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Deja vu all over again, what?
Dec. 28th, 2023 02:53 pmIn the 1970s, women booed the idea of a male pill. Have we finally changed our minds? Well, I dunno: have men, over that lapse of time, come around to showing themselves really, really responsible over matters that affect both halves of the couple? E.g. can women always trust men about conscientious condom deployment? (I was reading on some relationships site the other day the plaint of some poor young creature whose boyfriend, who was either still adolescent or barely out of it, claimed to have breezed into a clinic and had a vasectomy pretty much on the spot - yeah, sure, right? - then a few weeks later thought better of it and allegedly gone to have it reversed, which is layers of fabulation.) I don't think this is an issue of the technology, unless the male pill has some visible effect to indicate that it's been taken.
Am old and cynical.
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‘Historical reparation’: new bookshops in Europe give voice to female authors: like what they did in the 70s, though maybe they are not, these days, run by feminist collectives with strict and particular views on who was allowed on their shelves*? (though I will note also the mention in, I think, Claudia Koontz's Women in the Fatherland about one establishment in Germany which had works by women who had been Nazis because sisterhood, but nothing by even significant ally male authors).
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Constantly being forgotten, and thus constantly rediscovered: women can actually be funny. French and Saunders: How they proved that women are funny. O dearie me. O dearie, dearie me. I see I have been going on about this for more or less since time immemorial. F&S can be funny without, you know, no women ever having been funny before. There may be something to be said about a particular historic blokey moment in comedy from which they emerged....
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*Still beswozzled by my encounter in Sisterwrite with mass market paperback of The Barbarian - US title for Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1930), in which somebody had pencilled, 'politically incorrect'. Huh?
