to force their partners to get pregnant. Their goal: not to settle down as family men but rather to exert what is perhaps the most intimate, and lasting, form of control. (“Control” may also include attempts to force both pregnancy and abortion, even in the same relationship.) Together with earlier small-scale studies and reports by those in the field, the new figures help fill out the picture of a long-known, but under-addressed, phenomenon now referred to as "reproductive coercion,” in which abusive partners subject young women already at risk of violence to the additional health risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. The new data confirm that we must expand not only our assumptions about who’s forcing whom to get pregnant but also our understanding of the meaning and causes of “unwanted” pregnancy. “If we are serious about stopping unplanned pregnancy in this country, we simply must address the sexual violence and reproductive control that often cause it,” says Esta Soler, president of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, which has been a leading advocate on the issue.

Reproductive coercion is often the result of violence and abuse in relationships. Of course, how can we be surprised that this happens so often when there is an entire political party dedicated to promoting reproductive coercion on a planetary basis? Any politician who engages in an anti-abortion campaign or measure participates in a large-scale reproductive coercion.

Hatred of Women Trumps Hatred of the Environment

In order to promote their anti-women policies, fundamentalists are willing to do anything. They are even adopting a seemingly environmentalist discourse. For them, even the environment they normally hate and try to destroy at any cost is a good enough justification to promote the subjugation of women. Today, they are coaching their anti-women propaganda in a completely spurious concern over how the contraceptive pill is "damaging" the environment:

This year, birth control advocates are celebrating 50 years of decriminalized hormonal contraceptives. American Life League and our co-sponsors don't think half a century of contaminating our waterways is something to celebrate. Study after study has shown that hormonal estrogen in the water has severely damaged the ecosystem and our health.

Of course, these women-haters are somehow not as interested in the horrible BP oil spill. For them, liberated female sexuality is a lot more damaging than the eco-disaster we see in the horrifying pictures of the Gulf oil spill.

Appropriating threatening types of discourse and using them for their own purposes is a favorite ideological trick of the Conservatives. Sarah Palin, one of the biggest women-haters around, calls herself a feminist in order to appropriate the intellectual and political prestige of the feminist movement while simultaneously diluting its message. Now anti-choicers appropriate the environmentalist discourse in order to push their agenda of denying women the right to their own bodies. This does not prevent them, of course, of pushing the most anti-environment policies thay can think of the second they come to power.

Robert Dornan's Goodbye American Woman: A Review

Robert Dornan's Goodbye American Woman is a curious example of a North-American anti-feminist backlash. I am co-authoring this post with a guest blogger who was kind enough to recap the content of this book for me.

Guest Blogger:

I picked this book because I got interested in how North American guys perceive Russian culture and people.

I grew up and lived next to Moscow until I moved to the US in 2003, which gives me some grounds to think I know how things truly are in Putinland. Given a delicate subject of this book – Russian women – I hoped to have a good laugh while comparing the content of this book with reality.

I am happy to say my expectations have been exceeded fivefold.

The author starts by introducing two Canadian guys, Bob and Alex, who work as mid-level software engineers in Toronto. Both their professional and personal lives leave much to be desired (i.e., suck): the only source of joy in Bob’s after-divorce life is spending time with his kids. Although Bob (according to his own words) is fairly good-looking with a long string of pretty girlfriends in the past, his present condition (according to his best friend Alex) is termed as “butt-ugly”. Unlike Bob, whose child support payments put a sizable hole in his budget, Alex has managed to escape the dark side of marriage by never having one in the first place. In fact, he appears to be performing better in the dating department, although he complains that it’s not cheap: despite all the equality talk, Canadian women are not eager to split the dinner bill and 99% of the time Alex has to pick it up. It’s a good thing that he can economize by still living at his father’s place. To make it short, both guys seem to be disillusioned in bitchy, pushy, over-demanding, and mercenary women.

Alas, they don’t see any way out: since all the women in North America are like that, what is a nice Canadian guy supposed to do? cross the Atlantic?

Literally enough, crossing the Atlantic turns out to be the solution to all of their problems. The two friends are forced to fly to Moscow, Russia, to fix a few software bugs, and they end up fixing their miserable lives into the bargain. As it turns out, Russian capital is filled with warm, hospitable, fun-loving people who quickly bring back to life the jet-lagged Canadian pilgrims. Russian women prove to be absolutely gorgeous, elegant and feminine creatures who are so much unlike their North American sisters that it’s just breathtaking, period. Most importantly, Russian ladies are smart and sensitive enough to see what great guys Alex and Bob really are, and they have no inhibitions expressing their appreciative feelings to the two gentlemen. After they spend ten days in Moscow, our newly born software engineers return to Toronto, but life is never the same without their Russian girlfriends. Within a few weeks, they fly back to their loved ones and propose. Needless to say, the two ladies are beside themselves with joy and gratitude and can only answer yes. In a few months, all six of them (I forgot to mention that each lady has a fairly grown up kid) would move to Canada to start a new life.

Now, if Alex and Bob strike you as two losers who cannot put two and two together, I agree. The funniest thing is that the book has no lack of information about what is really behind that syrupy fairy-tale. A few other characters in the book supply lots of accurate facts and opinions about what drives the men and women who sign up for that mail-order-bride-like business. However, all of their advice falls on deaf ears: Alex and Bob never stop to wonder why it only takes them a 13-hour flight to Moscow to become marriage material.

Clarissa:

It is funny to observe the many forms anti-feminist backlash can take. The author of this book feels uncomfortable in the world where women have claimed for themselves a place of equality and human dignity. He hates the idea that a woman can have thoughts, desires, and opinions of her own. In the inhospitable universe where women have other goals than attracting and satisfying men and men have to learn to treat women as human beings, Dornan turns to the myth that submissive, compliant, doll-like women exist in parts of the world still unspoiled by vicious feminism. The greatest joke of the book is that in his search for such women he goes to Russia, of all places.

Anybody with a modicum of intellect and historical knowledge would realize that Russian-speaking countries have a historical legacy of female empowerment unmatched in the West. Women of my generation (early 30ies) were brought up by mothers and grandmothers almost a 100% of whom worked full-time their entire adult lives. In class, at work, at home, and in the majority of public settings, Russian-speaking women have been dominant (or, I would even say, domineering) for decades. This, of course, came at the price of complete sexual disempowerment and repression for women.

This is why it is so hilarious that anybody would be so deluded as to search for a sexy submissive doll in a Russian-speaking country. If anything, the pathetic mail-order bride seekers find the exact opposite.

What Women Need According to WaPo

For anybody who has read my blog at least once before, it must be pretty obvious that I'm not the kind of a person who reads The Washington Post regularly. However, I do skim through it every couple of months to see what depths of idiocy its so-called journalists can reach. Today, an elderly indivudual named Richard Cohen has come out with an article titled "Why is there no female Tiger Woods?" where he offers a clumsy recitation of most idiotic myths about female sexuality.

Like many patriarchal losers of his ilk, Cohen cannot accept the simple fact that women might have sex for pleasure. This is why he goes out of his way to convince himself that the only reason why women have sex is to have babies. Conversely, the reason why women don't have sex is in order not to have babies. Cohen pretends that he doesn't know that modern methods of contraception allow women to avoid the danger of every sex act culminating in a pregnancy. This quasi-journalist is desperate for an explanation why nobody has had any sex with him for the past couple of decades. The sad thing is that his pathetic search for this idiotic explanation has to be done publicly, and the poor readers of his newspaper have to witness these embarrassing efforts at convincing himself that nobody wants him because of some obscure evolutionary designs: "Women seem not to have the evolutionary urge to couple with cheaply dressed strangers. They have a stronger need to mother — to have a child and then raise that child. . . Since recreational sex can lead to diapers, women have to be prudent. As they say down at the Fed, they have to consider the out years. This is why women more than men link sex to love and commitment. I'm not saying that all of them do or all of them do all the time. I'm just saying that there seems to be few women who behave as Tiger Woods did. Even women who have no moral compunction against multiple affairs draw the line at a number somewhat below Tiger’s." One can practically smell the desperation of this poor man, who is falling all over himself in order to keep believing that women haven't cheated on him, or if they did, at least it wasn't that often or with that many people.

I have noticed that men, who insist on some special link that women make between sex and love/commitment, usually are the ones absolutely incapable of offering even marginably passable sex to anybody. It is as if they were saying: "I can't offer you sexual satisfaction because I suck in bed. But I can offer you marriage and access to my wallet. And since you are a woman, that is what you need, right? Sex isn't that important to you, right? Please tell me it isn't. Please please somebody just tell me that women don't really need sex! Pwease, pwetty pwease!!!"

This image of constantly cheating men and women who have their noses perennially stuck in a baby's diaper is so near and dear to Cohen that it blinds him to one simple reality. If it were true, then who the men would cheat with? Unless the cheating man in question is gay (and there has been no suggestion that Tiger Woods is), then for every act of cheating by a man, there needs to be a woman present.


Cohen ends his article with a childish outburst against the group of people he sees as his biggest enemy: the feminists. He blames feminists for the fact that many women have discovered that sex is fun and does not have to be sacrificed to the needs of moth-eaten fools like this journalist. Cohen thinks that if he repeats something enough times, it will eventually come true: "The reason the Glass Ceiling has not broken is that women have other priorities — maintaining relationships and being a mother. This is the way it is, and this is the way it has always been." Note the hysteria in these last sentences. "It has to be this way because I can't deal with the thought that women might have other priorities. If they do, then what is my role in life? Who will need me?"

The answer is clear. In today's world nobody except an irrelevant rag like The Washington Post needs outdated chauvinists like Cohen. And the reason we still encounter the glass ceiling everywhere is not that we are only interested in babies and relationships. It's that wherever we go and whatever we attempt to do, we encounter a condescending jerk like Cohen  lecturing us on our needs.

What is 'machismo'? Student responses.

 For today's mini-quiz, my students in my Hispanic Civilization course had to answer the following question: "What is 'machismo'?" Here are some of the answers. Obviously, I am doing something wrong in this course because most of the students still have not been able to process such an important concept.

• "a male superiority complex."

• "masculine style."

• "men acting like they have all the power."

• "a macho mentality." 

• "macho but in an oppressive way towards women."

• "a set of characteristics or qualities that depict the nature of a man who is confident and strong."

• "a very aggressive guy."

• "men being manly."
  

• "the idea that men are better than women." (Finally, a good answer and that, from a male student.)

• "it is the masculine feeling and presence in culture." (God, what have I done to deserve hearing about "masculine feelings" so early in the morning?)
  

•  "when men treat women like dirt because they see women as inferior to men." (That's the kind of writing I like!)

• "masculine superiority over all females and other males. 'Alpha male' mentality combined with vanity, sexism, and chauvinism." (You've got to love this student.)
  

A Woman's Place: Palin and Beck

Everybody who is familiar with my blog knows that I'm not a huge fan of Sarah Palin, to put it very very mildly. I have criticized her here, here, here, here, and in many other places. You can disagree with her politics, hate her way of presenting herself, dislike her penchant for expressing opinions about things she does not understand. But it is absolutely wrong to demean her because of her gender.


Glenn Beck, a disgusting parody of a human being, recently came out with the following statement on Palin that he, in his mind-numbing idiocy, probably considers funny. This was in response to whether he would consider a Palin-Beck presidential ticket in 2012: "I was just thinking, what, I'm going to take a back seat to a chick? Go shoot a bear, make some stew, I'm hungry in here. . . I’m just saying, Beck-Palin, I’ll consider. But Palin-Beck -- can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? She'd be yapping or something, I'd say, 'I'm sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I'm not in the kitchen.' I mean, you'd have to live up to the evil conservative stereotypes, you'd have no choice but to do so." How is it possible that somebody capable of being so vile and obnoxious is even being listened to? Why do we allow such disgusting individuals to make money out of polluting our airwaves? What's wrong with us that somebody so miserable can even joke about running for president?

P.S. And of course, the second I wrote this, Google AdSense put an advertisement for Palin's new book on my blog. There is just no winning with this woman. :-(

The Father on Top

It isn't called the patriarchy for nothing.

My regular readers might remember my recent post "The Groom on Top," where I discussed how the groom's name always appears on top of the bride's in the marriage license. Today, I discovered an even more galling fact of a similar nature. In the papers of admission to the maternity ward**, signed by women who are about to give birth, the baby's father also signs his name on top of the mother's - every single time! Even in the process of giving birth, which is one thing that men definitely cannot do, women are still less important.

Taking into the account that women who are single mothers check into the hospital with no male company at all, this strategy of signalling male importance in the situation where men are definitely less relevant and often completely absent, is profoundly sexist. It's like there is absolutely nothing whatsoever that a woman can do in order to be deemed important.

** Do not worry, my friends, I am not giving birth.  I was accompanying somebody else to the maternity ward.

Bride's Special Day

I just encountered the following description on the site of a wedding organizer:

Thank You for looking me up. Hopefully this site will answer some of your questions about what I offer, rates and what other people have thought about my work. I love this job ~ Helping a bride organize her most special day is what I do. I have also done many wedding ceremonies. So if you're not having a traditional church ceremony let me know.

Get it? Helping a BRIDE organize HER special day. Evidently, there are people who do not find this weird, perplexing, or offensive. I mean, why is the bride organizing this on her own? is she getting married to herself? Or is this supposed to be a woman's job somehow? And why is it HER special day? What kind of day is is supposed to be for the groom? Non-special? Routine? Why on earth would anybody want to participate in a marriage ceremony that is special to only one of the people?


Every day we are bombarded by TV shows, movies, websites, articles, etc. that tell us how women are desperate to get married and men are either reluctant or, at best, indifferent. So many women start believing this unhealthy hype and become convinced that it is their sacred obligation to hunt for a proposal, kill herself organizing an elaborate wedding, and tolerate a man who is not all that invested into this whole thing. My question is why don't more people find all this profoundly humiliating?

The Groom on Top

 Notice how the groom's information is placed above the bride's? I've searched many of these marriage application forms and for the most part they look like this, with the groom sitting consistently on top of the bride, or, in the best of cases, the bride's and the groom's information sitting next to each other. It would only be fair to have a couple of application forms where the bride would be on top, but somehow they are nowhere to be found.

 

So what good can any one expect from an institution that puts a woman in a secondary, subservient position from the very beginning? And don't even start me on the barbaric custom where women abdicate their own last names in order to signal that they are a man's property.

San Antonio Doctor Traumatized by Female Sexuality

USA Today published this hilarious interview with a religious fanatic disguised as a doctor who wants to make her patients pay for having rich and fulfilling sex lives. This individual refuses to prescribe birth control to her single female patients because she can't get over her envy towards them: "I'm not going to give any kind of medication I see as harmful," said Phillips of San Antonio**. The drugs would not protect her patient from "emotional trauma from multiple partners," Phillips reasoned. "I could not ethically give that type of medication to a single woman." It's sad that no drug is available to protect Dr. Phillips from the emotional trauma of knowing that there are women in the world who have sex purely for enjoyment.

It's funny how this freak stops at single women. Apparently, she doesn't realize that having multiple partners has nothing to do with your marital status. She also doesn't realize that the reason people take birth control in general and this kind of contraception in particular has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of partners they have. This weird person is so stuck on the painful (to her) thought that somebody somewhere might have more than one sex partner that she can't discuss anything else. It's terrifying to see how many insane individuals get into the medical profession. I shudder to think what this "doctor" might do to a patient who does something to hurt her sex-deprived sensibilities.

**And then people get upset with me for dumping on certain states as places where all kinds of freaks flourish.

C-section Persecution

I have already discussed how the ruling patriarchal ideology marginalizes women who give birth through C-section**. Women have to be constantly punished for their gender through pain and suffering. Those who try to minimize the pain of childbirth through scheduled C-sections are shamed into seeing themselves as traitors to their femininity and told that they are a "failure."

Here are some more disturbing facts provided by Feministe about the persecution faced by women who give birth through C-sections:

Insurance companies can consider prior cesarean sections as a “pre-existing condition” and deny a woman coverage for childbirth. Additionally, in Florida for example, women who have had c-sections are charged 25% more in premiums if they want to retain their health insurance coverage of birth.



In Illinois, according to a Chicago Sun-Times article on 6/26/07, a woman’s emergency c-section (much to her physician’s consternation) was denied coverage by BlueCross BlueShield.

The sad thing is that women often buy into this anti-C-section propaganda and gleefully participate in shaming women who have C-sections.


** Check out my posts "The Truth about C-section," "A C-section Makes You a Failure," and  "Ideology in Birth Preparation Classes."

Russell Bishop: A Male Chauvinist Pig

I am so tired of these butt-ugly, balding, uneducated, middle-aged women-haters. As if we didn't have enough stupidity coming out of Ross Douthat on a weekly basis, here is an individual called Russell Bishop. He just came out with an article trying to convince women that working and having careers is bad for them. Material possessions do not make you happy, he argues. "There is very little correlation between material world success and happiness or fulfillment," Bishop writes. This line of reasoning does not lead him, however, to enjoin everybody to stop working. Just women. He is also incapable of realizing that many women work not because of their inherent materialism but precisely because having a career makes them happy and fulfilled.

After telling women just how miserable they are because of their careers, Bishop proceeds to offer advice. Of course, it's pretty self-evident that no woman would ever consider asking for advice from this raging chauvinist, but this doesn't stop Bishop from pontificating in his condescending manner. His advice to the supposedly unhappy women: Learn to accept and cooperate with what is. The implication is clear. In order to be happy, women need to just accept and cooperate with the patriarchal system that benefits Bishop and deprives them of their rights. We should accept and cooperate with the lack of pay equity, violence, sexual harrassment, and constant condescension. Sit quietly in your corners, little ladies, and learn to be happy with what you have. And in the meanwhile, go clean yourself some toilets.

Bishop's article is titled "Women are unhappy? And you are surprised?" No, Russell, I'm not surpised at all. While jerks like you regale us with your sanctimonious chauvinistic rubbish, women will continue being unhappy. It's people like you who create pay inequity, who make work environment intolerable for women, and who create the discourse that keeps marginalizing us.

Scientific Sexism

Chauvinism pervades every single area of our lives to an incredible degree. Even scientists, whose job is to discover and report objective data, prefer to push their patriarchal ideology instead. A recent article in Science Daily is a perfect example of that.

The article is titled "Unnatural Selection: Birth Control Pills May Alter Choice Of Partners." Its main goal is to bash the most important scientific breakthrough of the XXth century: the birth control pill. Many patriarchally-minded people hate the pill because it liberated women from having their lives controlled by their biology (as I discuss in my last post.) So they come up with studies which are aimed at scaring women off of the pill.

The main problem with taking oral contraception is that it will destroy your personal life. Giving birth to an unwanted child every year of your life, of course, will not do that. But taking the pill definitely will. So how does the oral contraception damage our lives? According to the article, by "interfering with a woman's ability to choose, compete for and retain her preferred mate." Women who are on the pill, the article claims, are less likely to prefer "men showing dominance and male-male competitiveness." Of course, female interest towards domineering jerks is diminishing (which in my book is great). This is a natural process for a society that is trying to move away from patriarchal stereotypes. The only group of people who might find this tendency scary is domineering men. So, in reality, the pill doesn't prevent women from "retaining their preferred mate." What happens is that domineering losers cannot retain a woman in a new reality where women aren't tied forever to these idiots by constant child-bearing.


In order to sell their idiotic propaganda to women, these pseudo-scientists tell us that if we dare to mess with nature's design that destines us to be perennially pregnant, we will not be able to find us a man: "The authors also speculate that the use of oral contraceptives may influence a woman's ability to attract a mate by reducing attractiveness to men, thereby disrupting her ability to compete with normally cycling women for access to mate."   I have no idea since when specialists in Animal and Plant Sciences, as these pseudo-scientists are, qualify to talk about purely sociological issues such as mating and dating. But from personal experience of someone who has been on the pill for 15 years, I can tell these stupid women-haters that they can relax. My attractiveness hasn't suffered and I have never in my life had to compete with any women ("normal" or otherwise) for access to men. Somehow, men never give me the chance and just keep competing for me, as annoying as it is to me.

Woody Allen: Chauvinism and Pedophilia

I don't know much about Hollywood movies. They have nothing to do with art and as for their entertainment  value, the best you can expect is extremely mediocre entertainment. I heard Woody Allen's name, of course, but never watched his movies. When I finally tried watching one of his films, I was so shocked by his chauvinism and his unapolgetic approval of pedophilia so much, that I had to turn the movie off after ten minutes. It was painful to watch how this famous director and actor promotes his unhealthy ideas about male-female relationships. It was even more painful to consider that he is so much applauded and celebrated for it.

Only yesterday I discovered that Woody Allen's personal life does not contradict his filmic approval of pedophilia. This shoscking information is from the Wikipedia: "During the proceedings, Farrow alleged that Allen had sexually molested their adopted daughter Dylan, who was then seven years old. The judge eventually concluded that the sex abuse charges were inconclusive,[52] but called Allen's conduct with Soon-Yi "grossly inappropriate." She called the report of the team that investigated the issue "sanitized and, therefore, less credible," and added that she had "reservations about the reliability of the report... After breaking his relationship from Farrow in 1992, Allen continued his relationship with Soon-Yi Previn. Even though Allen never married or lived with Farrow,[54] and was never Previn's legal stepfather, the relationship between Allen and Previn has often been referred to as a father dating his "stepdaughter," [55] since he had been perceived as being in the child's life in a father-like capacity since she was seven years old. For example, in 1991, The New York Times described Allen's family life by reporting, "Few married couples seem more married. They are constantly in touch with each other, and not many fathers spend as much time with their children as Allen does."[54] Despite assertions from Previn that Allen was never a father-figure to her,[56] the relationship became a cause célèbre. At the time, Allen was 56 and Previn was 22. Asked whether their age difference was conducive to "a healthy, equal relationship," Allen discounted the matter of equality and added this protestation: "The heart wants what it wants."" 

After reading this, I can't help but ask myself, do we as a society really value young girls so little as to find all of this acceptable? Why is the creator of really crappy movies so admired in spite of these horrible actions? How is it possible that a society that screeches about "moral values" on every corner should tolerate such egregious acts? Is anybody as disgusted with tis as I am?