A feminist discovers marriage
I got married and quit my job. Can I still call myself a feminist?
Four months ago, I got married, and four weeks ago I quit my job. No, this isn’t some archaic commitment to tradwifery, nor a decision based on kids. But the two, life-changing decisions weren’t entirely unrelated either.
For context, 2023 was a huge year. I started a new role – a big, stressful role – at the same time as planning my wedding. I was still low-key recovering from long COVID, and a close family member was desperately unwell.
I was balancing on the edge of burnout for months – committing to yoga classes and restful weekends as a way to preserve my energy, withdrawing from social activities and “hunkering down” to manage my stress. It wasn’t working. I loved my job, but my nervous system didn’t.
It wasn’t just me. According to an article in The New Yorker, the Great Resignation of 2021 made way for The Great Exhaustion of 2023, driven by the incessant digital ping-pong of remote work. Many of us have, quite literally, become devitalised by Zoom.
And yet, I felt I couldn’t quit. Because … well, you don’t quit. Not when you have an interesting job with a wonderful team and do work you’re proud of. Not when you have a mortgage amid rising interest rates and a cost-of-living crisis. Not when you’re a woman, nay, a feminist, raised on girl-boss culture in the prime of her working age. Not when you’re making enough money to eat at Totti’s and shop at Incu and honeymoon at Raes.
So, what changed? Well, I got married.
I didn’t expect marriage to change anything. As a thoroughly modern young woman, I’d never seen a husband as a happily ever after. A man had never been my financial plan. My partner and I had fallen in love at 20, lived together for years, bought a home, and split the domestic and financial load equally before we wed. I was just a girl, in a loving and respectful partnership with a boy, wanting to tie the knot.
But, much to my surprise, it did change things, beyond the vaguely cringy thrill of saying “my husband” to a stranger and feeling like a child playing dress up.
When you stand up in front of your loved ones and publicly declare “what’s mine is yours”, when you legally, formally, ritualistically create a new family, it means something. It might not make sense logically or rationally, but there’s a strange alchemy to it, a solidifying energy.
Our marriage gave me a launching pad from which I could take a big career risk – pursuing writing full time – knowing I have a soft landing if I stumble or fall. With this gift, I had the ability to take a break from the grind and pursue a more meaningful vocation, without worrying about the mortgage or putting food on the table. And while I’ll definitely have to sacrifice fancy dinners and bougie shopping, it’s a small price to pay for my peace.
We all know wives have traditionally got the short end of the stick when it comes to career, often sidelining their dreams in service of their husbands. They were the ones who abandoned their jobs to keep the home fires burning, facilitating men’s professional lives in the process. The result of this is generations of gender inequity, including the gender pay gap and unequal division of housework, which continues to this day.
But in a healthy modern marriage, these spousal sacrifices can swing in the other direction. By offering me a financial buffer, my husband is the one supporting my ambitions, not the other way around. Could that be, dare I say it, a feminist act?
I understand not everyone has this option, and not everybody needs it. It’s a privilege to have a safety net, whether it’s parental, spousal or even social. But in a culture where we’re questioning the value of heterosexual marriage, or painting it as innately oppressive, I think this context is worth considering.
Sure, marriage has a bit of a PR problem. Weddings are undeniably expensive and extravagant and capitalist. And for many people, being in a solid and stable defacto relationship may provide this same support. But that wasn’t the case for me. It was marriage that did it. The legal, formal, ritual of it. The weight of it.
And while this isn’t a reason to get hitched if you don’t want to, it might give us pause to re-examine our perceptions of marriage in a modern context. Perhaps it’s no longer the patriarchal prison it once was. Perhaps, with the right relationship, it could be all the things it always had the potential to be; romantic and loving, tender and supportive, a safe harbour from which we’re free to adventure, knowing someone’s got our back.
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Are 80% of Democrats Really Fascists?
You might have heard that voters choosing to elect Republicans — especially a certain one — is the biggest threat to democracy today. Democrats don’t quite put it that way, of course, but it’s why they’re throwing the kitchen sink at Donald Trump legally and disqualifying him from state ballots. It’s why dozens of Democrats around the nation are working to disqualify more than 100 Republicans from running for Congress. Heck, Democrats in a couple of states even removed other Democrats from the ballot so their dear leader doesn’t face a primary challenge.
Saving democracy by preventing citizens from voting for their preferred candidates. Welcome to Joe Biden’s America.
The theme of Biden’s first big 2024 election speech last Friday was to repeat a tired refrain and scare voters about Trump’s supposed threat to democracy. The Leftmedia’s job is to poll voters to make sure they got the message, and then report the results of the poll to reinforce the message. That’s pollaganda. After that, Biden and other Democrats can keep talking about the issue because voters say it’s important.
It’s one of the most obnoxious feedback loops in politics today, but don’t underestimate its effectiveness with low-information voters armed with bulk-mail ballots.
To illustrate the point, a coinciding CBS News/YouGov poll found that an astonishing 81% of Democrats believe that Colorado and Maine were right to disqualify Trump from their state ballots and that other states should follow suit.
In other words, 81% of Democrats are fascists.
Fascists concoct bogus charges — in this case “insurrection” — to disqualify their opponents from elections. People honestly defending democracy (and we’re a Republic in any case) don’t do that.
As Peter Heck rightly notes, “Why should it be surprising that the same movement that fought so hard to discredit Fox as a legitimate news operation, or remove Rush Limbaugh from the airwaves, or conspire with the censorial ideologues running every major social media platform, would take the next logical step and try to remove troublesome political rivals from ballots?”
Among Republicans, 90% of those polled think Trump should remain on the ballot.
Assuming Trump is the GOP nominee, the real problem is this: 44% of independents also think he should be disqualified from the ballot. (Former conservative and now New York Times columnist David French is among them, which isn’t surprising given that he suffers from one of the most acute cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome we’ve ever seen.) We don’t think it’s a stretch to say those are unlikely Trump voters, which could also hurt down-ballot Republicans. Put another way, it’s going to be awfully tough to win an election when large numbers of voters don’t think you should even be on the ballot.
Ironically, by the way, 70% of respondents in that same poll say “democracy today is threatened.” Perhaps they should look in the mirror.
Public sentiment could change after the Supreme Court settles the issue after hearing Trump’s challenge to Colorado’s Supreme Court decision on February 8. If the justices throw out the Colorado court’s preposterous reading of the 14th Amendment, voters might conclude that continuing to have a former president’s name on the ballot is tolerable after all.
Yet Democrats have also worked extremely hard in recent years to delegitimize the Court in the eyes of the aforementioned low-information voters. In this case, they’re feeding that distrust with hints that Trump’s Court appointees could line up behind him out of loyalty.
Unfortunately, Trump’s own attorney is also doing that. Alina Habba is one of the few lawyers in the country willing to take on the client from hell, so we’ll give her credit for trying, but in one of the most foolish and self-defeating things we could imagine a lawyer saying, Habba made this prediction: “I think it should be a slam dunk in the Supreme Court. I have faith in them. You know, people like [Brett] Kavanaugh, who the president fought for, who the president went through hell to get into place, he’ll step up.”
The prosecution rests its case.
That notwithstanding, Democrats have made a complete mockery of justice and “democracy” in all of this. After Trump shocked the world by defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016, Democrats pulled out all the stops, using the Leftmedia and the deep state to wage a four-year coup against him. They impeached him twice. They’re now prosecuting him on 91 charges in four separate cases. And they’re trying to keep him off the ballot.
While these fascists play their anti-democratic games, Joe Biden goes out there to make a grand speech at Valley Forge in which he said, “We’ll be voting on many issues: on the freedom to vote and have your vote counted.”
Just not if you want to vote for Donald Trump, certain GOP congressional candidates, or even another Democrat in the presidential primary.
One final note: Bloomberg ran an op-ed with this all-too-real headline: “2024 Is the Year of Elections and That’s a Threat to Democracy.”
This whole thing would be hilarious if fascism wasn’t such a threat to the Republic.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/103435-are-80-percent-of-democrats-really-fascists-2024-01-09
**************************************************Doctor is suspended for refusing to use transgender patient's preferred pronouns - during argument about danger of sex change drugs
A family doctor has been suspended for three months after telling a transgender man they were a 'biological woman'.
Dr Raymond Brière — who had been practicing for more than four decades in Montreal, Canada — was found by a complaints body to have acted in an 'inappropriate and disrespectful manner' after telling a patient that they were genetically female during an argument about the risks of hormone drugs.
During an appointment in mid-2022, the patient asked the Dr Brière for a prescription for testosterone therapy to help them transition into a man.
The individual said they were ready to take the next step and had already undergone a social transition by changing their pronouns to he/him.
Dr Brière initially noted he had never helped a patient become a man before, and then warned that testosterone therapy could make them more aggressive.
The patient disputed this, telling the doctor that their medical opinion was based on 'stereotypes'.
Dr Brière has more than 700 patients in Montreal. The trans man — who has not been named — was one of his patients since 2018.
World Health Organization accused of 'trans bias'
The organization is set to call for people to have the right to self-identify as the opposite sex.
Dr Brière then suggested the patient could take testosterone via a gel that is rubbed into the top part of the arms or into the armpits.
But this was again rejected by the patient, who said they were only willing to use testosterone injections — which can cause a body to 'masculinize' more rapidly.
The pair then had an argument about the patient's pronouns, with the patient repeatedly requesting that they are referred to as 'he/him' while the doctor said they were 'biologically a woman'.
In a recording, which the patient took on their cellphone without the doctor's knowledge, Dr Brière said that if a genetic analysis of the patient's chromosomes was carried out they would be found to be 'genetically a woman'.
The doctor also told the patient that their change in gender was 'in your brain' and that their body would remain genetically female, still having the two XX chromosomes rather than the XY chromosomes that men have.
He added that: 'A patient until today, [but] you were a woman, dear madam'.
Dr Brière also refused to use the pronouns, saying that he was only being asked to do so because the patient believed his 'circle is the absolute truth'.
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Australia on Track to Terminate Dual Citizenship for People Convicted of ‘Serious Crimes’
Legislation that would give courts the power to take away dual citizenship from Australians has passed the House of Representatives and entered the Senate on Nov. 30 for heated debate.
The Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Repudiation) Bill 2023 enables the court to strip a dual Australian of their citizenship if they commit serious offences.
These include terrorism, treason, advocating mutiny, espionage, foreign interference, foreign incursions and recruitment and certain offences in relation to explosives and lethal devices.
Labor Minister Murray Watt, discussing the legislation in the Senate (pdf), said the bill provides an “appropriate mechanism” to deal with dual Australian citizens who have “committed crimes that are so serious and significant that they demonstrate the repudiation of their allegiance to Australia.”
“The bill promotes the value and integrity of Australian citizenship and the ongoing commitment to Australia and its shared values, while also contributing to the protection of the Australian community,” he said.
The power to cease the citizenship of an Australian under the legislation would be left to the courts, as a judicial ruling, rather than via executive power of government.
“Under the legislation, the court would only be able to make a citizenship cessation order if the Minister for Home Affairs makes an application for the order,” Mr. Watt explained.
Shadow Home Affairs Minister James Paterson said the coalition supports the bill because it “enables the citizenship of a convicted terrorist to be removed.”
However, he explained Opposition leader Peter Dutton wrote to Prime Minister Albanese with amendments (pdf) to “strengthen” the bill.
“If the government is able to agree to these amendments, which we have also circulated in the chamber and which should now be available to senators, that would make it very easy for us to support the swift passage of the bill,” he said.
Coalition Seeks Amendments
Mr. Paterson explained the amendments expand the list of offences to include advocating terrorism and genocide; advocating violence against Australia’s national interest; child sex offences; and other serious crimes.
“We are concerned that it doesn’t capture slavery; torture; use of a carriage service for child abuse material; use of a carriage service involving sexual activity or causing harm to a person under 16; urging violence; advocating terrorism; threats to security, including training with a foreign military; offences related to monitoring devices in the Criminal Code; harming Australians, including the murder of Australians overseas; and many other matters,” he said.
The Greens did not support the bill due to concerns that dual nationals would be treated differently than Australians holding citizenship only in Australia.
Australian Greens Whip Senator Nick McKim said, “the Greens will not be supporting this legislation.”
“If you’re a dual national, you'll be treated differently under the law to someone who is just an Australian citizen,” he said.
“If you’re a dual national and this bill does become enduring law in Australia, which I suspect it will, and depending on what the High Court has to say about it, and I expect the court will be asked to think about this in due course—pending those two matters—it will create two different classes of people that are treated differently under the law,” he said.
Opposition deputy leader Senator Cash said the bill was rushed through the House of Representatives and had a number of “very clear gaps.”
“There’s a reason we are talking about this bill today: because it is nothing more and nothing less than a cover for the government’s failings in relation to the NZYQ case,” she said.
“Now, as Senator Paterson has said, in the interests of improving this bill for all Australians, the coalition will be putting forward a number of what we say are small amendments but incredibly serious amendments which will actually strengthen the bill we have before us.
Senator Claire Chandler, on behalf of colleague Mr. Paterson, moved for the legislation to be referred to an intelligence and security parliamentary joint committee after it passes the Senate.
Ms. Paterson moved a motion on behalf of colleague Mr. Paterson that after the bill is passed, it be referred to the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security for inquiry and report by March 14, 2024.
However, the Senate journal (pdf) indicates debate on the bill continued before being interrupted for Senators statements on other matters.
Law Council Raises Concerns
Meanwhile, the Law Council of Australia has raised concerns that the bill is proceeding through parliament with “insufficient scrutiny.
In a media release on Nov. 30, the Law Council suggested the bill be referred to committee prior to passing the Senate, not after, as has been proposed.
“At the very least, this Bill should be referred to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) to allow proper scrutiny—before, not after, the Bill passes,” Law Council of Australia president Luke Murphy said.
“Any measures pursued to remove the citizenship of an Australian engages the key legal principles on which our democracy was founded, and therefore demand careful consideration by the Commonwealth Parliament and Australian citizens themselves. Such measures should be reserved for the most extraordinary of cases.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
<> http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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