DISQUS

I have tried to contact Sunless Nick via Hathor and the Contact form mistakes me for spam. I would like to ask Sunless Nick's permission to translate and adapt this blog post into Spanish, so that I can send it to friends and put it in my blog. With "adapt" I mean to remove some cultural references that are unknown in Spain such as "rape kits" or Kobe Bryant. Nick, if you want to contact me my email is eugeniaandino at yahoo dot com.

I love the way this blog can put together a clip of Van Damme dancing and a critique of rape jokes. It's like jeans and stilettos, they shouldn't work together but they do.

I guess that "They simply affirmed something that which has and forever has existed." means "they affirmed that the only real marriage is between one man and one woman". Let's make a list of what has constituted a real marriage. No particular order.

- The absorption of a woman into a man´s legal status as a person.
- The absorption of a woman into her father in law's family, her status becoming as much "X's wife", as "Sister-in-law number N"
- The union of infants / children / minors, supervised by their parents as a way to create political unions (royalty etc).
- The union of an infant / child / minor with and adult, for the same reasons.
- Unions that could, or could not, be broken, depending on who was the king at the time.
- Unions that quite often did not require consent.
- The union of a man with one or more legal wives. Official mistresses (as in-residence, second-class wives) sometimes optional, sometimes forbidden.
- The sharing on a woman among several men, normally of the same family.

I think that saying that the union of two consenting people, man and woman, for life, is the only thing that constitutes a real marriage, requires a good dose of blindness.

Brenda Johnson from The Closer. But I was a child when HIll Street Blues was on TV; I don't remember anyone's names, but I loved it because my parents did.

Glass-ceramic stoves. Phew, it took me four internet searches to find the name in English.

Melissa, I read the blog on bloglines. I don't read every article, and I very rearely read the comments. When you disappeared, I thought that you had gone on holidays and only after several days I read one of Portly's posts about how you were feeling. Then I made a donation.

I have learnt more about third wave feminism reading this blog for six months than in four years as a PhD student.

And I miss you. I think it is selfish to say that, but still. I miss you.

oddjob, the thing about medical ethics is that lots of doctors (urologists, gynecologists, and non-specialised doctors) don't always take into account partner transmission when a woman has a UTI or candida, because we can get it without sexual transmission anyway. In the past, I've had my UTIs / thrush / etc checked by about five or six different doctors, and the ones that didn't know me personally didn't even ask if I was sexually active. It's like having a house with five doors, and closing four, and wondering how the robbers got in.

Hey, men can need something similar to a pap smear, but I don't think there is enough interest in stopping them from spreading STDs. Quite graphic detail follows.














My ex-boyfriend had an active colony of Candida on his glans before we started our relationship. It was visible, as a brownish stain on the pink skin, and he told me that when he was on his previous relationship, he went to an urologist who said that he didn't know if the stain was a live colony or a scar, and the way to check it was to make a biopsy. My ex thought that the idea of having a tiny piece of skin cut off was simply horrifying. The urologist knew he had a partner and didn't care about her getting candida a second time after my ex refused the biopsy.

Later on, when I got candida repeatedly, everyone blamed my low defenses, hygiene or habits. Funny thing I haven't had an infection in years. Not even after sharing towels in a campsite while taking antibiotics. So, I ended up believing that if men don't go to the urologist as often as women go to the gyne it's because no one cares sufficiently about their partners' health.

The truth is, when I saw the speeches on television I didn't think anything, zero, about Michelle Obama's dress, but I did think that 1) Biden and Barack Obama had coordinated their ties on purpose, and it looked silly, 2) McCain had coordinated his tie with his wife's clothes, and it looked ridiculous.

yugenue, Again, I'm not American but I'm from the part of my country with the "funny accent". As in, anything said with my accent is understood as a comedy act if you drive 100 miles up north. And I absolutely agree with what you say. Mocking is bad, imitating is worse.

I'm European and I'm 30 years-old. This question is not rethorical. Was there a time in History in which the Republican party didn't suck?

The Spanish elections, 2000. I didn't vote because I didn't like the Socialist candidate, Almunia, and he didn't stand a chance against the Conservative president, Aznar. People like me gave Aznar the Parliamentary majority he used to send us to Iraq and to destroy the University system, among other things.

Well, the values of the French revolution were equality, freedom, fraternity. I see American politicians talk a lot about freedom, less about equality, and zero about fraternity. So maybe Fraternity is the liberal, leftist, European value??

I teach English to 14/15 year-olds. Liss, I hope you like to know that half of today's class was dedicated to the American election and some basic differences between your political system and ours. They aren't my easiest group, but they were interested, and they could even extract a grammar lesson from Obama's slogan and compare if to McCain's. Some of my students are even excited about being old enough to vote in our national elections in February 2012!

Re: Santander Bank. These guys are so efficient they are scary. Part of the reason is that the "Bank of Spain" (the bank-for-banks, kind of like the Federal Reserve) has very tight rules about what banks can and cannot do. For this and a few other reasons, Spanish banks have been some of the safest in the world. I will think this crisis is the end of the world when any of the four major Spanish banks is in trouble.

WOW.

It's not spooky, it would still be in awful bad taste even if it was the whitest, richest male on the planet.

I have been brought up in a country where religion is Catholic by default. About 5% of the people go to church on Sundays, but everyone celebrates all the fun holidays. If you're not Catholic or you want to break up with Catholicism, you become (or are brought up as) an atheist. That's it. I'm a bit different because I've travelled quite a lot. And these are the ways in which it has affected me:

First, I would become Episcopalian if I could, just because of its official position regarding homosexuality and women priests. I consider myself Christian-not-Catholic.

God is to me sometimes neutral, sometimes female. When I'm in the mood to pray to a male God I think of Jesus, rather than God the father.

I've added to my faith bits and pieces of Paganism / Wicca that aren't in too much direct contradiction with the Gospel, just because it is more comfortable to have a less patriarchal religion.

And I would like to go to church more often, I miss church, but I just can't go to a Catholic church here, knowing that a woman could never, ever be preaching there. I go maybe once or twice a year.

In short, patriarchal religion has made me more eclectic and also lonelier in my practice.

I read in a Spanish newspaper that Palin hasn't been seen wearing the same clothes twice since she became the VP nominee. Is there any truth to that? Because if she's having, let's say, a public appearance a day for 50 days, that's 50 suits. Even if they are all going to charity afterwards, that's a ridiculous waste.

It's an excellent article. And I have to confess that when I read the bit about Margaret Thatcher I thought for one fleeting second "That one? But she didn't deserve any respect!".

"people who think that they're better than anyone else. "

I think that you have to be very stupid to mix up "elitist" and "arrogant". Specially if you've given plenty of evidence of being both.

(child abuse follows; warning)










My first wet kiss was non-consensual, aged 12, and the second wasn't either, age 17. In the first case, it was a stranger, and in the second, we were flirting, something was certainly building up, but I didn't expect a wet kiss so soon and I panicked. The poor boy was so sorry and confused!

A couple of years later, when I finaly had consensual wet kisses, I was very surprised by the great difference and the intensity of the feeling. I thought it would be the same feeling on my mouth + pleasure. Somehow, it was something else.

This is Spanish, so bear with me. "influencia" = influence, the noun. "influir" = influence, the verb. "influido" = influence, the adjective. I hate it when people say influenciar (verb), influenciado (adj). It's incorrect and sounds horrible.

And "razonable" (reasonable) to mean "good, positive".

Don't worry! I'm just incredibly happy that a regular commenter here agrees with me after I have looked stupid a handful of times :)

hattie, am I the Nila you mention?

when it comes to violence in general it's more often the *men* who are the victims, so it's not even fulfilling that particular stereotype. (Is stereotype the right word here? English is not my first language.)

English is not my first language and the United States are quite an alien culture to me so I'm assuming you have good faith.

Can you tell me what is that violence "in general" you refer to?
Workplace? Ehem. Women make less money than men, and suffer sexual harrassment among other forms of sexual and psychological violence. Women in the world as a whole are poorer than men. Poor people are more vulnerable to violence.
War? There are more male soldiers than women soldiers. True. In modern warfare, these male soldiers either bomb equal parts of men and women from a plane or with a distance-guided missile, OR they go to Country B, and rape anyone available. The victims of modern wars are women, more than men.
Domestic situations? The amount of female abuse of male partners in the Western world is calculated to be about 10% of all violent situations.
Violence due to the fact that a man fails to achieve masculinity standards? Hi. Welcome to feminism, we are trying to overcome patriarchy and the imposition of gender standards. Would you like to join us?