(April 2006) Random factoid: people who are employed to check vaginas for evidence of abortions are referred to as forensic vagina specialists.
Meanwhile, Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield has written Manliness, a celebration of privilege that Yale University Press recently published.
(Poor Harv. I guess his own school wouldn’t publish this sexist diatribe so hot on the heels of ousting its own prez because of his propensity to mutter sexist crapola.)
Mansfield claims that women secretly like housework and enjoy changing diapers whereas men not so secretly like war and look down on so-called women’s work.
“Now that women are equal,” he asserts, “women should be able to accept being told that they aren't, quite."
Equal? Huh? In what universe?
Slide down from your ivory tower on your own slug slime Harv and check out the Really World where salary inequities and cliterectomies and misogyny and religious bias etc. etc. etc. keep far too many women under the thumbs of violent and controlling men
(who, let me guess, are just being men when they claim such authority as their own—at least according to your neat calculations).
This inequality is happening at a time when men are intent on depriving women of the very right to control our own bodies too (yet some of these same men sue when they are forced to support their offspring).
Example: The National Center for Men—that poor downtrodden group—has filed a lawsuit they’ve dubbed Roe v. Wade for Men on behalf of a twenty-something-year-old man who claims that he should not have to pay child support because the woman he impregnated told him that she was on birth control and thought she was infertile.
So let me guess: Harvey and his ilk believe that the stripper who was allegedly gang-raped at Duke should bear the child if she becomes pregnant as a result of the alleged assault, but that the thugs who allegedly raped her should not be held accountable because boys—the poor testosterone-driven things—will be boys.
Meanwhile The National Center for Men continues to express outrage about how freaking unfair it is that men tend to die earlier than women.
(I am so goddamn SICK of hearing men celebrate their bad behavior while whining about the fact that they will be held accountable for this same behavior!)
As Kimberly Gadette says in Wake Up and Smell the Diapers,
consuming cheese doodles and beer and lolling on the couch does not make for longevity. Darn the luck, if only men liked housework. By getting off that sofa and washing a floor, scrubbing a toilet, raising a kid, they, too, might live longer.
Reality bites, iron boyz.
Meanwhile, I wish I were attending the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham instead of working, especially because this year’s festival includes a special Class in America series.
(I say that with some level of irony, since my ex-wife’s best friend’s very upper-crust British father—a man who celebrates his classism and privilege but is way too effete to ever succeed at the physical requirements of being a soldier and so maybe isn't really a man after all according to Harvey's definition—is one of the judges who selected this year’s films. )
Okay. I need to pour my homemade soy parsley soup into a Tupperware and scram now . . .
. . . but first, I forgot to mention that I had Lucinda screaming on my iPod last night while walking and was so distracted that I damn near stepped on a great blue heron, which startled the bejeezus out of both of us. Its beak was nipple height and its beautiful body was so close to mine that I felt the wind from its wings as it flew away. Wow!
LISTENING TO: Siouxie and the Banshees
READING: An article about domestic violence
SANG IN SHOWER: America's “Daisy Jane” (from my junior-high-school daze)
BEST-OF SPAM: “go longer for her” (Oh I do baby. I do.)
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