During his week-long series of farewells at the Canadian Liberal Party convention, Prime Minister Jean Chretien told the National Liberal Women’s Commission that he was proud of all the women he’d appointed to public office, but that “it’s important to find slots where you have a chance of winning.” Some attendees apparently misunderstood him in his thick Quebecois accent, and thought he’d said a word other than “slots.”

THURSDAY I SAW Jean Chretien’s farewell speech as Canada’s prime minister. It made me want to move there even more.

Here was a guy fluent in two languages (that’s two more than our federal leader), pointing with pride to everything that’s happenned in his country during his leadership–balanced budgets, decent health care, staying the heck out of Iraq, same-sex marriages, even the careers of Shania Twain and Alanis Morrisette.

Then came the clincher: Chretien’s barbs at the opposition coalition, whatever it’s called this week:

“Canadians should beware of those on the right who put profit ahead of community . . . beware of those on the right who put the narrow bottom line ahead of everything else.”Canadians should beware of those on the right who would reduce taxes at the expense of necessary public services . . . beware of those on the right who do not care about reducing social and environmental deficits. Canadians should beware of those on the right who would weaken the national government because they do not believe in the role of government.”

You think we could ever get a guy that on-the-bean?

ONE OF THE FEW intelligent conservative publications out there, The World & I (founded by pals of Unification Church honcho Sun Myung Moon), has a long, intriguing essay about “The Feminization of American Culture.” The writer, Leonard Sax, implies a connection between the rise of feminine values and a rise in “environmental estrogen,” due to chemical leakoffs from all the plastic products lying around our homes and landfills.

I’d already heard about the latter phenomenon in a Hugo House lecture a couple years ago by Olympia postcard designer Stella Marrs. Marrs didn’t think the pervasiveness of estrogen-like chemicals was a good thing, for women or anybody. Recent medical disputes about the long-term effects of (deliberate) estrogen therapy regimens, such as a possible increased breast-cancer risk, might back her up on this.

Which brings me to the good friend of mine who’s studied a lot about the Greek Amazons, warriors of legend who would undergo masectomies to gain better bow-and-arrow skills. Are the women of the industrialized world, Sax’s article asks, gaining more dominance at the expense of their own health?

SHERI GRANER RAY claims in her new tech-insider-market book,
Gender Inclusive Game Design, that females “currently make up over 52% of Internet users and 70% of casual online gamers.”

In a related anecdote, a certain female Internet user of my acquaintance claims she’s got a fullproof Spam-mail response: “I just write them back and tell them if they want to sell me something to create a longer penis, they should send me a penis first. I never get another email from them again.”

This is written on Sunday, March 16. The day before the Irish Catholic Church’s sanitized substitute for the ol’ pagan spring equinox fertility rites. A time to honor nature’s cycle of renewal; the hope that comes from new life; and the libidinous, procreative spirit that makes it all possible.

But instead the world sits and waits for all hell to break loose, for wanton death and destruction to rain from the sky onto a small country already suffering under a brutal dictatorial regime, now to be decimated by the agents of another brutal dictatorial regime.

No, all you masculinity-bashers out there in alternative-land, this is not a war about penises or testosterone. It’s almost the complete opposite of that. Both the Iraqi and U.S. war regimes are fueled by an anti-erotic passion, an ultimately nerdy-geeky quest for abstract power. The U.S. neoconservatives are particularly addicted to this internalized, repressed, retro-pre-pubescent, anti-sex, anti-life state of mind.

This state of mind can be seen among censors who would outlaw images of sex but who don’t mind images of violence. It can be seen in a government that promotes abstinence-only “education” in the public schools, but refuses to decently fund basic education in these same schools. It can be seen in a national health care “policy” aimed solely at enriching the drug and insurance CEOs. Indeed, it can be seen throughout a federal Executive Branch whose every large and small decision is predicated upon rewarding big campaign contributors and/or silencing dissent.

A Guerrilla Girls ad in the Village Voice suggested sending estrogen pills to government officials, imagining that would immediately make them start seeing everything correctly. I suspect it would only turn them from sanctimonious, repressed men into sanctimonious, repressed women-in-men’s-bodies.

No, we need more passionately female females on the side of peace. And we need more passionately male males. (And, of course, more passionately queer queers, etc.)

In the eternal Dionysian spirit of life, we need to actively be out in the world with an intense, dedicated love. We need to sow the seeds of peace, to cultivate the fruits of true democracy. We need to do our share of initiating consensual, cooperative interaction here and abroad. We need to plow, thrust, pull, push, kneel, gaze, lick, caress, rub, nibble, sniff, and do whatever else it takes to help bring the planet out of its current frustration and toward greater serenity and satisfaction.

Or, to be Irish about it, to help the world become as ecstatic as the end of Ulysses.

…in rural Eastern Washington can be found today at the unlikely spot of SexNewsDaily.com. Scroll about halfway down the hereby-linked page to find the memories of one “Larry K.” concerning the girls he knew back home, who drank and cavorted like rebel girls everywhere but who disdained abortion or even contraception—because they saw what used to be called the “shotgun wedding” as a path to an at least marginally-better existence.

Mr. K also chides college-grad feminists for not seriously considering the plight of the non-affluent:

“To lower class women the world doesn’t look like patriarchy; it looks like it’s run by a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.… Feminism failed because it failed to seriously consider the fears of the mass of women who don’t have many options.”

I also see the world, or at least the non-Moslem world, as controlled by “a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.”

White affluent women are the second most privileged class in this country. It’s not surprising for such a woman to see only affluent men above her socioeconomically, and then to perceive the whole of society as “The Patriarchy.”

I’m not denouncing such women. It’s easy to fall into limited perspectives. It’s harder to imagine life from somebody else’s point of view.

But it’s vital.

…the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health in Washington DC is, alas, currently inoperative as a real-world attraction and is only available online. The site’s so fascinating it makes one long for a physical display site. Take this pairing of two tampon magazine ads: a repressed American one and an outrageous British one.

This holiday season, you can give the special lady in your life a genuine Hello Kitty “shoulder massage” stick, which, the page linked herein notes, can also be used “for other purposes.”

A TRIBUTE PAGE by a woman who admires “women who have small breasts and still look amazing.”

a virtual exhibition of some 100 vintage 45 RPM record labels.

ANOTHER GENDER-MYTH CHALLENGED: As certain bestselling books have been noting lately, females can indeed do less-than-great things to other females.

F’rinstance, that Eastern Hemisphere ethnic tradition known there as “female circumcision” and around here as female genital mutilation is a practice passed on from mothers to daughters (see the item at the bottom of the page linked here).

JUST ONE DAY after I read a zine editorial bemoaning the music biz’s continuing demeaning treatment of female musicians, along comes an AP dispatch about companies introducing “feminine” styled guitars for teenage girls. Make of it what you will.

…who’ve complained about my continual use of the perjoratives “boomer” and “yuppie,” I’ve been searching for new cliches-in-the-making. In Chicago, I’m happy to report, they’ve coined a new name for style-conscious, career-concerned, and sex-savoring young-adult white females–“Trixies.”

…who’ve opposed wars in the past (sometimes blaming them on “testosterone poisoning” or similar reverse-sexist reasoning) will now have to reconcile any personal opposition to a war against the Taliban with the existing feminist denunciations of that regime’s treatment of women.

Author-essayist Riane Eisler, interviewed in the L.A. Weekly, has her own such ideological reconciliation: The Afghan fundamentalists’ misogyny, she claims, is such an integral part of their ideology of violence and domination that it’s the duty of equality-loving people to fight back against them.

SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with another dare received on an email list.

A WILD BORE: Nickelodeon recently debuted Pelswick, a cartoon series created by our favorite Portland paraplegic satirist John Callahan. Its hero is a 13-year-old boy, who just happens to use a wheelchair.

One emailer on one of the lists I’m on noted that, not too long ago, such a character situation would never have been deemed an appropriate topic for a children’s light-entertainment series. This correspondent also asked if anyone could “name a subject that isn’t at least potentially entertaining.”

Here’s what I came up with:

• Claims adjustors.
• A year in the life of a flaxseed farm.
• A plastics chemist at Chrysler testing new PVC formulae for use in doorknobs and cup holders.
• A few hundred K of decompiled source code for HVAC systems-management software.
• A drizzly Tuesday night in late January in Aberdeen, Wash.
• A dark corner of outer space where no matter or light ever passes through.
• An all-New York City World Series.

(On the other hand, a drawn-out, never-concluding Presidential election is about as much fun as one can have with one’s garments currently being worn.)

YOU ROCK, ‘GRL’!: Media reaction to the ROCKRGRL Music Conference, Seattle’s biggest alterna-music confab in five years, was nothing if not predictable.

Before the conference, the big papers described it as an attempt to get a “women in rock” movement back on track after the end of Lilith Fair (which was really an acoustic singer-songwriter touring show, and which had included almost no nonsinging female instrumentalists).

During the conference, the papers tried to brand everyone in it as reverse-sexists, out to denounce “the male dominated music industry” and anything or anyone with a Y chromosome. Many of the speakers and interviewees, however, declined to fall in line with this preconceived line. Some at the panel discussions took time to thank husbands, boyfriends, band members, and other XY-ers who’ve supported their work. Others in interviews insisted their musical influences and life heroes weren’t as gender-specific as the interviewers had hoped. (Even at the discussion about violent “fans,” someone noted that stalkers and attackers can be anyone (cf. the Selena tragedy).)

And as for the music industry, it’s not built on gender but on money and power games; games which routinely prove disastrous for maybe 80 percent of male artists and 90 percent of female artists. (We’ll talk a little more about this tomorrow.)

THE END OF SOMETHING BIG: Saw Game Show Network’s hour-long tribute to Steve Allen a couple weeks back. Was reminded of how, seeing one of his last talk shows as a teenager, he was briefly my idol. He did silly things; he always kept the proceedings moving briskly. He also wrote fiction and nonfiction books, plays, and thousands of songs.

Of course, nobody remembers any of the songs, except the one he used as his own theme song. And the books and plays were essentially forgettable trifles. His main work was simply being funny on TV, and he was able to do it on and off for nearly 50 years.

As for his latter-day involvement with a right-wing pro-censorship lobby, you have to remember he was the son of vaudeville performers and was steeped in the old American secular religion of Wholesome Entertainment. To him, the past two or three decades’ worth of cultural bad boys and girls probably didn’t really represent a “moral sewer” but a mass heresy against what, to him, had been the One True Faith.

THE MARKETPLACE-O-IDEAS: The NY Times reports about some American leftist economists (including James Tobin, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bruce Ackerman) who’ve found an appreciative and excited audience for their ideas–in Europe.

You can think of it as the socio-philosophical equivalent of those U.S. alterna-music bands that could only get record contracts overseas.

You can also think of it as another of the unplanned effects of cultural globalization. Even avid opponents of a world system ruled by U.S. corporations are taking their ideas from Americans.

TOMORROW: Apres Napster, le deluge.

ELSEWHERE:

• Whack-a-President-elect wannabe….