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Black Cinderella: The wonderful ridiculousness of being Black and Female in 2004

Hip-Hop's Feminine Image. ART EXHIBIT ENCOURAGES A DIALOGUE ABOUT WOMEN’S ROLE IN THE CULTURE

"Glossy goes for cutting edge. A magazine devoted to cosmetic surgery? The numbers told NewBeauty's publishers the time was ripe."

Girls Just Wanna Be Swapped. Why post-feminist women enjoy Trading Spouses and Wife Swap.

The Good Wife. According to Desperate Housewives, most women lead lives of quiet desperation.

Girls Just Want to Have Fun: A new book snoops on sororities. "The classic American vantage point on sororities is that of Bluto's in Animal House—standing on a ladder in the dark, peering into a bedroom window. This is partly because sororities veil themselves in secrecy, which only makes freshman hormone cases more curious than ever about them. Curiously, though, while sorority life is almost as old as women's college education itself, virtually nothing has been written on it. Scholars have done some work on traditionally black sororities, but the inner world of predominantly white sororities has been largely ignored."

SARAH'S STYLE SECRETS. "AUDREY Hepburn. Lauren Bacall. Diana Vreeland. And now, Sarah Jessica Parker. Tonight, she'll be crowned a "fashion icon" by Council of Fashion Designers of America - a rarely awarded honor that will be bestowed during the gala event known as the Fashion Oscars." And she don't have no tattoos or nothing.

Leadership gathering targets black female execs. "Opinions will be flying Friday at the third annual Nia Enterprises Leadership Summit aimed at black female leaders."

June 5, 2005
Thrifty women who are worth millions: Author profiles 'Millionaire Women Next Door'. Hmm. I wonder what it is they know that the rest of us, with our closet full of designer clothes and no savings, don't.

Gynecologist accused of molestation: "Dozens of women have sued a gynecologist, saying he performed unnecessary and painful surgeries, molested them and in some cases raped them in the exam room." Must be read to be believed.

I am 17 and have been going out with my boyfriend, "Johnny," for about a year. A few months ago, we started having sex, and since then, we've been having sex every day, sometimes up to four times a day. Abby, I don't want to be doing this so regularly, but Johnny seems to want it ALL the time. I like making love with him, but not all the time. He says it's special and meaningful, but it's starting to seem like he's using me.

The other day, I told Johnny I didn't want to do it, but it happened anyway. I didn't resist, so it wasn't like he raped me or anything, but it wasn't right. What should I do?

Wake up, honey. You ARE being used. You are being treated like a convenience, not a person, and this isn't love. And I have more bad news -- when a person says "no" to sex and it "happens anyway," that is the definition of rape.

I urge you to pick up the phone and call R.A.I.N.N. (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network). The toll-free number is 800-656-4673. They can help you to clearly understand what happened and find counseling.

A Victory for Abortion Rights. New York Times. "At a perilous moment for women's reproductive freedom, it was a heartening development this week when a federal judge in California firmly rejected the 2003 federal ban on what its critics call "partial-birth abortion." With separate suits still pending in New York and Nebraska and the likelihood of appeals right up to the Supreme Court, this will not be the last word from the judiciary on this issue. But the clear and forceful parsing of the statute's myriad constitutional defects by the judge, Phyllis Hamilton, provides a worthy model for decisions to come."

Remaking Iraq Without Guns. New York Times. "When the heads of the world's leading industrialized nations meet in Georgia next week, they can do something unexpectedly positive for the Middle East, Muslim women, economic freedom and even democracy — if they take seriously a small but powerful idea on their agenda: microlending in Iraq."

Census: it pays to be a man in most jobs. "If a woman wants to make more money than a man, her job options are severely limited. She could clean up hazardous waste. Or install telecommunications lines. But not much else. The Census Bureau compiled statistics on hundreds of job categories from its 2000 headcount and found just five where women typically earn at least as much as men." From Salon.

DC "Spellbound" Star Struggling. washingtonpost.com. "In the ballroom of Washington's Grand Hyatt Hotel, hundreds of children sat uneasily Wednesday afternoon with huge numbered signs hanging around their necks. One by one, under the glare of television lights and the gaze of tense parents, they approached the microphone and began to spell, letters spilling from their lips and arranging themselves into the words they have spent countless hours memorizing: lenitive, equipollent, polemoscope, verbigeration.

Across the Anacostia River, in her sparsely furnished apartment, a contestant from a previous Scripps National Spelling Bee -- 18-year-old Ashley White -- arrived home from her job as a salesclerk, having just picked up her 10-month-old daughter from day care. White was tired, the baby fussy. Out their window, buses growled by on Minnesota Avenue SE."

Cosmetics That Change With the Seasons
RUTH LA FERLA, NY Times. Stephane Marais courts controversy the way his competitors court fame. Mr. Marais, a Frenchman, has made his name by pushing beauty's boundaries to subversive and unsettling extremes. He has caused ripples on the runways by blackening one side of a model's face or punctuating her maquillage with a blood-colored teardrop. Now he is upending convention with a makeup line with packaging that will change several times a year, a guerrilla strategy that plays on the ephemeral nature of fashion itself.

The Anti-Feminist Mystique, by Rachel Donadio, New York Observer. "The cardinal rule to leading a happy life is that you must never, under any circumstances, Google yourself." Newly minted New Yorker staff writer Caitlin Flanagan—provocatrice, chronicler of contemporary domestic life, self-described anti-feminist—was speaking on the phone from her home in Los Angeles.

She was discussing what she has learned in the aftermath of her controversial March cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement," a sprawling, 12,000-word polemic in the guise of an observational essay. In her signature prose—biting and witty, full of a writerly flair hard to find in discussions of "women’s issues"—Ms. Flanagan argued that upper-middle-class women have achieved their goal of having both a career and a family more often than not by employing—or, she maintained, exploiting—other women lower on the class ladder: nannies, on whom they don’t always bestow the same benefits they demand for themselves, like Social Security and maternity leave."

In and Out of Our Right Minds: The Mental Health of African American Women.

Soothe Your Nerves : The Black Woman's Guide to Understanding and Overcoming Anxiety, Panic, and Fear.

Sex and death in the heart of Africa. Hungry, frightened and helpless, young women in the Democratic Republic of Congo are selling their bodies in exchange for food and shelter. And the men expecting such 'payment' are the UN peacekeepers responsible for protecting them.

As with Bill Cosby in yesterday's Annotations, inconvenient, uncomfortable little truths just keep slipping out all over the black community. I saved this article from last year, just waiting til I got the blog up and running. Unfortunately, the article is no longer available on line from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. This much drier excerpt from state cosmetology subcommittee meeting minutes will have to do. See page 2 for Ohio State Rep Shirley Smith's primal scream over the state of black beauty salons.

Here's a delicoius excerpt from the original article: "State Rep. Shirley Smith is sick and tired of the way some Cleveland salon owners treat their clients. She's tired of waiting up to five hours to get her hair done because they've quadruple-booked customers. She's weary of calling hair stylists at home to wake them up for appointments. She's disgusted by their filthy restrooms and their habit of dribbling food on her head during their working lunches."

It goes on and wonderfully on. What on earth made a politician say what she was actually thinking and what anybody who's ever been to an average black hair salon knows? Vote for Shirley Smith!

If this aint complicated enough for you, check this from Africana.com last year: "Recently, I went to an African American-owned day spa and salon in New Jersey to get my hair washed and styled. My appointment that day had been cancelled because the woman who did my hair was gone and they were trying to find someone who could do natural hair. In a sea of black faces, in a business owned and operated by black people they were trying to find someone who did natural hair! Finally, a woman who called herself the co-owner of the salon announced that they could not accommodate me. I told her that it was disheartening to hear that in a salon owned and operated by black people there was no one who could do black hair. The woman shrugged it off, while another woman (doing a white woman's nails) asked me to step outside. The woman explained that although they were a black-owned salon, they were not there to simply serve black people.

The bitterness of that salon visit lingered long enough for me to put in a call to my friend and attorney, asking her if she believed it to be discrimination if a black-owned salon refused to due your hair based on its texture. My friend thought the idea was interesting, but persuaded me instead to exercise my First Amendment rights, to speak freely about the issue and if necessary protest the salon and its indifference to the needs of black women. And so I did. I sent out e-mails to friends, complained to the Better Business Bureau and the state's governing body that licenses beauticians and barbers. I also wrote this essay."

I hate her friend for talking her out of the suit. I would have loved to see the lawsuit with one black accusing another of discrimination based on immutable characteristics! I straightened my hair a few months ago for the first time in 12 years. During my nappy period, especially at the beginning, I caught hell. I had black beauticians actually hiss at me for bringing my nappy hair into their salons. "We don't do that stuff here!" one snapped tellingly. Is it just me, or does that sound like "we don't serve your kind here?" I had beauticians, trained cosmetologists, tell me my hair would break off if I didn't straighten it and that I had to have extensions braided in because natural hair wouldn't braid. Inevitably, when I wasn't thrown out immediately (to be fair, often with embarrassment that black people couldn't do black hair) the stylist would say 'yes' indignantly when I asked if they could do natural hair. They lied. More than once I left a salon with wet hair, in agony after 20 minutes or so of them trying to swirl my hair in every which direction like I was Farrah Fawcett. More seriously, when I worked at a fancy law firm with my wild hair, it was the black secretaries and cafeteria ladies who sucked their teeth at me and demanded to know why I "didn't do something with that hair," that they'd be the ones 'having to live with my mess' when I went back to law school. The old school white partner I worked for rated me his best sumer associate ever. It was the black folks who dogged me out.

For anyone who thinks Rep. Smith is lying, explain these internet jokes. People tend not to talk about phenomena that don't exist, right?

You Know It’s a Ghetto Salon When….
1. All the stylists wear house slippers
2. Four people are booked for the same 1 o’clock appointment
3. Your stylist calls YOU at her salon talkin’ bout “I overslept but I’m on my way.”
4. The Asian man from the carryout comes to personally take food orders.
5. A crackhead comes in every few minutes trying to sell deodorant or batteries. Street vendors revolving-door through to peddle everything from baby clothes to Gucci shades to FUBU gear to Rolexes.
6. You have to divide your tips ‘bout 4 different ways cuz one permed you,
one shampooed you, one wrapped you and your stylist finished you up.
7. Every trip takes HOURS.
8. The tape man is there selling tapes for $5.00.
9. Your stylist has to finish her wing dinner before she can start on your hair. OR Your beautician says she’ll wash out your perm as soon as she’s finished lunch.
10. They send Boo-Boo’s baby girl to the 99-cent Store for your $10 ‘deep conditioner”.
11. Your ears are ringing because ‘Back Dat Thang Up’ is blaring on the radio and she’s singing along.
12. Her boyfriend and his boys come by and you pray she’s finished before there’s a drive by.
13. A playpen, portable crib or stroller, complete with child, is a permanent fixture.
14. You have to supply any of your own hair care products AND/OR the beautician must go to the beauty supply store to buy supplies after you explain what you want done.
15. Conditioner is extra.
16. You want your real hair styled and no one knows how.
17. There’s a permanent “Out of Order” sign on the bathroom door.
18. You can’t see your finished hairdo because the stylist has plastered all the mirrors with pictures of herself and her friends, mostly wearing something scandalous.
19. There’s a receptionist station-but no receptionist.

"If you live near a Curves health club (and with 7,500 of them dotting the U.S., Canada, Europe and Mexico, trust us, you do), you may have barely noticed its unprepossessing exterior. Each location in the chain of women's gyms takes up only 1,000 to 1,800 square feet on a given sidewalk or strip mall, and is adorned with a violet-and-white awning bearing a Barbie-style scripted logo that makes the place look like a hair-scrunchie kiosk from 1986. But Curves' spare exteriors, and the minimalist fitness programming that goes on inside, have helped the chain become the country's fastest-growing franchise. It boasts nearly 3 million members, and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest fitness center franchise. Curves locations are so ubiquitous that they seem to act as antimatter counterparts to business brethren like McDonald's and Starbucks, popping up on every corner to suck that extra fat right back.

But these days, the women's gym first franchised in 1995 by Waco, Texas, fitness entrepreneur and born-again Christian Gary Heavin is not just doing battle with the saturated-fat-mongers across the parking lot. The past month has seen a whirlwind of confusing press about how much -- if any -- of Curves' profits Heavin gives to anti-abortion groups, and what kind of anti-abortion groups. The storm has left Heavin, franchise owners, gym members and the media locked in a battle that illustrates the confusing powers of the press, the Internet, and political and religious conviction. What seems clear is that Heavin is a committed foe of abortion who has contributed his own money to health agencies that discourage terminating pregnancies; he even blasted a local chapter of the Girl Scouts in print for its associations with Planned Parenthood. But Texas Planned Parenthood leaders have praised some of the health centers Heavin funds, and some feminists continue to defend Curves as one of the most pro-woman health and business ventures in the country. The fracas, which has included imprecise reporting and a scattershot boycott, prompts the question: What does it mean for a business to be good for women?" From Salon.

Folks just never run out of things to criticize us for, do they? NAIROBI, Kenya --An Idea Still Looking for Traction in Kenya: East African Women Vote With Their Feet Against Baby Strollers. Irene Wambui can't imagine why anyone would buy a baby stroller. She says she sees it as a cold cage filled with useless rattles, cup holders and mirrored headlights. Imagine children being stuffed into such a contraption and pushed around town like some kind of pet. From the Washington Post.

Brown Eyed Girl: Gateway Girl
First, they hated me for my [biracial] looks. Later, they loved those looks — but what did they know of the person inside? From Africana.com.

From Africana.com: Marita Golden, author of a new memoir titled, "Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey Through the Color Complex", chuckled when I commented that you would never know by watching Snoop Dogg's and Pharrell's video for last year's summer jam, "Beautiful", that there were beautiful black African looking women in Brazil. Actually, the same could be said about black America as well. If the "Beautiful" video is the sole barometer for what defines black women's physical beauty — and it shouldn't — then any woman with dark skin and natural kinky hair better follow Missy Elliott, get her date drunk, lean into his chest and convince him she looks like a Halle Berry poster. Barring participation in the Missy method for affection and acceptance, it is still unclear how the current standard of fair skin, long silky blonde hair, and thin facial features will widen to embrace the rich dimensional beauty of black women particularly when black music videos increasingly rely on Latina, Asian and white women for the complicated roles of booty shaker and hip winder. Marita Golden writes of her own coming of age as a young woman where "colorism" (color prejudice amongst members of one tribe or black folks' color mess) within the black community was, and frankly still is, a taut skein woven into our familial and larger socioeconomic fabric."

May 11, 2004

Here's my two cents on the role of female GIs in the torture of Iraqi prisoners.

Critical Noir: Spelman Women Take a Stand. "In protest of the degrading images of black women in the video for Nelly's song "Tip-Drill," the women of Spelman college forced the rapper to cancel his appearance at a bone marrow drive on their campus". Once again, Mark Anthony Neal is on the case.

Check this thoughtful sister out in The Black Girl Chronicles: Just Another Negro in the Diaspora. Thank God for the young sisters and brothers free enough to let those wonderful minds run free instead of running and hiding from all those pesky, frightening ideas.

"To understand what might happen in America if President Bush gets his way with the Supreme Court, consider recent events in Portugal. Seven women were tried this year in the northern Portuguese fishing community of Aveiro for getting abortions. They were prosecuted — facing three-year prison sentences — along with 10 "accomplices," including husbands, boyfriends, parents and a taxi driver who had taken a pregnant woman to a clinic. The police staked out gynecological clinics and investigated those who emerged looking as if they might have had abortions because they looked particularly pale, weak or upset. At the trial, the most intimate aspects of their gynecological history were revealed." From the New York Times.

Can't you just see the mullahs gathering the whole family to watch the spectacle of the 'sinners' (i.e. women and their doctors) humiliated in court and then jailed? Much the same crowd that loaded up the family, grannies to enfants, to picnic at hangings and lynchings no doubt. Kristoff, the writer above, may just be egging this crowd on with such lovely descriptions of people's lives destroyed by the Hand of God. Er, by anti-abortionists.

Ladies, our knight on the white charger. I can feel myself exhaling. Here's a young brother who really gets it: "The State of Our Union: Black Love and Marriage, 2004. For all the real problems black men and women face in trying to find love, the myths are even worse. It's time to make a positive stand for black love." On Africana.com.

Georgia lawmakers banned genital piercings for women. (Not for men, mind you -- you can get Prince Alberts all day long.) First the marriage amendment and now this. Why is the state of Georgia trying so hard to get in my drawers?

Negro, Please [note: we invented this feature a while back. In it, we imagine black folks writing in, as they call in to Tom Joyner, and admit to frontin' on racial issues when they know they know better. Like.... ):

I don't have a pot to piss in. My teeth are falling out my head. I have cut my Synthroid back to every other day. But I am sharp on Sunday. I cuts up the streets, I'm so sharp. And Crowns? I'm black, ain't I? You know I got 'em. The bigger the better. The louder the better. The less the people behind me can see the pulpit the better. And you know spring has sprung. I have given up hot meals and Lipitor. My Crown is laid up for me at Macy's, and I can't greet the Risen Savior in last year's chartreuse. Look for me Easter. I'll be dozens deep in every AME, every COGIC, every Baptist church you peek in.

The Height of Disrespect: New study on 'hip-hop' sexuality finds anti-woman strain—even among young women, by Thulani Davis, in the Village Voice.

"Valerie Simpson Exposed: While Ashford and Simpson may have grown to become an R&B institution over the years, in the beginning there was only one." By my boy Mark Anthony Neal on Africana.com.

What am I reading? Can I first tell you what I'm NOT reading? Not a one book listed in this "Black Expressions" catalog QPB so thoughtfully sent me last week. Did you have to fight your publisher not to have a puffy, texturized, loud-colored cover? Does every title have to be the pithy equivalent of a neck roll? I can't even bring myself to cruise the African-American interest table at B&N because just the damn glare off the dust jackets puts me in a bad mood. Are we really this shallow -- that mainstream black fiction bottomfeeds with the worst "white" romance novels? Happy as I am to have black folk embrace one of their gay own, does it have to come in the form of E. Lynn Harris' puerile tomes?

Anyway, some of what I've been liking:

Emma's Way -- Deborah Scoggins
In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz -- Michela Wrong
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families -- Phillip Gourevitch
Cuba Confidential -- Ann Louise Bardach
Savages -- Joe Kane
Samba -- Alma Guillermoprieto
Divided Highways -- Tom Lewis
Losing the Race -- John McWhorter
The Book of Sarahs -- Catherine McKinley
Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation -- John Philip Santos
Fat Land -- Greg Critser
The Atonement -- Ian McEwan
The Collected Stories -- William Trevor

Take care,
Lisa H.

Can you explain something for me? What is with this adulation of Essie Mae Washington Williams? I read she received repeated standing ovations at a fund-raising dinner in South Carolina recently. Now I am all for respecting and celebrating our elders, but I get the feeling that there's more to it when it comes to cheering Mrs. Williams. Is it her relationship to Strom Thurmond? Well what exactly about that merits dap? Is it that she stands as the embodiment of some triumphant "I knew that cracker was two-faced!" that some of us seem to be feeling? Again, what is that? The man is dead, his damage is done, and she seems to have respected him a whole lot more than any black body else. I don't get the sense that Mrs. Williams pities herself, but for some, the Tragic Mulatto apparently is a figure of fascination even into the 21st century. Mrs. Williams has spent 82 years creating a life apart from her father's. Why reduce her to "segregationist's daughter" now?

And, last ... I don't know your musical tastes, but if you favor intelligent, musical R&B rooted in Sly and Curtis and Marvin and the Isleys, try Van Hunt. (There's a great interview at npr.org with samples of several songs.) I am a sucker for singer/songwriters, and the part of me that still fiercely celebrates black qua black is just giddy right now.

Take care,
Lisa H. (who lives in that great soul plantation, Atlanta. She is a chronic runaway.)

From the indispensable Kalamu listserv:
>>PUB: call for papers--women in u.s. race riots

Abstracts on women’s roles in specific race riots (listed below) are invited to complete a collection tentatively entitled “Rage, Resistance, and Representation: Women in U. S. Race Riots.” Springfield, IL (1908); East St. Louis, IL (1917); Chicago, IL (1919); Detroit, MI (1943).

This collection of essays will investigate the various active roles women, and particularly minority women, played in nineteenth- and twentieth-century race riots, paying specific attention to exposing the cultural fallacy of women’s passivity in the public realm of violence, especially in relation to the construction of racial identity and cultural race relations. At this point, the collection will include essays from the disciplines of Literature, History, Law, African American Studies, Native American Studies, and Theater. The essays focus on a wide range of riots, from Boston in 1835, to Los Angeles in 1992.

I have included below additional information from the original CFP. Please send 500 word abstracts by March 31 to Julie Cary Nerad at juliecarynerad@racescholar.net.

More information from the original CFP: This project proceeds from the assumption that our historical representations and interpretations of race riots have constructed active resistance to or participation in (usually white) mob violence as primarily masculine: whenever possible, men fought to defend (reputedly or actually) their cultures, communities, and families. Women’s roles, in comparison, are remembered as primarily passive on both sides of “the color line”: women’s bodies were protected, defended, raped, beaten, mutilated, or ignored. These dual constructions, while often accurate and productive for highlighting the gendered and sexualized violence of race riots, leave a yawning void in both our understanding of minority communities’ resistance to national, racialized forms of terrorism, and our cultural memory of white women’s role in the public domain and their engagement in “the race question.” This project will begin to fill those voids by investigating how women participated more actively, through both rhetoric and action, in race riots. While the essays in this collection should not ignore the ways that women – or men – were victims to (usually white) mob violence in race riots, they should primarily highlight how women actively participated in those riots.

Essays should explore the theoretical and ideological constructs (such as the lingering myth of separate spheres, perceived biological racial and/or gender difference, or the “cult of true womanhood”) that proscribe and silence our cultural memory of women’s participation in violent public acts in relation to race. While the essays should note the precipitating causes of the respective riots, the essays should more importantly explore the underlying cultural issues such as the control of property, the attempt to exercise various rights (such as freedom of speech or the franchise), political power or definition of the nation, etc. that ultimately fuel race riots. Essays may deal with the historical archive itself, or they may deal with fictional representations of riots in order to emphasize how women’s roles have been proscribed, lauded, condemned, etc. in the cultural imagination at different historical moments by different voices. The essays should focus on race riots rather than spectacle lynchings, as the socio-cultural dynamics of the two types of events are significantly different. Finished papers should be no longer than 10,000 words and will be due tentatively August 31, 2004.

If this does't help put American Blacks' political problems in perspective, nothing will.

"Cleansing Iraqi Bob Victims Takes its Own Toll". From the New York Times: "In a large white room where the air was damp from open water faucets and the stunned grief of a few women, Khalila Sharif washed away the bitter past from the body of a 20-year-old schoolteacher from Baghdad.

The young woman's name was Aida Jabber. When suicide bombers detonated their explosives at the Khadamiya mosque in Baghdad on Tuesday, they took with them, among so many people, this woman who was described by her friends and relatives as gentle and devout.

Ms. Sharif had to cope with what was left of her, scrubbing the remains of its map of blood, masking with cotton wadding and two shrouds the evidence of trauma, so that the body would be pure enough for a proper Muslim burial." ...

"When Shiite Muslims die in Iraq, their relatives often bring them to be buried in Najaf, one of the holiest cities in their faith, about 115 miles south of Baghdad. The dead must be clean to go to God. So when the victims arrive in Najaf, they are turned over to the men and women whose sole task is to wash the bodies of the dead. The work runs in families, and Ms. Sharif's mother and grandmother were body washers."

So when's the party?

"More Teenagers are Striving for Restraint": From the New York Times: "The teenage pregnancy rate in America, which rose sharply between 1986 and 1991 to huge public alarm, has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States. And though pregnancy prevention efforts have long focused almost exclusively on girls, it is boys whose behavior shows the most startling changes.

More than half of all male high school students reported in 2001 that they were virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990. Among the sexually active, condom use has soared to 65 percent for all male students and 67 percent among black ones. The trends are similar, if less pronounced, for female students, who remain slightly less likely than boys to report that they have had sex. Nowhere are the changes more surprising than in poor minority neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx, which a decade ago were seen as centers of a national epidemic of teenage pregnancy."

Kuwaiti Women Make Progress: Remember, oppression anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Written by a friend, Peter Berkowitz.

You have to read my boy Mark Anthony Neal on Phyllis Hyman.

February 25, 2004

Hell no Halle: Why does even the luminously beautiful and internationally recognized actress Halle Berry feel the need to spreadeagle herself on the November cover of Savoy magazine (mine just came, a common problem with them)? Even my horndog of a husband was put off by the crotch shot. Don't go there Halle. You don't gotta anymore.

Was she wrong then or is she wrong now and does she know the difference? From the New York Times: "A federal appeals court has agreed to hear a request from the woman formerly known as "Jane Roe" to reconsider the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe vs. Wade that ended state bans on abortion. Norma McCorvey, who joined abortion opponents almost 10 years ago, says abortions are psychologically harmful to women."

Here are a few other things that psychologically harm women:

a)Women, safely past childbearing age, who look back and suddenly realize that bearing unwanted children is no big deal.

b) People without uteruses who are determined to control mine.

c) People with uteruses who are determined to control mine.

d) People who can't sleep at night while abortions are performed but can sleep at night while poor, third world women are denied either birth control, abortion or the right to say no to their husbands.

e) People who can't sleep at night while abortions are performed but can sleep at night while poor kids live in the land of plenty without access to health care, decent educations or healthy food.