Every party is courting the women’s vote. They are The Undecided – more women than men are still parking their vote. That’s typical of most elections. Women listen for longer, decide later in an election campaign. When the time comes, they will be the kingmakers, if you’ll pardon the term. It leaps to mind because […]
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Liberal Video Depot: Canadian Women’s Favourite Pick-up Line
Clever. And funny. Watch the video and find out what is the favourite pick-up line of Canadian women and why it’s being re-posted on a political blog. And they came out with it before this went public. {Video by ShitHarperDid} Please send LVD your political and news videos and clips.
Continue readingLiberal Video Depot: Canadian Women’s Favourite Pick-up Line
Clever. And funny. Watch the video and find out what is the favourite pick-up line of Canadian women and why it’s being re-posted on a political blog. And they came out with it before this went public. {Video by ShitHarperDid} Please send LVD your political and news videos and clips.
Continue readingLiberal Video Depot: Canadian Women’s Favourite Pick-up Line
Clever. And funny. Watch the video and find out what is the favourite pick-up line of Canadian women and why it’s being re-posted on a political blog.And they came out with it before this went public. {Video by ShitHarperDid}Please send LVD your politi…
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Access to Post-Secondary Education
I recently had the chance to read a 2008 book entitled Who Goes? Who Stays? What Matters? Accessing and Persisting in Post-Secondary Education in Canada. Edited by Ross Finnie, Richard Mueller, Arthur Sweetman and Alex Usher, the anthology features 14 chapters written by a total of 21 authors. I found Chapter 4 (co-authored by […]
Continue readingApril Reign: The Handmaids Tale Dystopia Meets Reality
April Reign This story is both a horrific example of the human trafficking going on in the world and a warning as to what could happen to women should the womb police get their way. Anyone familiar with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaids Tale will recognize this type of scenario; In
Continue readingThe Liberal Scarf: Equal Voice National Leadership Summit
The Equal Voice National Leadership Summit is going on in Ottawa today, and I’ll be providing live updates via Twitter if you want to follow along at www.twitter.com/WilliamNormanYou can also watch the live webcast at http://equalvoice.ca/
Continue readingHappy International Women’s Day!
Oh, the regina mom‘s been a busy woman this past year! Marketing a book takes time and energy in the planning and carrying out. Needless to say, this blog has fallen by the wayside. However, I could not miss the opportunity to wish my readers a happy International Women’s Day and to share a piece […]
Continue readingbastard.logic: Of Patriarchy and Paradox.
So, um, Happy New Year, kids. We at bastard.logic are proud to kick off 2011 with the debut of our newest co-blogger, Amy Lauren, whom you’ll no doubt be seeing quite a bit of as the year progresses. – mb … Continue reading →
Continue readingPraise The Senate For Doing Something Business and Governments Wont
“Women hold up half the sky” – Mao Zedong
Two Conservative bloggers have taking a legitimate issue about women in our country and instead turned it into political theatre. One such blogger who calls himself BC Blue called Liberal Senator Celine Herv…
Continue readingCol. Williams: Other questions lurk
The horrific crimes perpetrated by Canadian Forces‘ Colonel, Russell Williams, have forced those of us who’d rather not, to look at disturbing images which were presented as evidence in the courtroom. You won’t find a link to those images here. Why the media insists these images are publishable news, that this is a story of […]
Continue reading40 years post-Bird…
Need I really add more? FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SEPTEMBER 28, 2010 FOUR DECADES AFTER ROYAL COMMISSION ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN REPORT – WHAT DO WE HAVE TO SHOW FOR IT? OTTAWA – Today marks the 40th Anniversary of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women Report, which was groundbreaking for women’s equality in […]
Continue readingPop The Stack: Why does Canada have so few women in politics?
Report today that Canada ranks 50th in the World in the number of women in politics. Is it time to consider a quota on minimum number of female candidates for a party? Some people worry that this might lead to forcing unqualified people into office. But that’s just silly, we all know there are large […]
Continue readingredjenny: Mass Murder of Women
Bob Herbert: Women at Risk “I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women,
Continue readingredjenny: Mass Murder of Women
Bob Herbert: Women at Risk “I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women,
Continue readingredjenny: Mass Murder of Women
Bob Herbert: Women at Risk
“I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.
We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.
Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.
I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.
Or, can you imagine if the gunman was Arab, Muslim or black. The news would be filled with analyses of black violence or Muslim misogyny or whatever. Just look at how some people try to make Mark Lepine into a secret Muslim, so that the violent impulses can be blamed on his Algerian-ness instead of his male-ness. Why is it when a white man commits a similar act, neither whiteness nor maleness are examined?
According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.
We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.
We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.
The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.
One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.
What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”
I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.
Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”
Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.
A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.
There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.
We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.
I don’t for a minute believe that all men hate women or that all men are violent or whatever the right wing wants you to think feminists believe, but that there is an undercurrent in our culture which accepts too much violence in general and too much violence against women in particular.
We need to take a good honest look at our society and take responsibility for these sick people we raise. We need to promote healthier ways to deal with anger and other strong emotions. We desperately need a healthier masculinity. We also need to abandon our antisocial and ultra-competitive society that rewards domination.
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