…like a fish needs a bicycle.

Context here.

Ann Coulter

A Michigan legislator, Lisa Brown, gave a speech in the statehouse last week that would have made her right at home in a women’s studies course at a local community college, but a wacko in a group of actual legislators.

She commented on a pending abortion bill by first announcing that she was Jewish, kept kosher, described her various sets of plates, and then saying that Jewish law makes abortion mandatory to save the life of the mother.

This had absolutely nothing to do with the bill being considered, but it may explain why there are no Jewish Tim Tebows.

Then she said: “I have not asked you to adopt and adhere to my religious beliefs. Why are you asking me to adopt yours?”

Her smashing crescendo was: “And finally Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no’!”

It’s not clear where Rep. Brown got the idea that the Republican caucus was planning on date-raping her, but I think there’s been a terrible misunderstanding. The bill under consideration merely ensured the safety of women having abortions — and, in a small way, the safety of the fetus, whom the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited legislatures from protecting directly.

Thus, the bill addressed insurance and inspections of abortion clinics, and included a requirement that the abortionist confirm that the woman having the abortion was not being pressured by a third party to do so.

I have not polled all the Republicans in the Michigan statehouse yet, but the ones I’ve spoken to assure me that Rep. Brown’s vagina played a very small role in their deliberations. It’s odd that she seems to think she’s the object of so much Republican male fantasy.

Why must a certain type of woman always start shouting about her vagina whenever the (more…)

A 6-year-old boy was suspended from his school for three days after school officials say he told a girl “I’m sexy and I know it,” a line from a popular song.

D’Avonte Meadows, a first-grader at Sable Elementary School in Aurora, is accused of sexual harassment and disrupting other students, according to a letter the school district sent to the boy’s mother after he was sent home Wednesday.

School officials issued a statement saying they couldn’t discuss the case, but they pointed out a school board policy that defines sexual harassment as any unwelcome sexual advance. There is no age limit.

Sexual harassment used to mean the boss made a demand on female employees: put out or else.

Then it was expanded to include things that would create a hostile work place, such as men telling raunchy jokes or putting raunchy posters on the wall.

Fine.

But a six year old makes a “sexual advance” by quoting a lyric?

Suppose it was a 30-year old in an office, quoting the same line to a female staffer. Would she be helpless and collapse into a puddle of tears? Faint?

No, she’d more likely come back with a wisecrack such as, “Glad you know it because no one else does.” And he’d slink away. (Unless he was Bill Clinton — he’d go find someone to fondle.)

The Democrats invented a fake “war on women.” Infantilizing them into shrinking violets inflicts true damage.

As for D’Avonte, perhaps he’s learned a valuable lesson: there are jerks in charge where you’d least expect it.

Now he knows.

Kirsten Powers in the Daily Beast

Did you know there is a war on women?

Yes, it’s true. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher, Matt Taibbi, and Ed Schultz have been waging it for years with their misogynist outbursts. There have been boycotts by people on the left who are outraged that these guys still have jobs. Oh, wait. Sorry, that never happened.

Boycotts are reserved for people on the right like Rush Limbaugh, who finally apologized Saturday for calling a 30-year-old Georgetown Law student, Sandra Fluke, a “slut” after she testified before congress about contraception. Limbaugh’s apology was likely extracted to stop the departure of any more advertisers, who were rightly under pressure from liberal groups outraged by the comments.

Let it be shouted from the rooftops that Rush Limbaugh should not have called Ms. Fluke a slut or, as he added later, a “prostitute” who should post her sex tapes. It’s unlikely that his apology will assuage the people on a warpath for his scalp, and after all, why should it? He spent days attacking a woman as a slut and prostitute and refused to relent. Now because he doesn’t want to lose advertisers, he apologizes. What’s in order is something more like groveling—and of course a phone call to Ms. Fluke—if you ask me.

But if Limbaugh’s actions demand a boycott—and they do—then what about the army of swine on the left?

During the 2008 election Ed Schultz said on his radio show that Sarah Palin set off a “bimbo alert.”He called Laura Ingraham a “right-wing slut.” (He later apologized.) He once even took to his blog to call yours truly a “bimbo” for the offense of quoting him accurately in a New York Post column.

Keith Olbermann has said that conservative commentator S.E. Cupp should have been aborted by her parents, apparently because he finds her having opinions offensive. He called Michelle Malkin a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick.” He found it newsworthy to discuss Carrie Prejean’s breasts on his (more…)

Here is yet another example of why the federal government should not be steering the economy.

Christina Hoff Sommers:

…the situation being whether you’re a Democrat or Republican.

Don Surber:

I am going to keep this simple. What was said by National Organization President Patricia Ireland about Paul Jones on April 2, 1998, and what NOW is saying now about Herman Cain.

From April 2, 1998:

Judge Susan Webber Wright’s ruling dismissing Paula Jones’ complaint against Bill Clinton certainly gives lie to the right-wing charge that anti-discrimination laws have gone too far. And it shoots down the tired complaint that a man can’t even compliment a woman at work anymore.

Jones alleges that Clinton ran his hand up her thigh, exposed himself to her, asked for oral sex and pointedly reminded her of his friendship with her immediate boss. No woman should have to put up with such behavior at work. But according to the judge, even if then-Governor Bill Clinton propositioned and pawed then-state employee Paula Jones — certainly misconduct for any employer or supervisor, Jones does not have a valid harassment claim because she could not prove that the overall result was a hostile work environment.

This ruling does not mean it’s open season on women in the workforce.

Women who face unwelcome sexual behavior at work can still win in court if the harassment is so pervasive or so severe that it interferes with their jobs. When it does, lewd bosses and crude co-workers can and will be held accountable.

From Erin Matson, NOW Action Vice President on Monday:

Revelations that presidential candidate Herman Cain was accused of sexual harassment while heading the National Restaurant Association, as well as suggestions that financial settlements bought silence, are deeply troubling.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sexual harassment in the workplace. Unfortunately that has not stopped the widespread practice of unwelcome sexual advances, innuendos and jokes in the workplace being leveraged by men against women.

Last night, Mr. Cain’s campaign responded to news reports of the allegations with a statement that the press were “Spreading rumors that never stood up to the facts.” And yet this morning, Mr. Cain acknowledged that he was accused of sexual harassment while he was at the National Restaurant Association.

Setting the Cain campaign’s utter disregard for the facts aside, it’s outrageous for anyone to suggest that sexual harassment allegations represent political smears to be dismissed rather than the bravery and dignity of women simply trying to go to work.

This morning, Mr. Cain made a statement saying: “Yes, I do have a sense of humor. Some people have a problem with that. Herman is going to stay Herman. Thank you very much.” Feminists will continue to closely follow this story with the seriousness it deserves.

From Wikipedia: “On November 13, 1998, Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000, the entire amount of her claim, but without an apology, in exchange for her agreement to drop the appeal.”

This case that NOW kissed off as dismissed was settled for every dime she demanded 6 months later.

According to press accounts, Herman Cain’s accuser received $35,000 – 4 cents for every $1 Miss Jones received.

Kathryn Jean Lopez:

I’ve given birth to five babies, and I’ve taken 23 foster children into my home,” Michele Bachman explained from the stage of the first major Republican presidential primary debate of the 2012 season.

Jon Stewart would joke the next day that Bachmann was the winner of the primary “baby-off.” Imagining himself moderator, The Daily Show host added: “And I just wanna ask everyone else here up on the dais, Have you ever had to divide a birthday cake into 28 equal pieces?”

The Minnesota congresswoman was answering a question about abortion and brandishing her most authentic credentials as an embodiment of those God-given rights America was established to protect. She also underscored one of the ways she is a formidable challenge to conventional media narratives about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — a woman who fearlessly and credibly calls President Obama on the “shocking” lack of empathy that his policies demonstrate. She represents a continuing, promising threat to the prevailing view of what exactly social justice (see www.seeksocialjustice.com) and even feminism is.

The entrance of Sarah Palin onto the national political scene in 2008 marked a milestone: No longer could the mainstream media pretend that women in politics were all about liberal Democrats, wedded to the so-called ‘women’s issue,’ legal abortion. Now a candidate for the presidency, Bachmann drives that point home.

“Michele Bachmann’s commanding presence and performance in the debate sealed a political evolution that has been fomenting for some time: the diminution of feminism and the evolution of femininity,” Kellyanne Conway, president of the polling company, says.

It’s about time. Polls consistently show that the majority of the country leans toward being pro-life — it’s why advocates of legal abortion will talk about making it “rare.” We’re a country that knows that abortion is not a good. And even 57 percent of “pro-choice” women in New York City think the 41 percent abortion rate there is outrageous, according to a McLaughlin & Associates poll done for the Chiaroscuro Foundation this spring.

Italians must regard Americans as Puritans.

How could a nation that once had a porn star proudly serving in its parliament(Cicciolina) and the equivalent of Hugh Hefner running the country not think that?

A recent New Yorker story about Italy’s head of state since 1995, Silvio Berlusconi, and his prostitution trial had me laughing out loud at his outrageous behavior.

He owns most of the Italian media and is known for his sexist TV shows.

On “Colpo Grosso,” a game show that aired in the late eighties and early nineties, contestants had to strip if they got an answer wrong, and the inevitable conclusion was a showcase of topless women, blushing and trying to cover themselves with their hands…. “Buona Domenica,” which is on the air now, features young women in tight dresses being prodded into a clear shower stall to get soaked in front of a live audience. On one episode, the host explains to a guest, “I’m not doing it for me, I’m doing it for all Italian men—you get the shower.”… On “Scherzi a parte,” a woman in her underpants hangs from a meat hook alongside hundreds of hams as a man in a butcher’s costume stamps a sell-by date on her behind.

Cheryl Thomas in the Daily Beast:

As far as we know, the immigrant woman who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape has not been ignored, harassed, or banished from her community. Nor has she been accused of prostitution or dishonoring her family, as she might be in many parts of the world.

Rather, New York law-enforcement officials have carefully documented and followed up on the hotel housekeeper’s allegations of violent sexual assault. They pursued a massively powerful man onto an airplane and arrested him based on her statement alone, with no witnesses to corroborate her story. A female judge denied bail and the accused was detained, and prosecutors prepared a complaint.

Compared with what happens in much of the world, our legal system’s response, acknowledging that rape is real criminal behavior instead of shaming or blaming the victim or completely dismissing her claims, is revolutionary. I am deeply proud of it.

Indeed. And it’s not just Muslim primitives who devalue women.

The French, reflexively fawned over by American pseudo-sophisticates, seem to regard child rape (Roman Polanski) a minor indiscretion.

Carrie Lukas:

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day—so dubbed by the National Committee for Pay Equity, which represents feminist groups including the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority, the National Council of Women’s Organizations and others. The day falls on April 12 because, according to feminist logic, women have to work that far into a calendar year before they earn what men already earned the year before.

In years past, feminist leaders marked the occasion by rallying outside the U.S. Capitol to decry the pernicious wage gap and call for government action to address systematic discrimination against women. This year will be relatively quiet. Perhaps feminists feel awkward protesting a liberal-dominated government—or perhaps they know that the recent economic downturn has exposed as ridiculous their claims that our economy is ruled by a sexist patriarchy.

The unemployment rate is consistently higher among men than among women. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 9.3% of men over the age of 16 are currently out of work. The figure for women is 8.3%. Unemployment fell for both sexes over the past year, but labor force participation (the percentage of working age people employed) also dropped. The participation rate fell more among men (to 70.4% today from 71.4% in March 2010) than women (to 58.3% from 58.8%). That means much of the improvement in unemployment numbers comes from discouraged workers—particularly male ones—giving up their job searches entirely.

Men have been hit harder by this recession because they tend to work in fields like construction, manufacturing and trucking, which are disproportionately affected by bad economic conditions. Women cluster in more insulated occupations, such as teaching, health care and service industries…

It gets raucous as Pakistani actress Veena Malik tells off the mullah.

…women’s sports not getting enough ink.

Christina Hoff Sommers write:

Since 1989, the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California (USC) has published a study of “Gender in Televised Sports” every five years. The latest report has just been released and the Women’s Victim Industrial Complex is reeling from the findings. “Shocking,” says the Women’s Sports Foundation.

According to the report, coverage of women’s professional teams has “nearly evaporated” and a “deepening silence” has enveloped women’s professional soccer, basketball, golf, field hockey, and softball. “Nothing short of stunning” says author Michael Messner, a feminist sociologist at USC. “This is simply intolerable.”

Diana Nyad, sports show host for National Public Radio affiliate KCRW and a celebrated distance swimming champion, was moved to write a special introduction to the latest report: “Women’s athletic skill levels have risen astronomically over the past twenty years … It is time for television news and highlights shows to keep pace with this revolution.” She describes the neglect of women’s sports as “unfathomable and unacceptable.”

But the heavy focus of news and highlights shows on men’s sports is not only fathomable but obvious—that is where the fans are. And that is where advertisers expect to find customers for “male” products such as beer, razors, and cars. Men’s professional sports are a fascination (obsession is more like it) to many millions of men, because they offer extreme competition, performance, and heroics. Women’s professional sports, however skilled and admirable, cannot compare in Promethean drama.

IBD:

Arne Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools since 2001, has garnered much praise for his efforts to improve them. But his efforts have largely amounted to pouring new wine into old bottles with little to show for them.

Duncan holds a degree in sociology, not education. He supports higher teacher pay and more training but has done little to loosen the teachers’ unions’ grip on education. Like the UAW, these unions have been a drag on innovation while imposing huge costs.

He has supported closing failing schools but not the right of parents to take kids elsewhere. According to a 2005 Chicago Sun-Times article, Duncan, Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Chicago Teachers Union all oppose vouchers, saying they “haven’t been proved to be effective and would tax public resources.”

Duncan’s record has been unimpressive. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), Chicago Public Schools have remained below the national average during Duncan’s term.

Under Duncan, Chicago schools’ average reading scores rose just one point on average from 2002 to 2007, to 250 out of 500. The national average in 2007 was 263, and 75% of Chicago students scored less.

In math, scores rose from 254 in 2003 to 260 in 2007. But the national average that year was 280. Again, 75% of Chicago students scored below the national average. In writing, the story was the same, with about half falling below the national average.

President of Los Angeles NOW endorses Sarah Palin:

Jonah Goldberg:

The academic feminist left has scared the dickens out of mainstream men and women for so long, the liberal establishment is terrified to contradict feminists’ nigh-upon-theological conviction that female authenticity is measured by one’s blind loyalty to left-wing talking points. This is a version of the Marxist doctrine of “false consciousness,” which holds that you aren’t an authentic member of the proletariat unless you agree with Marxism.

It works like this: If you don’t agree with feminist scolds, you’re not a real woman, even if you’re a very feminine working mom. But even if you’re an actual man — never mind a childless feminist who looks like a Bulgarian weightlifter in drag — you’re a “real woman” solely because you nod your head like a windup clapping monkey every time you read the latest editorial in Ms. Recall how they christened Bill Clinton the “first female president,” too.

But here’s the fun part. Feminists are hooked on their own Kool-Aid; they actually believe the stuff they say. The shrill, angry women you see on MSNBC claiming to speak for all women actually think they do. But they don’t. They speak for a few left-leaning women in faculty lounges, editorial boardrooms and that’s about it.

Mainstream liberals have been in captivity for so long, eagerly accepting their ritual beatings, that they’ve gotten Stockholm Syndrome and convinced themselves that Gloria Steinem and Co. are the authentic voices of women everywhere.

Stop laughing.

The reality is that there is an actual reality out there, and it doesn’t look anything like what feminists see beyond the rims of their ideological blinders.

For instance, immediately after the Palin announcement, the priestesses not only ruled it “sexist” for McCain to pick a woman but also said it was strategically dumb — “insulting to women!” — to think any real women would switch support from the beatified Obama to that old devil McCain.

Well, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, there’s been a 20-point swing among white women from Obama-Biden to McCain-Palin. Did this “ideological brain rape” suddenly induce an epidemic of false consciousness?

Of course not. Nor are women mindlessly switching loyalties because there’s a woman on the ticket. What the Palin pick has demonstrated, however, is that the Feminist-Industrial Complex is a fraud. Disagreeing with self-described feminists doesn’t mean you’re anti-woman. Usually it just means you’re sensible.

And for that lesson alone, we should all be grateful.

For years, Rush Limbaugh has been skewering “femiNazis.” He was ahead of his time.

Jonah Goldberg:

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth-control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the Progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1989 — said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing.

What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. “Our living-room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.” A member of the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed “What Every Girl Should Know.” The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.” Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

Under the banner of “reproductive freedom,” Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the “positive” eugenicists, deriding it as mere “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children…and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

Read it all.

Goldberg doesn’t go into the support that Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper and founder of International Harvester, indirectly provided to Sanger. McCormick’s son Stanley was a nutcase (schizo sex maniac) who married Katherine Dexter, the first female graduate of MIT with a science degree.

Dexter became a major figure in the women’s suffrage movement and funded the development of the first oral birth control pill.  Stanley spent the rest of his life living in Riven Rock, an estate in Montecito, California — basically an asylum for one.

Another twist is that Stanley’s brother, Harold McCormick left his wife, Edith Rockefeller (daughter of J.D. Rockefeller) for one Ganna Walska, a mediocre European opera singer with a talent for marrying wealthy men. She married six times and got wealthier as she wed.

In 1941, she retired to Montecito, not far from her onetime brother-in-law, where she bought 37-acres as a planned retreat for Tibetan monks. But it was wartime and monks couldn’t get visas, so she turned it into a tropical garden. It is now open for tours and has a collection of rare cycads.

Mark Steyn: 

Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. “Healing The Wounds Of Democrats’ Sexism,” as the Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Sen. Clinton’s presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism.

How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a resume you could print on the back of his driver’s license, a Rolodex apparently limited to neosegregationist race-baiters, campus Marxist terrorists and indicted fraudsters, and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socrates.

“On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience here today.”

Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, Ill., many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.

But what of the fallen heroine? If it’s any consolation to Sen. Clinton, she’s not the only female to find that social progress is strangely accommodating of old-time sexism. There was a front-page story in London last week about a British Indian couple in Birmingham – she’s 59, he’s 72 – who’d had twins through in vitro fertilization and then abandoned the babies at the hospital when they turned out to be daughters, announcing their plans to fly back to India for another round of IVF in hopes of getting a boy.

In the wake of the media uproar, the parents now claim something got “lost in translation” and have been back to the hospital to visit the wee bairns. But think of Mom and Dad as the Democratic Party and the abandoned daughters as Hillary, and it all makes sense.

There’s a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the gender ratio has declined to 1,000 boys to 900 girls nationally, and as low as 1,000 boys to 300 girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced “one child” policy has brought about the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun– “bare branches.” If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adulthood under this policy there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. In practice, a “woman’s right to choose” turns out to mean the right to choose not to have any women.

And what of the Western world?

From 2000-05, Indian women in England and Wales gave birth to 114 boys for every 100 girls.

A similar pattern seems to be emerging among Chinese, Korean and Indian communities in America. “The sex of a firstborn child in these families conformed to the natural pattern of 1.05 boys to every girl, a pattern that continued for other children when the firstborn was a boy,” wrote Colleen Carroll Campbell, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former Bush speechwriter, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the other day. “But if the firstborn child was a girl, the likelihood of a boy coming next was considerably higher than normal at 1.17-to-1. After two girls, the probability of a boy’s birth rose to a decidedly unnatural 1.51-to-1.”

By midcentury, when today’s millions of surplus boys will be entering middle age, India and China are expected to account for a combined 50 percent of global GDP. On present trends, they will be the most male-heavy societies that have ever existed.

As I wrote in my book “America Alone,” unless China’s planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what’s going to happen to all those excess men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can’t get any action are not a recipe for societal stability. Unless the Japanese have invented amazingly lifelike sex robots by then (think Austin Powers’ “fembots”), we’re likely to be in a planetwide rape epidemic and a world of globalized, industrial-scale sex slavery.

And what of the Western world?

Canada and Europe are in steep demographic decline and dependent on immigration to sustain their populations. And – as those Anglo-Welsh statistics suggest – many of the available immigrants are already from male-dominated cultures and will eventually be male-dominated numbers-wise, too: circa 2020, the personal ads in the Shanghai classifieds seeking “SWF with good sense of humor” will be defining “must live locally” as any ZIP code this side of Mars.

Smaller families may mean just a boy or a girl for liberal Democrats, but in other societies it means just a boy. The Indian writer Gita Aravamudan calls this the “female feticide.” Colleen Carroll Campbell writes that abortion, “touted as the key to liberating future generations of women,” has become instead “the preferred means of eradicating them.”

Mental Floss:

The National Woman Suffrage Association was formed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 139 years ago today. To mark the anniversary, Chris Connolly is here to discuss the role of the bicycle in the women’s movement.

Seven Pounds of Underwear
Clearly, women haven’t undergone any fundamental alterations of their physiological makeup in the last hundred years, so what allows them to live the robust, fainting-free lifestyles they do today?

Foremost, the Victorian lady rarely exercised or engaged in physical activity, which left her poorly conditioned. Secondly, it was fashionable to be frail. Just as American women in the 1950s were expected to become June Cleaver and young girls today aspire to Gwen Stefani-like independence, the Victorian woman was expected to adopt certain behaviors.

The third contributing factor to the frailty of the Victorian lady was clothing. Their garments were typically thick and black, exaggerating the female form while concealing the flesh. Curves were accentuated by tightly laced corsets, which, when coupled with long and heavy underskirts, greatly limited women’s ability to move or even breathe. (Hence much of the fainting.)

This attire was not only intended to restrict women physically, but morally, too. In a society where the accidental exposure of an ankle took on the pornographic stature of a lap dance, such dress was required to protect a lady’s virtue. In fact, the term “loose” originated to describe a woman who went uncorseted, while “straight-laced” women obeyed societal dictates.

Eventually, some women began to take a stand, and, in 1888, a letter published by The Rational Dress Society—a group of women who argued for reasonable clothing—stated, “the maximum weight of under-clothing (without shoes) approved by The Rational Dress Society, does not exceed seven pounds.”

Seven pounds of underwear? An improvement? That’s more than any jog bra in the world. Clearly, women needed to change their underwear. And that’s where the bicycle came in.

It’s always useful to remember how far we’ve come when judging the Islamic primitives of today.