Contraception Does Not Support Equality:
The Windmill Mason’s Guild,
The Jew-Hater’s Dilemma, and Schrödinger’s Mexican
“Don’t trust People in the Cyber World”
English text of a primarily-Cantonese poster erected by the Police Force of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region,
photographed on 2011-02-04, available here.
I. The Assertion that Contraception Supports Equality:
Advocates of contraception frequently claim that contraception supports, or is even essential for, the equality of women with men. Such statements include:
1. “Despite the importance of the right to contraception in achieving health-related SDG 3, as well as gender equality SDG 5, there are still several reasons that prevent women from a free access to contraception.” – Access to Contraception Around the World: Situational Analysis & Current Challenges, Focus 2030, published 2024-03-06. Accessible here. Editor’s Note: Focus 2030 is a French non-governmental organization ostensibly dedicated to the advancement of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs.
2. “Family planning is central to gender equality and women’s empowerment.” – The United Nations (UN) Population Fund, retrieved 2024-12-20. Accessible here. Editor’s Note: “Family planning”, in the context of this article, is clearly is a euphemism for, or at least a euphemism inclusive of, contraception.
3. “Since reproductive health and women’s empowerment are intertwined, trends in contraceptive use can also reveal progress towards another global target: progress towards gender equality.” – The Unmet Need for Social Context in Family Planning, World Health Organization (WHO), published 2020-03-10. Accessible here. Editor’s Note: The implication made by the author(s) is that the availability of contraception is necessary for women’s empowerment, and suggests that an increase in contraceptive use would be an indicator of increasing gender equality.
4. “The Parliamentary Assembly believes that protecting women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights should be given a high priority by public authorities at all levels, as an important part of gender equality policies, with a view to building fair and equal societies and promoting health and well-being.” – Empowering Women: Promoting Access to Contraception in Europe, Resolution 2331 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, adopted 2020-06-26. Accessible here. Editor’s Note: The implication of this Resolution, clearer perhaps from its title than its content, is that contraception is necessary for equality and is a part of “sexual and reproductive health and rights”.
5. “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.” – Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania versus Casey, United States Supreme Court Case 505 U.S. 833, adjudicated 1992-06-29. Accessible here. Editor’s Note 1: Although the case in question related to abortion as opposed to contraception, the core of the argument – that artificially limiting fertility is essential to women’s equality with men – applies equally to contraception, and indeed Planned Parenthood, the plaintiff, has applied this argument to contraception as to abortion. Editor’s Note 2: On 2022-06-24, this ruling was overturned. Based.
6. “В России нет запрета абортов. В этой сфере нужно действовать очень аккуратно, права и свободы женщины должны соблюдаться.” | “Within Russia there is no prohibition of abortions. In this sphere (alt. ‘area’, ‘topic’, ‘realm’), it is necessary to proceed very carefully – the rights and freedoms of women must be protected (lit. ‘obeyed’, ‘followed’).” – Владимир Владимирович Путин | Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, rejecting a proposal to restrict abortion within the Russian Federation, 2023-12-14. Accessible here. Editor’s Note 1: The law in question, which petitioners sought to alter in order to restrict private healthcare providers from performing abortions (they did not seek to prohibit abortion wholesale), is Статья 56: Искусственное Прерывание Беременности (“Article 56: Artificial Termination of Pregnancy”) of Федеральный Закон N 323-ФЗ: Об Основах Охраны Здоровья Граждан в Российской Федерации (“The Fundamentals of the Defense of Health of Citizens within the Russian Federation”). Accessible here. Editor’s Note 2: The same law N 323-ФЗ contains a provision creating a right to contraception and indeed requiring the State to provide contraception; this is Статья 51: Права Cемьи в Cфере Охраны 3доровья (“Article 51: Rights of Families in the Area of the Defense of Health”). Accessible here.
Although the Russian case does not equate contraception with women’s equality to the same degree as the English-language examples (“one of these things is not like the others”), I include it here because I seek always to dispel lies, and a common lie told in the Western world – particularly among self-described “Conservatives” – is that Russia is a Conservative country from a Western standpoint. In my experience, this idea is a whole-cloth, delusional fantasy of American Rightists. In nearly every stereotype, there is some drop of truth: Not all Americans are fat, but there are plenty of fat Americans. Not all of India is dirty, but you will see some filthy corners in Mumbai. Not all of Africa is violent, but there are rough neighborhoods in Mogadishu. Not all Mexicans work in construction, but there are a lot of Mexican construction workers. The stereotype that Russians are conservative is the only stereotype in which I see zero truth. In many stereotypes I see little truth, but in this alone, I see not a drop of truth, not even a ghost, not a shadow.
II. The Assertion of Inherent Equality Between the Sexes:
The examples above are but a fraction of a fraction of near-identical claims that contraception (and, in some cases, abortion) are essential for equality between men and women. The core of the claim is this: separating sex from reproduction – or, at least, the option to do so – is a requirement of male-female equality. At the same time, and from the same organizations, we hear claims that the sexes are born equal. The same United Nations that claimed “family planning is central to gender equality” also stated:
“Women & men are born equal. But power relations in our global society perpetuate gender inequality.” – UN Women, 2018-06-05. Accessible here.
Similarly, UNICEF (a project of the United Nations, hence the prefix “UN”) defines “gender equality” as:
“The concept that women and men, girls and boys have equal conditions, treatment and opportunities for realizing their full potential, human rights and dignity, and for contributing to (and benefitting from) economic, social, cultural and political development. Gender equality is, therefore, the equal valuing by society of the similarities and the differences of men and women, and the roles they play. It is based on women and men being full partners in the home, community and society. Equality does not mean that women and men will become the same but that women’s and men’s rights, responsibilities and opportunities will not depend on whether they are born male or female.” – Gender Equality: Glossary of Terms and Concepts, UNICEF, 2017-11-01. Accessible here.
III. Self-Contradiction: “Women and Men are Inherently Equal”, yet “Artificial Contraception is Needed to Achieve Equality”:
These statements by the United Nations, and similar statements by governments, private businesses, non-profit organizations, and individuals, contain a fundamental conflict. They make two claims that are mutually exclusive. First, they claim that men and women are inherently equal, i.e., that the biological differences between men and women do not make one sex superior and the other inferior in any sense, and that men and women ought to be equally valued despite inherent differences. Second, they claim that contraception is necessary for women’s equality to men. You may accept the first claim and reject the second (as I do). You may reject the first and accept the second (which most propagandists of contraception de facto seem to). You may reject both claims. However, no right-thinking person can accept both claims.
On a fundamental level, the most important difference between women and men is that women naturally become pregnant and give birth from sex, whereas men do not. There are other differences, of course. Men typically have greater physical strength (and greater potential physical strength with training) than women, though a woman who exercises will easily become stronger than a man who sits on a couch. Women typically are in better cardiovascular and immune health than men of similar ages living similar lifestyles, and the fact that women outlive men on average is not, to any significant degree, the result of women being less likely to engage in dangerous professions (military service, logging, etc.) or dangerous activities (reckless vehicle operation, drug abuse, etc.) – indeed, the greatest deltas in mortality between the sexes are found at the oldest ages, and not many 90-year-olds are street racing or railing mountains of cocaine. Women’s greater life expectancy is, therefore, not to any significant degree due to prejudice against men. Cognitive differences between the sexes are more controversial; I tend to think that such differences exist on average, but in my experience they are quite minor. Measures of intelligence show similar averages between the sexes, though men skew to the tails; there are proportionately more men who are geniuses and who are mentally retarded (the latter in large part due to X-linked disorders). Intelligence testing does show some deltas, with men generally performing better on tests of spatial intelligence, and women generally performing better at language learning, though again, such deltas are small. Incidentally, my own intelligence skews heavily towards the stereotypically-feminine pattern: I have considerable aptitude for learning languages (a trait I share with my mother), but deficient spatial reasoning and a tendency to become lost quite readily. My poor spatial sense is particularly an issue in flat areas; I was born and spent much of my life in mountainous terrain, where the slope of the land (noticeable even when walking in the dark) was an important navigational cue, and where it was typically possible to climb to a high vantage point for a broader view. Currently I live in a flat area, where these cues are largely absent; I also live in a much more built-up area than when a young man, and so the few high points in the landscape provide little improvement in view as the heights of ripples in the earth are exceeded by the heights of manmade structures, which block any far-off vista. Exacerbating the issue, GPS/ГЛОНАСС jamming is common in my locality. Up until about 2020, the jamming was rare, and typically when such false signals were broadcast, they always showed one’s location as being at an airport, often 50 kilometers or more from one’s actual location, so it was easy to determine that the GPS readings were inaccurate. I speculate that jamming GPS such that all affected devices “thought” themselves to be near an airport was an anti-drone measure; many commercial unmanned vehicles with onboard GPS have safety systems to auto-land when they detect themselves to be in restricted airspace, and are preprogrammed with a database of such areas, though of course there are workarounds for this. As of 2024, GPS/ГЛОНАСС jamming has become both more frequent and more subtle in my area; typically the false signals show one’s location as being a kilometer or two away from one’s actual location, which makes the error more difficult to detect. It’s necessary to reference street signs to determine if a device is being jammed, which is no easy feat in blizzard conditions with limited visibility, so my deficient masculinity – my deficient spatial sense – is especially troubling me at the moment. I recall a particular occasion, when purchasing an underwater camera housing, in which the seller gave me not a street address, but rather latitude and longitude coordinates. With working GPS, navigating this way would be easy, since GPS systems can work off such an input, but of course this was during a flurry of jamming, and I thought to myself: “Ah, yes, latitude and longitude. Let me get my sextant, my astrolabe, my telescope, and my star charts out of my bag – good thing I carry these constantly with me, never know when you’ll need a sextant”. For whatever reason, everyone else seems to assume my navigational skills are impeccable, because I’m constantly asked for directions by strangers. Something about me causes strangers to choose me when wanting directions, and I estimate I’m in the top 5% in this regard, even though said strangers would usually be better-served asking almost anybody else. Perhaps it’s how I dress, or perhaps it’s that I have a доброе лицо (“friendly face”), as I was once told, but I am a veritable magnet for direction-askers. Be it known, to all peoples of all nations: a man in a button-down shirt and woolen dress pants can nevertheless be as lost in a snowstorm as you are – if not more so. When examining sex differences in employment (there are more men than women in engineering – though also in garbage collection), I tend to think the causes are primarily cognitive differences in interest, rather than cognitive differences in ability, or sex discrimination (though I don’t rule the others out entirely). I suspect that women are, for some biological reason, somewhat less likely to be interested in engineering than men, but not that women are less capable of being engineers, at least not to any large degree. Having worked in technical fields all my life, where one spends most of one’s working day doing mathematics, the companies where I’ve worked have had a policy of hiring the best person for the job (indeed I have been heavily involved in hiring), and in my specialty that person has, very often, been a woman.
In some sense, my view that men and women differ primarily in reproductive biology (and that differences in cognitive tendencies are minor) is a very “Progressive”, i.e., Leftist, opinion. I certainly don’t believe that “women lack the math gene”, and I don’t accept “the testosterone-driven male brain” as an excuse for the excess of crime that men commit relative to women – and, darker still, often commit against women. If we take this “Progressive” view, and accept that, other than the fact that women become pregnant and men do not, the sexes are quite similar, and we believe that gender equality means equal valuing of “differences of men and women” (per the UN), then why in the name of the Lord does the UN (or anyone else) consider contraception to be essential to women’s equality? If we truly believed that men and women are inherently equal – that there’s nothing “wrong” with the fact that a woman with a typical sex life will be pregnant or nursing most of her life between puberty and menopause, giving birth to about twelve children on average – then why are we promoting, or even accepting, the practice of contraception, which makes a woman’s body more like a man’s (unable to give birth) in the exact dimension in which men and women differ the most?
The same UNICEF definition includes language asserting that “Equality does not mean that women and men will become the same but that women’s and men’s rights, responsibilities and opportunities will not depend on whether they are born male or female.“. This single sentence is incoherent and an example of the self-contradictory arguments for contraception, because biology – the product of evolution (in my view; you are entitled to your own) fundamentally provides men and women with different opportunities. Men, for example, do not have the opportunity to become pregnant and give birth. Women, in a natural state, do not have the ability to have sex without tending to become pregnant and give birth. Contraception, as a “solution” to the second inequality (there is as of yet no “solution” to the first), has the effect of making “women and men […] become the same”, which is exactly what UNICEF claims “equality” is not about.
IV. Contraception Claims to “Solve” Inequality by Making Women’s Bodies Like Men’s Bodies:
Proponents of contraception claim to support the “the equal valuing by society of the similarities and the differences of men and women” while actively working to abolish those very biological differences. Of course, there are two ways to reduce the inherent differences of men and women: make men more like women, or make women more like men. Interestingly – and, I think, tellingly – all major organizations which propagandize contraception are only interested in the second strategy. In part, this is because it’s easier to destroy than to build. It’s relatively easy with modern technology to damage a woman’s body (temporarily or permanently) so that she won’t get pregnant from sex (and hence make her more like a man). It’s totally infeasible (and I think it will remain so) to alter a man’s biology so that he will get pregnant from sex (and hence make him more like a woman). However, impracticality never seems to dissuade governmental or international organizations from pursuing a given course of action, so I think there is a second, more significant, reason: advocates of contraception really do believe that women’s natural biology is defective or disadvantageous, and really do value the masculine more than the feminine. In most cases they will not admit this (we will cover some exceptions later), but the evidence is everywhere.
The strongest evidence is this: Propagandists of contraception, despite claiming to honor and respect natural differences between men and women, choose metrics of “gender equality” which emphasize only those aspects of life in which men have a natural advantage, completely ignoring the spheres of life in which women have a natural advantage. Choice of metrics is extremely important, and the metrics chosen will always define the outcome of a comparison.
Imagine that, rather than measuring gender equality (and resolving the question “who are in a superior position: men or women?”), you decide to resolve the question “which skin tone is superior: dark or light?”. If you want to “prove” the superiority of light-skinned people, you can do so easily by choosing the metric “Vitamin D3 (cholecalciferol) Levels on a Vegetarian Diet in an Arctic Climate“. Simply transport your test subjects to a cold and dark climate (Siberia during the winter should do well), feed them a vegan diet, and measure their Vitamin D levels. Without adequate Vitamin D ingestion from meat and dairy, the body relies upon synthesis of cholecalciferol, which is dependent on ultraviolet light. Siberia is cold in the winter, so your test subjects will have the majority of their skin covered when outside – all but their faces, leaving very little skin to absorb the meager amount of sunlight. Light-skinned people will more effectively absorb the ultraviolet, and hence have a chance of maintaining healthy Vitamin D levels. Dark-skinned people will see their melanin block most ultraviolet before it reaches the levels of the epidermis where cholecalciferol can be synthesized, and will therefore suffer from Vitamin D deficiency. In this way, you might claim to have “proven” the superiority of light-skinned people. Of course, you could do the exact opposite. Instead of sending your test subjects to Siberia, send them to the Sahara; instead of depriving them of meat and dairy, deprive them of sunscreen. Calculate their rates of skin cancer, and you can easily “prove” that dark-skinned people are superior according to the metric “Skin Cancer Rates under Exposure to Desert Sun“. Congratulations: via a careful choice of metrics, you have simultaneously proven that light-skinned people are superior to dark-skinned people, and also that dark-skinned people are superior to light-skinned people.
The truth, of course, is that you haven’t proven anything – well, you haven’t proven anything about any skin tone being better than any other. You have proven something else: that choice of metric determines outcome. Let’s examine, then, what metrics the United Nations has chosen for its Gender Inequality Index (GII). Helpfully, the UN has an excellent graphic describing these metrics – indeed, an image of such quality that it could only be produced by an organization with a $3.59B annual budget (budgetary information from SDG Knowledge Hub, International Institute of Sustainable Development [IISD]. Accessible here):
-Gender Inequality Index (GII), Human Development Reports Data Centre, United Nations, retrieved 2024-12-16. Accessible here.
The exact methodology is mathematically intricate, and is sourced from the following:
“Multidimensional Inequality and Human Development“, Suman Seth & Maria Emma Santos, White Rose Consortium, University of Leeds, United Kingdom, published 2017-12-20. Accessible here (as a standalone paper) and here (as a chapter of “The Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach”, edited by Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, University of Pavia; Siddiqur Osmani, Ulster University; & Mozaffar Qizilbash, University of York).
Ultimately, we needn’t lose ourselves in the details. The UN approach to measuring “gender inequality” depends in effect on the following metrics, with the following directionality:
1. Maternal mortality ratio, i.e., maternal deaths divided by live births (lower is better).
2. Adolescent birth rate, i.e., births among women aged 15-19 divided by total number of women in this age group (lower is better).
3. Percentage of women with at least secondary education (equivalent to Школа or High School in Russian and American contexts, respectively) (higher is better).
4. Percentage of parliamentary seats filled by women (higher is better).
5. Percentage of women in the workforce, i.e., engaged in wage labor (higher is better).
Other than the first criteria, the UN has set standards of “gender equality” which are impossible to meet without either the use of contraception, or the population of a nation having extremely impoverished sexual lives. Natural fertility is the fertility that exists without any intentional action to either reduce birth rates (i.e., through contraception and abortion) or increase birth rates (ex., with the use Assisted Reproductive Technology [ART], which can somewhat boost fertility particularly in older women and men, and can also cause much higher-than-natural cases of multiple births [twins, triplets, etc.] by stimulating ovulation with artificially-produced drugs, implanting multiple embryos, etc.). In essence, natural fertility is the fertility rate when men and women have sex when they mutually wish to do so, and take no action to intentionally reduce or increase the chance of pregnancy. Estimates for natural fertility vary; a simple analysis based on average age of puberty (~14) and average age of menopause (~49) suggests that the typical woman has about 34 years of fertility in a lifetime, per:
“International Variability of Ages at Menarche and Menopause: Patterns and Main Determinants”, Frederic Thomas, François Renaud, Eric Benefice, Thierry de Meeus, & Jean-Francois Guegan. Journal of Human Biology, Wayne State University Press, Volume 73, Number 2, April 2001, pages 271-290. Available here.
“Natural Fertility and Longevity“, Alan Gagnon. Journal of Fertility & Sterility, Volume 103, Issue 5, May 2015, Pages 1109-1116. Available here.
Given 9 months of pregnancy duration and 6 months of exclusive breastfeeding, which itself typically causes lactational amenorrhea and temporarily halts ovulation (infants generally can’t be fed solid food until at least six months of age), this would give a total “time cost” of each birth as 15 months. In theory, this leaves time for ~27 pregnancies. This simple estimate is clearly too high, primarily because (a) most cultures sensibly limit sexual contact to at least some years after puberty, for both men and women; (b) although six months of exclusive breastfeeding is a bare minimum, most children will be nursed for substantially longer; (c) fertility is not flat across a woman’s lifetime, and decreases significantly in the late 20s and early 30s; (d) men’s fertility also falls with age, though less dramatically in most cases; (d) this estimate assumes all women become instantly pregnant as soon as they are fertile, which of course will not occur; even with an ideally-fertile woman and ideally-fertile man having sex constantly, the chance of pregnancy in a given cycle is likely only 20%-30%, and certainly below 50%; (e) roughly 2% of both men and women in a given population will be naturally sterile, which will decrease population fertility averages. There are also respects in which this simplistic estimate tends towards being too low. Particularly, it ignores multiple births, and there are well-documented cases of women bearing over 30 children in their lifetimes due to frequent cases of twins/triplets/quadruplets/etc., and claims of women bearing even nearly 60 children. However, such cases are exceedingly rate, and overall, the simplistic estimate tends strongly towards overstating natural fertility.
A more reasonable estimate, based on populations which generally shun contraception (though behavioral contraception and the exact sexual behaviors within a population can never be exactly known), is around 12 children per woman, among those with normal fertility, based on sources including:
“What Is Natural Fertility? The Modelling of a Concept”, Chris Wilson, Jim Oeppen, & Mike Pardoe. Population Index, Office of Population Research, Volume 54, Issue 1 (Spring 1988), Pages 4-20. Available here.
“Too Old to Have Children? Lessons from Natural Fertility Populations”, Marinus J.C. Eijkemans, Frans van Poppel, Dik F. Habbema, Ken R. Smith, Henri Leridon, & Egbert R. te Velde. Human Reproduction, Volume 29, Issue 6, June 2014, Pages 1304–1312. Available here.
“The Estimation of Natural Fertility: A Micro-Approach”, Eileen M. Crimmins & Richard A. Easterlin. Social Biology, Volume 31, Issues 1–2, Pages 160–170. Available here.
I will thereby take 12 children as a reasonable estimate of natural fertility levels.
V. Metrics of “Equality” Are Impossible To Meet Without Contraception:
When I became a father, I expected the labor of childcare to be tremendous. In professional life, I had noticed that all tasks are more difficult than the person assigning them expects. When I began my career, at the bottom rung of the ladder, my supervisors consistently underestimated the complexity of work they assigned me. As I advanced and had people working under me, I realized that I was no better than my own supervisors – I also underestimated the difficulty of work I assigned to those under me. There is also a strong tendency to underestimate the difficulty of work that one isn’t familiar with – for example, an electrician will tend to underestimate the complexity of a plumber’s job, and vice versa. When I delve into a new topic – learning a new language, a new chemical photographic process, etc. – the topic seems to grow ever-deeper. In short, the difficulty of most labor can only be understood by those who have done it; everything looks easy from a distance. My wife didn’t expect childcare to be a cakewalk, but her estimates of the difficulty were lower than my own.
In reality, the gap between my estimate and her estimate was miniscule when compared with the gap between either of our estimates and the actual work of childcare. It is as if we saw a whale in the open ocean: if she estimated its weight as one gram, I estimated two grams. I was less-wrong, but only by a shadow, hardly worth mentioning. Caring for an infant – or even a toddler – is substantially more than a “Full-Time Equivalent” (FTE) of work, if we take an FTE to be 40 hours per week. Childcare is of course not directly comparable to wage labor, but my estimate would be slightly under two FTE. It is therefore unthinkable that women would have workforce participation equal to men in a natural-fertility population where the average couple has 12 children. Certain people – women and men alike – have a tremendous ability to raise several children while also maintaining wildly-successful careers. Recently-appointed United States Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is one such example, having five biological and two adopted children while serving on the Nation’s top court, but these cases are unusual, and indeed even having a wildly-successful career without any children is unusual. Simply put, natural fertility demands that a large proportion of people’s time, perhaps even the majority, is spent on childcare, which isn’t compatible with large-scale full-time employment for women.
For all of its talk about “empowerment”, the United Nations – and other entities promoting contraception – have deliberately set goals, such as metrics of “gender equality”, that are impossible to meet without contraception. If we are to meet achieve goals, the UN demands that we neuter and spay ourselves – temporarily or permanently – as if we were livestock, or feral cats. From this standpoint, such entities assert that the natural human body is defective, that natural reproductive potential is somehow excessive, and that we must therefore treat fertility as a disease and “treat” it, with contraceptive pills or IUDs or condoms or vasectomies, etc. Ultimately, this is a genocidal and deeply hateful notion – an insistence that we modify men’s and women’s bodies to fit into post-industrial society. A humanistic notion, one borne out of love and respect for men’s and women’s natural bodies, would adopt society to human nature and biology, and build societies that best accommodated families with 12 children on average. The fact that proponents of contraception demand the opposite reveals all one needs to know about them, and their so-called “equality”. Their idea of equality is intentionally interfering with the natural function of women’s bodies, bending them to fit an arbitrary notion of an ideal nation. We can do the opposite – we can plan societies to accommodate natural human biology. We have done so in the past, in fact for virtually all of human history, and we shall do so again.
VI. The Windmill Mason’s Guild:
I took a woman to dinner for our last date at a restaurant which, though overall excellent (and hence intensely crowded), had strange white taper candles that for whatever reason constantly threw out tiny droplets of white wax. These aren’t easily noticeable; the droplets flare blue for a short moment as they are ejected from the flame, but then extinguish as they fall through the air, to land molten but not burning on your shirt cuffs, and are hardly visible in the dim light. It is only when you return home to find wax droplets on your clothing that you realize the issue, and wax is challenging to remove from fabric. In Russia, it is common for couples to be seated side-by-side, rather than across from each other, at dinner – better for a few kisses, and we so sat, leaned back into our chairs, as I moved the candle to the far-right-hand-corner of the table. I was seated to the right. In front of us was another table, and another man and woman sat down there, the man seated to the right and the woman to the left, as we were. I leaned forward slightly in my chair to pull the candle a bit towards me – I didn’t want the wax landing on us, but wouldn’t want to let it spatter on the unknown man’s back. As I leaned, I saw around the man’s right shoulder. He had his cellular phone out, and was using Google Translate.
I whispered to her of this, and we had a few giggles together, a few smiles, some pride in my heart for having learned Russian, and some pride in her heart for having taut me. My “р” (a trilled alveolar “⟨r⟩”, similar to Ancient Greek “ϱ” or rho, and not to be confused with Latin-derived “p”, though they are homoglyphs) has never been quite right – not in Russian, and not in French – and perhaps it never will be. She “ррррррр-ed” at me, as she sometimes did, a sort of soft rolling growl, and I did my best to imitate it, and got it wrong, as I always did. I noticed that it, in the case of the couple in front of us, it wasn’t only the man using Google Translate who was on his phone – the woman was on her phone as well, but all I could see was the glow; I was on the wrong side to see the screen. I asked my date to take a peek for me, and she did, pretending to rearrange the napkin holder and taking an opportunistic glance at the woman’s phone.
“Калкулятор”, she whispered to me. “Calculator”.
I thought again of the candles. I had encountered them before – every candle at this particular restaurant was of the wax-throwing sort, and yet I hadn’t encountered such candles anywhere else. They looked (and, with the exception of ejecting wax droplets, they burned) exactly like typical taper candles. I began contemplating the cause. Perhaps during manufacturing, the wax or the wick were contaminated with inclusions of water, and as small pockets of embedded water were exposed to the flame, they flashed to steam and spattered wax in the process. I cautiously moved the candle towards me, and turned my ear to it, intent to listen for any pops or hisses
On this occasion, intent to [listening to flame] [Jostled, “women are not incubators ==> SecondLife jostling)
Lily Allen (?) (sp?) – “Girls can dress up like boys, wear pants and suits. But for a man to dress like a woman is degrading – because you think that being a girl is degrading”
-Second-Life (Stanford class) & The Windmill Mason’s Guild. SecondLife has many severely physically disabled people. Shoved my arm.
https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filter-coursestatus-Active=on&q=COMM%20326:%20Advanced%20Topics%20in%20Human%20Virtual%20Representation&academicYear=20212022#
AMAZING Russian article (contraception is about adapting women’s bodies to “the modern world”):
Э О, [12/21/2024 1:38 AM]
AMAZING article. https://www.medicalexpress.uz/journals/articles/id=1272
Э О, [12/21/2024 1:39 AM]
That contraception is about adapting women’s bodies to “modern life”
Э О, [12/21/2024 1:39 AM]
AMAZING honesty.
Э О, [12/21/2024 1:39 AM]
I am gonna rip them to shreds though.
RE: Wells Fargo piece, the issue with non-transparent policies. Policies need to be transparent to the effect that someone effected can determine what the outcome will be. No secret rules, no secret criteria, no reliance on unavailable data.