Bookworm Room

My son asked me how Valentine’s Day began. I explained that, a long time ago, there was a man named Valentine who was known for his kindness to young couples who wished to get married (and he may have given doweries to poor girls so they could marry). He was also a Christian who died [...]

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The Museum of Modern Art hosted a symposium about feminist art. The story covering the symposium noted that the only time these feminist artists contemplated Islam they did so, not to discuss how their art could be used to help Islamic women break free from their invisibility and from the abuse heaped upon them, but [...]

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You are probably already familiar with the story about the huge increase in rapes in Norway, with 2/3 of them committed by “immigrants with a non-western background.” (And I wonder who those non-western immigrants might be?) I didn’t even bother to comment on it originally, because LGF had it covered. I’m commenting now because of [...]

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The Washington Post has picked up and expanded upon the story about Bonnie Bleskachek, the Minneapolis fire chief recently fired for all sorts of sexual and discriminatory shenanigans. It makes for fascinating reading if you don’t mind that your local fire house sounds like a lesbian Peyton Place with a dollop of man hatred thrown [...]

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I wrote “I am Woman, hear me whine” to riff off of a story about law firms’ difficulty in retaining black lawyers. I noted the role affirmative action has to play, but also suggested, based on my 20 years out of date experience at a big law firm, that women and minority attorneys might feel [...]

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There’s an article in today’s New York Times exposing (again) one of the problems with affirmative action — it elevates nice, ordinary people to situations where they’re bound to fail. This time the focus is on the nation’s top law firms, where African-Americans consistently fail to last: Thanks to vigorous recruiting and pressure from corporate [...]

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European feminist activists are apparently terribly upset that the European Court of Justice had the temerity to hold that it’s okay to pay people more for more time spent on the job, even if that affects women who take time off for children. The IWF, of course, has a good take on the story.

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In a slap in the face to Larry Summers (indeed, the New York Times includes many face slaps in its report), a special panel for the National Academy of Sciences has issued a report in which it says it’s entirely the fault of scientific institutions that there aren’t more women represented in science’s upper echelons: [...]

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I distinctly remember the laughs ordinary people had decades ago when a Harvard study for the then ridiculously high sum of $50,000 established that mother’s milk is good for babies. I had the same “duh” feeling when I read that a San Francisco neuropsychiatrist has written a book, based on cutting edge brain research, showing [...]

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I don’t ordinarily read Time Magazine, since I decided years ago, even before my political transformation, that it held little interest for me. (Although I distinctly remember, in 1982, a “hip” young man I worked with castigating it as a conservative mag fit only for parents.) The only reason I even read it now was [...]

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Over at the Independent Women’s Forum, they’ve had a series of amusing posts about the shenanigans at the NOW annual meeting.  So much about the NOW worldview, but this particular loonines, which Allison Kasic reports, really caught my eye: At the “I’m not a feminist, but…” workshop at the NOW conference I received an amusing [...]

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As I’ve noted before, feminism keeps reinventing religion in a feminized version.  The latest example, courtesy of NPR, is the feminist rediscovery of the mikvah — the ritual bath Orthodox Jewish women take every month after their period before resuming sexual relations with their husbands.  Here’s the feminist take on this ancient ritual: “I always [...]

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In the West, courtesy of modern birth control, when most of us have children, it's because we want them.  They, after all, didn't ask to be born.  To me, this means that we have obligations to them far beyond the material ones of food, shelter and clothing, and even beyond the less tangible one of [...]

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Phyllis Chesler writes movingly about the fact that Western women, obsessed as they are with abortion and Palestinian rights, have been shockingly silent regarding the treatment the Dutch have meted out to Ayaan Ali Hirsi. Among other things, Chesler has this to say: The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has offered Hirsi Ali a position. Karlyn [...]

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The popular image of the peacekeepers who travel to troubled regions is of a legion of selfless Mother Theresas, putting aside the comforts of their First World lives to aid those most in need.  And that image may well be true for the greater number of them. Unfortunately, one of Africa's many plagues is parasites [...]

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NOW, the National Organization for Women, is once again so busy attacking the Bush administration over abortion rights for pampered and protected American women that it simply has no time to deal with or acknowledge real acts of inhumanity committed against women.  My reading today began by touching upon the grotesquely exploitative sex trafficking in [...]

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Kevin Sites tells the appalling story of the tortures visited on a child in Afghanistan when, at 5, she was married into a family of sadists.  Although he doesn't say so, I can't help but believe that her tortures were a product of life under the Taliban, and the fact that she was able to [...]

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