Though the women of Femen defend their own right to use their bodies as swords, they wish to deny other women the right to use theirs as plowshares. - “A War for Peace”
By May of 2011 I was normally about 10-14 columns ahead; I know this because I mentioned it in “Extra, Extra!”, one of the first signs that my established system of update and miscellanea columns was starting to break down (another was that they were nearly always multi-part now, this month three and two respectively). But while I was writing them in advance, I still waited to post them until after breakfast each day; I didn’t start posting them upon writing and letting WordPress do the work until later in 2011. Certain patterns had developed over time; for example, update columns were usually near the beginning of the month and miscellanea near the middle, while Q & A was either on the last day of the month or close to it. The harlotographies (this month Nell Gwyn) had not yet settled into the five-week pattern they reached by autumn, and the fictional interludes (this month’s was “Necessity”) still bounced about quite a bit, but at least the holidays were predictable: this month saw “May Day” and “Another Friday the Thirteenth”, plus “Maman” (a reminiscence on my paternal grandmother) on Mother’s Day.
That wasn’t the only column on my childhood that month; “Wild Child” appeared the day before, and “Heroines” (all about my love of comic books) the week after. And while we’re on the subject of superheroes, I discussed a real-life group of them in “Real Heroes”, providing a sharp contrast to the federal prosecutor and her assistant who imagine themselves as such in “Where Are the Victims?” That month was full of deranged control freaks who envision themselves as heroes, such as the cops in “Clueless Wonders” the crusading Puritans in “A Procrustean Bed” and the super Swedish saleswomen selling sleazy snake oil in “Sales Pitch”. Many of them were neofeminists: in “A War for Peace” they used their sex appeal to stop other women from doing the same; in “A Fantasy of Hate” they defined most of the human race as “rape supporters”; in “Another Example of Swedish ‘Feminism’” they “rescued” a young woman from “false consciousness” by expelling her from university; and in “No Fun Shall Be Had” they destroyed a respected physician’s career to save womynkind from dumb jokes. Some of them even have magical powers: in “Projection” neofeminists turn sexual women into “living embodiments of their sick obsession with humiliation, rape and degradation”; in “Chupacabra” fetishists turn starving, mangy curs into mighty predators; in “Harm Magnification” governments turn ordinary people into “criminals” with the stroke of a pen; and in “Conjuration” the Great Holderini produces thousands of “child sex slaves” out of thin air.
Finally, rounding out the month were “The Eye of the Beholder” (containing my famous spinach analogy); “Parable” (which describes a country where restaurants are illegal); “New Reviews for May” (The Pyx, Soylent Green and Three Felonies a Day); and “Validation”, in which an economist realizes that most competent sex workers prefer not to be confined to Nevada brothels.