If you’re a fan of Sarah Palin, there is newish Facebook fan page for you. It just surpassed 1 million fans, which is rather a lot more than Al Gore and Michael Moore (or even Al Gore and Michael Moore put together a few times over – oh gosh, what a horrible image!), though not nearly as many as Barack Obama.
Thank goodness for science! How else would we know what’s appropriate or not?
It is the question that has troubled many a young woman as she dresses for a night out: How much should she dare to bare?
After all, if her clothes are too revealing, she may catch the eye of the wrong kind of man.
But too prim and she may attract none at all.
British scientists believe they have the answer, with an outfit that reveals 40 per cent of a woman’s skin providing just the right amount of attention.
No, not all flesh is created equal. “For the purposes of the study, each arm accounts for 10 per cent, each leg for 15 per cent and the torso for 50 per cent.” I’m not sure if that means you’re meant to get your calculator out when you dress up – I’m married and no longer have to bother with stuff like that; I just need to worry about looking my best…
That’s right! It’s the duty of good citizens to treat them kindly. Especially worms and ants and spiders:
Good citizenship is not just a question of respect for one’s fellow humans, it seems. The government has decreed that children should be taught not to hurt a fly.
New curriculum guidance says citizenship classes should pay due regard to the wellbeing of what it calls “mini-beasts”, including bees, ants and worms.
The classes are part of the “animals and us” section of the primary school citizenship curriculum. It says children can become “active citizens” by learning that “other living things have needs and they have responsibilities to meet them”.
By the age of seven pupils should have learnt that “humans have a responsibility to ensure the wellbeing of animals, including mini-beasts” and will have been told rules for “behaviour in areas where animals live”: for example, “not stamping on insects”.
Hey, I’m all for looking after animals and refraining from hurting insects (I make exceptions for mosquitoes, black flies, and deer flies – these I have an absolute right to exterminate at will). I just wish they’d teach kids to respect smaller forms of human life as well, is all.
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Update: A thoughtful reader reminds me that this would be a splendid time for a t-shirt plug.
A heart-breaking story about a baby with congenital myasthenic syndrome who was taken off life support after legal battle between his parents over whether or not to keep him alive.
I don’t know what it’s like to give birth to a baby who cannot breathe or move on his own. I don’t want to know what it’s like to give birth to a baby who cannot breathe or move on his own. I can only sympathize.
Please excuse me while I fetch my eyeballs. I was rolling them all the way to my shoulders blades and they unexpectedly dropped off. It happened when I read this post about the new book Flow: A Cultural History of Menstruation.
In many ways, Flow—published by St. Martin’s Griffin—is a breakthrough. Nearly all titles on menstruation are geared toward preteen girls or are dry and academic, published by small presses. Flow, though, targets a mainstream, women’s-magazine reading audience. It is a tome on all things period, from vintage advertisements for feminine hygiene products to tips on the latest eco-friendly sanitary products, such as reusable (yes, reusable) pads.
The authors hope Flow will reverse any revulsion we feel when (get ready) “the tomato boat has come in” or “the Red Sox have a home game”; when a woman is “saddling up old rusty” or “riding the big red Cadillac down the Avenue of Womanhood.” Their goal is to help women understand menstruation in order to make more educated choices about how to handle it. “Women have different reactions to their periods, different symptoms,” Kim told The Daily Beast. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all bodily function. More meaningful discussions would allow women to feel like they’re owning their decisions.”
Today the most basic choice is whether or not to menstruate at all. Since Barr Pharmaceuticals (now owned by Teva) introduced Seasonale, the first period-suppressing birth control pill, in 2003, a steadily increasing number of suppressants has hit the market. The drugs allow women to menstruate just four or fewer times a year. And while some women take a suppressant pill to curb debilitating symptoms, for others, it’s a lifestyle drug. (Some doctors stress that the long-term side effects of continually taking hormones are still unknown, and could pose risks.)
Where to start? Oh, you’re right. I should start with the easy obvious one. The tomato boat has come in? The tomato boat?
Maybe I don’t go out enough. Call me unsophisticated and vulgar, but I call my this “time of the month” my period, use a whole range of modern products I find convenient (I am totally areligious about that; to each her own, I say – if reusable pads do the job for you, then that is that), apologize to hubby for the unnecessary but hormone-driven temper tantrums (he’s used to it), and move right along.
It’s just not that big a deal. I don’t need to “own my decisions” about how I deal with it. I just need to deal with it without making an undue fuss. Would I like to live without it? On the days when it bothers me, you bet. It can sure be inconvenient. But so what? Nobody said life was going to be easy and inconvenience-free. And honestly, you really think you can play with mother nature like that and suppress your period and not suffer any kind of effect on your overall health from it?
The book’s authors explain that:
The “ick” factor that turned most publishers off, they say, is part of the reason that women are shockingly uninformed when it comes to their periods. Research shows few women can explain the physiological processes of ovulation and menstruation—and between 5 and 10 percent of girls have no idea what’s happening when they experience their first “time of the month.”
Hey, if you’re going to call it the “tomato boat”, you’re not really ideally positioned to lecture us on revulsion and ignorance. There will always be girls who will be clueless when they experience their first period. I was one of them; sure, I knew about it (and the whole this-is-how-babies-are-made business), but I didn’t recognize it when it came (in my defence, it wasn’t like what they’d said). I was laughed at by people who ought to have known better, but it didn’t exactly traumatize me.
Maybe some people will find that book helpful. But I’ll pass. Besides, I still have to retrieve my eyeballs.
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Tanya adds: Who needs a whole book about it? Everything I needed to know, I learned from this episode of The Cosby Show (3:30 in):
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdXSh_c-N4&feature=related]
I tend to agree with this op-ed in the Post today about normalizing teen pregnancy through shows like 16 and Pregnant. We shouldn’t make teen pregnancy look easy because it’s not. Neither are teen abortions.
As a result, we shouldn’t also make teen sex look so easy. But the author won’t touch that issue:
Positive reviewers have called the show “educational ” and “sweet and touching.” But those words say more about the people using them — for they suggest an increasingly casual attitude toward the underlying subject matter. Maybe when contraceptive use drops among young females, and 16-year-old girls begin dropping out of school to start families, the wisdom of such attitudes will be revisited.
If we are going to say teens will be teens–they are going to have sex anyway, then I’d advocate for teaching them about marriage, making their already very serious sexual committments permanent, and worrying less as a society about whether our kids have advanced degrees.
I know the abortion clinics are filled with girls who never envisioned getting pregnant with the guy she was having sex with, and now she feels she must have an abortion to escape his memory. If that is the case–why on earth are we treating sex so lightly? A girl who doesn’t actually like a guy should not be having sex with him.
And if these are little Romeos and Juliets–well then, get married and have kids. Enough already with engaging in adult behaviours while studiously avoiding–or glorifying–the sometimes difficult adult outcomes.
McGill’s Choose Life had their club status indefinitely revoked yesterday by the SSMU.
The motion, which passed by a vote of 16-7, stipulated that the “Student Equity Committee work with Choose Life to draft a document for Choose Life on how to abide by SSMU’s Constitution, By-laws, and Policies, which will be adopted by Choose Life.”
Maybe it will be a behavioral chart that will work on a smiley face basis. Perhaps double-smiley face stickers will be awarded when Choose Life quietly heeds to the temper tantrums of those who believe freedom of speech comes with strings attached.
They would be good to remember: “We must bring ourselves to realize that it is necessary to support free speech for the things we hate in order to ensure it for the things in which we believe with all our heart.” — Heywood Campbell Broun
The headline on the story is, ‘Barbaric’ rituals a no-no, feds warn, and here I am completely underwhelmed. Of course it’s true that in Canada we have laws against “barbaric cultural practices that tolerate spousal abuse, ‘honour killings,’ female genital mutilation or other gender-based violence”. And yes, I suppose warning people who want to come and live here that such practices are against the law is fine.
But golly.
A few things bug me. First, do you really think that people who think it’s completely OK to cut off a young girl’s clitoris and labia with a pair of scissors or an old razor blade, scrape off some of the remaining tissue for good measure, and sow the resulting mess back together so tight that the girl may not urinate properly until the day her husband unceremoniously re-opens her wound – do you really think those people who have this done to their own daughters will look at the Canadian government’s guidelines for immigrants and say, gosh, honey, we better change our ways, pronto? Says here it’s a big no-no?
Me, neither. So I worry that those words in the document will allow too many of us to feel a warm and fuzzy sense of security and go back to sleep.
And another thing: Female genital mutilation is recognized by every civilized country for the outrageous violation of a person’s most basic human rights, and we treat it with white gloves? We gently warn would-be immigrants that we don’t like it here?
That’s all?
Oh dear. Nicely done, Father De Souza!
On Tuesday, for example, my colleague Colby Cosh argued that we should be wary about putting too much emphasis on religion as the “evidence of the specifically Islamic nature of Hasan’s mania emerges.” After all, there were no doubt other factors at play. It would be “pretty stupid,” he argued, to draw a straight, simple line between jihadist beliefs and the Fort Hood massacre.
But back in June, when George Tiller, America’s most enthusiastic practitioner of partial-birth abortion, was murdered, Mr. Cosh took to these pages to argue that the killer was the logical extension of the pro-life movement, and that pro-life activists who denounced the abortionist’s murder were no better than Pontius Pilate, washing their hands of something in which they were deeply complicit.
It mostly went unmentioned in the stories about the Fort Hood mass murder last week: One of the victims was pregnant. Now some people are wondering whether the killer should be charged for that unborn baby’s murder, too.
Why not? I’ve said elsewhere and will repeat it here: Don’t just throw the book at this despicable murderer, throw the whole darn printing press.