A friend of a friend is looking for some help caring for a two-year-old. If you or someone you know is interested, email us here and I’ll forward it on to the right person:
Large family in rural Ottawa looking for a full-time nanny or mother’s helper to look after 2 year-old. Live-in or live-out. Area is not serviced by public transit. Has pets.
I’m reviewing Unnatural Selection, the recent book by Mara Hvistendahl about female sex selection resulting in 160 million missing women. It’s equal parts fascinating and depressing. I could easily cut and paste the whole book into a blog post. But here’s just one part in the section about how the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were enthusiastic promoters of population control in India, alongside the Population Council, staffed by an American, Sheldon Segal, who likewise supported sex determination “as an effective method of population control.” (Segal is also the inventor of Norplant, the contraceptive implant.)
The Emergency [started on June 25, 1975] as the period came to be known, affected all areas of life in India, crippling the economy and scaling back civil liberties. But it was an especially blean era for reproductive rights. Health officials in Indira Gandhi’s administration saw an opportunity to force drastic measures on Indians who had previously resisted birth control. The task of overseeing the gruesome campaign fell to Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi, who held no official political title. He wasted little time in announcing a massive effort to sterilize poor men. Widespread sterilization was an idea that had been introduced to India by Western advisers, but Sanjay Gandhi ratcheted it up to an unprecedented scale. At first his mother’s government rewarded men who consented to vasectomies. Before long, however, Sanjay Gandhi was issuing quotas so high that local officials could meet them only by dragging men to the operating room—typically a makeshift camp that had sprung up practically overnight. (Nearly two thousand men died from botched operations.) In some areas, police surrounded villages in the middle of the night and apprehended all the men. In others, they combined sterilization with slum clearance, razing whole neighborhoods and robbing men of both their reproductive ability and their homes at the same time. Protestors were killed. The scale of the campaign, which was memorialized by Salman Rushdie in the novel Midnight’s Children, is striking, given that many Americans today remain unaware of its existence. By the time democratic rule was restored, 6.2 million Indian men had been sterilized in just one year—fifteen times the number of people sterilized by the Nazis. (pp. 87-88)
Many Americans remain unaware of this, and many Canadians too, including me.
The review will follow when it’s published. Getting into the realm of massive understatements, suffice to say that “population control” has wreaked a lot of havoc in nations across the globe, including as one outcome, missing women at a devastating scale.
Why am I advertising a book about relationships here on PWPL? A couple of reasons:
1) it’s a good book
2) the blog that aims to help sell the book is likewise, chockablock full of great advice on how to get on in relationships but more importantly, how to conduct oneself with integrity when not in a relationship and enjoy the life you have
3) “Auntie Seraphic’s” advice is very counter-cultural, and that, my friends, is to be respected. She doesn’t fall into mainstream traps around relationships, neither does she fall into religious traps about relationships (The author, Dorothy Cummings is a practicing Catholic of the conservative variety. But I’m not Catholic and I still like it, so there you go.)
4) someday I will write a book and I will want help promoting it
So there you have it. Buy Seraphic Singles if you are single, and for a friend if you are not.
Why do I feel a sense of sweet vindication in reading this? I get called crazy for saying the same thing (albeit in a decidedly different way). Maybe Margaret Wente gets called crazy too. I’ll never know. But it’s nice to see these thoughts in print in the Globe:
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy sexual liberation as much as I’d hoped. Eventually, it occurred to me that it seemed to be working better for guys than it was for me. Men, I noticed, tended to agree that sex without meaning was pretty swell. Women tended to agree that sex without meaning was impossible. Although we approved of it in theory, we were all too susceptible to messy emotional entanglements. …
If men and women were equal in their sexual desires, we’d have a different conversation. But as that famous piece of doggerel goes, Hogamus higamus/ Men are polygamous;/ Higamus hogamus/ Women monogamous. The long history of civilization is in many ways a progressive effort to rein in the indiscriminate (and frequently destructive) sexual desires of men. This effort, no doubt, frustrates men, but it’s good for women and children, and also for society.
Besides, there’s something about monogamy that some long-married people have discovered (much to their surprise). It’s the same thing Dan Savage tells gay kids: It gets better.
To summarize: “Sexual liberation” liberates men and hurts women. That’s my view and I’m sticking to it. (I might add I also think it hurts men in a long term, societal sort of way, when men find themselves to be 40 and living wholly unfulfilling lives in the fast lane, or in the not-so-fast lane as the stats showing men living in mama’s basement will attest, but this is a short blog post and I won’t get into that here.)
Up front: I’m musing here. I don’t think tattoos are an important matter of morality, or life and death.
However, I do find myself staring quizzically in moments. Take the lady I saw yesterday, who had a small ice cream cone with a heart next to it, tattoed on her leg. It was a cute small icon, just perfect if you worked at Hallmark and were designing a “Hope you beat the heat” card for someone who lives without AC. But as a permanent addition to your skin? Forever and ever?
I recall another friend who got a massive butterfly tattoed on her back. Again, is this because butterflies are just so pretty, that you ache inside without one permanently etched on your body? Or what about the guy who stayed over at my place, a friend of my then-rommate, who emerged from a night of partying to show off the exact replica of the CD case of his favourite band? He’ll carry that on his shoulder, even when the kids don’t know what CDs are, or that they used to come in cases.
I personally feel that if something is going to be engraved in my skin, I’d think a bit more about what that was going to be. There will be no pixies or leprechauns, no butterflies or ice cream cones or favourite bands. Here ends the rant.
Abortion ‘increases risk of premature birth’ Abortion appears to increase the chance of giving birth prematurely in a subsequent wanted pregnancy by a third, according to a British study.
So you’ll recall the heartwarming tale of my being complimented on the way to beach volleyball. I follow that up with something, er, less heartwarming. Similar story: walking down a road with a friend, having gotten off the bus this time, also on the way to play volleyball. This time we’re in the burbs though, and as we pass by what I think was a Lebanese restaurant a guy, way off in the shadowy distance, shouts “sluts.” Yes, at us. We keep walking. We are further away now, and he comes closer, but still remains hidden behind the restaurant’s wall. He hollers again. At this point, I shout, “Show yourself, you loser!!” (Perhaps a bit high school, but that’s what I did on the spur of the moment.) He runs away.
One man’s pretty girl is another man’s slut? (A variation on what our high school politics teacher taught us: “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”) This was likely some sort of minor cultural clash (if you can call it that). Hard not to see the Arabic on the restaurant’s sign, is all I’m saying, and I didn’t have a clean burka to put on this morning.
To conclude: We didn’t go there for food after the game.
The Real Housewives of the Bible. Coming soon on DVD.
I have only read the article I’m linking to here, but I think this could be interesting. Sometimes I feel hopeless that our culture is trapped in this 1970s time warp, teaching ridiculous notions on sex and relationships as if it was the wisdom of the ages. Goes without saying that part and parcel of this attitude is castigating religious values as misogynistic and backwards. But something tells me that a woman living in the Negev in exile was probably a whole heck of a lot stronger than any of us are today, whether or not we call ourselves “feminists.”
I found parts of this funny, other parts, not so much. But I think it’s worth posting anyway.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AGaufgGzC8&feature=player_embedded”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AGaufgGzC8&feature=player_embedded]