Bits and pieces from your headache-addled host

Well, I’ve finished my course of generic antibiotics, and it appears that, to quote the Verve, the drugs don’t work. I still have sinusitis, and my answer to all requests for my presence is limited to ‘if I don’t have a throbbing headache, I’ll be there’. I have been redirected to chemist-bought remedies by my doctor, which are at least a lot cheaper than NHS prescriptions these days (though since watching Michael Moore’s Sicko, I feel I should limit my complaints about the NHS and resume thanking my lucky stars that we have one).

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Heart has started a new blog aimed at fighting the lies spread around the blogosphere about radical feminists. She has begun with some of the more repeatedly repeated slanders which have been launched by various people opposed to radical feminism. Most of the things that have been said about me in the blogosphere have either been so stupid as to be easily refuted by a five-minute perusal of my blog (bigoted, fascist, moron, hate-filled etc.), others have been those standard labels for rowdy females by means of which the namer shows his own misogyny and general idiocy, and some have been baseless insults nonetheless cleverly targetted to cut me deeply in the heart. (Seriously. I have been grimly impressed by the abilities of some of my detractors to work out which insult would most pull my strings. I should be flattered that they loved my blog enough to pay such obsessive attention to it!) I’ve discussed the sorts of insults thrown at radical feminists here, here and here.

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Nineteenth century feminist quote of the day:

The root of the evil [of prostitution] is the unequal standard of morality; the false idea that there is one code of morality for men and another for women… As a floating straw indicates the flow of the tide, so there are certain expressions that have become almost proverbial, and till lately have passed unchallenged into conversation and in literature, plainly revealing the double standard which society has accepted. One of these expressions is ‘he is only sowing his wild oats’; another is, that ‘a reformed profligate makes a good husband’…. We never hear it carelessly or complacently said of a young woman that ‘she is only sowing her wild oats’.

Immoral men know that for every victim you save, they can easily get another to fill her place, so long as public opinion is unchanged, and male profligacy is condoned.

Josephine Butler, a nineteenth century feminist who fought the Contagious Diseases Acts which forced brutal physical examinations and detention on prostitutes and women believed to be prostitutes. She was remarkable in being one of the first women to publicly speak about prostitution, veneral disease, and to place the blame for prostitution on men, in an age in which women were subject to condemnation for the mere act of speaking publicly, let alone about sexual violence. Butler’s demands that men regulate their sexual behaviour in order to protect vulnerable girls and women have been deliberately misinterpreted in later times as an imposition of an oppressive ‘anti-sex’ morality upon poor little men. Anyone else feeling that deja vous, or is it just me?
Several of her essays can be found in Sheila Jeffreys ed. (1987) The Sexuality Debates, which contains also nineteenth and early twentieth century medical tracts, ’sexology’ and feminist works.

More to come, when I am less tired.

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Thank you for all the lovely random comments! Please keep them coming.