Give a little bit ...

It's been a rough year for many families in Toronto -- which means it won't be much of a Christmas for the kids whose parents have lost their jobs.

As a result, even charities are struggling.

But it's not just the Christmas-celebrating families who are in trouble. Many new Canadians from other cultures are also finding it hard to make ends meet.

War, terrorism and a better way of life for his wife and children moved Saadad Hussain Malik to leave his native Pakistan and bring his family to Canada.

Malik, wife Shahzadi Sadaf, and daughters Bakeezah, 15, Sunaina, 9, Malaika, 7, and son Abdul Moize, 4, arrived in Toronto last year, after five painfully long years of waiting for immigration clearance.

But Malik believes it was all worth it, despite the fact the family is struggling financially after he was laid off his job almost a year ago.

"We are happy in this country," Malik said. "My children are doing well in school and are very happy. My daughter (Bakeezah) finished near the top of her class in Grade 9."

One of the things that impressed him about Canada was the gifts his children received last Christmas from the Star Santa Fund. The children were among 45,000 in the GTA who received gift boxes from the fund.

"I thought it was a wonderful way to welcome people to this country," Malik said.

 The children were excited and will be asking about the gifts again this year, he said. He was under the wrong impression they were eligible to receive gifts only once, but was pleased to hear no such restriction exists as long as the family is still financially needy.

Malik came to Canada as a telecommunications engineer with three degrees and supervisory experience with a major company in Pakistan. But he could only find a lower-level job here in his field and was eventually let go. He has been trying unsuccessfully for jobs since. He thought one might materialize in Alberta, but though the company indicated strong interest the offer ultimately fell through.

You can read many more stories here.

This year, the fund, with the help of staffers who volunteer as elves, is delivering gift boxes to 45,000 kids in the GTA. Each box contains a book, candy, winter woolies and a toy suitable to the age and gender of the recipient.

Won't you please help light up a child's holiday season with a few dollars to the Star's 103 year-old Santa Claus Fund?

Just a little can mean so much.

After all, the spirit of Christmas is not supposed to be about the latest electronic doodad but about giving, and sharing.

In fact, rather than spend the usual storm on the kidlets in my life, who have so so so much, I'm going to be making donations in their names. I hope you join me.

Sexual healing

Where does Big Pharma come up with these ideas anyway?

Restless vagina syndrome? For serious?

It’s not your fault, ladies (and certainly not your partner’s), that you don’t orgasm every time you have intercourse, or that you lack the libido of a 17-year-old boy. You have a disease: female sexual dysfunction (FSD), and the pharmaceutical industry wants to help.

You are among the "43 percent of American women [who] experience some degree of impaired sexual function," according to a Journal of the American Medical Association article. The FDA’s evolving definition of FSD includes decreased desire or arousal, sexual pain and orgasm difficulties -- but only if the woman feels "personal distress" about it.

So, convincing women to feel distress is a key component of the drug company strategy to market a multi-billion-dollar pill that will cure billions of women of what may not ail them.

By promoting the belief that "normal" women have explosive sex all the time, BigPharma helped launch the disease. However, the FDA has yet to approve a treatment for women who fall short. Until then, they could try the Orgasmatron: a dial-a-delight spinal implant that rarely works -- and risks infection and paralysis. Or, for $60/month, pop LexaFem pills -- containing (how-could-it-not-work) "horny goat weed extract" in order to "feel like a real woman today." Its website promises, "You won’t ever feel unhappy again with LexaFem in your arsenal."

You know, I wish they would stick to things like curing cancer or fighting malaria or something useful.

As for coming and going, there's no problem a little loving attention and some batteries won't fix.

(The video may be NSFW for some of you.)

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Just found this video. I don't know why but these dancing ferrets made me want to update this post.

Misandrystanding

Well, this should confuse some of the regulars in the comments section.

Despite the popular belief that feminists dislike men, few studies have actually examined the empirical accuracy of this stereotype. The present study examined self-identified feminists' and nonfeminists' attitudes toward men. An ethnically diverse sample (N = 488) of college students responded to statements from the Ambivalence toward Men Inventory (AMI; Glick & Fiske, 1999). Contrary to popular beliefs, feminists reported lower levels of hostility toward men than did nonfeminists. The persistence of the myth of the man-hating feminist is explored.

That's right. We hairy-legged jack-booted feminazis feel better about guys than those girly girls do, at least according to this small study conducted at the University of Houston.

More from the f-word, via April Reign. (And be sure to read the comments.)

Melinda Kanner, one of the researchers, has this interesting observation:

Our work finds that, indeed, non-feminists believe in traditional gender roles such as men being breadwinners and women being caregivers. At the same time, these non-feminists actually appear to resent the confines of the traditional roles they advocate, which presents a paradox for women and men in traditional heterosexual relationships.

That to me means that non-feminists have greater expectations of men -- perhaps based on fairy tale notions of Prince Charming and knights in shining armour.

All of which has got to lead to disappointment sooner or later, no?

And disappointment leads to resentment.

Just ask the guy whose former adoring wife turns her back when she doesn't get what she wants.

Based on my own observations  -- never mind the study which could probably be picked over ad nauseum by those who refuse to believe it -- women who think they will be coddled and cared for are the absolute worst when it comes to dissing men. Those of us who are prepared to stand up for and support ourselves really have no reason to trash the men in our lives. If we're not happy, we can leave. We have options.

It's the men in power we have real problems with, the men who would deny us equal rights, reproductive choices, pay equity and equal opportunity.

Oh and yes, the misogynists. Like the misogynists who shoot up women's aerobics classes.

Now obviously I don't speak for all women, feminist or otherwise. And maybe I generalize. But I'll bet that neither this study nor I is far off the mark.

Some of you might find this test interesting.

Ad-dendum

Further to those male-bashing doofus-husband commercials all over the small screen right now, comes this from Science Daily.

An Oxford study suggests that if you want to settle down, your chances of getting married or living with someone are probably highest in Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries and the United States. According to the study, men in those countries are more likely than their Australian counterparts to do the household chores and thereby make marriage a more attractive option to their nation's women.

The study constructs an 'egalitarian index' of 12 developed countries, based on responses to questionnaires about gender, housework and childcare responsibilities. Norway and Sweden top the egalitarian index, with Great Britain in third place, followed by the United States. At the bottom of the index are Japan, Germany, and Austria, with Australia languishing as the least egalitarian. Data about the number of women in partnerships was then compared against the index. Women of similar age and educational background were compared across the participating countries to see if their country's rating on the egalitarian index bore any relation to whether they were living with a man or not. Other controlling factors, such as the female unemployment, were taken account of.

The study found that women living in less egalitarian countries were between 20 and 50 per cent less likely to be living with a man than comparable women living in a more egalitarian country.

Now get off the computer and go put a load of laundry in.

It might pay off at bedtime.

Just saying.

Chew him up and spitzer out

Provocative, as usual, column from my friend and colleague Rosie Dimanno today, about ''cuckolded''  wives such as Elizabeth Edwards and Veronica Lario Berlusconi not ''manning up'' and suffering their cheating husbands silently.

Both have been profoundly wronged, certainly to hear them tell, which each is doing via the vehicle of biography and TV confessional, for one, and ambushing emails to the media, for the other.

Say what you will about husbands who are cads – as their respective spouses, disgraced Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – appear to be. Yet males, even those who have been on the violated end of infidelity, are rarely wont to open a vein in public.

There are exceptions to this generalization, of course. But for the most part, men do not go whingeing to Oprah or pen avenging memoirs that simultaneously mortify a couple's children or wash the dirty BVDs out in the open.

I suspect this comes from the social conditioning of boys, who are still raised to not shed tears in public or otherwise reveal themselves as pussies. Girls, by comparison, are nurtured in the culture of tattle and tell-all grievance from the time they're subjected to their first schoolyard name-calling.

Females are inundated with mass media messaging – subliminal and overt – about bred-in-the-genes persecution, the biological and manifest destiny of their X chromosome, the gender for whom offence is endlessly done to.

The consequence, too often, is a kind of emotional indigestion with public burping as the antacid, especially for women who can command an audience.

They seek public validation for their pain.

Ummm ... and feel free to jump in here Rosie if you read this -- a guest post would be awesome -- but I don't think it's so simple.

For one thing, I don't think Senora Berlusconi is all that tearful. Instead, she's out kicking billion dollar butt.

For another, Edwards handled the situation when it happened with discretion and aplomb.

Like so many other politcal wives who are forced to stand by their man while they make tearful public mea culpas after being caught with their pants down with hookers or in men's rooms -- remember Eliot Spitzer's wife Silda? -- she is not curling up into a fetal position.

Maybe it was political opportunism on the Edwards' part -- although how anybody could believe this would never come out is kinda crazy. I truly believe Elizabeth took a ''this is nobody's business but ours'' approach.

Now she's cashing in. Good for her.

Of course I can't say how many male pols have been cheated on because, after all, the media aren't interested in what non-elected people do. Besides, cuckolded men tend not to hold news conferences. 

The only reason anybody cares what Edwards and Lario have to say is because their husbands were/are famous cheaters.

P.S.I know the origin of the word cuckold relates to the cuckoo but I liked this photo better.

Rich bitch

Oh cry me a river.

Manhattan women whose investment banker boyfriends and husbands no longer make seven figure salaries are pooling their tears and their problems, reports the New York Times.

Once it was seen as a blessing in certain circles to have a wealthy, powerful partner who would leave you alone with the credit card while he was busy brokering deals. Now, many Wall Street wives, girlfriends and, increasingly, exes, are living the curse of cutbacks in nanny hours and reservations at Masa or Megu. And that credit card? Canceled.

Raoul Felder, the Manhattan divorce lawyer, said that cases involving financiers always stack up as the economy starts to slip, because layoffs and shrinking bonuses place stress on relationships - and, he said, because "there aren't funds or time for mistresses any more."

(One such mistress wrote on the blog that when she pouted about not having been taken on a trip lately, her married man explained that with money so tight, his wife had taken to checking up on his accounts.)

These Choo-less Recession Widows even have a blog, Dating a Banker Anonymous, where:

... women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships. DABA Girls was started by two best friends whose relationships tanked with the economy. Not knowing what else to do, we did what frustrated but articulate girls have done since the beginning of time - we started a blog. So if your monthly Bergdorf’s allowance has been halved and bottle service has all but disappeared from your life, lighten your heart with laughter and email your stories to dabagirls@gmail.com. Warning all stories sent will be infused with our own special brand of DABA Girl humor.

To be honest, I am not entirely sure the whole thing isn't a very clever put-on.

But either way, it beggars belief how much coverage the ''suffering'' rich people are getting in the media compared with those working poor who have lost their jobs, their homes and had to give up their pets to shelters (or worse, abandoned them) because they could not even afford the price of cat food.

On a related matter, here's a look at how many well-off couples, who have lived the 1950s stay-at-home wife lifestyle, are experiencing economic shockwaves.

In a bloated front-page profile in the New York Times Style section on Sunday, a headline informs us that a laid-off dad from Darien, Connecticut is "A Bit Lost."  Scott Berry, the dad in question, lost his job as a technology analyst for a boutique investment firm in Manhattan in December 2007 and has actively been looking for a new position ever since.  Meanwhile, Scott’s wife Tracey, who has gone back to work after a brief stint at home, balks at the prospect of buying her kids clothes at Walmart. 

"How can you complain about my spending when you don’t have an adequate income?" Tracey asks Scott during their arguments.  "How can you complain about me not earning an adequate income, when you can’t control your spending?" asks Scott.  Less sympathetic is the anonymous wife from Tribeca who tells us that in her family it was his job to provide a nice lifestyle while hers was to run the household and the children’s lives.  When he loses his Wall Street bonus and his income drops from $800,000 to $150,000 a year, she’s bitter and crushed. "Let me just say this," she tells the reporter. "I’m still doing my job."

Give me a break.

What happened to for better or worse, for richer or poorer ... ?

UP YOURS DATE: OMG, Now those poor little rich girls may have a book deal.

What will the book be about? How to stay beautiful without your boyfriend’s black Amex? Where to shop when you have to spend your own money?

Can the movie be far behind?

FURTHER UP YOURS DATE (30/1/09): I thought something smelled fishy.

Spoiled, awful, hateful gold-diggers feeling sorry for themselves...there's an eagerness to buy into this tale, to believe that people are like this -- that women are like this -- that's disappointing. Because yes, it might be a tale of spiteful gold-diggers, but it might also be a far more interesting tale of women who know exactly what buttons to press, and what stereotypes to feed, in order to get themselves a lot of attention.

Girl guide to Christmas

If you're looking for a little something different as a stocking stuffer for your favourite feminist -- or feminist lover -- consider the Antigone Foundation's Dreams for Women calendar:

The project began in January 2008 and has since been featured in Ms. Magazine and in the International Museum of Women, garnering worldwide media attention and submissions from as far away as Japan, Germany, Brazil, France, and Romania. The Dreams for Women art project asks women and men of all ages to tell us what their dreams are for women by painting, drawing, writing, sketching or decoupaging them onto a postcard. Postcards are posted every second Saturday on the Antigone Magazine blog.

Lots of postcard samples here.

The calendars, which are $20 plus shipping a pop on an individual basis, can be purchased online.

The money raised by selling these calendars is instrumental for us to launch Antigone For Girls (a magazine written by and for girls aged 10-15 that will encourage them to get involved in leadership and politics).

It's a good cause and an inexpensive gift. Go for it.