Four bits on women (and maybe on who defines/controls them)

• How It Is Done: Working Mothers, Guilt and Childhood Obesity -- bad science used to beat up on working mothers, as though parenting weren't hard enough.

  But whatever the demerits of the study, that popularization really is utterly loathsome. Loathsome! Note that working fathers are not mentioned. Fathers are not mentioned. And the recommendations for women, or rather the scolding: Try not to work so much!
  
  I write about these kinds of crappy studies because they are worms which drill through the skins of women and fester deep inside us. We are not worthy! We are responsible! Nobody else is to blame! We must walk on our hands through life and not fall! I don't write about them because I somehow think that women are perfect, for example, but to show how this thing is done. It is non-stop, really.

• Feminists Make Better Lovers -- doesn't apply to women exclusively, but reveals biases about many things, including what kinds of studies do and don't get popularized. [Hint: the ones that do are the ones that confirm the cultural narrative!]
  
  
• Take Your Legislation Off Me -- some grim legislation being discussed right now, the discussion again revealing all kinds of underlying assumptions, including that men should get to make all the decisions in matters affecting women.
  
  
• On Labor -- a personal story that serves as a reminder that women carry disproportionate risks in creating our next generation.

  Every day women choose to do the hard labor of a difficult pregnancy. Its courageous work, which inspires in me a degree of admiration exceeded only by my horror at the notion of the state turning that courage, that hard labor, into a mandate. Women die performing that labor in smaller numbers as we advance, but they die all the same. Men do not. That is a privilege.

  Amen.