...with several of you on the flist, American arrested in Japan for kidnapping own children.

Obviously, I feel horribly for the former couple's children. That said, here's a 38-year-old man who divorced his Japanese wife in January and has already replaced her with another. Anyone who has spent time in Asia will already know where my sympathies lie concerning this dispute.

That will be all.

As some of you already know, I have a job selling clothes in a really trendy Japanese store. Part of working in any such environment in Japan are two duties called "chirashi-kubari" and "kamban-mochi," which translate to "flyer handing-out" and "sign-holding" respectively. ( Prelude. )

Well, sure enough, he apparently showed up after the store had closed, asking for me. Since then, he has apparently been back regularly (luckily never when I've been working) and has said things that have made the managers and Boss Bosses so uncomfortable they actually had us doing chirashi-kubari indoors for several days. Not blowing me off now, are you Boss Wife?

( It's only gotten worse. ) That was bad enough, but nothing like today.

Because oh, ( the freaks were out in force today. )

I felt, after all this, that I deserved a trip to Book-Off. The largest Book-Off in the city is three storeys, which are connected by an external elevator. As I was riding the elevator down to the first floor I noticed a kid in his late teens/early twenties, kneeling a few steps below me. I figured he was just tying his shoes or something, but he noticed me behind him, stood up, and hurried off the elevator. It took me a moment to realise that he'd been taking a photograph up the skirt of the girl in front of him with his cell phone. Oh, Japan.

That will be all.

Full text is here, because I do NOT want it archived on my lj.

The basic thrust of it is this: hymen reconstructions are becoming ever more prevalent in France, so that Muslim women can receive certificates of virginity to show their future husbands and in-laws. Of course, all of this is abetted by the greedy, immoral surgeons who make it possible.

I mean, oh wait. These medical "providers" really do have the patients' best interests at heart.

Those who perform the procedure say they are empowering patients by giving them a viable future and preventing them from being abused — or even killed — by their fathers or brothers.

“Who am I to judge?” asked Dr. Marc Abecassis, who restored the Montpellier student’s hymen. “I have colleagues in the United States whose patients do this as a Valentine’s present to their husbands. What I do is different. This is not for amusement. My patients don’t have a choice if they want to find serenity — and husbands.”

Oh, really. So you're doing it out of the good of your heart, to save lives.

Then why fuck are you charging $2,900 to the women whose lives you're "saving?" I mean, since your motivation is compassion in the face of this life-and-death scenario, and not anything base like personal profit.

I rest my case.

That will be all.

...in which crypto-misogynist Caitlin Flanagan once again ( proves her suck. )

...in high level company positions that doesn't reference the "opt-out revolution" or being "naturally family-oriented." ( Archived here, mainly for my reference. )

That will be all.

...I have heard of in a long time. Linked from Alternet because The Nation's URL might change.

But seriously: women your job is to pump out kids and even Vatican Roulette is cheating?

That is creepy.

That will be all.

C&P from In These Times on celebrity culture and gender roles, archived for my own edification.
( Read more... )

That will be all.

...claiming once again that it's biology - this time a woman's estrogen level - that makes a woman attractive, as opposed to sense of humor, liveliness, the interesting things she says, etc. etc. Oh god do I hate these sort of studies.

First, let's take a look at methodology: the '14 men and 15 women' of the (presumably) all-Scottish beauty raters does not a sample make, as any student of Statistics 101 should know. Small sample sizes do not give representative results, ever. I can draw five random cards from a deck and use that 'sample' to show that even numbered playing cards don't exist. Only when sample size begins to approach the population size do representative results emerge.

And for god's sake, why are these studies not conducted on men? I have yet to see a single research project specifically dealing with masculine beauty, let alone one where men are asked to rate one another's attractiveness.

But of course, what if this is just me not wanting to face the truth about such things. After all, while the study itself doesn't touch upon the ways in which personality affects perceptions of beauty, it is true that people's first impressions of attractiveness are based solely on the physical. What if the conception of physical beauty was more fixed than I'd like to believe? I headed over to the New Science blurb on the study and looked at the two composite faces - one created from the women while at the height of their estrogen cycle, the other at the trough.

I had to admit that one of the women was clearly more attractive than the other. It seemed I just didn't want to face the truth.

Until I scrolled down to the bottom of the page to discover that the face I thought was by far the more attractive was the one of the woman at the lowest point in her cycle.

Which just proves what kind of bullshit these 'studies' are.

That will be all.

I got disgusted a few months ago with a well-known feminist blogger who was all too eager to believe someone's proclamation that Japanese women are frequently raped in the streets, despite the fact that neither she nor the OP (who'd read about her statement in a crime novel) had ever once set foot in the country. This sort of willingness to believe the absolute worst is one of the unfortunate habits of a lot of feminists, and counterproductive when trying to assess and solve the real problems.

Sexism exists in Japan, but it isn't women being dragged into alleys by roving gangs and raped (that sort of thing tends to happen where the bush administration has control over an area). ( It's much more insidious. )

That will be all.

...WTF Moment, ( courtesty of Japan. )

It makes one wonder what the heck they're learning in class. That will be all.