Came across this thought in my April 2009 edition of Real Simple magazine:
What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn’t supposed to touch the bone.”
Anna Quindlen, Living Out Loud
Update, July 6, 2009: Just returning to check the comments and it appears this was all a hoax. Wanted to update the post to that effect, and say I’m sorry I posted about it in the first place.
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I’d be grateful if anyone had additional details on this story.
Take a look at the April 24 blog entry. A couple in Brabant Lake, Saskatchewan has allegedly been kicked out of their house for talking about forced sterilization and abortions amongst native Canadians, and for distributing a pro-life newspaper. If anyone has any details about this community and can pass them on, please do.
“ The people who keep their houses do as their [sic] told.” Sergeant Janes, RCMP detachment head. At 10:30 am Vaughn Skogstad, chairman of La Ronge Housing Authority and past NDP campaign chairman, his helper, Sergeant Janes and a constable arrived at our door of our house to tell us that we have to leave. We were told that we committed unlawful entry when we opened up our house after travelling seven hours in a snow storm. Sergeant Janes said “ you knew this was coming and you did nothing about it. It is not your house. (repeated 6 times) It belongs to the province. You knew that they were going to do this. The people who keep their house do as their told.”
I said that they are just doing this because we distributed pro- life newspapers and are exposing that Indian people are being pushed into abortion and sterilisation. He admitted that this was true. He said that you should have tried to get a lawyer and buy the house. …
There is a strong conviction among some self- proclaimed progressive elite in La Ronge and elsewhere that native people should be sterilised and have abortions by force if necessary. This clique which expects people “to do as they’re told” has never allowed pro- life materials in the North.
There are places in Canada where people believe in forced sterilization and abortion? I already know about the freedom of speech problem–though being evicted for distributing a newspaper is especially harsh.
(cross-posted to The Shotgun)
This post is interesting. I’m certainly open to the idea that we can’t extrapolate our findings about insects too broadly to humans, and there is increasing evidence that girls can be just as promiscuous as boys, given the right social prompts.
What’s really mind-blowing, though, is the comments section, and the near-unanimous consensus that the rubes reporting 4 (for women) and 7 (for men) lifetime sexual partners must be either lying or hopeless prudes, because all the hipsters joining the discussion seem to have hit the double digits while still in high school.
Some sample comments (from the “clean” ones):
“I think they meant to say “Memorial Day weekend” instead of “lifetime”. Typo! ”
“LOL. I always wonder about me and my friends when I read those studies because I don’t know a single person – male or female – who have had fewer than 10 sexual partners. Most of my friends have 20+ sexual partners and we’re in our 20s so either we’re an extremely promiscuous bunch who is having sex for the rest of the country or the subjects of these studies are lying.”
“In NZ, the average age for girls is 15, and boys is 17, I believe. Also, I have heard of another study, that claims average no of partners for men is 8, and for women is 20. I’m going with culture, FTW!”
“an average of four in their lifetime? i had four this MONTH! aaugh! ”
Does anybody know – are the Amish accepting converts?
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Andrea adds: Actually, Rebecca, some of the Hawaiian Islands are uninhabited. No need to convert, and you could still use electricity and other modern amenities.
Saudi Arabia is reportedly banning women from going to the gym (yes, I mean banning them from going to women-only gyms) because, the inevitable clerics say, they are places of “shamelessness”.
What rot. If you’ve spent any time at a gym working hard, you know they are places of shame. I am routinely humiliated there myself. Sometimes, I don’t do pushups right. Other times, it’s my leg-raises that stink. I only rarely manage graceful spinning kicks. Yet I keep going and keep improving regardless, and good luck to any cleric who’d try to bar my way (my palm strikes are a thing of beauty, if I say so myself).
Planned Parenthood in the USA is a wealthy enterprise.
The abortion giant [Planned Parenthood] took home $85 million in “excess of revenue over expenses” (a nifty way of saying profits) and had an operating budget of over $1 billion for the 2007-2008 fiscal year, according to its latest annual report. Included in that budget was $350 million in “government grants and contracts” (an equally nifty way of saying your tax dollars). An increase in the number of abortions performed helped fuel the profits.
Budgets don’t lie–and 85 million “excess revenue over expenditure” ain’t too shabby. Turns out the abortion industry is recession proof, too–they are doing better business now that people are worried about finances.
Sometimes people take the time to send me articles. And sometimes it’s clear why. Other times, I wonder. Like with this one:
Does this sound like you? When there is a situation in life that you have no control over, you go shopping. You spend money on something you want but don’t really need, which acts as a gateway to alleviating stress. The moment you hand over your cash or credit card in exchange for a shopping bag, you instantly feel a rush of happiness and gloating pride.
Um, no, this doesn’t sound like me, actually.
I suffer from something different. A kind of Scottish Frugality combined with what I call “Polish Wartime Mentality.” We’ll call it SFPWM. What this means is that I privately agonize over every purchase, making sure there’s a very clear return policy before I plunk my card down. I’ll never forget the first time my share of a dinner came to 80 dollars, yes, 80 dollars!! The shock of which not even the many bottles of wine we consumed managed to dull (And who chose those bottles, and how much were they? I ask you, because I can tell you this–it wasn’t me.) I told my mother how terrible I felt and she asked–but did you have fun?
I think it’s bad when your own mother is more concerned for how much fun you had over costs. And so, I am sure there’s a syndrome here for psychologists to examine. Sign me up! I’ll be the first volunteer for the “what to do with young people who act like their grandparents without any justification” study.
I was recently shopping for massage oil for my baby. Rather than read the labels I was selectively sniffing each sampler in my quest for the right smell. Is it surprising that the right baby smell happened to emanate from the “sensual” massage oil? It was almost funny – no, it was downright funny – when the cashier gave me an innuendo-charged look: do I really look like I need help in that department? Do you sell skunk-based massage oil and bath products? Because I’d much rather keep my babies more than 9 months apart. Really.
In the six weeks since my last post, my littlest girl turned 2 months, got really sick with a respiratory virus and is now turning into an adorably pink and chubby heartbreaker. In the six weeks since my last post my biggest girl turned 13 and made me a teenager’s mom overnight. I will write more on that later but for now, I want to tell you how my life has changed since my daughter became old enough to look after her siblings: my husband and I get to go on dates. But dates aren’t what they used to be when we had no children. Here is a snapshot of honest-to-goodness dates my husband and I had in the last three months:
1. The “Grocery”: Put the children to bed and head out grocery shopping. We get to argue about nutritional labels and how much sugar is too much sugar and why I never buy whole wheat rotinis because they remain chewy even overcooked. That’s when my husband realizes that I buy the fancy tomato paste and asks if this is how I squander his hard-earned money and I pretend to start crying and say “aren’t we worth $1.09 to you?” and the single guys with their cart full of frozen pizza and TV dinners think “just when you thought it was safe to go out…”
2. The “24”: Put the children to bed early, get yourself a treat – my husband likes expensive scotch, I like expensive ice cream – and head downstairs to watch our weekly dose of Jack Bauer. We don’t technically need a babysitter for that one.
3. The “Do you come here often?”: A variation of the movie date but we each see a different movie and meet for coffee after. Isn’t that awful? But since we go out to the movies once a year, we might as well see a movie we really want to see. And it’s not like we speak during the movie, right?
4. And my favorite, the “Who are these kids and why are they calling me Mom?” We figured that one out by accident when there was no table for eight at our favorite restaurant. They set us up on two tables for 4 at opposite ends of the dining room. The four oldest children – three girls and one boy aged 13, 11, 9 and 7 — got their own table, ordered their own meals and sent the bill to our table. Not having to deal with their minor table misdemeanors was so relaxing and we actually got to have uninterrupted adult conversation.
When it comes to keeping your sanity with six children, every little bit helps.
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Andrea adds: Now I understand why married folks have improved health outcomes. You bicker in the grocery store over tomato paste, but you are, after all, in the grocery store, buying tomato paste. I tried doing groceries and being healthy for a good two months in winter just now. It is very time consuming and inevitably left me with healthy leftovers, now stockpiled in my small freezer, which my Polish Wartime Mentality won’t let me throw out. So I have changed my tune, oh yes. Clearly, it is the right of every single person to have cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then it is my right to demand socialized medicine treat me for scurvy.
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Véronique adds: I dream of eating cereal three meals a day. And according to cereal makers, they are chockfull of vitamins and nutrients!
Not permanently, no–please keep reading. We value our readers.
But if you live in the Ottawa area, we are all meant to be outside right now. Immediately. On patios, on bicycles, by the canal, in the sun. Spring is officially here, and just as soon as I’m done plugging our t-shirt line as appropriate spring wear, I’m leaving the computer. For. The. Whole. Day. (For someone who has a blog, you’d be surprised to learn of my love/hate relationship with this machine. My next blog will be one uniting luddites of the world.)
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Brigitte adds:
Andrea adds: Brigitte, are these children frozen? Chiselled in ice? I’m concerned.
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Brigitte, a.k.a. Ms. Brown Thumb Of Death, says: It’s a garden statue, Andrea. That’s why it looks so lifelike… Still, it looks more alive than most of my flowers. (I need professional help, don’t I. Off to Home Depot!)
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Andrea adds: Well, phewf. Looked at your frozen ice cream children and I worried the White Witch was in town. But if it’s just a garden statue, then it’s all good. (Aslan is still on the move.)
How do you morph a centuries old traditional institution into precisely what you want it to be just like that?
I can’t help it. I chuckled my way through this earnest account of a girl’s struggle to incorporate feminism into her wedding. (An off-white gown? Money to charity? Wot? Because no traditional woman would ever do that.)
Emboldened, I blogged again – this time about the ways I was incorporating feminism into the wedding. I wrote about keeping my last name and buying a not-quite white dress from a store that gives all the money to charity. I blogged about the struggle Andrew and I had getting engaged in the same month that California overturned same-sex marriage rights. We had actually discussed not getting married until everyone could; instead, we decided to use our impending marriage as a way to talk about same-sex marriage among our friends and family. In our engagement announcement, for example, we asked anyone considering getting us a gift to instead donate to an organisation fighting for same-sex marriage rights. It felt good, feminist even, to write about an institution so wrought with sexism and discuss ways to make it our own.
You know, if I were to stop laughing, I’d say, sure, one must know and understand what any tradition means before participating, in order for said tradition to be meaningful.
However, let’s pretend you have always found a particular tradition offensive, and have railed against it publicly–it is at least a little bit funny when you just drop it all and join in. Albeit in a random, haphazard way, accompanied by plenty of neurotic anxiety.
I need help. I really don’t know what to think of this story. Part of me says it’s creepy, part of me says it’s sweet. Either way, I feel very sorry for this poor woman (and the countless ones in her situation).
A California man has signed papers to symbolically “adopt” and give his last name to his wife’s two aborted fetuses.
Stan Musil said he filed the posthumous “adoption” on Monday as a way to support his wife, Lisa, and help her heal from the pain of having those abortions, Lisa Musil told FOXNews.com.
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Andrea’s gut reaction: It’s weird, but what he is essentially saying to her is I accept you and your past. She is obviously still very much struggling with herself. In that sense, I don’t have a problem with it. That said, this information is not news; it belongs in a counsellor’s office.
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Rebecca adds: It’s creepy because it’s, well, a bit ghoulish – and I’d feel the same way about, say, getting a dead adult you were close to in life to “symbolically adopt” you. It’s sweet because this guy is willing to do something weird to bring his wife some peace. And it’s a wonderful story in that it makes it clear that abortion causes suffering and anguish for women, and it also makes it clear that these were babies that were aborted – nobody grieves over (to pick at random) a surgically removed kidney, much less asks her husband to symbolically adopt a destroyed kidney. The legions of counsellors telling women that most women just feel relief after an abortion – what would they say to Lisa Musil? How do they explain that? Are they willing to concede, in this case at least, that her two abortions ended two lives and caused profound suffering in another?
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Tanya adds: I think the motivation behind this act is what could potentially render it creepy or anything else. In this case, however, I’m really touched by the couple’s actions. In giving the children a full name, these are clearly being recognized as people. The symbolic act of adoption by her husband is the closest these 4 people will ever be to a close family. It’s not like the man can say, “hey, let’s have your boys over for a barbecue.” He’s accepting his wife’ past. He’s recognizing that she loves the children she aborted, and misses them. He’s loving and missing them along with her. He’s symbolically taking on the role he would have, were they still alive today.