Filed under: Anger management, Good grief, Oh for Pete's Sake, oh HELL no!, ridiculous!, things that make you go hmmmmm, Uncategorized, Uncharacteristic Aggression, what? um...what? | Tags: Oh for pete's sake, What.
Warning: This is a bona fide rant. If you have trouble with strong opinions, go here.
Ok menfolk. This is the 21st century and it is commonly acknowledged that women are every bit as smart as men. Or it should be, anyway. In fact, there are several people in my aquaintance who regularly announce that I am the only person they’ve ever met who’s smarter than Terry. And I’m a woman. Surprise surprise. I know of one other person who’s smarter than I am, and guess what…*she’s* a woman too! This is no slight against Terry, mind you, he’s the smartest person *I* know and live with!
So anyway, I am, honestly, sick and tired of menfolk making health care decisions and judgements about women, of twisting the facts in an inflammatory way that puts the ideas into people’s heads that women are unable to control themselves. I am tired of it being said that we are the cause of men sinning, which totally denigrates men as well, by implying they’re vulnerable and unable to control themselves.
Ok, there’s this whole thing with Rush Limbaugh calling a young woman named Sandra Fluke a “slut and a prostitute” because she appealed to Congress about the need for access to birth control. After reading her testimony, nowhere did I see anything about her wanting birth control so she could have sex 5 times a day with lots of men, the way Mr Limbaugh implied. However, there are many people out there (some of them I know quite well) who listen to him and use him as a source of information. Great, this just hammers home the point that we women aren’t really able to make sound decisions, because if we had easy access to birth control we’d all just be sexing it up with every man that comes along.
Then oh horrors we’d go having abortions right and left, because we’d be too busy sexing it up to be bothered with having babies.
Ok, here’s the deal. I am pro-life, fairly strenuously so. I think life begins at conception and it behooves the mother to take care of that baby until it’s born, and afterward. I think it makes sense for life to begin at conception. However, I am smart enough to recognize that not everyone shares my belief. I wish they did, but don’t we all, because not sharing a belief can be taken as other people thinking you’re wrong. However, everyone’s experience in life is different, and those experiences shape our beliefs. Therefore, I recognize that other people have different beliefs based on their lives, which are different from mine. I have never become pregnant from rape. I have never had a prenatal test that showed I was carrying a child who would be born dead, or would only live a short time after being born. Thus, I cannot with assurance say that a child conceived in rape, or who was anencephalic (had no brain) should be carried to term because I do not know what kind of effect carrying that pregnancy to term would have on the mother. I have never been a 15 year old girl pregnant by her uncle, or the older man down the road. Those are shoes I will never walk in.
I think it is safe to say that the menfolk who are making the decisions in Congress, the ones who are so stridently advocating for strict laws on birth control and women’s health will never walk in the shoes of a woman pregnant by rape, or one carrying a child who is so terribly deformed it won’t live, or a woman who has polycystic ovarian disease and is racked with pain every month during her period, or the myriad other reasons a woman might have to make a difficult personal decision. So why aren’t women the ones making these decisions?
Why is it perfectly OK FINE for insurance to cover Viagra or Cialis, but not birth control pills? Believe me, I do understand how important to a man’s psyche his sexual perfomance is. I am not knocking that. But shouldn’t a woman have just as much control over her own sexual agency as a man? And why are men the ones making these decisions?
I understand why a woman who is unmarried and sexually active is frowned on, because our country had a Puritan background. BUT…this is not a Christian nation, as much as many Christians would like to believe. It is a nation founded on the principle of the ability to freely choose the religion you wish to belong to, or the choice to belong to no religion at all. (there is a point here…) If you are not a Christian (and I know many people who are not, even though I am), why is it necessary to hold you, the nonChristian, to a Christian standard, including virginity until marriage, or heterosexuality, or monogamy? These are all ideals I accept, but recognize that it is kind or odd to think that I should expect a nonChristian friend to share the same sexual values that I do. Yes, I wish they would, but to expect them to and to reject them as a person and a friend is…not what I am going to do. Therefore (maybe I’m getting to the point now), to make this country one where birth control is withheld from women while Viagra is given to men is a double standard that I despise. Who are those men going to have sex with? Each other? Will we divide this country into Sluts and Virgins?
Oh I don’t know…I am just really pissed off and disgusted by Rick Santorum and Rush Limbaugh and their ilk, that make women out to be dumb vaginas who can’t control ourselves and aren’t smart enough to make a decision. It’s enough to make me want to throw something.
I tell you what I’d like, for those men and the ones who agree with them to spend just a couple of months with periods. Let them bleed out of their ass for a week, have debilitating cramps, food cravings,bloat up and feel murderous, just a couple of times. Let’s give them some morning sickness, let them carry a baby to term just once, experience labor and the joy of passing an 8 pound watermelon through their anus, with all the ripping and FUN recovery…and then listen to us whine because they don’t really feel like sex a week later. If they could do that, just once, I am willing to bet the whole tune would change in a fat hurry.
*let me make it perfectly clear. Terry has never even ONCE treated me like I’m less important than he is. He is not the man I want to throw things at.
comment made somewhere else:
Most people are also not aware that Medicare has spent 240 million dollars on penis pumps for old men.
So a 70 year old man get get a boner, but women are whores for wanting birth control. -Pheeno
Comment to the comment:
I have no problem with helping old men get boners, I just want women to get the same consideration, like not having to suffer agonizing periods that last for 2 weeks, or even (gasp) maybe not want to get pregnant. Ok, fine, let’s make it hard to get abortions, but if you’re going to do that then BY GOD YOU’D BETTER MAKE IT EASIER TO GET BIRTH CONTROL. HELLO! Otherwise, who are all those men on Viagra and medicare penis pumps going to have sex with? Each other? oh no…that would be homosexuality which is also Bad. grrr. -Rootietoot
My brain does things. Does yours? Irritating thing, that brain. Mostly it’s a pretty good part of the body. It allows me to do stuff like remember how to take an infant dress and turn it into a bubble suit (with some work…it’s a 30 minute job typically, that took me 3 hours because it’s been a solid 20 years since last time I did that…BUT…I managed).
However, it has gas. It farts, regularly. I could be sitting there (like right now), just watching CNN and talking to #4 about when he needs to be at school for his basketball game and up pops this weird little memory.
I was 20 years old, and working at Golden Corral as a waitress. This was before it became Buffet Central, and had actual waitresses that actually brought you food and stuff. Anyway, I suddenly remembered this one busy night and there was this young man who’d obviously brought a young woman with him on a date. And I completely forgot about them. They were sitting at one of my tables and the entire time, after I’d brought them their food, I neglected them. I never refilled their tea, asked them if their food was right, nothing. Every time I remember that I wonder if their date was ruined. Was I the inadvertent and neglectful cause of her getting pissed off and refusing to ever go out with him again? What if he was planning to ask her to marry him, but the mood was ruined by lack of iced tea?
Dear Fellow Who’s Date I Possibly Ruined, I am sorry. I could make excuses and say things like “we were really busy” but I could have found 30 seconds to ask if your steak was ok and did you need more iced tea.
That is the kind of random memory my brain throws out there now and then.
I remember working at Piece Goods, a local fabric store. I was measuring some elastic for a customer, and didn’t pay attention too well, and stretched her elastic as I was measuring it, so she didn’t get as much as she was paying for. I cheated a customer. What is she was making a special garment for someone? What if it didn’t work out right because she didn’t have enough elastic? What if she couldn’t afford to buy another piece of elastic? Dear Person I Cheated, I am sorry. I hope I wasn’t the cause of a ruined garment that resulted in you not having a pretty dress to give your niece or you having an appropriate outfit for a job interview.
Where does this stuff come from?
Now, I don’t beat myself up over giving inadequate service 27 years ago. But my brain, she is a random and silly twit sometimes.
Does your brain ever do that, and throw out something random and completely unconnected to anything going on around you?
Filed under: *eep!, Anger management, Good grief, oh HELL no! | Tags: What.
Ok, every year for the past several years my Grandmother has given me some money, with instructions to purchase something I really want that I would not ordinarily buy. This year, I bought a new sewing machine. It’s a fancy pants machine with lots of bells and whistles and a big thing that lets me do embroidery, monogramming and such. What fun, right? So I’ve spent the past few weeks figuring out all the sewing stuff. It has lots of options.
Having done that, it was time to sit down and figure out how to embroider. It came with what appeared to be software that would allow me to take any True-Type font and embroider with it. I could also apparently take an image, (perhaps a drawing) and convert it to an embroidery program. Nice, right? There was a USB stick in the box that would let me do all this stuff on the computer, then put it on the USB stick (they call it a dongle, which makes me giggle in a 12 year old boy kind of way) and plug it into the sewing machine and get to work.
Only, I can’t get the dongle to do it’s thing. It just dangles. (didja see what I just did there? *snort). So, I called the handy dandy 1-800 number on the package.
Ronald the Indian Software Tech: “Oh no, that’s not the dongle. That’s the built in programs you can use immediately. To get the dongle you have to buy the software.”
Me: “But I have software.”
RIST: “No, you have the software that lets you view the images, not actually USE the images. you have to buy the software for that.”
Me: “What.”
He: “You need to contact your dealer about purchasing the software.”
Me: (polite Southern euphemism for What The Hell)
So, having just written checks to the local university for tuition and fees and books within the past week, I realized that buying a fancypants sewing machine is much like that.
You have tuition fees (the sewing machine) which get you in the door. Then, you can attend classes (sew straight lines and make buttonholes). However, if you want to actually use the education (sewing machine) to it’s full benefit, you have to buy textbooks (software) that isn’t actually included in the cost of tuition (sewing machine).
I interpret this as kind of a scam/ racket sort of thing. So. I have to spend $400 on software, which will get me the basic package and a dongle. If I want to fancy stuff up a bit, perhaps do shaped monograms or cross stitch or digitize an image, that will cost more- to the tune of $1200. I can buy the basic package and add units (cross stitch, monogramming, digitizing) on later, which I will as I sell stuff. I made a deal with Terry, for him to buy the software for me and in exchange I will do some embroidery on work uniforms for him, as well as some other stuff.
But still…Kinda misleading there, Husqvarna Viking, putting that viewing software in there and making it seem like I could do something more with it. You’d be better off, in my opinion, upping the price by $400 and already having it ready to go.
