It’s Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, giving you a unique opportunity to simultaneously atone and celebrate if you have a significant other, or just atone.
And then there are the Norwegian curlers.
Read my post, All in a (Valentine’s) Day Work
Happy Valentine’s Day
Happy Valentine’s Day to all my visitors and friends
And stright from the guru, a note of advice: High heels ‘may improve sex life’
Wearing higher heels – although perhaps not stilettos – may improve your pelvic floor muscles and in doing so boost your sex life, a study suggests.
An Italian urologist and self-professed lover of the sexy shoe set out to prove that high heels were not as bad for women’s health as some suggest.
Here’s the important part,
She said her study of 66 women under 50 found that those who held their foot at a 15 degree angle to the ground – the equivalent of a two inch heel – had as good posture as those who wore flat shoes, and crucially showed less electrical activity in their pelvic muscles.
This suggested the muscles were at an optimum position, which could well improve their strength and ability to contract.
The pelvic floor muscles are an essential component of the female body. As well as assisting sexual performance and satisfaction, they provide vital support to the pelvic organs, which include the bladder, bowels and uterus.
I’m particularly fond of these:
Perfect for walking out the House floor.
And on a totally unrelated subject, the new Indiana Jones movie trailer:
The American feminists’ silence on the subjection of Islamic women
Christina Hoff Sommers writes about The Subjection of Islamic Women And the fecklessness of American feminism,
The condition of Muslim women may be the most pressing women’s issue of our age, but for many contemporary American feminists it is not a high priority. Why not?
The reasons are rooted in the worldview of the women who shape the concerns and activities of contemporary American feminism. That worldview is–by tendency and sometimes emphatically–antagonistic toward the United States, agnostic about marriage and family, hostile to traditional religion, and wary of femininity. The contrast with Islamic feminism could hardly be greater.
Sommers explains,
One reason is that many feminists are tied up in knots by multiculturalism and find it very hard to pass judgment on non-Western cultures. They are far more comfortable finding fault with American society for minor inequities (the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club, the “underrepresentation” of women on faculties of engineering) than criticizing heinous practices beyond our shores. The occasional feminist scholar who takes the women’s movement to task for neglecting the plight of foreigners is ignored or ruled out of order.
Sommers mentions Katha Pollitt, who
casually places “limiting young people’s access to accurate information about sex” and opposing abortion on the same plane as throwing acid in women’s faces and stoning them to death. Her hostility to the United States renders her incapable of distinguishing between private American groups that stigmatize gays and foreign governments that hang them. She has embraced a feminist philosophy that collapses moral categories in ways that defy logic, common sense, and basic decency.
I can’t say that I would expect decency from the American feminists. After all, these are the women which, as I have said before, equate women with their gonads and see nothing wrong with a lesbian statutory rape, which is even presented as a “salvation”.
Phyllis Chesler has written eloquently about the feminist establishment’s unwillingness to take on Islamic sexism,
She faults it for “embracing an anti-Americanism that is toxic, heartless, mindless and suicidal.”
In the irony-poor mindset of the feminist establishment, there is no notion that believing that our culture is ruinous for women, while failing to see the horrors routinely perpetrated against women in Arab countries and in other parts of the world, shows their argument in all its emptiness.
Unfortunately, it is suicidal not only for the feminist establishment, it is lethal to women all around the world.
Update
Via Dreams Into Lightning, Is Phyllis Chesler right?
Valentines to vaginas
It’s a sad state in affairs of the heart that across our country Valentine’s Day has become “V-Day”, as in Vagina Monologues Day. V-Day was born on February 14, 1998. It stands for “Violence, Victory and Vaginas”.
Sad for a number of reasons:
- To begin with,the premise of a monologue by one gender complaining about the opposite gender on a day where supposedly love is celebrated doesn’t bide well for relationships between men and women. Obviously.
- The Vagina Monologues describes the seduction and statutory rape of a thirteen-year old girl by a lesbian as a romantic “event”. Let me point out, this is morally wrong. Statutory rape is statutory rape, folks.
- Then there’s the objectification of women as vaginas. Ensler claims that “Vagina stories found me”: Women are their gonads and nothing more.
- And worst of all, the premise that all men are predators and pervs – and women their eternal victims.
Now, I have and enjoy a vagina, and this focus on vaginal be-all strikes me as silly. Unlike a silly woman that Ensler mentions in The V-Day Edition of her play, I don’t need to spend a whole day looking for my vagina. Unlike my cell phone and my reading glasses (which I have spent a whole day looking for), I know exactly where my vagina is at all times. So do millions of women around the world: it is no big deal. As Kathleen Parker says,
Not to be a spoilsport, but it’s not as though vaginas have only suddenly come to mankind’s attention. And the Big O, though universally regarded with awe, is not advanced physics.
I find it ridiculous that there’s even a need to have to explain this.
While proceeds from all performances of TVM on V-Day go towards local groups that work to stop violence towards women, and the original play did speak out against vaginal mutilation, what does this vaginal mentality accomplish?
Certainly not any better understanding between men and women.
As Mama said,
The endless propagandistic screeching about the evil and inherent treachery of men has taught many women to be acutely and deeply defensive in their relationships with men. The trust is gone, and that trust is what is needed in order to establish the type of reflexively loyal and intimate relationship which we naturally desire and of which we are naturally capable. (That’s men and women!)
College girls who buy into the campus vaginal monologuing will never understand that love, real love, means surrender. For as long as you believe that any man, no matter how good or how much he loves you, is a predator simply because he is a man, you will never ever truly love him.
And you know what? There is no guarantee that you won’t get hurt when you truly love. Even if the guy is a great guy who really loves you. In fact, the odds are very high that you will get hurt down the line. That’s just the way life is.
This is not my vagina telling you: it’s my heart.
Self-realization? More like dehumanization:
Colleen Carroll Campbell explains how:
By explicitly equating themselves with their sexual organs (“My vagina is a shell, a tulip, and a destiny. . . . My vagina, my vagina, me,” “my clitoris . . . was me, the essence of me”), the play’s characters parrot the premises of pornography: That women are objects, not subjects; that women are the sum of their sexual organs; that feminine sexuality and identity can be reduced to feminine body parts. By encouraging audiences to chant vulgar slang words for a woman’s sexual organs, the play dispels any sense of mystery and reverence about feminine sexuality and contributes to the desensitization of a culture already drowning in obscenity. By presenting the lesbian seduction of a minor as a “salvation” experience in contrast to the many heterosexual encounters that portray men as perverts and predators, the play perpetuates the pessimistic view that men and women are doomed to use and abuse each other.
The Monologues defines healthy sexuality as the selfish pursuit of sexual pleasure and encourages audiences to become connoisseurs and voyeurs of all manner of sexual experience. In doing so, the play champions the very commodification of sex that endangers women — including those trapped in a sex trade driven by our culture’s insatiable appetite for unlimited and instant sexual gratification. Ensler may have intended to extol the best virtues of women, but she wound up imitating the worse vices of men.
By no definition of the word do I see any victory in any of this. I see a lot of one upmanship, and a lot of gaining and keeping the upper hand, and a lot of people using each other, and a lot of the characteristics of a culture of pornography, but no victory.
No victory for anyone.
Is this part of a trend towards a neuterized society?
Last year Dr. Melissa Coulther made a very convincing case:
Hatred for both the essential uniqueness of men and women have created a hostile environment for all people. The unintended consequences of neuterizing–both men and women feel betrayed by their innate gender tendencies and with their self-loathing project this hatred on society.
We can argue about that later.
Clearly the notion of celebrating love on Valentine’s Day is a thing of the past. Now it’s all about the alliteration: “Violence, Victory and Vaginas”.
In all this V-Day celebrating, nowhere does the notion of virtue enter the picture. Instead, the day is dedicated to “Violence, Victory and Vaginas”.
Violence, Victory and Vaginas?
How grim.
PS [ ON STAGE ] “The Vagina Monologues”
For the seventh year, George Mason University’s Sexual Assault Services will present the Eve Ensler play (featuring a new monologue about peace), performed by students and others in the GMU community.
Now peace is about vaginas, too.
Update : Larwyn emailed,
Fausta,
I won’t be happy until the entire world has read Gerard’s “Voice of the Neuter” at least twice.
But it would illustrate the last point of your post beautifully.
Here it is, Larwyn, The Voice of the Neuter
technorati tags Valentine’s Day, Vagina Monologues, relationships, men and women, romance, V-Day
The language of flowers
… at least according to this article:
Rose (Love)
Orchid (A Belle)
Iris (My Compliments)
Sunflower (Pure thoughts)
Amaryllis (Splendid beauty)
Tulip (Declaration of love)
Carnation (Pride and beauty)
Hydrangea (Heartfelt)
Bird of Paradise (Joyfulness)
Chrysanthemum (Fidelity)
Daffodil (Chivalry)
Tiger Lily (I dare you to love me)
Anthurium (Hospitality)
Peony (Bashful)
Lilac (Youthful innocence)
Anemone (Anticipation)
Aster (Patience)
But wait, there’s more here, and here. If that’s not complicated enough, the color matters, too.
How about some nice sugar-free chocolates, instead?