"So if a Christian young man sees a teen temptress in Daisy Dukes but is still able to put a lid on his fiery loins and return to his copy of the "National Review," has he not had his moral strength TESTED and PROVED thereby?"

Listen, if a teen hottie in DDs walks by and I go back to reading the (ugh) National Review, the pope should nominate me for sainthood NOW.

Either that, or call up my "friend" Bruce to go shopping at Pottery Barn...

....what are we supposed to deduce from Tracy's eyes??

We all live in a gynocracy. It's called the family. Whose idea do you think it is to go look at new drapes while the football game's on?

Remember: if Mama ain't happy, nobody's happy.

Women 25-44 might be happy, snow expected to fall tonight at the North Pole, and Bush says "everything's A-OK" in Iraq. More after these messages.

Folger's not too wrong overall, though. Yeah, Andrew made the point of unsold inventory needing to get cleared out, but he's missing a big point: while the housebuilding megacorps are sucking wind, the smalltime contractors dependent on local business are mostly getting by, due to the same problem: nobody can sell their house, so instead of buying a nicer one, make your current house your dream home.

My retired engineer father in FL still does freelance work for contractors specializing in decks, patios, pools, kitchens, etc. People who still have decent credit and/or equity are still able to get loans for additions and upgrades. Dad's been reviewing an average of 4-5 new plans per week for a nice engineering fee. This is in FL, remember, where the housing resale market isn't likely to come back anytime soon.

Just remember, even the darkest storm cloud can still have a silver lining somewhere.

Yesh, the analogy doesn't really work...after all, every real Klingon joins the army/space fleet, looking for the chance to die fighting bravely. They don't hide in the Q'onos National Guard and later start hopeless wars with other planets.

Better analogy: the Ferengi, concerned only with big profits. And their homeworld looks pretty lousy too.

...because nobody, especially some professor of a liberal arts/social science department, will ever acknowledge we've arrived at a point where we can safely cut off her gravy train.

Viewed at from another angle, these non-producing academics are fighting for resources that might go to fund something useful: scholarship for women, perhaps, or lab equipment or updated periodicals in the library. All of these would serve aspiring women much more than some professor without private sector skills telling them how difficult the world is, because they're women. How out-of-touch. Today's women achieve the feminist dream by doing, not bitching.

"How so, other than with its mere existence, which seems to bother so many people?"

Poison ivy, as an existential object, does not bother me. When it settles in my yard and begins clogging its roots in the soil, competing for sunlight and ground space to the exclusion of my raspberry bushes, it bothers me.

As a former academic (that's where my particular diatribe came from; I can't speak for anyone else here), I've seen at the graduate/faculty level the motivations and pet projects of those defining themselves as "womens' studies" scholars first, historians second, versus those who see the order reversed. Pretty much, the first label tended to identify the methodology you considered important in research; if you were a historian with an interest in WS, you focused on topics affecting women (sweatshop labor, "Boston marriages", Abolition, etc) using research to solve a question and make a subject better known.

If you saw yourself as a WS person first, your entire method would be skewed. Critical analysis went out the window in favor of supporting a WS ideology. Scholarly review was a joke and highly politicized, even more than in other liberal disciplines, because the whole basis for WS to exist as a discipline is founded on politics. That's the basis for a political movement, and from the developments of the '60s through '80s, a valid and beneficial one. But it does not make for an academic discipline at taxpayers/endowment expense.

As to the poison ivy analogy: again, the resources used to fund a WS department are better spent on something that will actually help women, not tell them how to think. The women going to colleges now think very differently than the women of 1958 or 1968--even 1988. Using my daughter and her friends as a representative subset, they don't feel oppression in their daily lives. You doubt this? Look at some profiles on Facebook to look into their souls. At some point the problem is effectively solved, and that time might be now. The problem is that the WS academics have too much invested to end their cushy careers.