It took me forever to figure out and trace down what that "absurd sexual double standard for women" is in English...the one that's so obsessing the Sex these days....

It turns out that what is referred to is the fact that there are, in English, no equivalent terms of opprobrium for males for the words which refer to females as "sluts, whores, skanks, etc."  Call a boy those things and he will smirk with gratification. Girls who are called such things repeatedly or insistently enough often kill themselves.  It is, after all, the female equivalent of "Dishonor."  But of course the young ladies who are working themselves into such a pother about this linguistic happenstance, and who are blaming the English language and those who speak it, and write it, for this disparity, are seriously setting the cart before the horse in faulting the language for doing what languages properly do by way of faithfully reflecting the psychology and beliefs of its users.  In no language that I know of--and I know of several--is it possible, or feasible, to render the sexual profligacy of men opprobrious (to men), or to speak of the sexual profligacy of women without implied censure, contempt and disapproval.  Among female English-speakers the term "womanizer," for example, has a distinct pejorative and scandalous meaning--but it is never a word that a man can use, in speaking of another man, without some connotation of friendly approbation.

I bethink me of a conversation I had some three decades ago, with Kirsten, about the ever-odious Orrin Hatch, whom, as far as I can recall, I described as a right-wing ideologue from Utah and a Mormon--and Kirsten replied, "Yes, and he's a womanizer."

To which I replied, "So fucking what?  Who cares if he fucks a lot of women?  Are you nuts?"

Black People, feeling their oats after their recent gains against the University of Missouri,

have tumbled to the fact that Woodrow Wilson was a viciously anti-Negro racist--as indeed he was. What they don't get, being so fixedly self-absorbed, is that racism was, arguably, the least of Wilson's moral and ethical defects, as a man and a statesman.

Long talk on the phone, day-before yesterday, and (at her instance) yesterday, with my oldest friend,

Margo Seideman/Egbers/Wheeler/(and finally Mrs. W'm.) Hurd, who lives way over on the East Coast in North Carolina, about Life, and about our lives starting out together, back in October of 1964 when she married her first husband Donald (then "Deacon") Egbers, and the next month, when (at his instance) I moved in with them in their upstairs apartment on East 10th in Spokane, and stayed with them through the next spring and summer of 1965,  when we all lived in a 36' sloop moored in a marina in Portage Bay at the foot of University Way in Seattle, till I left our irregular union and we went our several ways in September--me to a job in an export brokerage and documentations firm in downtown Seattle, and an apartment on Capitol Hill; they (together at last, or finally just the two of them together) went back to Spokane to a failing marriage in which Margo worked (as a social worker) and Deacon continued painting (brilliantly) and play-acting and rôle-playing (preposterously).  The high point and major event in our lives having been, in December of 1964) meeting and staying in contact (for the rest of our lives) with (His Avatarship) Bill and Sue (née Sylvia Calvin) Weaver; as eventually I, and all my friends, did do.  Margo generously allows that I was the glue that kept her and Deacon together, and herself sane, and I told her--what she might not have realized--that my getting up every morning and chopping wood was  what kept me physically fit (You don't need much at age 22, but you must have some exercise, and it must be regular) and our little household on the boat warm and fed (when there was food to cook). So I rang off recommending Babette's Feast, saying that it was Pope Francis's and my favorite movie. And last night, courting sleep, I looked it up on Hulu and watched it yet again, paying particular attention to the incidental characters--the kitchen lad, and the fashionably pious ladies at the Danish queen's court, all so perfectly rendered and characterized.

Cougar, Puma or Mountain Lion, as you will,

He's actually a felid of the Genus Felinae--an overgrown pussycat--which may explain why, despite his large size, his predations among humans have been few, compared to, say, jaguars, lions, tigers and leopards.

On my way to see the good Dr. Chan this afternoon, I was

delayed at the King and University Streets' bus stop, where also a sweet, serious gentleman of a certain age, and a speaker of the local pidgin, though grave and circumspect and not at all childish in demeanor, was waiting, like me, for the Number One bus, not the Number One Ltd., who turned to me and said, so softly and with so incongruously childish an intonation that I had to strain to catch his meaning, "The flags at the military base, they be all lowered--Why?"  

"At half-mast, I imagine,"  I replied, "because of the murders of all those people in Paris."

"I thought we lowered American flag for Americans."

"Sometimes for our allies too."

"Why they kill them all?  So many--What do they gain?"

"Except to make themselves hated, you mean?  I don't know.  We don't know who they are or what they want.  I doubt they are even Muslim: They sound like the CIA to me."      

Phonecall from Phil last night

We talked about yesterday's massacres in Paris--up to a 160 innocent victims by this morning's count--with me trying to imagine who could be perpetrating them, and Phil sounding just a tad strained and artificial, saying, or trying to say, something to the effect that, with all these immigrants and refugees holding fanatical religious beliefs, random massacres of innocent persons is what you have to expect; which, I suppose, is true, but which seems to give more motivational importance to fanatical religious beliefs than I like to allow them.  I'd much prefer to believe that it was historical chickens coming home to roost from France's iniquitous  colonial adventures in, say, Viet Nam and Algeria.  Then I could say, and half-believe, "and serves them bloody right, too!" except that you can't even think that about the random massacres of innocent persons.

Well, but--false flag or not--it (the eruption of massacres) has had the effect of closing the borders--which many in the Sweet France have been desperate to do these past several decades, though they dared not say so, and of getting really tough with the intransigeantly unassimilable. And so, I guess, we'll have to acknowledge th'ascendance of Mme. Le Pen. Welcome, Marine.

Say that you are a bad-ass Nigger, invading a home, with your weapon drawn and ready to shoot,

and granted that you're young (well, 23 years old) and stupid and full of rage--still, why ever would you shoot a woman nursing a baby?  Is it a Nigger thing?

?

If there hadn't been a 6th Episode of the 11th Season of Supernatural--the best so far, I think--last night,

I'd have scotched yesterday entirely:  'Veterans' Day' indeed!  I am so full-up to my wiggly ears of having these murderous mercenary swine touted to me as heroic 'Veterans' and support-worthy 'Troops.'  To which I say ¡Haditha! and ¡My Lai!

But last night's Supernatural was, in many ways and particulars, exquisite.  From having the Darkness revealed as the Sister of God to the Demon-accountant in Hell blaming the 40% diminution in live-soul collection in the Pacific Northwest on the Legalization of Marijuana.  

the saddest word of tongue or pen is that Rupert Murdoch (Rupert Murdoch!),

has bought the majority of the shares of the National Geographic Society, and, for openers, fired a fifth of its staff.  Mr. Murdoch doesn't believe in global warming.

Oops!

Born this date in 1849 in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, Ruy Barbosa de Oliveira was a federal representative, senator, Minister of Finance, writer, jurist and diplomat.  Barbosa's liberal ideas were influential in the drafting of the first republican constitution.  He was a supporter of fiat money, as opposed to a gold standard, in Brazil.  During his term as finance secretary, he implemented far-reaching reforms of Brazil's financial regime, instituting a vigorous expansionist monetary policy. The result was chaos and instability: the so-called fiat experiment resulted in the Bubble of Encilhamento, a dismal politic-economic failure.

I keep reading novels of Françoise Sagan

I don't really mean to.  The latest, Un peu de Soleil dans l'Eau froide, that I picked up at the library without examining it, was signed Quoirez--Ms. Sagan's actual patronym--which I didn't recognize, and I was several dozen pages into it before it occurred to me to look it up on Wikipedia to see why I was enjoying it so much. And enjoy it, as I have all of Sagan's work, I did.  I can't think of an equivalent in English: Someone whose writing is deft, clear and (especially for a woman) utterly unaffected; with "real" characters that the author seems entirely outside of.  The only thing that surprised me (shocked, and left me incredulous) was the desperate suicide of our heroine at the end--merely and simply because she has overheard our "hero" (her lover) telling his oldest and bestest male friend that he often wishes he were single again. So, what planet do women live on?

Actually, there was one other little thing that I found (and find) bizarre and inexplicable:  How, after getting frustratedly drunk and staying out all night without calling home, our fading but still handsome "hero" gets his face slapped--What kind of savages engage in such behavior? Heterosexuals?  Really?