Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers' Alliance.

"Sanvean (I Am Your Shadow)" -- Dead Can Dance

"If a woman's husband dies, let her lead a life of chastity, or else mount his pyre" -- Vishnu Smrti xxv.14

Last month, in the wake of the ghastly stoning death of D'ah Khalil Aswad, My Left Wing's Maryscott O'Connor wrote a passionate indictment of organized religion.

Sure, I hate all organized religions. But I especially loathe those religions that use special modes of dress and behaviour to segregate women from men; in itself, that shouldn't mean much, but invariably when women are especially set apart from men, it is generally with the understanding that it is because women are either inferior or dangerous or "unclean."

Witness the Hindu widows of India.

Most leaders and the press view violence against women and children as just "a women's issue" or "a children's issue" - in their minds, a secondary issue. But it's not only that millions of women and children are victims of violence in their homes every year; the fact is that intimate violence provides a basic model for using force to impose one's will on others.

When children either experience or observe violence against their mothers in their homes, they learn that it's ok, even "moral," to use violence to impose one's will on others. This is why throughout history, the most violently despotic and warlike societies have been those where violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman.

Author of "The Feminine Mistake" Leslie Bennetts writes in The Huffington Post:

Everyone knows that authors have to be prepared for negative reviews. What I didn't anticipate was an avalanche of blistering attacks by women who hadn't read my book but couldn't wait to condemn it. Their fury says a great deal about the current debate over women's choices -- all of it alarming.

In the comment thread that follows, hcgorman asks:

 Maybe it is the title?

You know hc, I had the exact same thought. And yes, I get that it's a play on "The Feminine Mystique." But maybe a lot of us are just tired of being told that no matter what we do, no matter what we choose, we're always wrong.

I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
my self
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind
and my body and my soul and
whether it's about walking out at night
or whether it's about the love that I feel or
whether it's about the sanctity of my vagina or
the sanctity of my national boundaries
or the sanctity of my leaders or the sanctity
of each and every desire
that I know from my personal and indiosyncratic
and indisputably single and singular heart
I have been raped

-- Poem About My Rights by June Jordan (excerpt)

I went to see "Casualties of War" in the theater, when it first came out. I didn't know that much about it. I liked Michael J. Fox. He was so adorable in "Family Ties." And I was fascinated by Vietnam history. I probably should have read some reviews, but I hate spoilers. So I was totally unprepared.

Amy Richards is at work on Opting-In: The Case for Motherhood and Feminism, which will be published in 2007. She is also the co-author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future and Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism. In 1992 she co-founded the Third Wave Foundation and since 1995 she has been the voice behind Ask Amy, an online advice column.  This is her first time writing on www.RHRealityCheck.org.

Bill O'Reilly doesn't scare me. I have been on his show a few times and know that his bark is a lot louder than his bite. He's a bully, in that classic playground sense - he's not nice, unless you play his game. That said, however, when his producer invited me to contribute to a segment about the then impending Supreme Court cases dealing with later-term abortions, and the medical records from two abortion providers in Kansas being turned over to that state's Attorney General after a two year escapade, I was apprehensive.

I just read the NYT article about the stained glass ceiling for women in the church, and I was especially struck by this comment:

...in the marketplace of ideas and values, men matter most and...by definition, women have to take a back seat...

Why do men matter most in the marketplace of ideas?

I have stayed out of the Duke Lacrosse rape story. I have no capacity for journalistic dispassion on this issue for reasons that should become clear as of this writing. My associate the Blogging Curmudgeon emailed me this CNN story this morning and I found myself staring at the smug visage of Reade Seligmann for several uncomfortable moments: handsome, entitled, determined, all-American, boy-next-door. Suddenly, I was hurled back in time to my own high school days; days I prefer to think of as long ago and far away.

In my case it was the star of our high school basketball team who I knew better as an altar boy at my church. He was handsome, poised, intelligent, and we all knew, destined for greatness. When I first heard, through the rumor mill, that a girl had accused him of date rape, I simply did not believe it. No one did. We all sounded much like the good reverend quoted by CNN:

"Knowing Reade Seligmann as well as we do here at Delbarton, I believe him innocent of the charges," said the Rev. Luke L. Travers, headmaster at Seligmann's $22,500-a-year high school.

Just give 'em a hummer. Thus spake Sharon Stone.

Young people talk to me about what to do if they're being pressed for sex. I tell them (what I believe): Oral sex is a hundred times safer than vaginal or anal sex. 'If you're in a situation where you cannot get out of sex, offer a blow job.' I'm not embarrassed to tell them.

Well I'm mortified to read it.

When I read the Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, it was a punch in the gut -- what Friedan wrote about, was the reason for my mother's suicide.

Bright, but from a depression-blighted family and a woman, so college was out of the question, my mother scored so high on federal exams that she became the head of the local employment office.

And then the men came back from World War II, she married my father (not so fresh from shell shock) and my mother was relegated to a lonely kitchen, as a baby machine.

When I read the Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique, it was a punch in the gut -- what Friedan wrote about, was the reason for my mother's suicide.

Bright, but from a depression-blighted family and a woman, so college was out of the question, my mother scored so high on federal exams that she became the head of the local employment office.

And then the men came back from World War II, she married my father (not so fresh from shell shock) and my mother was relegated to a lonely kitchen, as a baby machine.