Nothing New Under the Sun(day)

Acronyms for sale

I woke up this morning thinking about sex, race, gender, and housework. But in going into the rabbit hole of information now readily available to all of us with wi-fi, I find that all my thoughts have already been thunk, so to speak. I was thinking about my age as being OTD (or Older Than Dirt), and then I began pondering racial classifications and how people of mixed ancestry should be classified. I came up with OTW (Other than White) but the United Kingdom beat me to it. At the marvelously simple title of Gov.UK, I discovered how advanced their system of classification has become. They have broken down their population into many sub-groups and are basing the data on surveys of the people’s preferences. By the way, they no longer capitalize either black or white. And then in my treasure trove of books, out popped “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon—literally fell on the floor from a pile near my bed. So I was off and running into racism and colonialism as described in 1961, with a foreword by Jean Paul Sartre (one of my idols back in the day along with his lover Simone de Beauvoir).

But back to what had me mulling over all of this heavy stuff this morning. I had heard a statistic which amazed and saddened me. In Russia, 70% of the doctors are women (yay), but they still do most of the housework (boo). In confirming what I had heard, I actually found a site that lists quite a few countries with even higher numbers of women doctors. However, it was pointed out that when that happens the job itself is devalued and the doctors are no longer the high-paying professionals they are elsewhere. So my feminist sensibility is somewhat baffled as to how to proceed. I honestly thought that “women’s work” had gone the way of Miss and Mrs. And that leads me to the last thing I was musing about: The latest sex for sale scandal.

When I did my post before with P words, I forgot to include Profumo, which I well remember as THE sex scandal of its time, but neatly resolved when he resigned. Nowadays, nothing seems to dislodge corrupt politicians (which we can discuss at length another day). But I was interested in this latest sex brouhaha because the newspaper reported the men who had been arrested and said that they provided young Asian women to any number of well-known clients, none of whom have so far been named. So back to classifying people by ethnicity (the word the UK uses instead of race), I was perturbed that it immediately came to my mind that high-powered men desire docile women. Geishas for gangsters? It perturbs me that I am guilty of assigning characteristics to groups instead of my purported belief that everyone is an individual. A work in progress, indeed.