Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Business meeting followed by lunch in the pub with Piper today. Piper had met my friend on Saturday, when friend and I had passed through the village and stopped for lunch, and we ran into Piper, and I was interested in his reaction. He approves. Says he got "good vibes". That's nice. Piper is a very good judge of people, and he's not going to sugarcoat for me.
My driveway was full of snow when I returned on Sunday, but I didn't clear it yesterday because it was melting nicely. There was a storm predicted today, but ALL the TV maps and all the online maps showed the snow to the north of us. We absolutely weren't supposed to get anything more than a little rain.
When I left the house this morning to meet Piper, it was snowing heavily. After lunch, Piper had to drive south to a meeting in Fishkill, and I was worried about it, so I asked him to call when he got back. He called at 5, and said that as soon as he got out of the village, it turned to rain. No problem. He went on to say that the snow had now stopped in the village. I looked out the window, and it was still coming down thickly here at my house.
There's something strange about this place. I've mentioned before that when I drive north from NJ, I get depressed as soon as I get within three miles of home - because the snow is so much deeper here. It's a three mile radius circle around my house. Even north of here has less snow.
I don't understand.
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There's a commercial, I don't know exactly for what brand, but it tells us about a girl in South Africa who is "forced to miss school as much as one week out of four" because she doesn't have sanitary supplies. Buy our product, and we'll contribute (pads or tampons, I forget which) to girls in African villages.
Um, forced?
I went to high school in a very economically depressed area. Very few girls in my high school could afford to buy a commercial product that they'd use once and throw away. That would have been seen as the height of extravagance. Profligacy. Stupidity. They used the same thing their mothers and grandmothers had used - rags. Skillfully folded, pinned or tied, washed, bleached and then boiled, and reused.
Nobody is going to convince me that a girl is FORCED to miss school because she doesn't have access to rags and boiling water. Sorry. I don't buy your sob story. You don't have to have something just because someone is selling it.
Ok, I'm tough. And yes, I have used rags. That's where the expression "on the rag" comes from, you know.
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"Settling", for and against, has been all over the blogosphere this past week, after an article written by Lori Gottlieb in The Atlantic. She says that women should settle for “Mr. Good Enough” before it’s too late.
A lot of men don't want to marry these days. They'd rather have serial long term uncommitted relationships. Stay while it's good, get out when it isn't good any more, without all those costly legal entanglements. The number of younger men who have a genuine desire to get married is dropping. Women's clocks are ticking, and men don't have a clock, until they start to fall apart, and then they want to marry a nursemaid. So Ms. Gottlieb's point is that if your standards are too high, you may never find the perfect man, the soul mate, the passion, who will ALSO be willing to marry you, and so you'll have to lower your expectations. Settle.
I haven't heard anyone else say this, so I will: It's women's fault. We have made it too easy for the valuable men to get anything they want without having to make any committment. It's Nature for woman to want home and family, and for man to want woman. But the old expression is "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free"? We're giving too much away. We've made it too easy for men. Female sexual freedom came with a price, and now we don't want to pay it.
This has a deeper effect that no one has mentioned (not in what I've read, anyway). If there are children (and even in an uncommitted/temporary relationship, an unmarried woman in her mid to late 30s is hearing the clock ticking), when the man leaves the children will most likely be left to the woman's care. Sure, he'll likely pay support, but it's the woman whose career takes the hit. Raising a child takes more than money. It takes time. She can't put in the overtime, go on the business trips, take evening classes, she has to stay home during measels and mumps and childcare glitches. She becomes professionally undependable. He goes on with his life. His career progresses and hers stalls. He can afford the damn child support! He's getting raises. (Not to mention time for dating.) She is slowed down for the rest of her life.
Damn it ladies, stop giving your lives away! Stop making it so easy. We old feminists worked hard to get you younger ones an equal chance for the good-paying jobs. You're letting the men take it all away! And they're chuckling about it. They know they have you over a barrel.
Make him work to deserve you. Make him share the responsibilities and effects of the fun times.
Stop giving yourselves away!
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The "Silken Touch" is turning into a riding crop lately, eh?
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2 comments:
A few comments...
WHAT have women been doing for Hundreds of Thousands of year of human history? Sitting around feeling sorry for themselves because it was that time of the month? Come on. I saw that commercial once and it disgusted me! I was really pissed that a corporation would attempt to play on our sympathies and American stupidity like that, like THAT. I am more and more turned off by advertising that banks on the "unthinking majority" and consumer stupidity to sell their product.
When I was 25 and 3 months pregnant, I met a boy, a mere 24 years old, whom, at the end of the night, I brought home with me. We jokingly "married" that night, etc... 11 years later, he's still in bed right now and we're going to celebrate our 10 year wedding anniversary in a little over a month. Some men are smart enough to realize when they have stumbled across something valuable and keep it. Perhaps I was just lucky.
I think it's the mass media that's playing on men's passions and restless desires. They market youth, beauty and affluence, and when a man meets a "real" woman, who doesn't measure up to what he's been brainwashed to want by the mass media, he gets restless and goes looking for that non-existent "ideal" that he will never find and that women can never be. I think that's a significant part of the issue. Not just women's fault, IMO. I do agree that what you wrote is definitely relevant, though.
I think the country they are talking about is in Africa so I'm trying to be more understanding about it. Don't many African cultures practice female circumcision? Also, I think some of those cultures, Muslim or Christian, have strict beliefs about being around women that are menstrating. Believe it or not, the Old Testament has references to that. I just think they have a different culture than us, so perhaps the girls really are "forced" by a culture to stay home.
That aside, if the company was really just doing a good thing....they would do it quietly and not advertise it, so I get your point :)
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