Wagger April 14, 2007

I read somewhere recently that when a dog wags her tail that it means “I am willing to interact with you”.

Sometimes she is so willing to interact her tail hits her in the face.

I am…well, now I’m blogging, but I was working. Curly is laying in front on my desk on the floor (as a result of me asking her to move a bajillion times because I wanted to reposition my chair. She sits so that I can run over her if I’m not careful.). She can hear C in the other room and, by the sounds he’s making, we both (ie. Curly and I) can tell he’s getting ready to go somewhere. I can tell that Curly can tell because each time he makes a noise, her tail starts banging the floor…and the closer to ‘ready’ he’s getting, the harder the tail hits the floor.

It’s cracking me up.

Ah ha!

It wasn’t that long ago that I started becoming interested in blogs that leaned more closely to the right. Sometimes I enjoy the batshit crazy ones for the freak factor, but most times the more moderate ones where I can have a decent argument without it going completely nutso. But today, I’m leaning towards the batshit crazy (update: due to Reg’s comment I need to clear up that I think that bumf and m’ville are not batshit crazy…I don’t think that they think that feminists are trying to make the world a no-penis zone…which is the topic of this post. The others I listed may also not think this, but I do think they’re leaning toward the batshit crazy side of things).

Why do I enjoy them? Not because I”m “switching sides”…not that there’s “sides” to “switch” necessarily…but because when I started reading them my eyes were opened to issues that I wasn’t aware of or that I thought were put to rest. Now, I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating. Apparently there are still arguments over feminism. I’ve taken part in arguments over abortion rights, subsidized daycare, the right for a mother to work outside the home (and found the irony in forcing women to have children and then taking away subsidized daycare), etc etc etc. Honestly, I didn’t know.

(I also like reading them because they seem, at times, to be clubs of like-minded people who need an opposing voice. Everyone needs an opposing voice occassionally.)

I knew that as a feminist there were still issues I needed (and still need) to hammer into shape in my head. Of course there are. 50% of the population can’t agree on everything…so even those who call themselves feminists still need to work out the details. I thought, though, that people understood that feminism is a pro-women movement, that it is still necessary and that the focus is on respect and equality.

However, apparently feminist -to many people- is an ugly word. It conjures up images of home wrecking lesbinans who hate-fuck men and abort their precious babies afterward. They stomp in their birkenstock-clad feet all over a landscape of happy homes and demand more and more and more.

I read Pandagon, as I do most days, and this article came up.

The upshot is that scientists have found a way to make sperm from male bone marrow and now they’re applying for ethics to see if the same can be done with female marrow, leaving a man out of the equation. My fave part of the article is the reference to all the literature on male-free societies. It’s like they’re saying, “its just a science article but…wanna see something freaky?”

So…my initial response to the news that this might be possible was, ‘oh. neat.’ But apparently, this strikes fear in the heart of some because feminists hate men and look for any way to get them out of our way so we can finally erect that 15-story chocolate vagina where the Pentagon once stood and dance naked and shamelessly without bras and high-five each other on a job well done. Right?

Anyway…Amanda at Pandagon has a better response than what I can come up with.

Oh, and this one, too.