Heart of Snarkness |
is: Rock and Roll, baseball, comics, hockey, video games, education, animal rights, SoCal, grammar, raising chickens, examples of my social ineptitude, and the pratfalls of interacting with females, all with a healthy dose of snark. At least that's the plan. UPDATE: I do not usually post personal whining, so I guess interesting stories about MY experiences with women are mostly out, but I do reblog funny stuff from anyone else. Political tidbits are fair game; anything for a laugh, really. If it makes me smile or makes me angry I'll put it up here. So, snark is promised and shall be delivered. I'm a health nut and a vegetarian for six years now, so veggie stuff may pop up here as well. Also, I like to write, in case you didn't notice. |
“It’s easy to see why the lowest-ranked country is Yemen, where 55 percent of women are illiterate, 79 percent do not participate in the labor force, and just one woman serves in the 301-person parliament. Horrific news reports about 12-year-old girls dying in childbirth do little to stem the tide of child marriage there. Instead, demonstrations in support of child marriage outstrip those against it, fueled by clerical declarations that opponents of state-sanctioned pedophilia are apostates because the Prophet Mohammed, according to them, married his second wife, Aisha, when she was a child.”
Then — the 1980s and 1990s — as now, clerics on Saudi TV were obsessed with women and their orifices, especially what came out of them. I’ll never forget hearing that if a baby boy urinated on you, you could go ahead and pray in the same clothes, yet if a baby girl peed on you, you had to change. What on Earth in the girl’s urine made you impure? I wondered.
Hatred of women.
How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after “morality police” barred them from fleeing the burning building — and kept firefighters from rescuing them — because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened.
What hope can there be for women in the new Egyptian parliament, dominated as it is by men stuck in the seventh century? A quarter of those parliamentary seats are now held by Salafis, who believe that mimicking the original ways of the Prophet Mohammed is an appropriate prescription for modern life. Last fall, when fielding female candidates, Egypt’s Salafi Nour Party ran a flower in place of each woman’s face. Women are not to be seen or heard — even their voices are a temptation — so there they are in the Egyptian parliament, covered from head to toe in black and never uttering a word.
And we’re in the middle of a revolution in Egypt! It’s a revolution in which women have died, been beaten, shot at, and sexually assaulted fighting alongside men to rid our country of that uppercase Patriarch — Mubarak — yet so many lowercase patriarchs still oppress us. The Muslim Brotherhood, with almost half the total seats in our new revolutionary parliament, does not believe women (or Christians for that matter) can be president. The woman who heads the “women’s committee” of the Brotherhood’s political party said recently that women should not march or protest because it’s more “dignified” to let their husbands and brothers demonstrate for them.
Why am I laughing at this? My god it’s so funny, but THEY ARE SERIOUS. OK, at least the guy is serious. The woman might have another agenda besides actually passing and enforcing her bill. Teenagers; I wouldn’t worry about her confiscating all your old used socks anytime soon.
”I put forth an amendment that outlaws the depositing of sperm anywhere other than a woman’s vagina.”
”If killing a zygote is murder, wasting semen should be murder.”
This story was running its way through some small press sites, but of course jezebel has the best headline.
I love comics; absolutely love all forms of comics, including newspaper strips. Historically, comics have been a place where artists may put controversial work, including nudity and unpopular opinions. I’m not sure the kids reading page is a good pairing with the comics section, but I know if I have kids, they will be allowed and encouraged to read comics, just like I was. This Doonesbury strip includes no nudity, no foul language, and no shocking controversial point.
Many people (including me) object to mandatory medically unnecessary transvaginal ultrasounds for women who don’t need them and can’t afford them. As if what they are going through was an easy or inexpensive process anyway (it’s not), we now have to shame and tax them extra? This Doonesbury comic is timely and hopefully brings some humanity to the discussion, but it can only do this if people see it. So, since you may not otherwise see it, here it is. Click on the image at the link to see it bigger. Thanks, Gary Trudeau.
