Lisa Pryor asked men what they want in a wife. This article, an upmarket version of the Cosmo’s “how to please the cock” that gets rehashed every month, has prompted me to put into words exactly what I want in a man. The twist to my article is that I’m not offering a sexual relationship or marriage as a reward. All I’m offering is friendship, respect and possibly the chance to have more meaningful relationships with others.

I want men who don’t bet on sleeping with women, who don’t rate women on their appearance on a scale of one to ten. I want a man who treats me like a full human being, and who doesn’t base his treatment on how hawt I am. I want men to realise that communication is a two way street, who realise listening is not a chore. Now this may be a lot of work, but it’s worth it. Seeing the people around you as fully human enriches friendships and opens eyes to so much that’s been missed.

I respect men who recognise sex is about more than their own orgasm, who can distinguish between porn and sex. I want a man who isn’t afraid of being contaminated by women, and who doesn’t mock other men when they take up useful, pleasurable pursuits such as knitting or baking.

Finally, I’d like a man who doesn’t go *hur hur* at the thought of lesbian sex, because that shit gets annoying pretty quickly.

On the walls of a classroom at my school are various representations of concepts within Shakespeare. One poster has two sections, the first gold with a cross, representing religion. The second green with a witches cauldron, representing superstition. So remember kiddies, you’re going to suffer eternal torture and damnation if you don’t believe that the Almighty Son of God suffered to save you, but those silly witches are obviously false and representations of a laughably simple time, where people believed in miracles magic.

(For my opinion of Christianity, see Kissing Hank’s Ass.)

The Fourteenth Down Under Feminist Carnival is up at anjum rahman’s place. Full of interesting articles, including one by Linda about the Chaser.

No, the chaser are not in sufficient possession of the smarts needed to pull off political satire. Nor do they possess enough self-awareness to examine their position within social divisions while they sashay gaily around town, getting in the way of people who actually have to work to survive. Their approach to ’satire’ is to ridicule, harass and generally try to annoy…

Also, sajrfem has a new batch of feminist cookies.

The cookies say: "likes Buffy", "likes kick-ass chics", "my mom works!", "has a gay friend", "works with women", "is pro-choice"

For a link to all previous carnivals, click here.

I love that it exists. That if I need it, it’s there (though I do wish the megatheocorporacy would get around to creating 100% effective, cheap and accessible birth control so not as many women have to go through various invasive and/ or expensive medical procedures). Abortion is not something that should be regretfully whispered about. I love that many people have enough respect for the rights and intelligence of women to perform a procedure that has become fraught with religious and political shenanigans.

Women from the March For Womens Lives protest (click photo for link to others)

Simple but true

Dear Patriarchy,

I am Lilith. I am Hatshepsut, Sylvia Plath and Jean d’Arc. I am the evil brunette, the bitch who won’t shut up and won’t sit down. One day I will disintegrate; this mind, this body or this soul will break, but I will be broken prying your claws away from the puppet strings of my world. And I will not be alone.

Listen.

Sisterhood is deep, deep beyond your reckoning. For as long as humankind exists, there will be women like me. For as long as oppression and inequality exists, we will fight it, for we are not made to be docile. For every atrocity, every lie, every petty act of hatred shows us what you really are, your workings, your weaknesses.

We have heard women roar, and take full humanity as our birthright. The jack will not go back into the box. We know you, we name you and one day, you will be broken.

I feel guilty about this, but I’m cutting a lot of people from my blogroll, even though they’ll remain in my personal links, because I’m terrible at the upkeep of the blogroll and at a certain point if it gets too long then people just glaze over. Please don’t take it personally if your blog gets removed. To steal from the Hoydens- you’re all Ace Sheilas.

And because I have far too many draft posts and niggling bits of homework, here are a few links of interest.

• How You Guys — that’s right, you GUYS — Can Prevent Rape – Scarleteen
• Utegate as told by lolcats – Bek’s Blog. Freaking hilarious.
• Alternate Youth Music Station Thinks There’s No Alternative to Being a Bloke – Orlando at Hoyden About Town

The feminist reaction to the Republican nomination of Sarah Palin to the vice-presidency was very interesting. Some mocked her, some stayed silent, some defended her against sexism and some supported her candidacy. Then feminists were told they weren’t doing their job properly by op-ed writers, who thought all feminists should support Palin because she had a vagina (either that, or we were jealous because she is prettier than we are). They compared our support (less than optimal, but according to them, overwhelming) of Clinton to the support of Palin. Some people are still comparing the two. What they forget is that Clinton is one of us, a pro-choice feminist who has worked for women’s rights consistently for decades (and there’s also the issue that the launch codes in Clinton’s hands would be a damn better sight than the launch codes in Palin’s). Palin stopped calling herself a feminist after no longer finding it politically convenient. That feminists as a group supported Clinton more than non-feminist women shouldn’t be a huge surprise.

Read what could have been.

That is why every woman, every man, every child, every family, and every nation on our planet has a stake in the discussion [The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women] that takes place here.

Over the past 25 years, I have worked persistently on issues relating to women, children and families. Over the past two-and-a-half years, I have had the opportunity to learn more about the challenges facing women in my own country and around the world.

I have met new mothers in Jojakarta, Indonesia, who come together regularly in their village to discuss nutrition, family planning, and baby care.

I have met working parents in Denmark who talk about the comfort they feel in knowing that their children can be cared for in creative, safe, and nurturing after-school centers.

I have met women in South Africa who helped lead the struggle to end apartheid and are now helping build a new democracy.

I have met with the leading women of the Western Hemisphere who are working every day to promote literacy and better health care for the children of their countries.

I have met women in India and Bangladesh who are taking out small loans to buy milk cows, rickshaws, thread and other materials to create a livelihood for themselves and their families.

I have met doctors and nurses in Belarus and Ukraine who are trying to keep children alive in the aftermath of Chernobyl.

The great challenge of this Conference is to give voice to women everywhere whose experiences go unnoticed, whose words go unheard.

Women comprise more than half the world’s population. Women are 70% percent of the world’s poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read and write.

Women are the primary caretakers for most of the world’s children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued – not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders.

At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries.

Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated; they are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation; they are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers; they are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending office and banned from the ballot box.

Those of us who have the opportunity to be here have the responsibility to speak for those who could not.

RIP Eartha.

Lyrics here.

I try not to think about MRAs and “masculinists” too much, given their painful inability to see the forest from the trees, but Melissa McEwan’s post at Shakesville got me thinking about the arguments MRAs make. In short, if there is a single decent MRA point to be made that is not also a feminist point, or a point with a feminist solution, I’ll eat my keyboard.

MRA arguments tend to fall into three categories, arguments that are demonstrably false (which I have ignored for the purpose of this post), arguments that are true but narrow to the point of being misleading, and arguments that are based on demonising feminists for something that is the fault of patriarchy.

The narrow arguments are incredibly frustrating, because they generally take statistics completely out of context. An example of this is their reaction to the news that in many Western countries more women attend university than men. While that fact may cause panic at MRA headquarters, over at the Feminist HQ it quite a different story. We look at the gender differentials in labour and see a huge pay disparity, with women often shunted into the pink ghetto. In universities the senior positions are held by a disproportionate number of men, as is senior management in the public and private sectors. So when it becomes apparent that more girls are entering university than boys, that’s one of our small silver linings on a very dark cloud, and when MRAs complain about it, calling for “true equality” they’re saying that all we deserve is the cloud, and that we’re being uppity by expecting more. If they really want to a lower percentage of women to enter university they could work towards a more woman-friendly environment in trade jobs that don’t require degrees, or work towards an equal pay system where women don’t have to be more qualified than men to get the same wage.

Their other other arguments are also based on their superficial understanding of what equality constitutes. “What’s all this fuss about Violence Against Women?” they ask, totally forgetting the backbreaking amounts of energy activists have poured into making the issue an issue at all, “What about Violence Against Men?” is their constant refrain, ignoring that men are the ones perpetrating the majority of violent crime (and that feminists are attempting to deconstruct masculinity so violence isn’t quite so omnipresent).

When women have the same economic, social and political power men have, when men stop perpetrating violence against women in shocking numbers, then I’ll talk to masculinists and their ilk with a straight face. Until then (or until they can come up with facts so stunning that I eat my keyboard) they can stop pretending to be anything more than immature men who whine the moment that a fraction of their privilege is stripped away.