Bound

A first reader of God's War argued that there must be a better term for the wraps/cloth one uses to bind one's breasts other than, "breast binding."

I finally sat down and did some research tonight, and I'm telling you: I still can't find a better term.

The closest I came to finding a less clunky term for it is a "binder."

Bra, sports bra, breast wrap, wrap, binding, kimono, corset... but no actual term for a piece of clothing or wrap meant exclusively for the binding of the breasts.

Considering how many thousands of years women have been dressing up like men in order to gain more freedom in the world, I find it funny that I can't find an actual term for this.

Anybody else know of one?

Drinking the Kool-Aid

I'm watching Obama's Denver speech about the stimulus bill. I've read the pros and cons. I've listened to the GOP arguments (largely summed up by, "Soooooooooociiiaaaaaaaaliiiiiiiiiissssssssm!"). I understand everybody's fears.

Yet we happily invested trillions of dollars into foreign wars over the last eight years while our own country failed. Wars that killed tens of thousands of innocent people.

And we're not willing to invest in our own infrastructure? Our own country? Our own people? We'll spend billions to rebuild Iraq... but not our own country?

There's a great TED talk by Bill Gates where he points out that there are huge, important initiatives that will never be addressed by the free market. His example was malaria. Hundreds of thousands die of malaria in poor countries. There's no free market drive to prevent these deaths... because there's no money in it.

I was reminded of what Lyndon B. Johnson said when he desegregated schools. To paraphrase, "Sometimes we don't do things because they're popular. We do them because they're right."

(Also, why does the president have to sign the bill ten times? That was a neat bit of trivia)

Got Sex?

It's an indicator of how male-dominated our society is that the fact that women have diminishing libidos and don't seem to care that much about it is treated as the problem, when in fact it's merely the symptom of a larger problem--that women feel overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, understimulated, and shamed about their bodies. If we treated the actual problems that women face, higher libidos would be the happy result, I'm sure. But in order to do that, we'd have to treat male domination like a problem to be solved, and since few people really want to do that, instead we're left with articles that note women's lack of libido, but carefully resist asking why.