The Greatest Sentence Ever

This was in The Montreal Gazette a couple weeks ago, I put it aside and forgot about it til now. The paper celebrated International Women's Day on March 8th with a feature on feminism. One of their articles, on page B4, included this sentence:

"In her second year of environmental and First Nations studies at McGill, Rea Fenger is not sure she would even have called herself a feminist before she started working on the Radical Vulvas project."

The world has come a long way in my short lifetime for a sentence like that to even be conceivable, let alone to be presented in such an entirely matter-of-fact, unremarkable manner. Ah, progress.

Lower down, on the very same page, just to show us that there are still some perversions which even our society will disapprove of, is an article condemning that great evil, stay-at-home motherhood. Choice excerpts include a call for "a life more challenging than the playground and the PTA," the contention that women who leave the workplace "are neglecting their duty to society in general," and the plea that these women not abandon the public world for "the private world of laundry and kissing boo-boos." I, for one, take solace in the knowledge that for all those incredibly selfish stay-at-home mothers who, let's face it, should have had abortions in the first place, there are brave, progressive pioneers like Rea Fenger, studying the effects of Friday night bingo games on the ozone layer, and radicalizing vulvas wherever she goes.

The weirdest part of that anti-motherhood opinion piece (by The Gazette's Peggy Curran, if anybody cares, and titled 'Get To Work manifesto takes aim at the backlash generation') is this statement, presented not as opinion but as fact: "Conservatives are already asking why society should spend resources educating women." Really? Funny, I know my fair share of conservatives, and while the movement to repeal the nineteenth amendment is gaining ground, I haven't heard anyone suggest women shouldn't be allowed an education. The very idea is profoundly unfair. Can you imagine, women banned from a place like Harvard? The very thought makes me furious - I mean, why should they get all the breaks?!

Announcement

Sorry I haven't been blogging, I've been SUPER busy, working on lots of big non-bloggable projects and important career stuff, don't really have time to blog like I did when I started and was at school and bored out of my mind. I'll try my best, but you're really much better off reading Rachel Lucas and Kathy Shaidle and the other lovely folks in the blogroll anyway.

If I do post something soon, it'll be about how soul-numbingly awful No Country for Old Men is, I don't think I'll be able to keep that rant to myself.

Anyhoo, the announcement. I'm moving! To Virginia!!! I am beyond ecstatic. What a beautiful state, and I've always longed to live in the South, I set off in June and can hardly wait.

I LOVE This

Absolutely classic. I doubt the citizens of Ontario will prove as defiant (or imaginative)...

The Nail on the Head

Very insightful, very accurate observations in this post over at Church of the Masses, don't miss it.

Great Obama post

Over at Rachel Lucas. Heck, all her posts are great, and if I'd be honest I'd do little more than link to her and Kathy Shaidle all day, but I'm trying to show some restraint here, folks. Anyway, my favorite part from this post:

remember how much fun it was when Hillary was First Lady to call her names,
criticize everything about her (hair, face, clothes, ankles, size of butt,
voice, ideas, you name it)? How easy it was and how only some impotent feminists
cried foul? Well I hope you got it out of your system because you won’t be doing
the same to Michelle Obama when her husband gets elected, unless of course you
like being accused of racism.

The part where I disagree, though, comes here: "it makes no sense to me, because you’d think minorities would be less offended by Whitey treating them the same than by Whitey treating them like sensitive little children who can’t take their punches like everyone else." Come on, Rachel, you know that can't be true - if it were, affirmative action wouldn't even be an issue because black people would be too proud to accept it. We all know that certainly is not the case.