femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

someone publishes a book on the secret life of toe fungus. No, I am not kidding. And it made the front page (above the fold!) of yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Slow news day?

It is a rare morning when the front page of the NYTimes makes me smile. November 21st is a rare morning. Unfortunately, the smile was due to an absurd photo array of Dubya. and was accompanied by a mix of humor and embarrassment. Only Dubya could make a foreign diplomatic visit look like a game show appearance. Click here . Be sure to click on the photo shown so that you can see the full four-photo array. I shake my head. I shake my head.

So many things have horrified me lately, I almost don't know where to begin, but I'll start with the small text box article on page A22 of today's NY Times. In this article, Barbara Bush is quoted as saying "What I'm hearing, which is sort of scary, is that they all want to stay in Texas." What exactly is scary about that, Barbara? What happened to compassionate conservative? She goes on to make what is perhaps the most insensitive comment that I have ever heard. "And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." In what warped reality, does losing contact with family members; seeing dead bodies floating in flood waters and lying by the road and in shelters; spending a week or more without adequate food and water, unsure of your fate, fearful for your safety and surrounded by filth and human waste; being carted off by buses to wherever there was room; having your entire life uprooted, separated from friends and family and for many, from the only life you have ever known; in what reality is this better off? Spoken like a person who believes that money is the most important thing, Barbara shows her ignorance of the realities of this disaster.

I finished reading the new Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince about a week ago and last night someone mentioned they were about to start reading it. I told them how great I thought it was taking care not to reveal the ending, but as it turns out, someone had already ruined the ending for her. A couple of days earlier she came across someone wearing a t-shirt that revealed the ending in one sentence (which I obviously will not repeat here). I suppose this person thought they were being funny or perhaps they too have a vendetta against Harry Potter, but regardless of why they chose to wear that t-shirt, it's obvious that they are determined to ruin the simple joy that so many people get from reading those books. In the grand scheme of things, I realize that this isn't a grievous crime, but the simple mean-spiritedness that exists in such an act is just sad.

An article in The Seattle Times today is another example of adults letting teens down. Not only are students taught that they should suppress their sexuality and opt for "no sex" as opposed to "safe sex," not only are they told that their bodies don't belong to them that they can't make desisions about their reproductive health without their parents consent, but now they can't even write about how they feel. The Seattle Times reports:

A blank space appearing on page 50 of Shorewood High's annual literary magazine, Imprints, was once filled with a poem about a teenager's first sexual experience.

The 13-line verse was abruptly pulled from this year's magazine after parental complaints about a profane word in its title.

The fallout prompted school and district officials to seize, shred and reprint the issue. They also reassigned the magazine's faculty adviser, a move the teacher is now fighting.

Adding insult to injury,the administration claims that the poem was removed, not for its content, but because of the "profane" word in the title. Although it's fairly obvious from the content of the poem, which The Seattle Times did print substituting "(expletive)" for the offending word, that the original title was "My first fuck." Apparantly, that argument has little validity given that the publication has contained "profane" words in the past. It seems clear that the issue is not so much that the word was considered inappropriate but that a young woman writing about the disillusionment she felt during her first sexual experience is considered to be inappropriate for a school publication. Of course, it is. Since teenagers don't have sex when they're in high school (shock! dismay!)and they certainly would never use a word like "fuck."

This goes into the "you've got to be fucking kidding me" category. Why do these things still surprise me? Yes, we have reached the point where we are so distrustful of our partners that we have created the "forget-me-not panties" which come equipped with a GPS tracking device that measures heart rate, body temp, etc and lets you know where your significant other is at all times. For the person who feels the need to equip their partner with a James Bond worthy tracking device to be sure she's not steppin' out on him, here's a hint: you probably shouldn't be with her anyway. Oh, yeah and "get a life." And no, this is not a joke. Check it out for yourself: http://forgetmenotpanties.contagiousmedia.org/index.html