Did you follow the recent story about tech marketing blogger Kathy Sierra and the various misogynistic death threats she's been getting?

99% of men really make the rest of us look bad. I'm only somewhat kidding, of course. In reality, 99% of humans make the rest of us look bad.

More seriously though, this is a very depressing finding. For the record, a few of us men are actually feminists. I know it seems radical. But, feminism is really just the radical idea that a woman has a brain. Or, more acurately, that women's brains on average are no worse than men's brains on average.

We were sitting in a hubble bubble cafe in Lawrence Kansas yesterday (yes, it's a college town!)...and the conversation between 2 male friends (one an engineer and the other a philosophy prof) turned a corner and met my Feminine Mind/voice. They were ruminating about "what things have really changed humankind since the discovery of fire, except LANGUAGE" etc...and I immediately jumped in with, "WRITING". I said, that since cuniform, and Sanscrit, much of the writing was for males, by males....in the idiom of HE- HIM. Although the Great Mother (Nature, Earth, etc; the power of Lifegiving, and the respect for "Goddess" as well as "God") was very very ancient by the time writing came about, it seems since that time, Western writing has usurped the feminine thought and language, and couched most everything in terms of the male, and the male identified ideas and philosophy and concepts . Written language in the Western form speaks of "his", as the commen pronoun (predicate adjective)..and all of humankind is called MAN." Oh", you might say," that is just a writing convention". Yes it is, and, it has certainly changed the way all Western people think. Did you grow up believing from birth that your genitalia matched the divine? Was your body created in the image of Her? Do you think if you are a guy, and you never have to worry, because no matter what kind of total loser you might be, the world has been made in your image? That you are not the original source of evil and that it was a male who was downfallen because of that terrible female? that Eve....etc etc... When education was forbidden to females, much that was written was not passed to them. That does not entertain an idea that certain types of knowledge were not passed to females, by females. Females are very resilent, and avoided being exterminated although the Church tried very hard to get them all. Why the Church (government) tried to exterminate women in the Middle Ages, and why females are not respected is a conversation for another day. It mostly comes from the belief that females had unfairly kept knowledge from males about reproduction...for a very long time. For perhaps 40,000 years? Once males understood that females had power because of their bodies (lifegiving), and that males had half that power...they decided to take it all. We are about 3600 years into that cycle. Language is how we give form, to ideas. Writing will change to include EVERYONE. Climate change and overpopulation will bring tremendous social change. More of the burden will be shouldered by those that are able to see the causes of these problems. And that is OK.Note: peruse the new constitution of South Africa. It is not perfect, but speaks of laws for "PERSONS" and for "EVERYONE". ( Not like the U.S. "all men" are "created equal" (except for the savages the slaves and the women and children), as it was couched by the "Founding Fathers. What happened to the founding Mothers? J.M.

Just one moment please. As a werewolf, I'm offended. It is unfair to poke fun of our inbility to properly use computers. We suffer from a recognized medical condition related to ingrown claws and can't possibly type well on tiny human-hand keyboards. If you must label, we prefer "computer restricted lycanthrope".

May the Geico Caveman forgive you.

;)

We need to start a new social cause movement to introduce the term "Huperson" to replace the word "huMAN", an obviously sexual and overt reference to a man from Hungary.

Ever thinking of just calling people: people? How about Terrans?

;)

Jan-
You had my attention at the mention of the Hubble Bubble Cafe.

M-Scott-

Good point that men can be some of the strongest feminists. It's true too that women can be some of the meanest perpetrators of misogyny. After all, who bound girls' feet in China? Their mothers. Who does the FGM in Africa? Women. The Nazis enlisted Jews to be prison guards, Kappos, and do their dirty work. The most inhumane social structures enlist the oppressed to oppress each other.

Anyway, as evidence of how people actually do dismiss online hate speech as free speech, here's a quote from Jarret Cohen, an insurance agent who, along with a UPenn Law student, defends the hate speech on his online forum: "I want it to be a place where people can express themselves freely, just as if they were to go to a town square and say whatever brilliant or foolish thoughts they have." But a town square is not anonymous. His forum is more like the walls of a bathroom stall.

Has anyone considered using the new IMBRA law as a precedent to regulating men's communication on blogs and the Internet in general? That is exactly what IMBRA does and it has been upheld by a federal judge. IMBRA does not permit American men to communicate, by email or any other means, with foreign women (can't even say "hello") unless he completes a lengthy form and submits very personal background information. Then she must (even if she does not want to) read it and sign that she read it and send it back before he can send her an email.

So if IMBRA can set conditions for speech just to say "hi" to someone in a friendly way, why can't there be a law that somehow restricts men from making unfriendly and threatening communication on blogs?