Oh, how dating has changed!

Thankfully, it's been 40-odd years since I've had to anything that might be described as "dating". I'm not sure I could bring myself to enter into the modern way of doing it (i.e. using an online app).

I was a bit taken aback, though, at an article about how many women are approaching the process these days. Maybe this is sixth-wave feminism or something (is that where we are?), but it doesn't sound particularly healthy to me.

Apparently, many women, especially financially-independent women, now expect men to pick up the tab on the first, and even subsequent, dates. Gone are the days when women wanted to be seen as equal by paying, or at least splitting, the bill. (Other research suggests that 45% of Canadians expect the bill to be split evenly, with 24% expecting the man to pay, and another 24% saying it should be whoever initiates the date.)

This is nothing to do with traditional values and deferring to the stronger, wealthier sex, or anything like that. This is a purely transactional approach about seeing "what they're bringing to the table in a potential relationship". More specifically, these women argue that there is still a "gender wage gap" where men typically earn more than women and should therefore contribute more to a relationship, and there is still a "beauty tax" where women are expected to pay more to meet societal standards of beauty. They may (or may not) pay on a second or third date to "signal my interest back to him".

Wow. Now, call me old-fashioned, but personally, I'm not particularly sure I'd wanted to be dating a women who thinks that way. I'm not really interested in a woman who feels she has to meet societal standards of beauty, and wants to be subsidized for it. It seems like a very cold and calculating approach to something that should be warm and fuzzy.

However, the article does go on to question why such an attitude has come about, and the answer is probably dating apps. The ease and availability (and also the transactional nature) of app dating has led to a sea change in attitudes, compared to the happy-go-lucky approach of my day, where you just happened on someone in a pub or a party, or you trailed after someone for months on end like a love-sick puppy.

Frankly, it doesn't really surprise me that studies show that fewer people than ever - just 8% of over-18s - are actively dating. Among the reasons put forward are a challenging job market, especially for younger people (and the concomitant decision to focus.on careers first and relationships later), the cost of living in general, a genetal sense of hopelessness about the state of the world, and, yes, "dating app fatigue and choice overload". Quite.

I know I couldn't face it. Let's hope I never have to!

Should we be worried about trans women in sports?

The issue of transgender women in sports keeps raising its head from time to time. My wife's personal trainer has been banging on to her about it for years now. Right wingers like Donald Trump and Danielle Smith raise the issue whenever they remember. (I'm not totally sure why it's mainly a right-wing issue.) JK Rowling continues to dismay her otherwise loyal following every now and then by bringing the matter up.

The latest blow-up occurred when Skate Canada, Canada's national skating body (and independent of the federal government), announced that it will stop holding major national and international events in the province of Alberta due to Alberta's recently-legislated ban on transgender women competing in women's sports in the province, as the ban contravenes Skate Canada's "national standards for safe and inclusive sports".

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who went to the lengths of using the notwithstanding clause to get her legislation passed (as it would otherwise have contravened the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms), of course shot back that she thought that Skate Canada's decision was "disgraceful" and that she expects "they will apologize and adjust their policies" once they realize the error of their ways. (As it happens, there are no upcoming national or international events scheduled to take place in Alberta anyway for the foreseeable future.) 

Smith also said that the decision was "offside with the international community, including the International Olympic Committee, which is moving in the same direction as Alberta". This is disingenuous, shall we charitably say, as is so much that Danielle Smith says. In fact, the IOC is just in the process of reviewing its position on female sports, and has made no pronouncements either way. Currently, it leaves specific rules to to the various international federations for individual sports, although there are rumours that it may be moving towards some kind of ban later next year. Whether that will be a blanket ban or something based on testosterone counts is not clear. The International Paralympic Committee, of course, will probably come to very different conclusions.

So, is this a real issue? Or is it just a straw man/woman, one that the right wing loves to mobilize every now and then to placate its more militant members? How many people does it affect anyway? Well, San Francisco's Office of Transgender Initiatives has produced its own handy summary of the situation. And yes, I know they have their own axe to grind, or at least their own confirmed views, but at least they are attempting to create some perspective on a very divisive issue.

First off, an estimated 1% of the US population identify as transgendered (more than I would have thought), and I assume a similar proportion in Canada and western Europe. Very few of them, though, have any interest in sport: 0.002% of college athletes are trans, and less than 0.001% of Olympians. This is a vanishingly small percentage to have engendered such a maelstrom of political attention. 

It certainly seems to have attracted significantly more attention than much more worrying and prevalent problems like sexual abuse of women in sport. It has also led to some unfortunate incidents like schoolkids in Florida and several other states being subjected to genital inspections.

It's not a new issue, either. Renee Richards, a trans woman, was competing in tennis back in the 1970s (she never actually won anything). Veronica Ivy became track cycling champion in 2018, although only for an advanced age bracket. Laurel Hubbard competed in Olympic weightlifting in 2020, but, despite all the media attention, she didn't win anything either.

There is also some confusion about cisgender athletes being accused of being transgendered. This is often due to high testosterone levels, but is sometimes just based on their rather masculine appearance. Perhaps the most famous is Caster Semenya, the successful South African middle distance runner who has won several World Championships and a gold medal in the 2016 Olympics. She is not transgender, though, she just has very high natural levels of testosterone, as some women do. In 2019, World Athletics required her to take medications to suppress her natural testosterone in order to compete (she refused, and sued World Athletics for discrimination). 

There are others: Imane Khelif, a cisgender female boxer from Algeria, who was accused of being transgender and hounded out of the sport; Dutee Chand, an Indian athlete who was excluded from selection for her butch appearance, despite not being trans; and at least five other African runners who were all withdrawn from their events for their high natural testosterone levels and/or their masculine appearance.

So, what does the evidence from scientific studies show us? 

A 2021 study in the journal Sports Medicine concluded that there is no scientific evidence to support policymakers' attempts to ban transgender women in sports. A 2024 study, partly funded by the IOC and published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that trans women have little physical advantage, and may actually have several disadvantages, when competing with cisgender women:

• Trans women performed worse than cis women in tests measuring lower body strength.
• Trans women performed worse than cis women in tests measuring lung function.
• Trans women had a higher body fat mass and a weaker hand grip strength than cis men.
• Trans women's bone density (linked to muscle strength) was about the same as that of cis women, not better.
• Trans women's hemoglobin profile (also a factor in athletic performance) was also about the same as that of cis women, not better.

All this to say that the issue of trans women in sports is probably much more about politics than it is about sports.

Why is it alway men that engage in risky investing behaviour?

If you've ever wondered why it always seems to be guys that do all that investment in cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, sports gambling, even belief in Donald Trump and conspiracies theories, some new research purports to explain it (but fails, in my opinion).

The research, published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making (yes, that's the name of a scientific journal!), identifies something called the "confidence-information-distortion-confidence" cycle. This essentially says that, once men have an initial opinion on something - whether it be choosing a mortgage or insurance option, making investment decisions, choosing a financial advisor or going it alone - they tend to interpret any subsequent pieces of information, whether confirmatory or useful or relevant or not, as support for their initial assessment. Even if it shouldn't rationally affect their decision at all, each new item of information somehow increases their confidence that their original opinion was right. 

You could just call it "conviction bias", rather than the pseudo-science gobbledygook this study chooses to employ. And it's hardly surprising or news, is it? More to the point, it doesn't really explain why men are more affected by this logic blindness than women. But it remains a fact that some 61% of cryptocurrency investors are men, high-risk stock trading tends to be a male province by a two-to-one ratio, and sports betting is male thing by a three-to-one margin.

A study explaining why women are more risk-averse than men might be more useful. I imagine it has its origins in evolutionary biology or child-rearing or something of that sort. These things usually do.

Are women who fish still fishermen?

On reading an article about lobster fishermen in Atlantic Canada, I was a little taken aback by the passing assertion that the preferred term for both men and women in the fishing industry is in fact ... "fishermen".

Not that this is such a revolutionary idea, and not that there are actually that many women in the fishing industry anyway. But it's certainly something I had never thought about. And apparently it's true.

If we're being politically correct, we say "humanity" instead of "mankind", "staff" for "manpower", "chair" for "chairman", and "firefighter" for 'fireman". But we still say "fisherman", mainly because there just aren't any good or obvious substitutes. 

"Fish harvester" is a bit of an awkward mouthful, even if Fisheries and Oceans Canada has officially adopted it. And "fisher" is a forest-dwelling carnivorous mammal found in the wilds of Canada, and anyway sounds just weird except in the biblical phrase "fisher of men". "Fish industry worker"? I said GOOD substitutes! "Fishwives"? Don't even go there!

And, anyway, as it turns out, if you ask any female person who fishes on either coast of Canada - and people have done just that - they will respond, to a man [sic], that they prefer to be called "fishermen", thank you very much. In fact they take strong exception to any attempts at political correctness. These are not bleeding-heart liberals or holier-than-thou intellectuals.

So, until the female fishermen themselves change their minds, we are probably stuck with "fisherman". Which begs the question: has anyone asked female board chairs what they would like to be called?

A peek at some of the views of the US Secretary of Defense

The USA takes another step towards Margaret Atwood's prescient Gilead as one of the Trump administration's highest ranking members re-tweets some offensive drivel from a self-described "Christian nationalist" pastor.

US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth couldn't help himself and re-tweeted an X posting about a CNN interview with Doug Wilson, senior pastor at the Christ Church in Idaho, who took the opportunity to air some of his nasty (and, let it be said, distinctly un-Christian) beliefs. And I'm sure he has many more, much nastier, beliefs he did not considered fit for prime time.

Among the ideas that Hegseth seems to approve of are: "women are the kind of people that people come out of" (a rather awkward phraseology, but you know what he means); women are the "chief executive of the home"; women should have "three or four or five" children, because that is their function; women should "submit" to their husbands; and more specifically, women should vote with their husbands, and not pursue their own political leanings; and more.

On other matters, Wilson defended his previous comments about slaves sharing a mutual affection with their masters, and his view that sodomy should be recriminalized.

Hegseth and his family regularly attend another church established by Wilson and his Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches organization in Washington DC. 

Remember, this is the man notionally in charge of the most powerful military in the world (although in practice he just does whatever he think Donald Trump would like, or whatever he is told to do by Trump).

Don't you just feel that these old grey men are dragging us down, inexorably, into a New Dark Age?

Women are super-powered humans

Quite an interesting article about female sensory abilities in the Globe and Mail this weekend.

While men may be, generally speaking, stronger, tougher and faster - and endlessly celebrated as such - women seem to have (much less well-known and celebrated) enhanced sensory powers. And this is not just anecdote, it is scientific fact.

Women have greater touch sensitivity. Using fMRI technology, it has been shown that female babies' brains light up much more than males' when touched. Also, the smaller hands and fingers of women have just as many sensory receptors as men, meaning that they are more densely packed. Also, women have more thermosensitivity (for detecting subtle differences in temperature) in their hands than men. Almost a century ago, women were employed by the US Treasury Department to detect counterfeit banknotes by touch, a task men were not able to perform.

Women routinely outperform men in smell perception. Furthermore, this superiority is in all tested dimensions: identification, discrimination and detection thresholds. Women just have a better sense of smell, period. From postmortems, it has been found that women have 43% more cells and nearly 50% more neurons in their olfactory bulbs (where smell is analyzed in the brain) than men. Women can be trained to detect an odour 11 orders of magnitude lower in concentration than men.

It's the same with taste perception. Female tongues have more papillae and more taste receptor cells than male ones. This is the case for all "flavours" - sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami - but it is especially notable in bitterness detection cells, possibly an evolutionary adaptation to guard against poisonous foods, which are often bitter to the taste. About 35% of women quality as "super-tasters" compared to just 15% of men.

Vision is more complex to test, but it seems that women have an edge in low light and in detecting subtle movements (like a change in facial expression), while men do better with high-contrast images and the speed of identifying fine detail. Another evolutionary development? Women, though, wins hands down with colour perception. Two of the cone cells that we use for colour vision are encoded on the X chromosome, of which women have two copies to men's one, resulting in a much smaller incidence of colour blindness in women (0.4%) than in men (8%). Women can also perceive finer gradations of colour than men, and some women even have four types of cone cells rather than three.

In auditory acuity, tests show women outperforming men by a substantial margin, both in hearing sensitivity and in speed of auditory responses. On the other hand, men tend to be better at pinpointing where a sound is coming from, and in detecting ultra-low frequencies. Women's hearing also declines more slowly, and later in life, than men's, partly due to environmental exposure (e.g. men have louder jobs, generally speaking), but also due to the hormone estrogen, which appears to help preserve the delicate structures of the inner ear.

All in all, this seems like a striking evolutionary dominance and fine-tuning in sensory abilities of all kinds. It's the hidden engine behind what has become known - and often derided - as "women's intuition".

It feels like no-one is really happy with the Hockey Canada sexual assault trial verdict

There is severe disappointment and outrage in some quarters after Ontario Supreme Court Justice Maria Carroccia ruled recently that all five of the young Hockey Canada players are not guilty of sexual assault in an incident in London, Ontario, dating back seven years to 2018.

The high-profile case has engrossed Canadians for months now, partly becuase it involves hockey and partly because it involves some pretty lurid sex. As I have commented previously, the victim, known only as E.M., has been subjected to days and days of stressful cross-examination, and the trial hung on the thorny issue of consent.

The trial saw a series of legal twists and turns, including an early declaration of a mistrial and the dismissal of the entire jury mid-way through. In the end, the trial was heard and decided by judge only - the aforementioned Justice Carroccia - with no jury involved.

And, in the end, the judge decided that, not only did the Crown fail to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the complainant didn't consent to the sexual activity, but that she positively DID consent to it, and even initiated much of the sexual activity. Justice Carroccia also concluded that E.M. was not as drunk as she later claimed. 

Furthermore, the judge did not find E.M.'s testimony to be "credible or reliable" and that ahe "cannot rely" on it (and, it's true, there did seem on the face of it to be many memory lapses and discrepancies compared to her previous evidence, all of which the judge had to take into account). She also called out E.M.'s use of the phrase "my truth", rather than "the truth" - pedantic? Maybe, maybe not.

Anyway, it's done, and thise rather slick, smarmy-looking young hockey players have walked scot-free. They are talking about complete "vindication" and "exoneration" (or at least their lawyers are). Frankly, it kind of smarts because the guys are clearly aware that they probably pushed it too far, and I'm sure they regret it. But against the law? Apparently not. The National Hockey League has deemed them personas non gratas anyway - the NHL was at great pains to distance itself from this kind of sleaziness and demeaning behaviour - so they will be forced to ply their trade in other leagues elsewhere. 

E.M. herself is traumatized by the whole process and obviously very disappointed that it came to nothing. Surely, she would not have put herself through it all unless she truly believed that she was in the right. But now she needs to put it down to experience and to pick up the threads of her life, which have been put on hold for the last seven years.

As a woman herself, I can't believe that Justice Carroccia found it easy to completely dismiss a fellow female in this way. But, as she says, "Believe the Victim" is all very well as a handy catch-phrase, but it has no place in a court of law, where the evidence in its entirety needs to be considered. I'm sure she would have liked to be able to believe the victim, but found herself unable to do so in this case. A tricky position to find herself in.

Most of the protesters outside the court clearly disagree - "We believe you", "Believe all women" and "Believe the victim" are by far the most commonly-seen placards - and most of the opinion articles I have read since the decision was announced have come down firmly on the miscarriage-of-justics side of things. There is an implicit assumption that the legal system has let E.M., and women in general, down. 

Predictably, the more conservative commentators commended Justice Carroccia's "bravery", while those more left-of-centre thought her decision harsh and unfair. There is no evidence I can find that Justice Carroccia is particularly right-wing or anti-women.or otherwise politically motivated. 

We are not now deep in the #MeToo movement - if anything, we are in a period of backlash - but Justice Caroccia's decision, and her explanatory words, should probably be considered brave. There is probably quite an implicit pressure to find in favour of the female victim in these cases; she must have been very convinced of her decision to find otherwise.

There is no doubt, though, that the case has put the #MeToo movement back several years. Many victims of sexual assault will not be willing to put themselves through the wringer the way E.M. did. We could almost have been back in pre-#MeToo times, when, in another high profile sexual assault trial, Canadian media personality Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted of all charges.

But was the verdict actually wrong, as the protesters so clearly believe? It's hard to say so in any definitive way. It's true that much of E.M.'s testimony did not hang together, and she did seem to consent to, and even direct to a some extent, the sexual encouter

All in all, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and hardly anyone seems completely happy about the outcome, probably including Justice Carroccia, who may have to watch her back as she walks home from the court for a while.

Ayami Sato first woman to play on a professional Canadian men's baseball team

Kudos to Toronto for signing up - and actually playing - the first women to play for a professional men's baseball team in Canada. 

Just so you know, this was not the Toronto Blue Jays in Major League Baseball, mark you, but the Toronto Maple Leafs Baseball Club, the rather confusingly-named team in the Intercounty Baseball League.

Ayami Sato is widely regarded as the best female pitcher in the world, and is a six-time Women's Baseball World Cup champion with Japan. She struck out one and did not allow anyone on base in the first two innings of the Maple Leafs game against the Kitchener Panthers yesterday. The Leafs ultimately lost the game 6-5.

This is maybe not on the scale of Jackie Robinson's first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 (the first Black man to play in Major League Baseball), but it is nevertheless a pretty big step, and an inspiration for thousands of young Canadian girls who idolize Sato.

World Junior Hockey players trial will help define "consent"

The ongoing trial of five members of the 2018 Canadian World Junior Hockey team is likely to be a watershed case in what constitutes consent and what constitutes sexual assault.

It is a particularly important case because the defendant, known as EM, then an awkward 20-year old university student, said and did some things that might have been construed as providing consent for the group sex that ensued. She was much the worse for alcohol, as were the young men, and admitted that she may have appeared permissive and compliant during the incident, even taking on the persona of a "porn star", but that she saw that as a kind of coping mechanism "just to get through" the ordeal. She has also testified that she tried to leave the room several times, sometimws in tears, but was persuaded, although not forced, to stay. 

There is apparently even video evidence of her saying that "it was all consensual" and that she "enjoyed it", although it is still not clear whether the video will be allowed as evidence.

But throughout the extended incident, she says that "I felt like I had no control", and was on "autopilot", almost separated from her body. She did what she did because she felt like she had no choice. Plus, she was so inebriated that she says, "I don't recall how I was acting", and "I don't know exactly what what I was doing". She was not even entirely sure she could identify which men were involved, because they "all looked the same" to her, and she actively misidentified a couple of them.

EM has a whole load more cross-examination to go through, having her credibility questioned, and I really don't envy her. (Court proceedings ended early yesterday, after EM broke down in tears several times.) I'm also glad I'm not on the jury. But the outcome of the trial will create an important precedent on what consent really means, and how much latitude women should be allowed in how they express it (or don't).

Women leading the growing political defiance in Iran

As one of the very few foreign journalists allowed in to report on the political and social conditions in Iran, the Globe and Mail's Geoffrey York centre-fold article on the growing political and religious defiance in Iran is eye-opening.

When Mohamad Khatami was elected Iranian president on a reformist/liberalization platform in the late 90s, there were wild hopes that the Iranian people could rise from under the cruel yoke of an Islamic fundamentalism that, in particular, mandated repression of women, through the police state of the revolutionary guard and the much-hated "morality police". But Khatami's attempts at liberalization were soon clamped down and rolled back by the "authorities" (i.e. the religious leadership and the police).

Since the election of new "reformist" presidents like Ebrahim Raisi in 2021 and Masoud Pezeshkian in 2024, and building on the widespread protests following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022, there has been a growing quiet defiance in Iran. Iranian women are openly defying the fundamentalist rules of the theocracy, quite literally letting their their hair down in public places. The younger generation in particular is leading this brave defiance. 

These women are still risking arrest, but increasingly the police are overlooking such contraventions. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this year, Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Javad Zarif said, "If you go to the streets of Tehran, you see that here are women who are not covering their hair. It's against the law, but the government has decided not to put women under pressure. This was a promise that President Pezeshkian made. He did not implement the law, with the consent of the leadership. So, we are moving in the right direction."

Iranian hardliners slammed Zarif's interview, and many women were somewhat disgusted at the government's attempt to take credit for a protest that they themselves had instigated (and for which they still run the risk of summary arrest). But this is nevertheless an extraordinary development in modern Iran, and gives hope that eventually the country will be able to shake off the stifling chains of its Islamist theocracy. 

And, never forget, it is grass-roots Iranian women that are leading the charge here.

Taliban continues to erase Afghan women

The Taliban in Afghanistan are starting to jump the shark with a series of new proclamations that are pretty hard to take seriously (unless of course you are Afghan, particularly an Afghan woman).

Already banned from showing flesh of any kind, looking at men they are not related to, and singing, reciting and reading aloud in public, a new Taliban edict has now come down disallowing women from being heard at all, even by other women. So, they cannot sing or play music, they cannot hold down a job of any kind, they cannot hold conversations with one another, they cannot even pray or recite Quranic verses:."Even when an adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray loudly enough for them to hear". 

Because? Well, female voices are potential instruments oftemptation and vice, don't you know? 

At the risk of incurring punishments that include beatings, detentions, torture, rape and even death, Aghan women are gradually being completely erased.

For what it's worth, men are now obliged to cover their bodies from their navel to their knees when they are outside their home, so no more of that naked shopping, guys! The Taliban's laws are becoming increasingly restrictive and bizarre, some of them worthy of a Monty Python sketch were they not so distressing and sad.

UPDATE

It gets worse! The Taliban has now banned windows that look onto areas where women MIGHT be seen inside their homes. A government spokesman explained: "Seeing women working in kitchens, in courtyards, or collecting water from wells can lead to obscene acts". He didn't elaborate on what kinds of obscene acts such a sighting of a working female might lead to, which is rather disappointing. I'm not sure even Monty Python could have thought up some of this stuff.

Taliban (hilariously) responds to allegations of gender discrimination

The Taliban's response to criticism is priceless. 

Four countries - Canada, Australia, Germany and the Netherlands - with the support of at least 20 other countries, are starting legal proceedings against the Taliban for violating the UN convention on women, to which Afghanistan is technically a party. The writ says, in part, "We condemn the gross and systematic human rights violations and abuses in Afghanistan, particularly the gender-based discrimination against women and girls". It also says, for what it's worth, that they do not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate rulers of the country.

Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban has barred girls from education beyond 6th grade, banned them from public spaces and most jobs, and forbidden them from showing their bare faces and raising their voices in public.

Nothing daunted, a Taliban spokesperson - sorry, spokesMAN - responded, "It is absurd to accuse the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan of human rights and gender discrimination". They purport to genuinely believe that human rights are protected in Afghanistan and that nobody faces discrimination. They believe that, because their actions are in line with (their interpretation of) Islamic Sharia law, they can't possibly be wrong.

It's quite shocking to see the extent to which they are in denial, and the extent to which their religion has warped them. That is, if they truly do believe what they say.

A disturbing tale from a French village

As if one bizzarro story yesterday - exploding pagers in Lebanon! - were not enough, there was the sensational French rape trial.

A court listened to distressing details of how, over a period of ten years in the sleepy medieval village of Mazan in southwestern France, 71-year old Dominique Pelicot drugged his 72-year old wife of 50 years, Gisèle, and invited in up to 70 men to rape and abuse her, while he videotaped it all.

Pelicot, along with other 50 co-defendants in the case who were all accused of raping Mme Pelicot, freely admitted, "I am a rapist, like the others in this room", and that "I loved her well for 40 years, and badly for 10". 

Gisèle, meanwhile, has become something of a feminist icon and a symbol of resilience and courage for speaking out about her abusive husband. She is suffering from weight loss, hair loss and memory loss as a result of the drugs her husband has been feeding her, a husband of whom she says, "I trusted him completely". She was met with spontaneous applause as she exited the court room yesterday.

It is a lurid and disturbing story, and really makes you wonder what happens behind closed doors as you look at your apparently affable and civilized neighbours. It's hard to believe that the village of Mazan will ever quite be the same.

Appeal of Weinstein case on a technicality is unfortunate

New York's appeals court just threw out the landmark 2020 rape conviction of Harvey Weinstein. No-one is publicly saying that Weinstein was actually innocent, and Weinstein remains in prison anyway due to a separate Los Angeles conviction in 2022 (which might also be appealed now). 

The case put before the appeals court, and accepted by it, is a technical one, that the judge in the original case unfairly allowed testimony against Weinstein based on allegations of prior sexual acts and behaviour not directly relevant to the case in question. This was called "highly prejudicial" and may have unfairly set the jury against the man. Although, frankly, how this differs from a general portrayal of Weinstein's character is beyond me.

At any rate, the New York case will have to be retried, and the witnesses and traumatized victims will need to testify in public all over again. I hope the lawyers who brought this appeal are feeling good about themselves. 

The Weinstein case was a crucial turning point in the MeToo movement and, as the dissenting appeal judges noted, this kind of decision, based as it is on legal technicalities, risks endangering years of progress in sexual violence cases. Even if the Weinstein case is retried, and even if he is re-convicted, this represents a set-back for the MeToo movement (although MeToo founder Tamara Burke insists otherwise), and a foot in the door for traditional patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes in the courts.

Men should butt out of the trans-women-in-female-bathrooms issue

Pierre Poilievre has made his stance on transgender politics pretty clear recently, backing up Alberta Premier Michelle Smith's rather extreme legislation. Well, he's at it again, offering his opinions on whether trans women should be using women's public washrooms and changing rooms.

But saying "Female sports, female change rooms, female bathrooms should be for females" does not really help much. That is not really up for debate. The debate is whether trans females or only "biological females" should have to join the line-up to use women's bathrooms.

When pressed, Poilievre did clarify his stance: "Female spaces should be exclusively for females, not for biological males." So, he is making the point that trans females are not really "females", they are actually just rather confused "biological males". Whether this also applies to trans females who have had gender reassignment/confirmation/affirmation surgery - and who therefore ARE biologically male - is not clear.

So, to protect the female general public from having to deal with trans women - who are almost certainly male perverts and predators in disguise, I suppose the argument goes - in their bathrooms, he is willing to expect trans women (who ARE at risk of abuse and attack, as is well documented) to try their luck in the Gents with all those testosterone-laden guys?

Poilievre did say, somewhat gratefully it seemed to me, that "it is unclear what reach federal legislation would have to change them" ("them" being the rules on changing rooms, bathrooms, etc), which are mainly provincially and municipally controlled.

Anyway, I thought it worth checking on what the general attitudes on the subject are. A meta-study on which gender is more concerned about transgender women in female bathrooms concluded that cisgender males are about 1.55 times as likely to express concern about safety and privacy as cisgender females, and that cisgender females are 4 times as likely as cisgender males to believe that transgender women do NOT directly cause their safety and privacy concerns. 

So, the women using those women's bathrooms are less worried about trans women sharing them than the guys who are not using them (again, the assumption being that men are more likely to assume that trans women are just males who are lying or mistaken about their gender.

Given that trans women themselves definitely know which bathrooms they want to use, it seems to me that men should just butt out of the whole conversation and let the women (cis and trans) get on with what THEY are most comfortable with, especially given that most of the action takes place in private stalls anyway. Is the idea of trans women washing their hands and adjusting their make-up in the mirror of a women's washroom so uncomfortable for men?

More medieval mob punishment in India

Another depressingly familiar report comes out of supposedly civilized India: a 42-year old woman was stripped and paraded naked through the streets of a village in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Her crime? Well, nothing, really. Her 24-year old son had eloped with his 18-year old girlfriend, and the village elders, well, didn't like that, and decided to take the law into their own hands.

So, the poor woman, who apparently knew nothing about her son's relationship or his plans, became the scapegoat for the outraged family of the girlfriend. Not content with parading her naked through the streets, she was then tied to an electricity pole and beaten mercilessly for hours. She is now suffering from severe trauma.

Eventually, more than a dozen people were arrested for the action, and a local police officer has been arrested for dereliction of duty (i.e. looking the opposite way). But this is far from an isolated incident in Hindu-fundamentalist rural India, where people think they know better than the laws of the land. Just this July, two women in Manipur state were dragged into the street and one of them was gang-raped. In August, a 20-year old pregnant woman was paraded naked by her husband and in-laws in Rajasthan after she left the husband for another man. A 23-year old woman was stripped and paraded in the streets in Gujarat when she eloped with another man. A few years earlier, five Dalit women were paraded naked and publicly caned after one of them eloped with a Dalit boy in Uttar Pradesh. A 45-year old woman was paraded naked on a donkey in Rajasthan after being accused (but not convicted) of killing her nephew. You get the idea.

This is all happening in Narendra Modi's modern India, where moon-shots and cutting-edge computer developments occur side-by-side with medieval punishments and witchcraft. You have to assume that the Hindu zealots are being encouraged by Modi's Hindu nationalist agenda.

New Kardashian bra is genius

This is what the world needs right now: the "perky" new Kardashian-owned SKIMS Nipple Bra, a full-cup silhouette bra with added built-in nipples, so that "no matter how hot it is, you'll always look cold".

Thanks, Kim Karshashian. Finger on the political pulse, as always.

Will the real Naomi please stand up?

I have read many of Naomi Klein's books over the years, from No Logo to The Shock Doctrine to This Changes Everything. She is a Canadian left-wing icon, with impeccable feminist, environmental and anti-capitalist credentials. 

I have also read many of Naomi Wolf's books - The Beauty Myth, Fire With Fire, Promiscuities - although much longer ago. As a respected and outspoken American third-wave feminist icon, her credentials too seemed impeccable.

But then Naomi Klein recently published Doppelganger (which, full disclosure, I have NOT yet read), and I find that Naomi Klein is apparently not the Naomi I once thought, but a rabid conspiracy theorist, a persona non grata for whom Ms. Klein is embarrassed to be mistaken, and a favoured guest on Steve Bannon's podcasts. She has been kicked off several social media sites, including Twitter, for her espousal of conspiracy theories about vaccines, geoengineering and other topics, and had a book "unpublished" due to grave errors.

How does such a trajectory occur? Was the old Naomi Wolf actually as right-on and reliable as we once thought? Interestingly, one ex-Wolf proponent has recently re-read The Beauty Myth and found it sorely wanting by today's feminist standards. Even in her prime, Wolf was a product of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and a new reading of even her older books shows that they have not aged well, it is argued. Academic papers on the book have found that as much as two-thirds of the statistics Wolf makes use of are spurious, cherry-picked or poorly-interpreted. 

I'm sure I will get around to reading Doppelganger eventually. Surely, Naomi Klein is still safe to read?

The Spanish kiss takes a turn towards the bizzarre

Well, this is a bizarre development that probably no-one saw coming. The saga of the unwanted kiss on the lips by Spanish football president Luis Rubiales after the Spanish women's team World Cup win has taken a turn towards the bizarre, as Rubiales' mother has gone on indefinite hunger strike over it.

I kid you not. I guess they are just a very passionate family or something, but this still seems like a rather extreme step. Maybe she is a bit concerned about the family's comfortable income? Maybe she has a peculiarly Spanish quixotic penchant for tilting at windmills? But a hunger strike?

The whole affair has taken a rather bizarre trajectory. First, the kiss itself, in the proverbial heat of the moment, of which Jenni Hermoso laconically said she "did not enjoy", and which caused an international furor and calls for Rubiales' resignation. Then came Rubiales' lacklustre "sorry for those who were offended" (sorry not sorry). Then, FIFA announced it was opening disciplinary proceedings, which prompted Rubiales to double down, insisting that he would definitely not resign, and calling the kiss "consensual". The Spanish government gets involved, threatening legal proceedings, as does the Royal Spanish Football Federation, even the King himself weighs in. Ms. Hermoso publicly confirms that "at no time ... was his kiss ever consensual". Feminist groups demonstrated in the streets chanting, "It's not a kiss, it's aggression". Finally, FIFA provisionally suspends Rubiales from his position, the entire Spanish coaching staff resigns en masse, and 81 Spanish internationals refuse to play for Spain until Rubiales is permanently removed. He's really not a popular guy, and this is to mention nothing of his crotch-grabbing tendencies...

But his mother loves him. Out of the blue, she locks herself in the Divina Pastora church in their hometown of Motril, and announces that she is going on a hunger strike, "indefinite, day and night", to protest the "inhuman and bloody hunt" of her son. 

Well, kudos to her Mama Bear moment, I guess. But that's a tough one, when most of the civilized world is against you. 

UPDATE

Finally, three weeks later, Rubiales got the message and resigned. His mother must be distraught.

Madonna pushes the behaviour of boundaries a little too far

Madonna (remember her?) put in an appearance at the Grammys this year and, entirely in character, stirred up a hornet's nest of controversy.

It was not anything she said or did, but merely her look that has garnered so much press and social media attention (the air she breathes). She has now had so much plastic surgery (think Michael Jackson) that she no longer looks like herself, and arguably barely looks human.

Sporting a look somewhere between a sexy schoolgirl caricature and a ceramic doll, the 64-year old has-been was probably just trying to stave off the ravages of age, but she has set off a whole tsunami of comments, very few of them complimentary. In response, Madonna dismissed the comments as "ageism and misogyny", and says she looks forward to "many more years of subversive behaviour-pushing boundaries [sic]". Sigh.