I hate patriarchy. But I like men who are not patriarchs. That makes sense, doesn’t it?
I’m a feminist but I like being both female and feminine. That makes sense to me too, although I occasionally run into people — mostly of my generation — who find that confusing.
I think about these things today because Frank Paynter left me a compliment to my “femininity” under the photo I left on my old blog site. And believe, me, I am complimented. At my age, I’ll take all those kinds of compliments I can get.
I remember my former boss (female, two years older than I) having a conversation about how different our attitudes are about accepting compliments from our male colleagues (i.e. “nice dress” or “hey, you got your hair cut; it looks great…”) as we get older. Of course, our whole unit was relaxed and collegial, so we were as apt to compliment the guys’ new ties or new hair cuts as well. But I know that in my younger, more radically feminist days, I was very sensitive to anything that smacked of condescension or trivialization — that I interpreted as detracting from my professionalism. Heh. How times have changed.
And they’ve changed not just for me as I move out of my prime (but, hey, there’s still a dance it the ol’ dame yet, don’t forget). I get to know younger women like Halley and Jeneane and Shelley and Denise and Andrea and Anita (and lots of my other Blog Sisters) and see strong, sexy, confident, professional, savvy women who blend being feminine and feminist with ease and humor. As I still sometimes struggle to walk my fine line between feminine and feminist, I recognize that’s it’s a line drawn by the times and the situations that shaped my definition of who I am. (Just another example of why I was born too early.)
I also recognize that, in creating a blog-identity as a “crone,” I conjured up an image of myself that’s true only in spirit.
So, thanks, Frank. You made my day. Hell, you made my whole week!

This from b!X’s site (who got the whole thing from here.) And if this just ain’t the Supremist irony!
“How much do you actually know about where the Pledge came from?
A Christian socialist who turned his back on religion. That’s the guy whose handiwork politicians of both parties and religious right leaders rushed to defend this past week.
Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister in upstate New York who sermonized against the materialism of the Gilded Age and who resigned from his church after businessmen cut off funding because of his socialist activities and lectures, wrote the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Now his words, composed for a magazine-sponsored school program celebrating the quadricentennial of Columbus Day, are treated as a sacred writ.
Originally, he was going to place the word ‘equality’ in there with I ‘liberty’ and ‘justice’ but realized he’d get resoundingly berated, since most people didn’t at the time believe that blacks or women should be equal to white men.”
If you don’t check b!X’s site every day, you’re missing the best way to keep up with the ongoing sagas of our country’s most current embarrassing ironies.

All of this blogging about the “pledge” and b!X’s post about the time he refused to say it in high school reminds me of my checkered pledge past.
When I was a young student, we were a nation “indivisible” and not “under God.” No problem there for me. By the time I was a teacher and had to stand up with my class to say the pledge, the “God” thing had been inserted; no one ever noticed that, while my lips were moving, I wasn’t saying anything. Then came the Viet Nam war, and I was an Assistant 4-H Leader of a group of a half-dozen girls that included my daughter. I was protesting the war and refused to say the pledge. I’m probably the only 4-H leader that ever got fired for political insubordination. Heh.

Got this off Aussie Alan Moult’s page. He got if off SatireWire. And it did make me laugh.
Exclusive: Band of roving Chief Executives spotted miles from Mexican border.
El Paso, Texas (SatireWire.com)

(I posted this on Blog Sisters, but if it’s good enough for there, it’s good enough for here):
Halley Suitt’s candid and candied comments to probing interviewer Frank Paynter prove that she’s anything but.
Paynter’s latest interview of the blog’s most fascinating women (heh — that’s my arrogant editorial sidebar, so don’t attribute that to Frank) is a portrait of Halley that reveals her complex, creative, productive human mind, her wittingly raunchy female soul, and her attitude toward body that — well, go and enjoy the view yourself. Move over ol’ Madonna and Britney. We’ve got our own Madonna of the Blog.

Wow. It looks as though my new site, thanks to b!X’s energy and creativity, is at this moment #26 on the Daypop 40. And I think that I also have to thank much-read Gary Turner for much of that, since it looks as though it is his announcment and link to me that is helping me to get all those hits. That’s a first for me, so thanks to two of the really good guys!!
And while I giving thanks, thanks also to all of you who posted comments on complimenting this new design. Apparently it loads fast too, and that’s surely a good thing. I’m also interested to know how the type size works. I had b!X make it larger than usual, since I know that I have a hard time reading small type. Like, I love Mike Golby’s stuff, but boy is it hard on my eyes to read!
And, while b!X hasn’t made the Daypop 40, he’s poppin’ as well, tuning up his own blog design. There must be something in the air.

An article in the current Free Inquiry magazine to which I subscribe has some very good articles on what they call “secular” vs “religious” humanism. I bill myself as a “spiritual seeker” and I have called myself an “irreverent non-believer.” While that sounds contradictory, it really isn’t because I do have a sense of the spiritual in humanity. This article articulated what is pretty much my strange magical non-belief — as follows:
Some among the ancient Gnostics, those great spinners of mystical, allegorical mythologies, had a name for the Ultimate Godhead. They called it “Man” (Anthropos, human being). This is a very old idea, rooted in the Upanishads where the world springs into being from the self-sacrifice of the Primal Man, Purusha, whose name is also one of the words for “soul.” What a breathtaking myth! What a powerful image! Let me suggest that the Gnostic myth implies something about what distinguishes religious from secular humanism, namely, a belief in the divinity of human nature. Such belief may not be a necessary condition for religious humanism, but it seems to me a sufficient one. That is, if you believe human nature deserves the epithet “divine,” you qualify as other (or, if you prefer, more) than a secular humanist.
I think of Ludwig Feuerbach and his relentless hermeneutic of suspicion. Feuerbach held that theologians are correct when they say we can discern the divine attributes. They are right to believe in such things as divine love, justice, mercy, sagacity