If you "leave a trail behind you" in the house and your bed resembles a crime scene, then you are not earthy, you are just not willing to put effort into being clean. This is exactly the sort of thing I mean.

If you were bleeding so that you literally could not staunch it, you would bleed to death in a short period of time. You know the rule of thumb from your ob/gyn--more than two pads in an hour, you go to the emergency room.

I wouldn't tolerate it if my child left trails of excrement all over the house and tried to say it ws "natural"; I don't blame anyone who would refuse to live in a house with a woman who couldn't keep her flow off the floor/bed/towels, etc. and tried to excuse that as being "an earthy gal".

Someone mentioned semen and went into this whole "semen is divine--let's roll around in it" thing (yeah--whatever--eyeroll), I'll just point out that men have a lot less jizz than women have blood flow, so it's not quite the same as a hygiene issue. Plus its release is usually voluntary and as such can be redirected, like excrement.

And while we're at it, let's state the obvious--menstrual blood IS excrement, in the most literal sense, all feel-good womyn stuff aside and in spite of revisionist slop books like The Red Tent. Looking at it that way, does it make sense to elevate it to some special status?

Sure, men have used this biological fact unfairly against women to say that they're dirty, but dammit, if you've got it all over your house then that IS dirty.

in another thread someone mentioned child abuse victims using filth, including clothing stained with their periods, to keep boyfriends/possible abusers at bay. One example was also given of a stripper who performed in a bloody thong. This is a known psychological phenomenom.

When Britney gave her lame performance that was so talked about--including on Salon--I finally went to you tube and saw the performance and it seemed to me she was deliberately sabotaging her so-called "comeback". The whole thing seemed like a big "f-you" to her handlers and her public. She was that out of the game. She refused to practice, wear the costume that was given to her, and once on stage she refused to even pretend to follow the dance moves or lip sync the song. The huge effort that was behind her, the whole effing star-making machine was suddenly revealed with all its cogs exposed--the voice over, the heavy reliance on a male (also pre-recorded) backup singer, the dozens of nameless dancers who were there to literally support her, the clones of her twisting on the poles, all of it, all of the millions of dollars worth of it--and she wasn't playing ball. It was, in its own way, fascinating. It was pure, unadultrated passive-agression on her part.

When a teenage girl is filthy, teachers are told it is a sign of abuse because the filth is a defense mechanism. Britney is very much at this stage now, and I believe the bloody undies flashed to "photogropers" is part of the same passive resistance she showed on TV not too long ago. Unfortunately, she has been violated and abused not by one man but by millions and millions of people, not one of whom have any interest in seeing her heal.

Read Susan Sontag on the camera as phallus, etc. etc. Nobody would argue that Britney Spears has not been sexually exploited, so naturally her behavior mirrors that of other abuse victims. What I can't figure out is why her parents are rewarded with becoming millionaires for abusing her while she was still a minor, instead of being sent to jail.

I predict that she'll be dead before too long. She has no way out that I can see. I'll be very surprised if she lasts as long as Anna Nicole.

Sharia advocates the death penalty for all kinds of "crimes", including crimes of morality, including having sex outside of marriage, the usual cause of "honor killings".

No, the Q'uran doesn't say you should kill a woman for refusing to obey her male superior on any issue that does not fall under Sharia. It only says disobedient women are to be first locked in their homes, and should they refuse to relent, they can be beaten.

But sure, Islam is fine for women. You run with that if it works for you.

And CAIR? We're listening to what CAIR has to say these days? Really?

Friggin' unbelievable.

That said, I've heard of Cinnamon before, and disagree with her on virtually everything. Except this. Even a broken clock....

Islam says if a woman is sexually active outside of marriage, she should be executed.

According to some scholars, she should be granted a trial of sorts first. But Sharia is so primitive it has few of the elements that we would recognize as jurisprudence today. There are some provisions for calling witnesses, and that's about it.

However, with Islam stating specifically that impurity should be punishable by death, do you really expect that the culture of honor killing wouldn't flourish under Islam? That it will not continue to do so?

It's like Hirsan Ali wrote about FGM--no, it's not Islamic, nor it is a universal throughout the Muslim world. But it fits well with Islam because of this religion's preoccupation with controlling women's sexuality and its emphasis on keeping them "pure". Same with honor killings--there's a weak argument to be made that it's cultural and not Islamic, but dang, it seems to go well with Islam and you don't see Muslims having put a stop to it in 1,400 years, have you?

The other thing to remember is that after 1,400 years the cultures in question have been largely formed by Islam, and the two (cultural values vs. Islamic ones) are so intertwined as to be almost interchangeable. This is rarely brought up but it is a fact.