Anger

There is a programme on TV called 'Holmes on Homes'. It's a Canadian show but it can be seen in Britain. Mike Holmes is called into people's homes where professional builders have botched things.

Tonight, he was in a house where virtually everything was crap. It started with the plumbing, soon got to the electrics and then he found carpenter ants and damp in the walls.

The electrician he called in looked at the appalling wiring. Everything that could be wrong was, everywhere he turned or looked the work was faulty, dangerous, unbelievable. He stood there with some group of ridiculous wiring in his hand, shaking his head and saying how he couldn't believe it.
And of course, in our homes, we all did the same thing.

And that's how I feel right now.
This week I wrote about a Scientific American research report on how women's abilities are underestimated.

My sister, telling me about her family's holiday in various African cities, recounted how in one, she was not allowed point blank, to pay for anything and in another, she was simply ignored. The money paying for anything was earned by her. It shocked me. Those countries are dependent on the tourist industry. What happens when a woman travels alone, or two women go there?

Following the Osama-Hillary tosh, all I see or hear about is how Hillary's hair is wrong or she's too short, or some other garbage. Reading even her fiercest critics I see no debate but that she is the more experienced, intelligent and soundest candidate, but...but...but nothing, trivia, nit-picking.
Basically, she's a woman.

Women, we were told this week, can expect to spend 16 years paying off their student loans, compared with 11 years for a man due to pay differentials.
That's without mentioning that she may take time out of her working life during those 16 years, to bring up children and sacrifice career.

I see a friend who is suffering health problems at the moment and I can't help wondering whether her concerns aren't being properly addressed because they are women's problems. I have seen that over and over again.

There's an advert on TV where one woman, clutching one of those trick chocolate bars that are wafer thin, so you have to eat two of them in reality, telling her friend that the dress she is trying on in a shop, a dress the friend looks fabulous in, doesn't suit her, just so she can buy it herself.
I am woman hear me undermine and lie.

I am fed up with being insulted and offended by other women. I'm fed up with other women doing it to other women. The best men I know are those who are also offended by it.
I don't want to see it on TV, I don't want my daughter and my granddaughter to still be suffering this crap.
I would hope that any intelligent person would feel the same and it pisses me the hell off that some don't.

So if I were a man saying this, would you be sitting up and taking notice instead of shaking your head and smiling about me going off on one yet again about imaginary feminist stuff?
Stuff that's all in my head.