Until the work that most women actually do – care work – is recognised, they will not have social citizenship and will remain in a fundamentally inequitable position. Women, as the child-bearing gender, are structurally unable to resolve, by themselves, the intrinsically conflictive juxtaposition between, on the one hand, society’s requirement that individuals engage in income-generating work before their activity is socially recognized and rewarded with full social insurance, and on the other, the inescapable need of all individuals to receive care. The fact that everyone, young, middle-aged and old, requires material and emotional servicing, including of course the care-givers themselves, stubbornly remains a gender-blind spot unrecognized by public policy.

M. Threlfall and C. Cousins, Gendering Spanish Democracy.

Third-wave feminism has dug a hole so deep for itself that it will now never climb out of it. It now proposes that, since everybody needs to be serviced and women are traditionally the serving class, this state of affairs should be codified and promoted on the state level. Why engage in all these complicated and messy efforts to open up the public sphere to women? Let’s instead get the welfare state pay us all a stipend for servicing everybody in sight and just be done with it.

I have been striving for a very long time to find any substance to third-wave feminism. However, enough is enough. I am now forced to conclude that third-wave feminism offers absolutely nothing but an attempt to justify housewifery. Eventually, the goal is to get the welfare state to pay women just for existing under the assumption that being female automatically means that you provide care and service people emotionally by virtue of your gender. Womanhood, thus, becomes a sort of a disability that should be financed by the state by default.

Never does one’s own article look more poorly written, intellectually shallow, and overall hopeless than when one is revising the final proofs. Profound changes cannot be introduced at this point, and this is precisely when one begins to see the need for many changes.

Finally, somebody is as outraged about the China-related apologism I see everywhere as I am.

Shopping as research and cooking as writing.

“If your parents subjected you to physical violence, if, like most parents, they subjected you to emotional coercion, manipulation and blackmail when you were a child, to that extent they committed evil. I must add, and as I have already indicated, that I emphatically do not mean that you must accuse your parent(s) in person. There are many situations in which such confrontations are entirely futile and pointless; often, confrontations of that kind serve only to make a bad situation still worse. But at a minimum, in the sanctity of your own mind and soul, you must have the courage to make the accusation when it is true.” A long and brilliant post.

Among all the posts I read around the Remembrance Day, this one was absolutely the best.

“Show me an American who developed a greater respect for his country as a result of its coercive measures that prevent him from burning a flag. You can’t force people to feel the same way you do, and making them put on a show while hiding their true feelings serves no purpose except to help you live in a fantasy world, at the expense of others’ autonomy.”

A journalist from Kentucky explains why Senator McConnell needs to go and I agree with her.

“Does Quebec have short-man syndrome?” It’s an interesting post, although I have no idea why it singles out men. Everybody in Quebec is shorter and skinnier, irrespective of gender. With my 5’6”, I always felt like a giraffe, towering over everybody on Montreal buses.

Anti-choicers murder a woman. This is how “pro-life” these vile freakazoids are. Tell me once again how I’m too cruel when these anti-choice freaks come by my blog. They promote murder of women, and I get criticized for telling them they are vicious animals.

There is a lot of stupid dating advice out there but this article is too stupid for words. For those who don;t want to waste their time on it, I can summarize: “Ladies, sit there like stupid idiots and expect to be courted, pursued, begged, etc. God forbid you show any initiative in a relationship because then you will not be ladies any longer.” Barf.

Plagiarism as cross-contamination.

An interesting prognosis for China: “The next five years will evidence tight central political control, high levels of repression, increasing military threats to China’s neighbors, and slowing economic growth. The consequence may be coup d’etat or revolution come 2017.”

An amazing post on the value of being a loner: “So before you decide to enter a career as a good “corporate man” you have to ask yourself the question NOT if your mind can handle it.  But is it worth the price you have to pay knowing your brain will never fully develop and reach it’s intellectual and philosophical peak.  Because I don’t know about you, but life is too short to have boring thoughts or be that person who thinks “boycotting oil on that ONE day” is somehow deep economic or political thinking.”

And the title of the post of the week goes to: “I adore writing!  I want to marry writing, have wild sex with it, make it have my babies, wrap myself in that zone only writing can offer for hours and hours.  It’s a chronic disease, that writing desire.”