Not Men’s Property: Medieval Women Chose Whether & To Whom To Marry

'While governments today dedicate billions to addressing violence against women,

the entrenched gender injustice

is quite the opposite.'

By Author Douglas Galbi: Many persons, including scholars in anthropology and other academic fields, believe that women have been regarded as men’s property except recently in enlightened places. According to this mythic history, women passed between fathers and husbands as transactions in men’s interests. Women were merely men’s “chattels.”[1] Medieval women themselves ridiculed a much less extreme version of that view. The medieval Christian church doctrinally required a woman’s free consent for a valid marriage. Moreover, the thirteenth-century Old French epic Aymeri of Narbonne makes abundantly clear that women’s consent to marriage was vitally important.
Aymeri was a noble, highly respected knight. At the request of Emperor Charlemagne, Aymeri led taking the city of Narbonne from a strong Muslim force. Aymeri then became King of Narbonne.

Love Byte

By K. F. Anderson: I remember I was so happy when my sex robot, Amanda, arrived. I felt a bit like a kid at Christmas as I pried open her shipping box and placed her in a sitting position on my bed. Well…a slightly perverted kid, anyway. No matter, we all had needs, right? Besides, what a man does in the privacy of his own home is nobody’s business. It’s between him and his partner – whether that partner had skin or the highly realistic synthskin that the website touted as “indistinguishable from the real thing”. I snatched up the quick start pamphlet clipped to the front of the little black dress the doll was wearing and skimmed for what to do next. According to the guide, it took four hours for Amanda to fully charge. Using the included cable, I plugged my toy up and looked for the charge light indicator that flashed just under the skin of the left arm. Damn, it was definitely not pre-charged. Nothing to do now but to wait. At least it was only about two in the afternoon. I could leave Amanda charging up, knock out that pile of laundry I’d been avoiding, catch up on a little TV, and that would still leave plenty of time in the evening for some well-earned fun.

The Cartoonist Who Dared To Find A Flaw In Females

By Mark Dent: Why was there a furious outpouring of unfettered rage directed at one man in our media this week?
Did a corrupt politician break an election promise? Was a serial killer finally apprehended? Did Donald Trump arrive at Melbourne airport? (I would have welcomed him).
No. None of the above.
It was all about a cartoon.
One cartoon.
One fucking cartoon.
Michael Leunig is a Melbourne cartoonist and is someone who has raised the ire of women on more than one occasion during his four decades of work.
For a long time, Leunig was a revered figure. He decided to turn away from political cartoons and attempt to create something more, for want of a better word, spiritual. His boss at The Age gave him a week or two to prove such cartoons had an audience. Prove it he did.
Here are some examples of the types of cartoons which made Leunig a household name in Melbourne and eventually Australia.

Wandering Israelis?

By Eve Mykytyn: One of Israel’s founding myths was that it would provide a homeland to a “people without a home.”  Before and especially after World War II, Zionists claimed that the countries in which Jews lived and were citizens were not a homeland.  Jews, like others, the argument went, were entitled to a homeland populated by Jews. Even at its peak, this argument never convinced a majority of Jews to move to Israel, although especially after 1967, many supported Israel from afar. It seems that some Israelis are also not convinced that they need to live in their ‘homeland.’

A PhD thesis by Omri Shafer Raviv, reported on recently by 972, documents the ‘professors committee’  formed by the Israeli government in 1967 in response to Israel’s sovereignty over the ousted Palestinians in conquered territories.  The committee explored how to limit resistance from and encourage the out migration of Palestinians. The professors were surprised by their findings that the Palestinians, the indigenous people of the land, did not want to leave even if promised a better life in, for instance, Kuwait.

If It’s A Boeing I’m Not Going

“I would walk before I would get on

a 737 MAX. I would walk.”

By Raúl Ilargi Meijer: During the Senate hearing into Boeing on October 29, Senator Jon Tester told the company’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg: “I would walk before I would get on a 737 MAX. I would walk.” He added: “There is no way … You shouldn’t be cutting corners and I see corners being cut.”
That’s all fine and well, but the hearing, which continues today, Wednesday, lays bare a giant gap in US law: that of accountability. Muilenburg is the “ultimately responsible” in a chain of command that is responsible for killing 346 people. But he is still the CEO, even if he was demoted from the chairman of the board position. Which was taken over by another -10 year- veteran of the company by the way. Fresh insights galore.
If you are employed by a large company, you can sign off on such decisions, the ones that kill people, and walk away unscathed. It reminds one of Monsanto/Bayer, which just annnounced that the number of Roundup lawsuits against it went from 18,000 in July to 43,000 today. Bayer at the same time announced that its turnover rose by 6% in Q3. 43,000 lawsuits and they’re doing fine, thank you.