Yes, she's gorgeous; now can we talk about something else?

Predictably, depressingly, talk in certain sections of the blogosphere has already turned to the looks of mooseburger-eatin' VPILF Sarah Palin, John McCain's surprise choice of running mate.

Other possible talking points (always with the caveat that what you read online, and certainly on Wikipedia, might not be accurate):

-- Of all womankind, only Geraldine Ferraro has ever got this officially close to the presidency until now.

-- Palin is a pro-life, pro-death-penalty gun nut who loves to kill animals. (Are we confused yet?)

-- The various nicknames and titles earned in the course of Palin's interesting past include Mayor, Sarah Barracuda, Governor, and Miss Congeniality.

-- Palin is a member of that strange organisation Feminists for Life, and props to her for not shying away from the word 'feminist', which indicates to me that unlike many of the right-wing men, um, dribbling over her image as we speak, she actually knows what the word means and understands that there's more than one way of being a feminist.

-- She has visited precisely three countries outside the US: Ireland, Germany and Kuwait.

But never mind what she knows or thinks about the world, life, death, gender, family or any of that stuff -- because lo, she is fuckable. And as we all know, that's all that matters.

Reasons why a blogger might suddenly not be blogging

It would be comfortable to think that the reason I've not had much of substance to say here over the last week or three is that life has been particularly busy, intense and fraught; several major tasks and crises have coincided, some of them not of a bloggable nature and/or in any case more likely to produce a thoughtful silence than anything else.

But I think the main reason is probably this thread and all that it implies. Regarding the original post, there are good arguments to make, and IRL in conversation with the author of the post one would probably at least try to make them. But any post about rape, abortion, breasts or any other area of contest and incomprehension between men and women is always going to bring misogynists, extremists and full-on florid nutters out of the woodwork and into the comments thread, and that is where you need to stop and ask yourself what on earth you think you're doing. Such is the charm of blogging that you sometimes forget how much precious time you're wasting in engagement with people you'd normally walk five miles through waist-deep mouldy custard to avoid.

Not always, though.

Separating the men from the boys

Unlike many bloggers I've been enjoying selected parts of the Olympics, especially the equestrian events which are always beautiful and exciting to watch -- the horses are wonderful, graceful, powerful creatures and the riders are incredibly gutsy and smart. My benchmark for watching horses and riders is an unforgettable afternoon once in Vienna when I went with my friend Helen to watch a training session of the Lipizzaner Stallions, in the indoor arena of the Hofburg palace where these horses and their riders are based.

Because it was a training session, of course some of the horses were only half-trained. They're stallions (duh), and everyone knows what that means. And because they originated as war-horse training, the elaborate, unnatural 'dancing' movements of these horses were originally designed to kill and maim, or to set up the rider to do likewise. Watching the strong, sweating, white-faced riders, some of them hardly out of their teens, as they controlled these horses without hurting them, was the second best lesson I've ever had in what it actually takes to ride a horse properly. (The best was when I fell off a cantering horse onto some rocks at the bottom of a dry creek bed and heard my mother's voice clear as a bell from 750 km away saying in ringing tones 'You get back on that horse.' I did.)

I've also been enjoying the swimming, which was my favourite sport as a teenager. What I have not been enjoying is the commentary; while I appreciate some (not all) of the commentators' knowledge and expertise, I've been depressed if not surprised by the way that the overwhelmingly male commentariat refers to male competitors as men and female competitors as girls. Several people have blogged about this over the last few days.

But I've had it on all afternoon and evening while pottering round the house and I've noticed something even more sinister. There are not two categories, but three. They're calling the women 'girls', the white men 'men', and the black men 'boys'.

Another border skirmish in the war between men and women

Over at Larvatus Prodeo there is debate raging on several different threads about various things to do with sex, gender and feminism. Assorted male commenters who have not done the reading are doing what such commenters usually do and instructing the female commenters (who have done the reading) on what feminism is, what women are like, and how to define such terms as 'patriarchy' and 'the male gaze'. Most of the definitions they offer appear to be matters of personal opinion; most of their instructions about what women are like appear to be based on particular personal acquaintances.

The terms 'patriarchy' and 'the male gaze' are cornerstones of feminist theory that have, over the years, built up quite precise yet complex meanings within feminist (yes I'll say it, because it's exactly what I mean) discourse. Those who have been following the debates in feminist and gender theory since the 1970s, or who came to it later but have done the reading, have very detailed understandings of how these terms are used within that conceptual framework.

Now someone's turned up observing, correctly, that it's impossible to have a discussion en blog about things to do with sex, gender and feminism because people always end up getting heated and unreasonable.

I wonder why that could possibly be.

But I doubt if any publisher would let me call it Femmobolshoblogohemisphere, no matter how hard I begged

I find that some time in the last 24 hours I have written, if only in my head, most of the introductory chapter of a book whose subtitle (visible or otherwise) would be 'Blogging and Gender'.

Unfortunately, much as I would love to research and write said book, there's the small matter of doing the work to pay the bills, including the time-consuming paperwork I'm sure will be involved in taking out a petrol loan, and the several months it will take to clean up the house for sale so I can keep paying for health insurance, which in any case is largely a scam.

So much to say, so little time.

Computer says no

When I bought my strawberry iMac in 1999, the Bloke immediately christened it Pink Patty. When I replaced it with the white eMac in 2004, the new model seemed to me to be a boy (possibly because it wasn't pink), and was therefore inevitably christened Patrick White.

(Who was, of course, gay, or as he would have preferred to put it, homosexual -- which is often also signified by pinkness, though not pinkification, which is reserved for full girliness. How's that for a little gender identification construction problematisation clarification valorisation.)

Now Patrick White is one of the many computers dotted about the country who that think daylight saving finished over the weekend. So every time I look at the on-screen, erm, time, I have to add an hour.

Yes, of course I know how to fix this. But I have a sort of atavistic fear of contradicting and correcting any entity called Patrick White. The old poppet has been dead for over seventeen years now, but the idea of gainsaying him still makes one shake in one's shoes. So I might just leave it alone, and by next week the time will be correct again with no intervention from me. Patrick White is merely ahead of his time; 'twas ever thus.