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  1. Bare Breasts: Objections and Replies — 27 comments
  2. Short Men — 21 comments
  3. Arrogance, I think — 7 comments
  4. A Man Shaken by a Bomb — 5 comments
  5. Why Do Men Spit? (and women don’t) — 5 comments

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Bare Breasts: Objections and Replies

[I wrote this piece back in the early 90s when Gwen Jacobs did her thing (yay, Gwen!), but apparently it all still needs to be said.  A couple years ago, I was ‘spoken to’ by a neighbour for taking my shirt off on a hot summer day …

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“Royal Male”

Noticed the headline while I was standing in the check-out at the grocery store today: “ROYAL MALE”.

Right.  It could have half a brain, but hey, as long as it’s MALE.

 

Impoverished (male) Scientists

To read the science journals, one would think animal life consists of nothing but predation and reproduction, both thoroughly competitive in nature.  The absence of any capacity for pleasure, or at least for non-competitive pleasure, is frightening.  Lining a nest with warm and soft material is not for …

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Making Kids with AIDS

[I wrote this piece a while ago, but have since then, seen the same sort of denial of male agency.  Apparently kids are found in pumpkin patches.  Yeah.  Or the stork brings them.  What are you, six?]

[Quite apart from the point about AIDS.]

What has been glaringly absent in …

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This is your brain. This is your brain on oxytocin: Mom.

I think many women realize that their children make them vulnerable; their love for them holds them hostage.  So many things they would do (leave?)—but for the children.  I wonder how many realize that their imprisonment is physiological.  And, in most cases, as voluntary as that first hit of heroin, cocaine, …

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Every Man, Woman, and Child

There’s an interesting phrase.  Man, woman, and child: those are my options, are they?  Identifying oneself by one’s sex is a prerequisite for adulthood: if I don’t want to identify myself by my sex, as either a man or a woman, I’m left with identifying myself as a …

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Short Men

I recently watched, with horrified amusement, a tv program about short men who choose to undergo excruciatingly painful surgical procedures (which basically involve breaking their legs and then keeping the bones slightly apart while they mend) in order to become a few inches taller.

Asked why they would choose to undergo …

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The Gender of Business

Business is male.  Make no mistake.  Everything about it smacks of the male mentality.

First, the obsession with competition.  You have to be #1, you have to outcompete your competition.  So hierarchy, rank, is everything.  As is an adversarial attitude.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  Business could be a huge network of …

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Why isn’t being a soldier more like being a mother?

Motherhood is unfair to women in a way fatherhood most definitely is not. Not only are there the physical risks (pregnancy and childbirth puts a woman at risk for nausea, fatigue, backaches, headaches, skin rashes, changes in her sense of smell and taste, chemical imbalances, high blood pressure, diabetes, anemia, embolism, changes in vision, stroke, …

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Why aren’t more men insulted by the low standards we set for them?

If he changes a diaper, he’s father of the year.

If he cooks something, anything, he’s a chef.

If he marries, but otherwise continues to live pretty much as he has to that point, he’s suddenly respectable.

If he continues to pay a child’s ball game into adulthood, he gets paid …

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