Jun 11
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 …
Jun 02
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 …
May 03
It’s Monday night basketball, an all-comers pick-up game, supposed to be fun and a good sweat. But week after week I steel myself against the anger, the frustration of not knowing how to correct the problem, and the despair of not being able to even begin to do just that. Eventually it happens: this time …
Apr 21
Great post here at gendertrender. https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/life-size-barbie-scary/
Is it wrong for me to love most the line “If Barbie was a real woman, she’d have to walk on all fours”?
Apr 12
I recently read The Fourth Procedure by Stanley Pottinger, in which, during a surgical procedure, a man is given a uterus containing a fertilized egg. He is enraged when he finds out, afraid that if it becomes public knowledge he’ll be a laughingstock. Turns out he’s right. But I don’t get it. What’s so funny …
Mar 29
I just read an article about the Brontes that mentioned “redundant women”. Apparently in 19thC Britain, there was such a male/female ‘imbalance’ in the population that about 500,000 women would remain unmarried. They were called “redundant” women and one of the big questions of the day was what to do with them. Geezus.
Mar 13
Check out this video, “Pretty” by Katie Makkai:
Pretty – Katie Makkai
Feb 28
I finished a novel by J. D. Robb the other day and also happened to read the back inside cover blurb: “Nora Roberts is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than one hundred novels. She is also the author of the bestselling futuristic suspense series written under the pen name J. D. …
Feb 14
I’m in this world, okay, and the people identify each other by sex. All the time. It’s like ‘Female Person Smith’ and ‘Male Person Brown’ or ‘Person-with-Uterus Smith’ and ‘Person-with-Penis Brown’ – I don’t know the exact translation. But sex-identity is a mandatory prefix. They distinguish males from females. Before they do everything else. Before …
Jan 24
I picked up a sci-fi novel the other day at a used bookstore. The jacket said it was set after a nuclear war and written by someone who’d rubbed shoulders with a lot of military people. Well, I figured it’d be interesting to see what they imagined life’d be like after a nuclear war. (The …
