FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

“It does not profit a man to marry. For what is a woman but an enemy of friendship, an inescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a domestic danger, delectable mischief, a fault in nature, painted with beautiful colors?”
St. John Chrysostom

Sensible, decent Jimmy Carter got it right again. “This view that women are […]

Yesterday, I went to the doctor’s office again to talk about my headaches again, but this is not a story about that. This is a story about what happened afterward.
Armed with a handful of prescriptions that would all supposedly do their parts to ameliorate pain that has plagued my life for three years, I went […]

 I believe that David Brooks is a smart man. I also believe that deep within him lies a belief in Manichaeism, that is, that the world is divided into dark and light, good and evil, and each person must choose his or her side or thereby lose his soul.
More important for Brooks, each nation must […]

Gail Collins’ column today most likely gave Suffragettes, Sappho, and all of our Feminist Foremothers the vapors today.
Seriously.
How else to react to the following:
The health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate contains a provision known as the Bo-Tax — so called because it would levy a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery […]

 I do not know what it is to be a woman in Israel. I cannot pretend to, as I have never been there. I have friends who have lived in Israel, some observant Jews, some not, but other than that, I don’t have much of a clue. Yes, of course, I read things. But I […]

This week marked the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, in which 162 people were killed, and scores injured. I began a series of articles that mirrored Virginia Quarterly Review’s decision to run a four-part long-form journalism piece that would be exclusively online.The articles, which all-told, totaled 19,000 words, told a stunning tale […]

The Guardian reports that a new drug, originally tested as an antidepressant, has been shown to increase sexual desire in women.
Women who took the drug during the six-month trial reported more satisfying sexual encounters and higher libidos than those who were given a placebo.
Doctors involved in the study said the drug may prove to be […]

Being fat in Japan is no longer a matter of shame or embarrassment: the size of your waist is now determined by law.
Concerned about rising rates of both in a graying nation, Japanese lawmakers last year set a maximum waistline size for anyone age 40 and older: 85 centimeters (33.5 inches) for men and […]

I was on my way back home from Sandton yesterday.  We were coming from a Christmas party that the hospital organised for kids with cardiac failure.  We were in a taxi and everybody was tired from job interviews, so the taxi was very quiet except for the soothing music that the drive was playing.
When we […]

 It was Monday morning and I woke up to prepare my kids for school, when I noticed that Busi was still sleeping.  So I went outside to Bongiwe’s room to wake her up.  To my surprise and disgust, Busi had slept in the same room with Bongi- her boyfriend- and Lugelo, Bongi’s daughter.
The thing about […]

I’ve gone back and forth between entertaining the idea of having children and shunning it completely ever since it first occurred to me that I might someday be a mother. Being the youngest of three whose ages span three separate decades, I’ve got next to zero experience handling kids. If I don’t know […]

Bitter? Moi?
Mais, non! I live in the greatest country in the world. Everything we touch turns to gold! Why, just look at all the great things we’ve accomplished in Afghanistan!
In today’s Guardian, we learn that Three Cups of Tea and The Kite Runner be damned, things are NOT better for women in Afghanistan.
Afghan women protest […]

Poor Sonia Sotomayor. David Brooks writes a sympathetic piece about her this morning, focusing on the fact that she has worked hard her entire life, sacrificed relationships and family, all in chasing the comfort of work.
In Brooks’ picture of Sotomayor, her loss of her father at nine took something away from her, and she’s been […]

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
–Virginia Woolf
I was in the midst of printing out this article, on the poor mothers of Haiti, when I spotted the most recenty copy of The Week, a subscription I still don’t know how I got, and whose viewpoint and presentation of the week’s […]

Image taken from The Art of Romance: Mills & Boon and Harlequin Cover Designs by Joanna Bowring and Margaret O’Brien
Am I more than my body?
As a woman, of late, I feel as if I have had to defend the boundaries of my body in order to prove and preserve my personhood.
Forces abound that seek to […]