Is it a man's world?

We have always nursed a private disdain for the feminist movement. Having been raised in a post sixties household where my father cooked and did laundry and ran his business and my mother taught and did laundry too, and raised my younger brother and I that the world was a peach ripe for plucking, regardless of gender, with a little elbow grease and some imagination.

Whilst we could appreciate the historical context of your Betty Friedan's and your Gloria Steinham's, coming of age in the eighties and being in college in the boom times of the early nineties, particularly in San Francisco, we shared no sympathies for the man hating shrews with the wiccan agenda, let's everybody share their labia, and bond as sistahs.

We thought it was a load of vagino-centric hooey.

Once many years ago, when we were attending a small college in the sticks, we were invited to stand naked and debunk the myths of our bodies in front of group of other women (need I describe the incense and the requisite drumming?). We declined, and with our friend MK we waited the others out in the car, for which, as I recall, we were roundly scorned.

Let us just get one thing straight, a gaggle of women is a hen party, and a hen party is oft toxic, a group of women who do not know each other very well, despite their best intentions can be dangerous to navigate, one false move and they (those self satisfied wiccans) will be the first to denounce you to the parish priest and will be those in the crowd who will yowl loudest as the flames scorch your flesh. We call this the Condi Rice syndrome, and for the record, when she goes down, we will dance on her grave.... Actually we can think of a number of women whose graves we would like to dance upon.

And then, in our precarious defense, for the record, it is not always thus. We have several groups of girlfriends to whom we profess absolute solidarity. Take our old group from highschool, as you will undoubtedly recall, highschool is rife with intrigue and betrayal, but fifteen years hence we have settled and mellowed and old rivalries are now fodder for jokes. We are wildly disparate, but the more time passes, the greater the esteem that we have for them.

But now we wonder if we ought to take up our mother's mantle. Perhaps it is still a man's world, and clearly they are wrecking it. If only there were a magic pill to curb the pettiness and the spite and the rampant oneupsmanship.

We are reading the latest Joanne Harris book, "Holy Fools" which is what brought on these musings, a sixteenth century fraudulent nun terrorized by her once lover/fraudulent priest and we are sitting at dinner working ourself into a state, thinking, cut the narrative short and just fucking kill the worthless bastard. Does that constitute feminism or does that constitute a psychopath, and is there a difference.

We tend to think that zeal in all it's myriad cloaks of many colors is benign poison at best, terrorism at worst. And mind you, we believe that those who bomb clinics in the name of God are still going to the special hell that those who take out buildings with aircraft full of human cargo are going to. Imagine how perplexed they shall be at finding themselves in hell... Imagine their absolute dismay, zealots all, Christian, Muslim, a sprinking of Jews (especially Sharon) Rwandans, Croats, a load of crazed Hindi and even a smattering of rogue Budists, imagine them all together, all hating one another and bound for all eternity for the singularity of their crimes. For, virtually all of the worlds dogmas all share a single coda, thou shalt not kill.

Funny how easily we forget.

In other news, the genocide in Sudan continues unchecked, the light skinned Arabs are decimating the black Sudanese. No one cares, they don't really have any natural resources that the civilized world cares to exploit. It is Rwanda all over again, perhaps ten years down the line and a million or so dead later, the (hopefully, one termer Resident Bush) will issue a heartfelt, but wholly inadequate mea culpa, just like my darling Bill did...

ah la la
la vie est belle
la vie est triste
on fait comme on peut, on fait de notre mieux.