Creepy . . .

Okay, so evidently my beloved Wikipedia was just too liberal (??) for some people so they created Conservapedia, Wikipedia's weird cousin that everyone tries to avoid at Christmas dinner. I guess their main complaint would be that Wikipedia is wrong sometimes, but . . . well duh. It's an online encyclopedia edited by people who can randomly sign up for it. You aren't supposed to use it as a resource for your thesis on Hermeneutical Exploration Of Onomatopoeia In The Works Of William Carlos Williams As It May Or May Not Relate To Post-Agrarian Appalachia. You're kind of supposed to know that going in. If you want hard facts, use a real encyclopedia. If you want to find out about the elephant population is fit to burst, you go to Wikipedia.

Anyway, one of Conservapedia's creepier entries was on Women and Men. First off, they're not terribly informative. I found out that a) women can get pregnant, b) women have thighs like rocks, c) oh, and that according to the Bible, women had best be subservient to men, quiet in church, dress modestly, and constantly pregnant. The men's entry is even creepier, because it simply says that man was created in God's image and that women had better not usurp authority.

I have never first hand experienced sexism and I'm so far removed from it that its just freaky to read stuff like that. We were discussing sexism in my Contemporary Art Issues course the other day and many people seemed to think it a complete non issue. We're past that. And in many ways I feel past it because I think that I am respected by my colleagues and I've never encountered a situation first hand where I saw anyone being disrespected because of their sex. I mean, reading Jane Austen novels where the protagonist had to marry and that was simply the only thing she could do with her life makes me laugh because the situation seems so ludicrous now.

And yet, we still can't get something as simple and straight forward as the Equal Rights Amendment passed.