OPINIONS OF ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES, A MINOR GREEK GODDESS. She can be reached at: ECHIDNE-OF-THE-SNAKES.COM

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Red Light Art 



The National Gallery in London is going to have its first contemporary exhibition. Its name is "The Hoerengracht", Dutch for Whore's Canal, and it is a recreation of the red light district in Amsterdam. Now watch this video which shows some of the installation and also includes interviews with one of the artists who created it.

You back? How did you feel about the comment which argued that the exhibition makes the visitor take the role of a prospective customer? I don't know about you, but I never felt that way, probably because I'm a heterosexual girl goddess. What always fascinates me is the way "mainstream" means "male experience." This is something that comes across very strongly in the video, and not only in that one throw-away comment.

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Stephen Dubner Overheard 



In an interview with the BBC (on my radio), Stephen Dubner, one of the authors of SuperFreakonomics, talked about the book. I wrote down a part of his comments, starting in the middle. Here are my notes:

...we wrote about the economics of prostitution. But we wrote about some more serious topics, too...

So there ya go! Prostitution is a giggly topic, not a serious one.

For more on that particular not-serious topic, see my earlier post.

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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Some Fun In These Times 

First, a nice pin for all Stupak people:





I'd like to add that there will always be choice for rich women.
Then: Every Sperm Is Sacred:




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The Cougars And the Messes 



Here's popular culture for you:

While everyone considers Demi to be the O.G. cougar, she doesn't see it that way.

"I'm certainly not the first person to be in a relationship with a younger man, but somehow I was plucked out as a bit of a poster girl," she says. "I don't know why that is. But I just kind of step back sometimes and say, 'There is some reason, and what is it that I have to share in a positive way?' I'd prefer to be called a puma."

("Puma" is already used to describe women in their 30s who go for younger men, so 47-year-old Demi doesn't really fall into that category. But she thinks "she came up with the new designation," so maybe it's best to let her go on believing that?)

Now about her 31-year-old husband. She loves him. A lot.

The predator language is quite revealing. What are men called who go for younger women?

And the sidebar on the linked page shows a woman who is Dressed All Wrong! Under the heading "Fashion Police":





The explanation to the pic:

Sloppy Suiting

Poor Eva is a mess from head to skirt at the New York City premiere of her latest flick.

So what's the problem here? It's fun to laugh at famous people, is it not?

Sure. But these really are the predominant stories on many fashion blogs: Celebrities with bad breasts or silicone breasts, celebrities with anorexia or fat bellies, celebrities with poor clothing choices or bad cosmetic surgery. Almost everything there could be said about any woman, at least by someone nasty, and that's why this is not only about laughing at stars but also about defining acceptable limits for how women look and act. And my cursory overview suggests that the "acceptable" really consists of tightrope walking.

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Worth Reading Today 



Frances Kissling discusses the background to the Stupak amendment, including the Hyde amendment, in an article at Salon. What made my brain happy was this part:

We started down this road in 1976 when the Hyde Amendment passed and when, in 1980, the Supreme Court upheld the principle that the federal government had the right to enact policies that favored childbirth over abortion by restricting funding for abortion. Most Democrats saw that giving antiabortion taxpayers greater moral standing than women who choose abortion was a political power play. After all, taxpayers don't get any other say in how their taxes are used. Pacifists' dollars support war; anti-bailout Americans saw their taxes go to banks just this year. Except on the issue of abortion, if you want to be a tax resister, the only thing to do is not pay your taxes and go to jail.



----
Added later:
Also check out Phila on this topic
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Monday, November 09, 2009

Bart Stupak, The Family Guy 






We know Bart Stupak as the Democrat who offered the infamous Stupak-Pitt amendment, right? But do we know Bart Stupak, the Christian fanatic? A member of the ultra-secret, ultra-powerful, ultra-rightwing Christian "Family"? Who used to live (and may still live, for all I know) in an ex-convent, a house belonging to the "Family", together with lots of other male politicians?

I'm not making this up, honest, though neither have I fact-checked any of it, and that's because Stupak didn't bother to fact-check what it's like to Live While Female. But here's what The Michigan Messenger wrote last summer:

Despite weeks of media attention paid to the now-infamous "C Street" house owned by The Family, a secretive Christian group, U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak — who lives at the house near the U.S. Capitol — denied any knowledge of the nature of the mysterious Washington, D.C., rowhouse and any involvement with the organization that owns it and uses as a seat of influence on Capitol Hill.

During a conference call with reporters Thursday morning, Michigan Messenger asked Stupak, a Menominee Democrat, about the house where he has lived for many years and his connections to the shadowy organization that owns it. The longtime Upper Peninsula legislator claimed to have "no affiliation" with the group, which is known as The Family or The Fellowship.

"I don't belong to any such group," Stupak said. "I rent a room at a house in 'C Street.' I do not belong to any such group. I don't know what you're talking about, [The] Family and all this other stuff."

The C Street house, a former convent, is still listed on official tax documents as a church but it functions largely as a boarding house, with six to eight members of the U.S. House and Senate living there at any given time. Current residents include Stupak, Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), and Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.).

...

Jeff Sharlet, contributing editor at Harper's magazine and the author of "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," lived for a time at Ivanwald, another boarding house owned by the group in Arlington, Va., this one for younger men without political power.

Sharlet said that Stupak's denial of any knowledge of The Family or its activities is false. "When I lived with The Family at Ivanwald, a house for younger men being groomed for leadership, I was told that Stupak was a regular visitor to the Cedars," Sharlet said. The Cedars is yet another compound owned by The Family, one that hosts weekly prayer events led by former Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese.

Sharlet said that Stupak had much greater involvement with the group than he is admitting, noting that the congressman was "a Family-assigned mentor to one of my brothers at Ivanwald." That Ivanwald resident, Sharlet said, "regularly left for what he and others described as mentoring sessions."

Not sure about you but I find this pretty scary.
----
Link to the story from Joseph Nobles on Eschaton threads. Picture is of Savonarola, because he got gangs of teenage boys to attack women who were not dressed according to Savonarola's ideas of Christian modesty. Though all that was a long time ago.

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More On The Stupak Amendment 



Mcjoan at Kos has a good post on what it might mean. The big question mark is about its possible impact on abortion coverage in employer paid group plans. That would depend on how the markets change in general.

For new definitions of the term "Stupak," see Urban Dictionary.

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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words? 



When I first read about the Fort Hood massacre I noticed the repeated use of certain pictures. This one was particularly common:





The Los Angeles Times explained it as follows:

A private is comforted outside Fort Hood Army base after the shooting deaths of at least a dozen people at a personnel and medical processing office and at a theater, both on base. (Ben Sklar / Getty Images)

This picture was also fairly common:





CBC links the following explanation to it:

Sgt. Anthony Sills comforts his wife as they wait outside the army base Thursday. They had to wait for a lockdown to be lifted before they could collect their three-year-old son, was in daycare on the base. (Jack Plunkett/Associated Press)

The Examiner:

Soldier comforts his wife.

The U.K. Guardian used this picture:





with the following explanation:

Daniel Clark hugs and comforts his wife Rachel after the shooting by Nidal Malik Hasan at the Fort Hood army base near Killeen, Texas. Photograph: Rodolfo Gonzalez/AP

All the bolding in these quotes are by me.

So what's my point, you might ask. A horrible event has just happened and people are upset. Other people comfort them, right?

But note how all those comforted are women and how all those doing the comforting are men. It may be that women were more upset by the events. But it may also be that certain pictures look appropriate when a massacre has just happened, and that those pictures are not necessarily picked to be representative of all the people who were upset or comforted others.

Note also that the last picture was picked by some newspapers and described as "the couple embracing" which is, of course, all we really see.

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Just Say No To Being A Woman 






It is that easy my friends, because being female is just like smoking. Honest:

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), the head of the Republicans campaign committee, caused a stir at last night's Rules Committee meeting when he suggested that treating female-related health conditions was comparable to insurance-company imposed restrictions on smokers.

"Why should a woman pay more than a man?" asked New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone, according to the Courthouse News Service.

"Well, we're all different," Sessions explained. "Why should a smoker pay more?" he said before interrupted.

Bwahahah! I don't know how some of these guys managed to slither out from under that big rock.

But it's so nice that he has never had to worry his pretty head about what the actual differences between smoking and needing gynecological services might be.

Someone in the comments to the linked post argues that the case of charging women higher premiums in health insurance is no different from the case of charging young men more for car insurance. It is, though, because young men can be taught to drive more carefully. Smokers can be helped to quit. But there is no twelve-step program for my ovaries to stop doing what they do.

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Sunday, November 08, 2009

My Sixth Blogiversary Is Today 



You can read through the archives if you want to know what I have done for the last six years. Thank you for reading and commenting here. Presents are appropriate, according to the goddess etiquette book on blogiversaries, but not required.





This is 1Watt's Thumper wishing me a happy blogiversary.
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Releasing Frustration (by Phila) 

Japan has one of the lowest teen birth rates in the world. One reason for this, I'd assume, is that Japanese teens tend to delay having sex longer than teens in many other countries.

All the same, the Japanese health ministry hopes to go further and fare better, and so they've commissioned a research study that apparently ties loss of virginity to skipping breakfast.
In a study of 3000 people, those who did not regularly eat breakfast in their early teens said they lost their virginity at an average age of 17.5, versus an overall average age of 19 for all Japanese.

Those who had a morning meal when they were younger had their first sexual experience at 19.4 years.

The study...concluded that a stable home life discouraged early sex.

"Those unhappy with their parents - such as for not preparing breakfast - may tend to find a way to release their frustration by having sex," said Kunio Kitamura, head of the Japan Family Planning Association who led the research.
Putting aside the issue of correlation vs. causation, the number of bizarre assumptions here makes my head swim. First, of course, there's the definition of "a stable home life" as one in which teens are waited on (by an otherwise unoccupied parent of unspecified gender), instead of being provided with food and taught to prepare it. Second, it's assumed that these teens became unhappy with their parents as a result of missing breakfast, though they might just as easily be refusing to eat because they're already unhappy with their parents (or for some other reason entirely, like scholastic stress). Third, sex is portrayed as some idle pastime like playing with matches, to be indulged in when one is bored or frustrated or resentful. Give teens something better to do, and sexual thoughts will scarcely cross their minds.
"If children don't feel comfortable in their family environment, they tend to go out."
To be fair, I haven't seen the study itself, and this article probably doesn't paraphrase it very well, especially given the language and cultural issues.

But taken simply as a layperson's description of research that may or may not be ludicrous, it's a good example of what I see as the ideological flipside of pop-science writing about Evolutionary Psychology. In the popular press, mating and parenting instincts tend to be all-compelling urges against which progressives and feminists struggle in vain, while sexuality tends to be a sort of pathology that's imposed on innocent teens from outside...often by an alleged breakdown in precisely those traditional family roles that EP has made holy. You must transcend biological urges as a teen, and you can't transcend them as an adult.

You wouldn't think we could have it both ways. But somehow, we manage.
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H.R. 3962 Passed. Some Collateral Damage. 



The House bill on health care reform passed. This is good news. The Stupak amendment was accepted. That is the collateral damage. Or the necessary compromise to get better health care for all (except for the collateral damage).


No Republican voted against the Stupak amendment. Isn't that something? I'm beginning to see a pattern here, what with only Republicans voting against the right of gang-rape survivors to sue. But of course several Democrats also voted for the amendment.

As is required, I'm of course pleased to see the House bill pass.

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Saturday, November 07, 2009

Saturday Reading Material And Some Eye Candy 






The eye candy first: Pippin (I can see my mouse from here!) by FeraLiberal.

Then the reading/watching material:

The Stupak amendment. Offered by your pro-birth Democrat, Mr. Stupak, who will never need abortions.

Wal-Mart offers swine flu advice while still punishing workers who are sick and stay at home.

Exploding tits in China (link thanks to sharl).

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Weekly Poetry Slam Thread 

A continuing experiment posted by AMc
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On Sgt. Kimberley Munley 






Based on current information, she is the officer who took Nidal Malik Hasan down:

The police officer who brought down a gunman after he went on a shooting rampage at the Fort Hood Army base was on the way to have her car repaired when she heard a report over a police radio that someone was shooting people in a center where soldiers are processed before they are deployed abroad, authorities said on Friday.

As she pulled up to the center, the officer, Kimberly Munley, spotted the gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, brandishing a pistol and chasing a wounded soldier outside the building, said Chuck Medley, the director of emergency services at the base.

Sergeant Munley bolted from her car and shot at Major Hasan. He turned toward her and began to fire. She ran toward him, continuing to fire, and both she and the gunmen went down with several bullet wounds, Mr. Medley said.

Whether Sergeant Munley was solely responsible for taking down Major Hassan or whether he was also hit by gunfire from another responder is still unclear, but she was the first to fire at him.

Sergeant Munley, who is 34, is an expert in firearms and a member of the SWAT team for the civilian police department on the base, officials said.

Such a courageous act saved lives.

Last night the following exchange took place on Eschaton comments threads:

this female MP was the first responder

What does her gender have to do with it??????
Hecate, Runnymeade Conspirator | Homepage | 11.05.09 - 9:29 pm | #

everything, because it shows that woman can't fucking kill someone when they have to.
BURP | 11.05.09 - 9:30 pm | #

Trolls will be trolls, you might mutter. But it's still worth pointing out that Sgt. Munley is a trained firearms expert, an experienced police officer and a SWAT team member, yet many still judge her first as a woman, and attribute to her their stereotypes about how women are.

I have thought about that a lot, starting with the phrase "throws like a girl." To throw in that particular manner has to do with not being trained to throw. Indeed, many such sexist comparison compare an untrained woman (in, say, fighting skills) with a trained man. This is faulty thinking in general but it is also extremely disrespectful of people (men or women) who ARE trained to act a certain way in emergencies.

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Friday, November 06, 2009

Love letters (by Suzie) 



I learned to love love from a mother who romanticized romance.

The following is stolen from an email I wrote some years ago to a man who thought I was intense. I'm out of town today, but I wonder how others have struggled with Heterosexual Love in the Time of Patriarchy. TMI warning.

Academically, everything I
 touched turned to gold. But I was so afraid that I wasn't attractive that, when I started to have sex, I learned as quickly as I could how to please
 men. I thought I could be the best at love and/or sex, as if it were an
 intellectual pursuit.

And yes, a lot of men have found me too intense, but then they end up
being drawn to the fire, and they crash their cars or call me drunkenly in
 the middle of the night. When a man protests I'm too intense or passionate, I know he's mine;
 it's only a matter of time. He's like a fish flopping in the bottom of my
 boat, protesting, "You'll never catch me."


When a man says he likes intensity, I know I will lose him. It's very
hard to sustain that over time. My experience is that intensity can smolder, flaring up occasionally, but it can't exist like the
blue tongue in the flame forever.

Tonight is the birthday of a man I loved, and I've been rereading emails to him:
-------------------------
"You do so much for me, give me so much, and I
still misbehave. I have all these wonderful experiences and, instead
of being satisfied, I want more. I'm like a damned child, lying on the
 floor, crying.

"I'm sorry I bit you."
--------------------------
"I long to see you at different times and in different places. I want to see how your expressions change, how your body moves. I am like Monet, who painted haystacks over and over, because they were different in different light.

" 'Have restraint,' I am told. 'Wait for him to make a move. Don't
burn yourself out.' But how do you tell a fire: 'Don't burn so brightly.' I would rather someone walk away from me because I was too intense, I
 was too much, I was too much myself, than because I was trying to be
something I'm not: a woman who follows the rules."
----------------------
"In class, my least favorite grad student started the
discussion by saying how much she hated
this week's readings. I blurted out how much I loved them and how I had read them to my lover.
If only I had had a little to drink, if only the lights had been a
little lower, I would have talked about your scent and your taste.
'I have hung his clothes from my bedposts so that his presence will surround me,' I would say. 'In the afternoons, if I nap, his
shirt blindfolds me, and I inhale him. When he
crawls into bed, I warm him.' "
----------------------
"(After my mother's death.) I wish I could inhabit a
rational world of philosophy. Last night, in my 19th century French
book, I was reading about debates over whether men embodied the
rational and women the emotional. I wanted so much to be rational, to
hold up my end of the bargain, even though I know the either/or debate
is a trap.
I wish I didn't have to be student and friend and lover as if nothing has changed.
Damn, the crying is back. This must be some version of the flu, in
which, instead of sneezing and vomiting, one just cries and cries.
 I need to pull myself together and read
a book on lesbians for
 class. It would be easier if I loved you less. (I'm referring to both
the crying and the lesbians.)"
-------------------

"Here is a quote from
one of the authors I'm reading: 'After years of considering my body little more than an unruly nuisance, I found
myself wanting to yield up control over it, to learn what it had to teach me, to experience the willing or grateful surrender of "I" to
 flesh.' "
-------------------
"Twilight, and the palms are dark, silhouetted against a lighter horizon.
How do I wean myself off wanting you?
 I don't listen to music when I'm reading for school, but still, there are sounds, the mechanical hum of the machines that surround me,
the faraway traffic that sounds like rushing water, someone laughing
or crying in the distance.
Distance defines my night.


"All week I have wagged my tail to please people. I have smiled and nodded my head in class when I wanted to lay it down on the table and sleep.
I wonder if I exist only as the reflection of what other people
want."
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Friday flower blogging (by Suzie) 

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The Stoopid. It Burns 






So I read about yet another list of Great Books:

The trade publication Publishers Weekly likely wanted to provoke discussion with its annual list of the year's best books, but not like this. In its issue of Nov. 2, Publishers Weekly compiled its PW Top 10, a decidedly subjective ranking of the best fiction and non-fiction published in 2009, including the biography "Cheever: A Life" by Blake Bailey; the novel "Await Your Reply" by Dan Chaon; and the graphic novel "Stitches" by David Small. But as The Guardian reports, the ranking has drawn protests from a women's literary group, which notes that there are no female writers on the list.

No female writers at all. Now that is conclusive proof that women cannot write, whatever tests seem to suggest about our verbal talents, and nope, there was absolutely no bias in the selection process:

In her introduction to the year-end lists, Louisa Ermelino, the reviews director of Publishers Weekly, wrote, "We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz," adding: "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male."

This is so stupid it's almost incandescent in its glorious stupidity. Unless none of the reviewers saw the title pages of the books they certainly could NOT ignore the gender of the author. It's usually pretty obvious from the name written there in fairly large letters. Have we learned nothing from all those studies which demonstrate that the gender of the supposed author of something DOES affect how the piece (interpreted widely here) is evaluated?

Gah. The only way a selection like this could truly ignore the gender of the author is if all books were submitted for review without any identifying information.
---
It is worth noting that a woman, Hilary Mantel, won this year's Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. Other good books written by women are suggested in the comments thread of the quoted post.

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Thursday, November 05, 2009

An Alien Post 



How would an ethical alien from outer space see the way we analyze violence? Some types of violence are analyzed to the bones (no pun intended), with all sorts of experts chipping in. Other types of violence (trigger warning for the links which follow) are analyzed very little, and this is usually the case with stories where the victims are mostly women. It is as if the sex of the victim is explanation enough.

We simply assume that these things unfortunately sometimes happen to women and spend very little time in trying to understand the killer's/killers' motives. In other cases we do spend time trying to understand what made someone commit such heinous acts, and ultimately this is so that future events of the same kind could be avoided.

Why the different treatment?
----
Added later:

Astonishingly, I now have an actual example of the analysis that follows violence which is not specifically against women:

Before making judgments about the shootings at Fort Hood, a thorough investigation needs to take place, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said Thursday.

"It is imperative that we take the time to gather all the facts, as it would be irresponsible to be the source of rumors or inaccurate information regarding such a horrific event," Cornyn said in a statement.

"Once we have ascertained all the facts, working with our military leaders and law enforcement officials on the ground, we can determine what exactly happened at Fort Hood today and how to prevent something like this from ever happening again," he said.



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My Blogday Week Post IV 






This is part of the continuing celebration of my sixth anniversary in blogging, where I re-post some of my earliest contributions. The one below has to do with some news about women in management not wanting the brass ring, after all, and probably reflects the early mutterings of the "opt-out" phenomenon:

On Glass Slippers and Ceilings


Cinderella's foot fitted the glass slipper and so she married the prince and lived happily ever on. At least in fairy tale terms. But imagine how uncomfortable glass shoes would be, how easily they would crack and splinter around your unprotected feet.

In some ways that's what women in business management wear every day. Their slippers are made of all sorts of contradictory materials: assertive, but not too much so or you'll be called bitchy, nurturing, but not too much so or your capabilities are suspect, just-like-the-guys but not too much so or you'll be called a ballbreaker. That these slippers crack and splinter is to be expected. That they cut the wearer's feet is not surprising.

So what does this have to do with glass ceilings? Glass ceilings are nice, they let us gaze at the sun rays or the moon and the stars, and pretend that there's nothing between us and these vast upper reaches. But of course there is. The glass is there.

Or is it? The corporate glass ceiling is supposed to keep women out of higher management; all they can do is to gaze at the stars. But now some say that there is no glass ceiling that would prevent women from flying straight up and getting a comet named after themselves. Instead, the reason for few women in leading positions is said to be.... Guess. If you are even one tenth as old as I am, you have heard this before.

Well, the blame belongs to the women, of course. They don't want the brass ring hard enough to grab it. They don't want the long hours. They want to be with their children, and to write poetry or ride a horse. They want to go to Africa to cure hunger. Women are just different.

Hmmm. Different from what? Men, of course, you thick-headed goddess.

Aah! That's why they don't fit into the public sector; the public sector was built to fit men's desires. Well, this is really interesting: why doesn't the public sector reflect the desires of both men and women? Why doesn't the fact that children must be taken care of by somebody, that families must at least meet once and a while, that human beings might need to write poetry or ride horses or cure hunger; why don't any of these things affect the way the jobs and the labor market are structured?

Why is a good manager one who has no life outside the job? Who thinks that managers are equally bright and energetic in their sixteenth consecutive work hour as in their first eight? Do you want important economic decisions made by people who don't remember what their children look like, or who haven't smelled at a flower or played a game for fun for decades?
Never mind if they are men or women, I'd shudder if humans took the division of labor to such extreme degrees.

What I see through my divine sight, are glass mountains on which people slip and slide in their glass slippers. Only those who also have glass hearts thrive. Too sad.

The glass ceilings are still there, of course. That so many deny their existence is because they are not there all the time. When some people look at the stars, they can feel the breeze and sense the raindrops, too. They know that the road is open. When others look up, they see the stars but they also see gates and locks, tree houses with "No girls allowed" signs, preachers telling what good motherhood is, coworkers looking at you askance when you are pregnant and tell that you are coming back, husbands 'helping out' but not knowing if the fridge has milk or what the pediatrician's name is. These people don't imagine things.

It's not as bad as it used to be. Families are more democratic, employers are more open-eyed and many men do their fair share at home. But turning the looking-glass back to face nothing but the women, each alone and separately, is a very cruel thing to do. Women are neither evil step-mothers nor Cinderellas, and the story doesn't reward the one who fits the glass slippers.


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Very Bad 



From the New York Times:

At least one gunman killed 12 people and wounded 31 in a shooting on Thursday afternoon at Fort Hood in Texas. Military police killed one shooter, who had two guns, and at least two soldiers are in custody.

Lt. Gen. Robert W. Cone, the commanding officer at Fort Hood, the largest active military installation in the country, said the base was in lockdown as military authorities, with the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigate the rampage.

"This was a terrible tragedy," said General Cone, speaking at a news conference Thursday afternoon. "Stunning."'

An Army spokesman, Gary Tallman, said that the dead gunman was an Army major. A law enforcement official identified the him as Malik Nadal Hassan.


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