Just to clarify the "negging" I wrote about in the army . . .

It was one male drill sergeant who used it to get the young girls to fuck him. You already are in a situation where the military is trying to reduce you to nothing, and this fellow targeted women he wanted by being very derogatory about their looks, or odour, or sexual preference. Then later he would toss out a near compliment and the more susceptible young women (17-19 mind you, this guy was married and in his 30's) grasped that near compliment as a sign they were liked. And they were very needy in that state.

He was able to use the basic training environment, his authoritarian position, and the fact that a lot of young women come in never having been away from home, and used the whole situation as his hunting ground for sexual conquest.

(He did finally get caught and put on extra duty as . . . punishment. But not for a long time.)

Negating yourself to find the pure essense is a fine thing - something a person should embark on knowingly. Negating another person so they feel worthless in order to make an easy sexual score - repugnant.

The movie, not the tall bearded guy.

Check out Osama for a glimse of Taliban controlled Afganistan. Follows a story (based on a combo of two tales from real life I believe) of a young girl with her widowed mother. Mother cannot support them because women can not work. So mom cuts the little girl's hair, dresses her as a boy and renames her Osama, a common Afgani name, and sends her off to work as a "boy". Movie doesn't end well - but may show some insight of what people are faced with.

I vaguely remember when the Taliban started closing off schools to girls - they said they weren't against education for girls, but all the boys need to have access to education first and there weren't enough schools or teachers (Probably becasue they murdered them or banished them because they were women)

When people are terrorized (by Taliban etc) they basically have to give up all semblance of family life, be prepared to die and have family die, lose everything you have, to eradicate culture terrorists like the Taliban. And most people (including those of us living in "civilized" countries) are loathe to do. Fear, inertia, frog in a heated up sauce pan syndrome . . . what ever.

I think the US military and humanitarian aid could have worked. Instead of bombing the snot out of a bunch of caves and transporting a bunch of people to Bagram for torture, or Guatanamo Bay to our concentration camp there; instead of almost immediately gazing upon all those "good" targets in Bagdad, we should have irradicated the active Taliban and Al Qaida operatives, at the same time improving the infrastructure there: roads, hospitals, schools and not just in the larger communities, go rural. Provide water and aggricutural improvements, help develop markets that could use those improved roads.

There was a LOT of things we could have done to improve the lot of Afganistan and the plight of girls there.

And we could have done it for a lot cheaper than, what? 10Billion a week or month in Iraq? (Do we have a tally for that yeat?) We would have looked like good guys AND have made up a little for abandonning that country after the Soviets left.

And for the record - the Taliban is pretty harsh on the men and boys there as well. It is just easier to target girls in a society that doesn't value females.

There is some very bad mojo that happens when you mix Angry God religion with educational ignorance. Happens all over the world no matter what the religion is named.

I remember my grandmother talking to a friend about a rape. The young woman had been walking along the canal that snips the tip of NJ from the rest of the state. It is a beautiful place. Current so strong that swimming there is a feat of strength. Farms, brush, nothing, houses - all line the canal.

The consensus these two elderly women reached was that she was just asking for it - by the mere stint of being there. This bothered me and I asked my mom why these two women would blame the rape on the girl - just because she was along the canal (the same canal I liked and explored)

Her reply was that if there wasn't a reason - if somehow the victim was not "asking for it", then it could happen to any woman. It was easier to find some reason to blame the victim than it would be to accept the randomness and therefore that it COULD happen to any woman, even them, even their granddaughter.

It was this thinking, I believe, that had women jurors being harsher on a rape victim than men. At least in the past. I am not so sure this is the case anymore - now that rape is much more opening discussed - and that we have been moving away from the "asking for it" rationale.

It would be interesting to see the same sort of study of jurors and their attitudes towards rape victims from 40+ years ago. There was a lot more animosity towards the victim then (I believe) and had to do with society's views towards women and sex and the randomness of rape. Far less rapes were even reported then than now.

Mirren (who I love as an actress) was forming her views about 50 years ago - in the 50's. Think about it.

Caligula - I saw that and still cannot understand how they got that many quality actors to be in that "movie".