Category Archives: feminism

Aging: Becoming My Mother's Daughter

Next month is my birthday. I have about 6 weeks of being 36 left.
I’m told I look younger. This is good news, I like it.
Truth be told, I really don’t care about looking “36”. Not yet. I probably will. Likely when it starts to show. When I’m 42. Heh, heh.
But you know what?

A shot taken of me by my friend Rick Rake at an event on July 28th, 2010.


I’ve worked for that age. The sun damage my skin shows now is in stark contrast to the pasty-white well-hidden tubby non-outdoors girl I was for the majority of my life. When I was a kid, I was the fat kid who whined and lied about pretend injuries to get out of sports. Every hike I was supposed to do, I got out of.
I was so not a joiner. I was pudgy, pudgy, wheezy girl.
Not so much these days. I’m not where I need to be, but I’m better than I’ve been since I was 18, and there aren’t a lot of 36-year-olds who can attest to being healthier than they’ve ever been — than they’ve literally EVER been.
Despite that health, I’m caught with fatigue a lot of the time. I just deal with it. My friend who’s 42 tells me she was always tired for a few years in her 30s. I’m assuming that’s where I’m at. I eat fairly well, exercise 6 or more hours a week. What more can you ask, right?
Honestly? My newly-appearing wrinkles give me pause. I’m not sure I’m wild about them just yet. I do, however, like the “character” they give my grin these days and the way they highlight the twinkle in my eyes.
I think I wear the few wrinkles I have well. I know my mother wore her age fantastically, like a perfect-fitting pair of jeans.
People were devastated when my mother died. She was a sexy-as-hell redhead at 57 when cancer took her 11 years ago this week. She looked fantastic. Dead? How ironic.
I’m thinking a lot about her this week. Maybe it’s part of my reclusiveness of late. 11 years. Wow. Mind-boggling. Can’t help but reflect on anniversaries, and I’m not thinking so much about the loss of her this year as I am about the woman I’m becoming on my own life journey, and if it parallels my mother’s. Wish I could ask.
I think a woman’s 36th year is pretty pivotal in who she is. She’s now out of the “targeted demographic” most coveted by marketers, she’s starting to pay attention to wrinkle creams and thinking biological-clock type thoughts if she’s not already a mother. It’s the beginning of the transition from “breeder” to “matriarch”, a different kind of role that women seem to play when they hit early middle ages.
One day we’re the chick next door that the guy wants to hang out with and tries to sleep with, the next we’ve become Mrs. Robinson and anyone we chase under our age begets us a label of “cougar”. It’s a quicker transition than you might think.
I’m not sure if I’ve hit that stage yet, since friends still think I look 28, so I might be able to get away with more.
That youthful appearance may not linger a lot longer, as the greys and wrinkles begin to mount.
I both like and loathe the greys I have now, even if few in number. They multiply.
Today, I’m thinking about getting a punk-rock haircut again and embracing the salt-n-pepper look that’s coming on. There’s something tasty about edgy prematurely-greying people. Very, very tasty. I can pull that off. Not like I’ll be all grey tomorrow anyhow.
Age, I guess, really is a state of mind. I know some folks at 36 who look like they’re in their 40s. How you live really starts to show through in a hurry, and it’s your choice. This is the age that your lifestyle becomes visibly apparent to everyone.
Because of that, getting older doesn’t scare me. It’s probably to do with decent genetics (that come with a ticking time bomb but sure look pretty) and probably because I feel like I’ve been through enough in life already that whatever’s coming down the pipes is something I know I’ll just handle. Scared? Who’s scared?
No, I ultimately like my age. I’d rather be turning 37 than 22 again. You couldn’t give me enough money in the world to relive my 20s. My 30s ain’t been no walk in the park, either, but from 35 on? Yeah. I like it. Liking it more all the time, the further I get from my past and the more progress I make on this vision of who I always cheated myself out of being.
Some of us SURVIVED our 20s. Some of us kind of defied an awful lot of odds to get past where we were. Some of us really fucking love coming into our older, more comfortable selves.
I wish the media could understand that. I wish marketers got it. My age is almost like a battle-wound scar. Like that scene in the movie Jaws, where Quint, Brody, and Hooper are shooting the shit about old scars:

Brody[pointing at Quint’s tattoo scar] What’s that one?
Quint: Oh, that’s a tattoo. I got that removed.
Hooper: Let me guess. “Mother!” [laughs]
Quint: Hooper, that’s the U.S.S. Indianapolis.
[Hooper’s face drops]
Hooper: You were on the Indianapolis?
Brody: What happened?
Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail.

As far as some of us are concerned, we probably shouldn’t even be alive. Enough’s gone on that, y’know, our survival’s really by the grace of God or whoever else was in the kitchen. Signs of age, to some of us, are like proof of getting to The Other Side.
At this point, I don’t see myself changing my hair to hide the greys. I’ll never be slowly salt-and-peppering again in my life, I want to enjoy the awkward and cute transition.
I also don’t see myself trying to hide wrinkles with Botox, ‘cos I never thought my face would be thin enough to have wrinkles — I thought it’d be unhealthily fat and smooth for decades yet. Wrinkles? SERIOUSLY? Okay, bring ’em.
There’s something satisfying about slowly becoming my mother’s daughter. I’m one size away from being the same size as her before her death, even if I’m 40-50 pounds heavier. Muscle tone!
Every now and then, I look in the mirror, and a woman who sort of reflects the mother I had as a wee little lass is the woman staring back at me. I still can’t believe that’s who I’m becoming. When I was 5 going on 6, Mom was the age I am now.
I never saw myself being here, now, looking more and more like her as she was then, every day.
But I’m starting to really, really like it.

The Dishonour of Honour Killings

Recently, here in the Great White North, a murder trial ended and the accused were sentenced to life.
A father and his son killed his daughter, all because she was too progressive to be a good little Islamic girl.
Muhammad Parvez and Waqas, his son, murdered Aqsa Parvez on December 10, 2007, in the guise of avenging their family pride in the face of her scandalous embracing of Western culture and lifestyle, even though they lived here.
These cultural-killing cases weigh heavily upon me.
I loathe what they do to the image of Islam, and what they do to my thinking, despite my best efforts.

Honour killing: image from The Baltimore Reporter.


I used to teach ESL a long time ago. Here, there. In people’s homes. It always gave me an interesting perspective on cultures I’d only ever seen from the flipside of a take-out menu or on the big screen.
For the most part here in Vancouver, that meant working with Taiwanese, Koreans, and the Mainland Chinese.
Once, though, I worked with two young Islamic women from Saudi Arabia. They were both married, under age 25, and would wear full burqas when out in the world, but, at home, wore tight jeans and cute trendy t-shirts that clung tightly to their breasts.
Their husbands were charming kind men who spoke to me often about our culture and tried to compare that with their traditional culture at home, so I could know more about them.
Their hospitality and the respect they showed me was warm and sincere. I always felt welcomed and appreciated, and never judged for being “Western” and very liberal. They even knew I wrote about sex, and the men found my blog entertaining.
I truly thought they were all wonderful people, and the kindness and graciousness shown me by them has lingered long in my memory as an example as what the true basic beliefs in Islam are — very similar to any a “good Christian” might follow.
But the burqas never sat well with me — the hypocrisy of bouncy, beautiful breasts being savoured in private but the pretense that this feminine beauty doesn’t exist in the world, or the suggestion that they’re doing what is right and good by Allah when hiding the feminine form from the world at large, despite the fact that Allah created all they hold in esteem.
But that’s a whole other issue that’s too large in scope to tackle, and which I’m not nearly informed enough to weigh in on without research.
It is, however, indicative of just how large a chasm exists between fundamentalist Islam and the standard Western world-view.
So, when a  family like the Parvez move here from Pakistan, there’s a galaxy of culture-clash to contend with.
Me, I’m so white I’m of the fish-belly variety of humans. With Irish/Scottish and French dotting my ancestry, I don’t even have a culture, let alone any experience with culture-clash — except for that which lands on our shores.
But that’s who we are. We’re Canadians.
We’ve got an open-door policy, and because we’re the most multicultural country on the planet, we’re constantly shaping who we are as a result of the immigrants who land here and build lives, for better and for worse.
You know what? I love that.
I love that, when Pierre Elliott Trudeau died, I had to take a cab that day and my driver was a man from South Africa. He was constantly wiping his eyes and sniffling as we moved slowly through rush-hour traffic.
In his thick, thick accent, he told me how hard he’d struggled to move to Canada two decades ago, that it had become his dream after this Canadian Prime Minister had been the only leader in the world to cry out against Apartheit in South Africa in the 1970s, that he saw Canada as being a place that held true to the belief that all men were equal — even beyond our borders.
This man made me cry that day — this immigrant, he and his love for my country, what we stood for, and what he wanted it to keep standing for now that he had given up his S.A. citizenship to become a Canadian. We cried together over a leader who divided the country but ultimately contributed more to what “being Canadian” meant than any leader in our history.*
It’s conversations with men like him who make me believe deep down inside that the majority of those who emigrate to Canada are those who ultimately admire our lifestyle and our tolerance of others.
So, yes, when I hear of honour killings, I’m left wondering how much it hurts the progressives who’ve immigrated long before these fundamentalist assholes, and how hard it makes life domestically for them.
Muhammad and Waqas Parvez are not your typical Pakistani-Canadians.
They are not your common Muslims.
And while honour killings aren’t common in Canada, they do happen.
From Wikipedia:

Human Rights Watch defines “honor killings” as follows:
Honor crimes are acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members, who are held to have brought dishonor upon the family. A woman can be targeted by (individuals within) her family for a variety of reasons, including: refusing to enter into an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce — even from an abusive husband — or (allegedly) committing adultery. The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a way that “dishonors” her family is sufficient to trigger an attack on her life.

Let’s face it. Much of what women have gained in the West, in terms of freedom to be who they want to be, has come in the last 60 years. We’re a young culture, too.
Islam, however, and its main regions of practice (Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq) forms the seat of all of civilization.
For thousands of years these principles have been in place. They’ll come undone, but it’ll be slowly.
The world needs to stand against honour killings, and while these sentences are a start here in Canada, they’ll do little to effect change in the high mountains of the Khyber Pass and throughout Mohammad’s land in Saudi Arabia.
Here, in Canada, some will experience anger and disdain toward Islam, as if these men represent all of what the Qu’ran teaches.
Like most religions, Islam teaches some pretty fucked-up things. Ask any cartoonist.
Any religion has proverbs that, taken word-for-word, could unleash hell with the devout. Islam is certainly not far from the path of nuttiness with ideas like Jihad and honour killings and the rants against cartoons and Salman Rushdie.
It doesn’t mean Islam’s unholy and hell-bent on destruction or death. That’s bullshit.
What men like the Parvezes do, though, is, they give validity to those who would tar Islam and rail against its practitioners with the belief that all who practice it are extremists who are literal about Allah’s messages in the Qu’ran.
And they make women like me scared of dating Islamic men.
I hate that.
The thing is, I’m not particularly afraid of dating a Muslim man — as long as he’s not a fundamentalist.
But I wouldn’t date ANY religious fundamentalist. I’d probably try to avoid most men who practiced religion of any kind, really, but I would think a Muslim would better understand why I’m not following his faith than a Christian would, since I was raised in Christianity and now reject the practice of it. Try to make sense of THAT, eh?
So, yeah, I’m not afraid of dating a Muslim man at all.
I’m afraid of dating his extended family.
Let’s face it. Families are nuts. You should meet mine.
There’s some serious fuckin’ wackadoos in the extended-family works here, and I would hate for anyone to judge me on the basis of being related to them. But they’re there.
And that’s the thing. A Muslim guy might be incredible, and god knows I find men of Persian descent incredibly hot, but I’m scared what Uncle Mojinder might be like or what distant Cousin Navez might get up to if I get a little rowdy one night, since I’m not exactly Miss I Don’t Drink.
It’s hard enough keeping philosophically on-page with a lover, but when there’s a cultural heritage that has the potential of honour killings in their extended family, it’s a little unnerving a concept for some of us who are given to misbehaviour.
I’m not sure how to end this piece, I don’t think there’s a comfortable “pat” conclusion I can offer.
It’s a terrible thing, honour killings — for what it does to women, for the rise of the fear and suspicions we nurse against an entire faith, all because of what some select group of them do.
It’s horrible that I feel justified in my fears, that I’m apprehensive of men based on their faith, not because I don’t trust them but because I fear their families.
And even that is hard on me, because I love what I know of the traditional Indian, Pakistani, and Middle Eastern family lives.
Yet.
Yet this one thing exists, a small niggling fear — this negligible concept of  “honour” and what it is for and to others, and the price one can pay for damaging it.
In the end, there’s a reason I’m not religious anymore. I stopped believing in Catholicism in my teens, and by rights all other religions, because of the fear and judgment they sought to have me live life under.
Life has many chains that will bind me, but religion will not be amongst them.
I want to know, I guess, how honour killings affect you.
What do you think of them? How have they changed your thoughts on Muslims?
If you’re a woman, does it make you apprehensive of dating men who are Muslims but super-hip and very liberal, just because you fear their family?
Have you ever had a friend who has been under the thumb of this religion and wanted out?
Talk to me. I want to hear about this.
*On his death, the stories I heard from second-generation Canadians who immigrated to Canada with their parents when Trudeau was leader, just blew my mind. The reverence they held for P.E.T., and the esteem they held Canada in, made my heart explode with patriotic pride. Yeah. That’s who we are, Canada. We’re the port in the storm.

Fuck You, Hollywood.

We’re witnessing the end of an empire at the box office.
Sex and the City 2 is lying there like a dead fish, with all the appeal of a used-up 45-year-old prostitute after a night of chasing 8-balls with gin after running the line for a sex-train at a frat party.
Naturally, Hollywood is CONVINCED it’s because the chicks in it are all old.
“Well, of COURSE Sam needs a vibrator — she’s 54!”
Let’s for a moment forget the ages of the women acting in the show. Let’s forget that they’re all around 50+ now.
Let’s do something wacky and think about the movie itself. And, hey, let’s think about the writing.
First: Have I seen it? No.
Here’s why not.
If I’m watching a show where some lead actor/actress from a flick is out whoring their movie, putting on the charm, and they play a clip — just ONE 30-second clip from a 90-minute movie — and the clip sucks shit? I mean, they’re supposed to be showing the one most appealing, funniest, engaging, COME-WATCH-US clip they have from the ENTIRE movie. And it’s shit? Well, I know the other 89:30 probably isn’t gonna be an improvement.
But if that 30-second clip is from a 2-hour-and-25-minutes-long movie and it still sucks shit?
I’m in favour of euthanizing everyone who views it in the theatres.
The shame!
Everything I’ve seen of Sex & the City 2 looks like has-been writers puked up every failed cliché they’ve ever heard, slapped some pretty weird dresses and shoes I’ll NEVER afford onto fancy-pretty chicks, and spliced that shit together.
Let’s see what some of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes are saying about it:

  • There’s only one thing worse than faking an orgasm: faking laughter. Shame on you, Sex and the City 2, for being a 2.5-hour laughless fake-a-thon that never finds the right spot.
  • Shoes, money, outfits, shoes, vagina, money, shoes, jewelry, outfits, money, shoes.
  • It goes from being what we know and love to… what were they thinking?
  • A flagrant insult to the audience that made the first film a phenomenon. Shame on the writers of this soulless drivel for trying to pass this Canal Street bootleg sow’s ear off as a genuine Alexander McQueen silk purse.
  • Early in Sex and the City 2, I started a list of things that could easily be cut because they go nowhere. It’s a long list.
  • It has no plot to speak of, little in the way of wit or intelligence, and is about 50% longer than can reasonably be justified.
  • A degrading portrait of women through an unfunny story about four Ugly Americans abroad.
  • It’s supposed to be Sex and the City. This is Sects and the Souk.

And that’s what pisses me off.
This movie isn’t failing because of the actresses. It’s failing because a director with shitty judgment had his hands on a shitty script that some fucko chose in a Hollywood office, and Decider Dude’s probably been sleeping with vapid starlets and hasn’t had his finger on the real-life pulse of America for three decades.
YET he thinks he knows what’ll appeal to broad-spectrum women around the world. Yeah. Right.
This movie is failing because it’s nothing of what the original series contained — cynical-but-true jabs at being single, sexy, smart women trying to get by in a big-city life at a changing time in American city culture.
So, it’s got nothing that made it great, except for actresses that play characters who aren’t the characters they were when America fell in love with them. Brilliant. Sure, that’ll be a raging success.
And the problem with these failing movies that have “older” actresses is, they’re usually shit from the get-go. They were shit on paper, they’re shit being shot, and they’re shit when they’re edited together for the screening room.
What’s the deal? Actresses don’t get great money-making projects past 45, so they get all scared about their future, then jump when Hollywood says they’ll slap a couple million payroll for ’em onto this lame-ass “but it’s sure to be a hit, look at all the OLD actresses we’ve lined up to appease the suburban-mom contingent!” movie.
The even bigger problem is with fans who’ll take anything shovelled at them under the guise that it’s even REMOTELY connected to the original story enterprise. Yeah, you know who you are.
This has NOTHING to do with the original series. It’s a bunch of chicks doing stupid, contrived things that only a BAD Hollywood writer would come up with.
We need great indie filmmakers to make awesome movies about women in their 40s and 50s that are edgy, ironic, bitingly funny, and not apologetic about crashing a few stereotypes. (I remember one called The Graduate.)
The movies we’re making for women have NOT improved. This is the same stupid-ass writing that’s brought us horrible, horrible, horrible chick flicks like The First Wives’ Clubs and The Women and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants and all those cliché my-time-of-the-month films.
Apparently all women have to do in their 40s and 50s is to be unhappy about love, confused about life, and needy about having friends.
The problem here isn’t the age of the actresses.
It’s that Hollywood doesn’t know what real life for women actually entails. It doesn’t know that life’s more complicated than soccer-practice “taxi” trips and bill-payments.
Hollywood doesn’t understand that not every woman gets manicures or pedicures.
It doesn’t get that not every woman is sitting around deviously hatching a plan to manipulate a man.
It doesn’t get that some of us actually love ourselves and our lives.
It doesn’t get that my quality of life isn’t determined by the ratio of man-delivered-orgasms versus personally-given ones.
Hollywood doesn’t understand women. At all. It didn’t 20 years ago, it doesn’t now.
I’ll confess: I’ve never been a real fan of Sex & The City.
That’s more because I’m not a girlie-girl and don’t really get into “girl” shows. I enjoyed some of it sometimes, but I’ve always been annoyed at how much validation its characters received from the male sex, or how much they all had to rally together and prop each other up against the un-validation given to them by male characters.
It always was a cliché — but a really well-written cliché with great laughs and realistic characters, and more true to some of the struggles of women in their 30s/40s than it is about them aging.
Now, though, it’s just another money-grubbing cliché-spewing pathetic example of why the mainstream movie machine is still broken.
And you smart, sexy, intelligent, successful women who are giving your money over to the box office to watch this piece-of-shit movie that stereotypes, demeans, and mocks the modern woman:
You’re part of the problem.
Shame on you.

Fit To Be Tied: A Woman's Right to Choose?

In 2006, I asked my doctor about getting my tubes tied so I wouldn’t have to worry about exploding with toddlers.
I was 30. He said no, that if a woman hasn’t had a child already, they typically won’t tie tubes when a woman’s under 35.
I’ll be 37 this fall and nothing has changed: My tubes are untied, I’ve never had a child, I never want one.
Moments, however, pass.
For a fleeting second, I’ll see a mom and her daughter, and the exchange is so silly and cute, that I smile fondly and remember my own mother and the bond we shared. I’ll never have that?
Yeah, I know. I’ll never have that. Yes, it’s a choice I’ve long made, and, yes, my choice sometimes saddens me.
But I know why I’ve made my choices, and I’ll stick to them. I’ve NEVER wanted to have a kid. And after life got hijacked by bad times, well, I want to sacrifice whats left of my life to a kid even less.
Even as a kid, I didn’t pretend my dolly was “my baby.” I’ve always liked kids, never wanted one.
This, unfortunately, makes me pretty unique.
Last night, some Twitter friends were caught in a debate about this news story out of Ontario, in which a young family has decided they’re full up on tykes. They don’t want any other kids beyond their two. Part of that young family is pictured here.
But she’s 21 and her husband is 23, so doctors won’t let her do a tubal ligation. She’s too young, too much life can happen, they say.
Now, I’m a woman, so I guess I should agree with the mom and dad, right? A woman’s body, woman’s right?
But I don’t.
I see their point. It makes great sense. And in a perfect world where parents have kids and kids grow up healthy and strong, it DOES make great sense.
But it’s not a perfect world. Marriages end, families split. Kids get sick. They die.
This mother could conceivably have more kids until she’s double her age. DOUBLE. Are her choices are coming from the right place? Is she just agreeing to a tubal ligation so they don’t have to risk having more kids, so they don’t have to buy contraceptives and fuss around?
Because getting tubes tied is no guarantee. A woman can conceive after a tubal ligation and it can be fatal.  My former sister-in-law almost died when she had a tubal pregnancy — it happened so quickly, too. Like a flash, she was hemorrhaging on a table and likely to die, leaving a 2-year-old boy to mourn her.
Luckily, she was saved. Miraculously, she reversed the procedure and, a decade later, has a new baby. With a new husband.
It’s not that no woman can make this decision and be sure, it’s that decisions like this are often made too lightly — even by “older, wiser” types.
Should it be allowed for young women to say, “No, I know what I want, and it’s not a KID” so they can have their tubes tied off? What do YOU think?
I’m torn. Yes, it should be allowed, but it should be a very hard decision to reach, and should be scrutinized by all involved, including a mental health practitioner.
Personally, I think a 21- and 23-year-old don’t know shit about life yet, so to think they’re “all done” is cute, at best.
But I get it. I understand.
Still, their ages aren’t in their favour.
I’ll be the first to admit I know what it’s like to be 21 and pissed that everyone thinks they know more about life than I do. I was a very wise 21-year-old and I took it personally when people questioned my age-appropriate wisdom.
But now I’m 36 and I’m telling you, I knew jack shit about life then. I had some ideas, but I’ve had a whole lot of years of confirmation and debunking since. When I’m 50, I’ll likely be able to say that about the age I am now, too. That’s life.
We grow, we change, we learn.
At 21, I’m pretty sure this woman has much to learn about life. And maybe she’s right and she’ll never have more kids.
Maybe.
But maybe she’ll be another marriage statistic with a broken home. Maybe a tragic accident will take the rest of her family from her.
Maybe.
Tragedies don’t just happen to OTHER people. Life doesn’t go according to plan. We’re stupidly naive little humans.
The doctors know this. It’s certainly worth their considering — especially when they spend 15-30 minutes tops with us for each appointment.
And if the only avenue doctors have is to say, “Well, you’re 21. SERIOUSLY,”  then there you go, maybe we need to hang onto that — because the wise among us are rare, and most people make decisions with knee-jerk considerations, not the gravity matters deserve.
But what do YOU think, and why?
Quick Facts:

  • SOME tubal ligations can be reversed. 6% of American women with tied tubes try  to reverse the procedure.
  • Depending on biology, it can often be done but chances of success depend drastically case-by-case.
  • 75% of tubal ligation reversals are as a result of divorcing and wanting kids with the new spouse.

RetroSteff: Why 40% of Women Don't Masturbate

When this blog first began, for its first year or so, it was all sex or relationships that I was writing about. Most of the time, anyhow, as I kept my “personal” writing on another blog. Somewhere along the way, I gave up separating the two.
But as I’m getting into writing my book, something’s got to give. As I said yesterday, I’m pretty sure y’all ain’t read my 4,000 postings on my two blogs, so I’m going to use this opportunity to help you find the ones worth reading on the days when I ain’t got time to write.
I figure that, you know, in a smirky tip of the hat to my efforts, I should at least make the first retro posting about masturbation and self-love. Continue reading

She's The King of The World!

(There are no The Hurt Locker spoilers here, no worries, since about 15 of you have seen it.)
thehurtlockernuevoposterIt took 82 years, but there’s finally a woman who holds the title of Academy Award-winning “Best Director” .
But it’s about more than just a woman taking home the big prize.
As a writer, I saw something incredible happen for a change at the Oscars. A little movie won. A movie won that was all heart, all story, all controversy, and had absolutely nothing “easy” about its content and no sell-out ending.
A lot of people who’ve not seen The Hurt Locker might think the film’s about the Iraq war, but like I was told by more than one person, it’s not. It’s not a movie “about” the Iraq War. It’s about one man trying to find his place. It’s about the hardest, most dangerous job in the world and what drives a man to do it. That just happens to be during the Iraq War.
Ask anyone who’s seen the movie if it’s pro-war or anti-war and they’ll have to stop and think — because it’s neither.
Continue reading

6 Decembre 1989: Remembering a Formative Tragedy

I was 16 on December 6th, 1989, when gunman Marc Lepine stormed into Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering school.
When the blood had spilled and screams for the 14 dead women faded into muffled tears, it was found that the gunman had left a note explaining his actions — he’d wanted to kill feminists for making his life so much harder, thanks to quotas and changes in hiring practices.
bigI don’t remember where I was when I’d heard about the killings, but I remember slowly growing aware of what happened and why. I remember the confusion I’d felt as as a 16-year-old and the anger and fear this massacre opened in me.
In 1989, things were pretty “advanced” for women already. We had the old soul sisters Annie Lennox and Aretha Franklin belting out that “sisters are doin’ it for themselves,” and movies like Baby Boom were showing that women no longer felt they had to have a man in order to make a “family” work.
I knew I could do anything I wanted to — that being a female really didn’t mean much anymore. Or did it?
Then, all my naivete changed. Continue reading

Miss California: The Boobs Are on the Job

I had to doublecheck my old-school calendar just now. Holy fuck, it really is 2009. Who knew?
Clearly not the folks running the Miss California Pageant.
Yeah, Miss California. You remember her? Perez Hilton went all “oh, no you didn’t [SNAP]” as a result of the ass-backward beauty’s anti-gay marriage stance she posited while she grinned and pointed her perky breasts at the —
[record scratches]
Right, the perky breasts. The now-to-be-infamous perky breasts paid for by the Miss California Pageant, so their homophobic girlie could have her cake and totally, like, not eat it at the Nationals. Continue reading

RANT: You Think You're A Feminist?

I can’t stand elitism. I can’t stand the “we’re better than you” mentality. And I sure as fuck can’t stand when someone’s got to get their hate on just to get ahead.
A particular blog post from someone in the sex blogging community is ridiculously sexist and moronic in its simplicity, in my opinion. Because I don’t feel the need to sling mud and hurt anyone’s reputations, I’ll leave it anonymous.
The blogger in question had a shitty day. Some guy, after she admitted she was responsible for causing a car accident, mouthed off with “It’s always the woman’s fault.” Because of this, she turned around and decided to slag all “privileged white males” as being asses.
Now, if she’d gone and said instead that she WORKS with privileged white males who are all asses, that’d be different, but her post more or less painted all as the same, and THAT is something I have a problem with.
Here’s the deal. Continue reading

Should Irwin Have Changed After Kids?

So, earlier I asked if you have the right to ask a risk-taker to tone down their lifestyle once you get hooked to them.
My opinion? No. You do not. And if they tell you you can go ahead and tell them how to change; don’t. You’d fucking with what oughtn’t be fucked.
In a nutshell.
My posting was inspired by the death of Steve Irwin. There are those who apprently think he should’ve “settled down” since he had kids. Yeah, as a kid, the first thing I wanna know is that my father gave up almost everything he loved so he could raise me — sit in a fucking armchair with a remote and tell me how he “used to be like that” once.
Terri Irwin got a precious gift that most of us might never, ever, ever receive: She fell in love with someone who kept all the qualities that made him so loveable as the person he was when they first met. Bloody sweet, that. And she had it for a while. And then it got snatched. Love happens, death happens, it all is what it is.
Life’s a truckload of hurts some days and there’s no getting around that.
The point is, it’s hard enough to be ourselves in the face of everyday life. It’s harder still to remember who we are when we get lost in the arms of someone else. To be able to hang on to your identity despite your love for someone else and your wish to be with them, why, that’s as downright admirable as it gets.
To hell with those who think otherwise.

_________________

In other Croc-Hunter news, let me go on record to say that, while Germaine Greer periodically says something intelligent, I:
a) think she can be a complete twat who has done as much to hinder feminism as she has to further it. She’s arrogant, dismissive of men, flighty, inconsistent, hypocritical, and far too militant for my tastes. (Despite my believing I’m a feminist, thank you very much. Ain’t no fucking eunuch here, baby.)
b) think she’s a far bigger bitch than I’d thought before now that I’ve read her comments on the death of Steve Irwin.
I do not believe that to be a strong woman I need to demoralize men. I believe that, as a strong, independent chick, I can exalt men in my life and cater to them as I wish, because I fucking well know who I am when I go to bed at night (most of the time; we all get a little too lost in our relationships some of the time). I take no backseat to any man. But I’ll hold the door open for ’em if they’ll let me, because I have nothing to prove. I’m empowered by the mere fact that I don’t need to seek power, all right?
I’d get into my whole beef about how feminism has been executed, but I’m too tired and it’d take too damned long. Suffice to say that while I fight for my equality, I don’t think it needs to come at the cost of emasculating men. There’s room enough for us both, and I don’t think chicks like Greer understand that concept, but then I don’t like her enough to read her work. I listen to others gripe about her and praise her, so I’m ignorant, but by choice.