Friday, March 1, 2024

The Elacestrant Extravaganza

It's the latest in cancer meds for women with estrogen-positive, progesterone negative, Her2 negative or low metastatic breast cancer. 

Another funny name of another funny pill. Supposedly it looks like Viagra:


Needless to say it doesn't have the effect I'm told Viagra has, but how would I know? I'm a Viagra virgin. Never took the stuff, never saw the stuff. Elascestrant might also be compared to "that gentle little blue pill" advertised for insomnia back in the day. Like most cancer meds, it's pretty strong stuff, but the pretty blue patina makes it seem friendly. To me, anyway. And that name--where did they get that one? Elacestrant? Sounds elastic, like a rubber band that'll snap you back to health. The Facebook page for this one sounds like the drug does do that --for some. Hoping to be among those chosen few, I'm happy to report almost no bad side effects. Any tummy trouble is resolved with chamomile or peppermint or fennel-anis-caraway tea--or a couple of bananas. And there are good side effects: I'm getting my eyelashes and eyebrows back. Fuzz is creeping across my cranium. Can't wait til I have enough to buy hairdye.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Another Fifties-Style Chicken Recipe

Bored? Want something new? This is easy and tasty. Ingredients:

Chicken drumsticks

Salt and pepper

Vegetable of your choice (I used a red bell pepper)

Elephant garlic

Can of creamed asparagus soup (or mushroom, or anything else you think might go with chicken).

If you want to get fancy, a container of cream. I didn't happen to have any around when I made this, but it turned out fine. 

 Steps:

Arrange chicken legs in Pyrex baking dish

Slice pepper and distribute pieces around chicken. Ditto with garlic

Salt and pepper to taste

Pour can of soup over all:


 Put in oven at about 200º C (about 400ºF) for an hour or less. Serve with rice or polenta:


Pleasant with white wine, rosé or beer.


Friday, February 16, 2024

The Death of Aleksei Navalny

I can only imagine it--what I imagine arises from recollections of reading the English translation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1962 novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Arctic circle cold, near-starvation rations, chains, isolation. For months, Navalny's family has been reporting that he's not getting food--he was allowed to buy bowls of oatmeal, but these were only shown to him. He was not allowed to eat them. Did he just die of starvation or was he killed? After all the man has been through--the poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent, the trumped-up legal humiliations, charges, prison--I somehow still thought he'd survive. I hoped for an outcry, a rescue, a return to civilian life; I hoped he'd be up on YouTube again.

What matters is his courage; no matter the consequences, he said what he thought. I hope he will be remembered; I hope his work will be valued; I hope his sacrifice will move Russia toward the beginnings of democracy. 

As President Biden said, “He was everything Putin is not. He was brave, he was principled, he was dedicated to building a Russia where rule of law existed and where it applied to everybody.”



Tuesday, February 13, 2024

The Perfect Salad

 


Ingredients:

One elephant garlic clove, pressed (or any large clove of garlic)

Lemon juice from half a large lemon

Good greek olive oil (slosh it in--a tablespoon or two)

Fresh ground pepper to taste

Bits of deli chicken slices and/or ham

A ripe avocado

Grated fresh Parmesan or Grana Padano

Most of a head of Boston lettuce (but you could use other)

First, press the garlic and add the lemon juice and olive oil. Beat all together and add the pepper to taste. Then the meat, the avocado (in small pieces), the Parmesan. Last the lettuce. Toss well. Enjoy with a glass of rosé. 

I find this the perfect meal to accompany the binge-watching of Suits. I like pretending lawyers can really pull these stunts. 

You might chase your meal with a square or two of Tony's Caramel Sea Salt Chocolonely. Mmm, mmm good.

Friday, January 26, 2024

Down By the Old Crock Pot

Haven't used the thing in a blue moon. But why not? It's there, it does everything for you, and all you have to do is load it up. 

I loaded as follows:

A piece of parchment paper (since fish otherwise tends to stick to the bottom of the pot)

A few slices of fresh fennel

A piece of frozen salmon

Salt and pepper

A slosh of white wine

A handful of cocktail tomatoes

A few slices of lemon on top:


Took about an hour and a half, since the fish was rock-solid frozen. Over rice, it was quite delicious. A glass of wine, a plate of perfect fish, and Netflix (binge-watching Suits at the moment).


                                                        What could be bad?

 

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Nikki Haley on Racism: What is Right, What is Wrong

 Nikki Haley said, “We’re not a racist country. We’ve never been a racist country.”

That's true and untrue. The Declaration of Independence is remarkably forward-looking. In 18th century colonial America, women could not vote--about 60% of men, mostly white, mostly landowning landowning men could. Having any voters at all was a new, radical idea. And the idea of all citizens voting was there--it just took a while to include women and nonwhite persons.

The famously ambiguous Declaration states: "all men are created equal," a loopily insane statement if taken to mean "of the same talents and attractiveness"--unless you've read through Jefferson's letters and know something of his biography. Unless you have a sense of the personal experiences giving rise to that political remark. Briefly: he was the genius child in a highly unequal group of siblings, two of whom were either very slow learners or intellectually disabled. Keenly conscious of the inequalities in his own family, he tried to even things up, arranging for his slow brother to take violin lessons. He wanted his siblings to be intellectually equal to himself--a tall order.

His letters show a more realistic grasp on equality: there, he wanted an artistocracy of virtue and talent rather than the European one of birth and wealth.

So his goal, like Nikki Haley's, was “lift up everybody, not go and divide people on race or gender or party or anything else.”

Haley was referring to Jefferson's aspirations--not to the systemic racism that came with slavery and Jim Crow, and which has now, through the legislature envisioned by Jefferson, been vanquished. Long vanquished. 

In other words, Nikki Haley is my second choice after Biden.

Monday, January 15, 2024

Celebrating Martin Luther King

In a nuanced Quillete article, John R. Wood reflects on Dr. Martin Luther King's connections to the notion of systemic racism; having fought for basic decency for African-Americans, King wanted to tackle the economic problems of the poor, believing that whites in favor of ending crimes against blacks were not pushing for actual equality. Yet King regretted the Black Power Movement--Wood points to this:

“Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White power!’—when nobody will shout ‘Black power!’—but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power,” Dr. King declared in 1967, in the last year of his life. 

King was well aware of growing up in a middle-class family; his experiences with racism remained matters of coldness and distrust rather than brutality, and he advocated for an affirmative action policy forcing companies to hire a certain percentage of black workers and for boycotting companies refusing to employ blacks. But he never lost faith in the basic message: win people over with persuasion and love. Seek and find common ground. Identity politics and "affinity" groups based on ethnicity rather than common interests build walls, not unity. Likewise, trotting out dubious statistics about what percentage of "black people" and "white people" think "white people" are superior/part of systemic racism.

The strength and the weakness of King's message was his believe in Agape--love--and its healing power. Yes, that's the right message. But love is far more ambivalent than hatred, because love makes people vulnerable. To find the courage to love, rather than hate--that's an essential feature of any person or institution seeking to reduce racism. 

The content of a person's character--the line immortalized by Shelby Steele in the book we would all do well to read, especially today--is what we should think of when we judge people. Not immutable traits like their skin color!

It's hard to believe how necessary it is to repeat this message in 2024. Happy Martin Luther King Day; take to heart his methods and philosophy.

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Lizard Eyes: Your Looks on Trodelvy

Side-effects are well-documented; some of us have them worse than others. But we're all bald, and for most of us, that means no eyebrows and no eyelashes. Which means your eyes take on the look of a lizard's--note that many lizard eyes have pupils and irises resembling human ones (apart from being surrounded by Green reptilian skin). But none of those reptiles can bat their eyelashes. Until recently, I had about six eyelashes (a young relative counted them at Thanksgiving). Now I'm down to one, and it looks embattled. A very few eyebrow hairs remain, but they're going too.

Eyeliner does camouflage some of the damage--or I think it does until I see a photo of myself. But the tumor markers are down! Ladies and Gentlemen, the tumor markers are down. I feel okay, apart from needing more naps and forgetting things, especially the day after treatment. 

You're also--more ickily--deprived of nose hair. Which means keeping a tissue with you at all times, and strategically deploying it to your nose the nanosecond it tickles, or before. Or all the time. Otherwise, it will drip like a leaky faucet and you won't notice until a few disgusted stares remind you. 

Eyelashes aren't just cosmetic--they protect your eyes and make it easy to wear contacts. I think nostalgically of the last time I used mascara.  

There's always microblading, a semi-permanent tattoo for cancer ladies, but I think I'll go for the low-tech approach--stencils and pencils. Previous experience tells me that once I'm off chemo, eyebrows and eyelashes grow back--curlier, too, like the rest of my hair. So what if it's steel woolish and dry? So nice when it's there!

 

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Merry Merry Ducky Wucky Christmas Marinade

There's nothing like duck at Christmas! Buy a bunch of duck thighs, preferably the French kind. There are a lot of complicated marinades on the net, but this one's easy:

Put plain sesame oil in a little pan. Heat. How much? Oh, around a half a cup. (Not the dark roasted kind! The neutral kind).

Slice in lots of garlic plus one little red onion. Stir. Squeeze a bunch of oranges into the pot; pour in at least half a bottle of maple syrup. 

Add a sprig or two of thyme and one or two of rosemary and any other nice-looking flavor packet you have lying around. Somebody gave me organic spice packets and one of them had a lot of rosemary and oregano and thyme; I threw in that one. 

Taste. Yum! Maybe a dash more maple syrup, and slosh in some red wine. 

Add in the duck and turn it over in the marinade, making sure each piece is coated. The whole thing will look like this: 



Just cover the bowl and let the duck cool its heels overnight in the fridge--later on, arrange in a baking dish; you can sear them in a pan first if you like, then bake at about 350 for over an hour . . . maybe even one and a half hours, depending on your oven. Keep checking. Enjoy. If you're feeling ambitious, make a gravy out of the leftover marinade (add a little flour, stir over low heat until it's a nice consistency).  Alternatively (and this is what I ended up doing): lift the thighs out of the marinade, sear them in olive oil in a Dutch oven, toss in a little flour, add the marinade plus a tad of broth concentrate or powder, and cook nearly covered, turning occasionally, for about an hour. It was good!

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Winter Chicken Serenaded by Vegetables

 This is generally yummy, but also particularly good for ladies on chemo who have what I call "Mr. Allnutt Syndrome" or worse. You remember the scene in The African Queen: Mr. Allnutt's stomach gurgles loudly while he's enjoying tea and toast with the ultra-proper missionary lady and her staid brother. 

So if the chemo's getting to your digestive tract, here's a recipe that helps--the basic idea being varied vegetables, a round one, a leafy one and a root one at least once a day (and cooked! Not raw). For example, onions, squashes, cabbage are round. Leafy greens: kale, bokchoy, spinach, Swiss chard, mache, lettuces, parsley. Root: carrots, parsnips, celery root, burdock. There are others. 

Here's my recipe:

Into a medium-sized rectangular Pyrex dish put:

•a little olive oil--rub around just enough to coat the bottom of the dish

•one or two red onions sliced into fourths

•washed, slightly chopped parsley

•lightly boiled small potatoes, carrots, chunks of celery root

On top of all this, put four (or more) chicken legs that have been salted, peppered, and cooling their heels in a dish in your fridge overnight. Not essential to leave them that long, but the skin will be crispier if you do.

Squeeze a lemon over all and bake at about 190ºC. or 375ºF for 45 minutes to an hour. Check the chicken with a digital thermometer. Should be at 175ºF or about 79ºC.

Enjoy!


 

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Another George Floyd Narrative: The Fall of Minneapolis

This is a typical response to Liz Collin's recent film, "The Fall of Minneapolis," which the New York Times has ignored, but which Glenn Loury and John McWhorter have been discussing, here and here.  Or here, if it's already been removed from the other places.

The basic thesis--backed up with the full toxicology report on George Floyd, revealed  a heart condition, atheroschlerosis, and levels of fentanyl and other drugs that could have killed him if he'd been sitting home in an armchair. 

But he kicked an officer. He agitatedly resisted arrest--I can see that; the full bodycam videos in the film show him arguing in the confused way that drunks do. He insisted he'd been shot during a previous arrest, which was either a delusion, an irrational fear, or a lie. The cop yelled, "Getcha fuckin' hands on the wheel!" and Floyd continued to wave them around and whine, "Don't shoot me."

Both were behaving badly. Language, officer! Narcotics Anonymous, George Floyd!

Would George Floyd have died so quickly if he'd been sitting up? And if he had died sitting up, would his death have been understood as inevitable?

I always thought this case was about a sadistic cop--not racism. But what if it's about a distracted or careless cop, or a cop who was blindly following the manual, and nobody realized George Floyd had just swallowed a bunch of pills in order to prevent them being discovered? There is that moment in the film catching white stuff dissolving on Floyd's tongue and foam around his mouth. The toxicology report in the film indicates he had very high levels of drugs in his system, but the one by a pulmonologist (here's the NPR version of that: https://www.npr.org/sections/trial-over-killing-of-george-floyd/2021/04/08/985347984/chauvin-trial-medical-expert-says-george-floyd-died-from-a-lack-of-oxygen) says the pressure on his body, coupled with his position on the ground, caused his death. And that he could tolerate huge amounts of drugs, amounts that would have killed a first-time user, and that he'd have behaved sluggishly if he'd really felt intoxicated. Then there's the condition of his heart and the fact he'd had COVID. 

My head is spinning. George Floyd was clearly no angel; I can try to imagine being a cop and thinking "If I sit him up, he can jump up and kick me again." But then again, one of the younger cops said, "Shouldn't we roll him over and check his pulse?" Was Chauvin careless or negligent? Or was he just trying to prevent Floyd from a greater mobility that would have created more difficulties --while wondering where the heck the damn ambulance was?

It looks as though George Floyd was an unknown quantity--a large, muscular man who denied being high but who looked high, and who appears to have swallowed a handful of pills as he was being arrested--and these pills were taking effect the whole time, but since he denied being on drugs, the police waited 36 seconds to call the ambulance. Which got there very late--then--and this is on film--the team bungled the treatment, since the oxygen tube was used improperly--that is, not unpacked, so that he did not receive oxgen. 

What impresses me most is the interviews with the many former police officers of the third precinct, and the few who have remained on the force. They all seemed straightforward, deeply wounded, and not remotely racist. The film is worth watching just for those interviews. 


Friday, November 24, 2023

On Being a Covid Virgin

Which is what I still am! Despite a single known exposure. Yes, got the latest vaccination a month ago. I hopped on the get-one-with-your-flu shot bandwagon, because the nice pharmacy lady recommended it.

Thanks to her, I'm up to my fifth round of Covid vaccinations, but my American compatriots tell me they're on their sixth or seventh.

Here's my theory about why I still don't have Covid--and it's pure guesswork:

(1) I wear an FFP2 mask or a KN95 whenever I'm on the tram or in the supermarket.

(2) I spend lots of my time alone or outside.

(3) At the gym, I take the cross-trainer near the open window.

(4) I eat my vegetables, get my protein, and don't drink to excess.

(5) I have Type O blood.

(6) I enjoy myself.

That's it! Next week I may be singing a different song . . .

Monday, November 6, 2023

Reposted: A Book Review Setting a Record Straight

Dear Readers, 

Whenever I wrote a book review, I'm drawn like a magnet to "just the facts" and that magnet has taken me through a series of unfortunate misconceptions to my fact-based view of things. Since Areo magazine is alas shutting down, I'm reposting my work here:

A Series of Unfortunate Misunderstandings: Rafia Zakaria’s “Against White Feminism”

Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism begins with a story. She has been invited to a “warm and cheerful” Manhattan wine bar, but worries that the women she is with will find her “uptight” for ordering Diet Coke and declining to partake of their pitcher of sangria. The only woman of colour and the only Muslim at the table, Zakaria announces that she’s “on medications.” Smiling broadly, she assures the other women that ordinarily she’d love a drink.

What she tells the reader is different. She feels discomfort, she writes. The sangria order is, for her, “the first hurdle” of many.

When the bill comes, she is expected to pay an equal share. Nobody remembers that she only had a Diet Coke. Zakaria sees that as a slight. But is there a woman alive who hasn’t good-naturedly split the bill with her slightly plastered pals even though she herself only had a glass of water? Zakaria does not think so. She has dedicated a book to the ways in which white feminists discount and exclude non-western women.

By the end of the first page, Zakaria has cast the other women with her at the bar as well-meaning but insensitive. A “noted feminist author” in the group looks at her “mischievously” and asks “conspiratorially” what her story is—“as if I’ve been hiding some tantalizing mystery.” She lets the reader—but not her interlocutor—know that she hates this question, and believes an honest answer to be “glaringly inappropriate for the wine bar and my prettily dressed, slightly soused, fashionably woke companions.”

In fact, her story is tragically common. At seventeen, in Karachi, she agreed to an arranged marriage with an older man. He “allowed” her to go to college after they moved to the US, but clearly resented her education, wouldn’t let her go on to law school, and later became so abusive that she left for a women’s shelter with only her toddler and a bag of toys.

When, she claims, she has occasionally “told the whole truth” to educated white feminists, they have always reacted with serious, shocked looks and then quickly changed the subject or made a hurried departure. She diagnoses “an aversion to lived trauma” that “permeates white feminism.” But this type of reaction is not unique to white feminism. What Zakaria accurately records is a flawed but frequent human response to tragedy that will be familiar to anyone who has lost a family member. How many well-meaning friends, learning of my husband’s death, clutched my arm, burst into tears and needed me to comfort them? How many, with round scared eyes, said, “You know, we could cry together”? How many simply stared, frozen, so identified with my grief they couldn’t speak? I lost track. It’s not easy for friends to stay calm and say, “Sorry for your loss.” The more they care about you, the more your friends are liable to say the wrong thing.

This is a scholarly book. By page 9, Zakaria is quoting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s opinions of Europeans, talking about their assumptions about the “other,” describing narratives of “white men saving brown women.” Yet she herself regards the women with whom she went to the wine bar as “other”—but assumes that she knows them.

While Spivak explores “the ways in which colonial populations … are unable in any sense to ‘speak,’” Zakaria is “interested in examining how women of color today are given some chances to speak, but are still not heard.” But Zakaria’s encounter at the wine bar reveals not the other women’s unwillingness to listen but her own unwillingness to speak. She experiences their friendly questions as barbed because she has decided in advance that they will never understand her. She feels her “rising anger” at “having to ‘keep it light’ and accommodate the expectations of people unfamiliar with all the things that can and do go wrong for women like me.” Her anger grows even as she says “breezily” that she married young and that he was “a jerk,” rolling her eyes as she reports that she divorced him and never looked back. When the other women respond with “good for you,” she feels patronized. She assumes that they could never have handled the full story, and blames them for the performance she herself chose to put on, the mistrust that is all her own. She justifies her behaviour by citing Spivak, whose theoretical framework “undergirds much of this book.” Zakaria assumes from the start that the women at the wine bar will never understand her—and that, even if they do, they will simply want to be white saviours.

Her first chapter, entitled, “In the Beginning, There Were White Women,” criticizes the feminist playwright Eve Ensler, of Vagina Monologues fame. Ensler’s sin? In a 2007 article for Glamour,  on rape in the Congo, Ensler asks “How do I convey these stories?” Zakaria interprets this as the writer focusing “the attention on herself” and setting herself up as a “white savior,” who presumes to speak for non-white women instead of letting them speak for themselves. By calling attention to their plight, Ensler is simply “virtue signalling.”

In Chapter Two, “Is Solidarity a Lie?” Zakaria complains about a time when she was invited to give a “small talk” at an informal college event. She felt slighted because the white woman organizing the event chided her for arriving late and was disappointed that she was “not in your native clothes” (which—if true—is indeed a tacky comment). The event turned out to be a “free wine” affair, in a hall filled with small tables, each devoted to a different developing country. Attendees drifted from one table to another. Zakaria got her own Pakistan table—but she didn’t get to go up to the podium and deliver her prepared speech.

This must have been very frustrating. But many of us academics have experienced similar bait-and-switches: organizers say they want a prepared speech, but when you get there you’re just expected to chat, eat olives and drink rotgut wine. Nobody is interested in the talk you so carefully prepared; you leave wishing you’d stayed at home with Netflix. But for Zakaria it was traumatic. She recalls sitting in her car weeping and “can still feel the burning shame” she felt that day.

Zakaria defines a white feminist as “someone who refuses to consider the role that whiteness and the racial privilege attached to it have played, and continue to play, in universalizing white feminist concerns, agendas and beliefs as those of all of feminism and all feminists,” citing as examples Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett and Betty Friedan, who, Zakaria argues, were instrumental in “establishing the white woman as the woman—the universal subject of feminism.”

But Zakaria seems to be confusing western political and social values with white people. For all de Beauvoir’s insights into existential philosophy, de Beauvoir, Zakaria claims, was blind to the concerns of women of colour. She asserts that de Beauvoir’s “belief in Western cultural supremacy and the essentialization of the white woman as the model for all women became baked into the very epistemology of feminism” and that her successors Friedan and Millett understand women to be “[white] women like her.” But de Beauvoir is interested in the universal category of women, which encompasses women of all ethnicities:

Economically, men and women almost form two castes … the former have better jobs, higher wages, and greater chances to succeed … they occupy many more places in industry, in politics, and so forth, and they hold the most important positions. In addition to their concrete power, they are invested with a prestige whose tradition is reinforced by the child’s whole education: the present incorporates the past, and in the past all history was made by males. [Emphasis mine.]

For de Beauvoir, women are a class, like the proletariat, but one with even deeper historical roots:

There have not always been proletarians: there have always been women; they are women by their physiological structure; as far back as history can be traced, they have always been subordinate to men.

Her focus throughout The Second Sex is on the experiences that all women have in common, by virtue of their shared biology and history of oppression. This takes different forms in different regions of the world and at different times, but shares the same origin in the subordination of one sex to the other.

Zakaria is disturbed by de Beauvoir’s “thoughtless reiterations” of stereotypes about the Orient which de Beauvoir describes as “separate, eccentric, backward, silently indifferent, femininely penetrable.” Alluding to de Beauvoir’s characterization of the history of women in India and China as a “long and unchanging slavery,” Zakaria asks, “Was she not aware that, two years prior to her book’s publication, Indian women had managed to overthrow the British Empire and won the franchise?” But although Indian women did indeed obtain the right to vote in 1947, fewer than 3% of them actually voted.

Other oppressive practices also persisted. Individual cases of sati happened as late as 2008. In China, the practice of foot-binding, though outlawed in 1912, was still occurring the year that de Beauvoir’s book appeared; in rural Chinese villages the practice did not end until the 1950s. A few women with bound feet were still alive in 2016. There was indeed, then—and still is—a tradition of brutality against women in many non-western cultures.

Zakaria rightly points out some policy failures on the part of western feminists working for charities in developing countries—though she is wrong to attribute these to racism. In her third chapter, “The White Savior Industrial Complex and the Ungrateful Brown Feminist,” she relates that would-be do-gooders in India—among them “development professionals, NGOs, and the United Nations”—launched a scheme to eradicate wood-burning stoves and replace them with environmentally friendlier options, such as electrical or gas stoves. “But no one asked the women who did the cooking whether they wanted the new stoves,” Zakaria points out. In fact, the Indian women did not want them, partly because wood-gathering provided them with opportunities to socialise and because they found it difficult to cook certain favourite recipes using the new ovens. (Similar instances are cited in Zakaria’s sixth chapter, “Honour Killings, FGC and White Feminist Supremacy.”) But this isn’t a white saviour problem—it’s a communication problem.

A sense of victimization dominates Zakaria’s book, although, curiously, when she discusses girls subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM), she seems to want to minimize the extent of this horrifying practice. Zakaria is right that, in the west, “anyone trying to introduce the complexities of the issue into the debate is discredited as a secret supporter of the practice.” This is clearly illogical. “A small nick or cut for cultural or religious rituals,” while also to be firmly condemned is “not wildly distinct from the traditional practice of a bris for male Jewish infants.” The most common form of FGM, which involves making a small pinprick or nick in the clitoral hood, is less invasive than male circumcision and not, as Zakaria rightly points out, “the moral equivalent of full clitoridectomies.” But she is wrong to insist that only a “tiny percentage” of Arab and African women undergo infant genital cutting. In November 2019, Reuters reported that one in five women aged 15–49 in Kenya had undergone FGM and according to the 2020 Somali Health and Demographic Survey, 99% of women under age 49 in Somalia have been subjected to FGM—most of them at between ages five and nine. In February 2021, the UN Women’s Report revealed that 92% of those Egyptian women aged 15–49 who were or had been married had undergone FGM.

Zakaria is right to suggest that the most lasting cultural changes usually come from within communities, rather than being imposed from outside. Yet the history of sati suggests that this is not always the case. Zakaria argues that, in 1829, when the British criminalised the practice, it was “rare in India … Large parts of the country did not practice the barbaric ritual at all.” But some contemporary estimates put the total number of cases at between 10,000 and 100,000. The scholar Syed Hussain Shaheed Soherwordi that there were around 33,000 incidents in 1810. There was even the high-profile case of Roop Kanwar in 1987, which led the Indian government to enact a new law against the practice.

Zakaria views domestic violence in the west and honour killings in the developing world as comparable:

Honour and ego, no one seems to have noticed, are iterations of the same forces of patriarchal dominance. ‘Honour’ makes sense to those in a collectivist society; ‘ego’ to those who live in an individualistic one.

But there is a significant difference between the contexts in which these two kinds of violence occur. In the west, domestic violence is considered a violation of a woman’s rights and is punishable by law. In many countries in which honour killings occur, they are sanctioned by family, tribe and community and the wishes and rights of individual women are considered irrelevant. Western law may fail to protect women from domestic violence—but in many societies in which honour killings occur, there is not even a credible attempt to prevent these crimes.

Women in such societies who make choices that would be legally protected in the west—to go to college or choose a romantic partner, for instance—may be injured or killed. Zakaria asserts that the definition of honour killing given by Human Rights Watch—“acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members who are perceived to have brought dishonour upon the family”—makes the “implicit white assumption” that such killings are specific to people of colour. But this ignores the fact that these are differences not of skin colour but of political and cultural expectations.

In her conclusion, “On Fear and Futures,” Zakaria expresses “foreboding” about separating women into “white women and women of color.” She is concerned, she writes, that white women might read her words as a personal attack. This white reviewer doesn’t. Many of Zakaria’s vividly told anecdotes ring true. But she is wrong to blame white feminism for much of the oppression women of colour suffer—instead of the oppressive political and cultural beliefs and practices of the societies they come from. She is right that women in the west are not always guaranteed fair treatment either. But the culprit is not whiteness nor are white feminists to blame.

Sunday, October 29, 2023

October Seventh and the Sad History

Trying to say where the Palestine-Israeli conflict began, some start with the Bible, some with the ancient Romans, (for the Hollywood version, see the 1959 Ben Hur, though in some quarters calling the main character, Judah Ben-Hur, Jewis, is controversial. For a scholarly version of the story, see this) some with the Ottoman Empire, some with the British Mandate for Palestine and, beginning in 1917, events leading up to the 1948 establishing of the state of Israel.

Most young people haven't heard of Yitzhak Rabin. Probably not the mobs mixing up Palestine with Hamas and calling for the decolonization of Palestine.

The 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, is where I'd begin: he and President Clinton, immersed in the Oslo Peace Accords, appeared to be close to forging peace between Israelis and Palestinians when Rabin was shot by a right-wing Israeli extremist. I sat watching his funeral, listening to his granddaughter's eulogy, hoping things wouldn't get much worse.

Israel is the size of New Jersey. The Gaza strip is about the size of Las Vegas. And yet these tiny portions of land are the crucible of world politics. Arabic and Hebrew are classed by linguists as "Semitic" languages--they are related. To hint at the notion these two peoples are related  does nothing to lessen the violence and bloodshed consuming them, but I wish what they have in common could lead to respect, if not love.

These things are true: Hamas stands for hatred and destruction, and will sacrifice its own people for anything. Israel believes in love of God and humanity. The only working democracy in the Middle East--even with Netanyahu still in power--it is an ally to Western Europe and the United States. Perfect justice is not possible now, if it ever was. 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinian people but it's a done deal. I still believe, even now, it is possible to find a compromise leading to peace. I'm whistling in the dark.

 

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Cancer Lady and Captain Tactful: More Adventures at the Gym

Bald me in my red cancer lady hat was minding my own business on the cross trainer when who should appear but Mr. Foot-Firmly-Fixed-in Mouth, yet again--he of the gracious comments such as "You've gained weight! But, uh, you look good!" 

Fixing me with his customary look of shocked displeasure, he said, "Oh, you are wearing a hat? Did you lose your hair? Are you healthy?"

"Three guesses," said I.

"But you--did you remove your hair? That's uh, a nice hat."

"Three guesses," said I.

He wandered off with a very puzzled expression. 

I upped my limit on the cross trainer, did all my exercises, and headed home thinking "oy, is this the dating pool?" I think I won't get my toes wet.

Sunday, September 24, 2023

Trodelvy Hair Loss, or Call Me Tufty

 Yes, that's what's left--some tufts in odd places, and if you've seen the Kenneth Branagh version of Frankenstein, you remember Bride Elizabeth after her transformation, when the ambitious young doctor and the monster are fighting over her:


I now share her hairdo--actually, she has a tad more hair than I do. On the upside, my face is more symmetrical. 

I hear some lose eyebrows, eyelashes, even nose hair--one guy said, "it's always dripping" since there's nary a hair in his nostrils. 

But somebody else got to keep her eyebrows and eyelashes! Me, I'll carry on with the mascara as long as I can. I must say, I like everything about this drug but the hair loss. I had no side effects, and for a week or longer after my second infusion I felt no sign of that slightly crawly feeling . . . as if a tiny creature or two had taken up residence in my scalp and decided to tickle each follicle. Combed my hair like always and it felt normal. Starting to imagine the hospital pharmacy had made some mistake (just given me saline!) I was almost relieved when, toweling off after a shower, I wondered where all that hair on my face was coming from. Oh. My head. 

But I'm going to the gym and my tap dance class. A symptom dogging me since my Ibrance days, sudden breathlessness, has disappeared. I actually have more stamina. This stuff is supposed to attack only cancer cells, as opposed to slaughtering other cells who just happen to be in the neighborhood. Maybe the treatment's working? In any case it's nice to have plenty of energy--I can use it.

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

The Perfect Meal for Trodelvy-ites

 You've got to see it to believe it: 


Yes, that's cold (refrigerated, leftover) sticky rice piled high with Kimchi. Yes, these kinds:



The one on the left is "mild"--meaning very sour but not the kind setting your mouth on fire. The one on the right with the the lid that makes it look like Bonne Maman jam is full of fire--when I popped the lid, I could see the fermentation bubbling. This kind of kimchi is special; as a Korean friend said, "it hurts going in and it hurts coming out." This is true; you feel that peppery burn at both ends of the alimentary canal.

Why is this meal so delicious? Why am I heading back into the kitchen right now, breaking off typing for just one more spoonful of the stuff on the left? "Ha, ha, like a pregant woman!" I said. And a nurse said. And my friends said. Which got me wondering, naturally, what on earth a 66-year-old postmenopausal woman has in common with a pregnant one. You'd think nothing. The whole business of my treatment has been to block estrogen, the hormone feeding the cancer. A pregnant woman's estrogen levels rise sharply in early pregancy. Which is, believe me, not the state I'm in. 

But maybe estrogen, or a need for estrogen, has something to do with my current cravings--and wow, are those cravings strong. I walk into my apartment and can smell the kimchi even before I open the refrigerator. Those jars are tightly screwed shut. "What a lovely aroma!" I pause to inhale, knowing most people would wonder "What's that awful stink?" It's the delicious fermenting heavily garlicked peppery spice of kimchi, elixer of the gods!

Without yesterday's dose of Trodelvy, however, I doubt I'd feel this way. I liked kimchi before, but in small doses, and I didn't eat it all the time. Now I'm gobbling it. Exhilerating. 

I listened to a podcast suggesting a beneficial effect of light doses of estrogen in breast cancer. Listening to this while dozing, I woke right up. It turned out the guy who invented Tamoxifen discovered that when the drug failed, light doses of estrogen helped push back the cancer. Can this be?

Sounds like a hair of the dog that bit you. But maybe. Maybe. 

Monday, September 4, 2023

Days of Trodelvy and Hair Loss

It's been great having hair, even if it looks like a toilet brush. But I'll be Yul-Brynnerish sometime in the next twelve days. So long, eyebrows! Been good to know you. Bye-bye eyelashes. Hello, looks-like-I-chugged five Schnapps look (the cortisone to combat nausea). Hello snoring (the anti-allergenic). 

"Trodelvy"--they all have such evocative names, these cancer drugs. I think of trolls digging and delving somewhere underground, Grieg's Hall of the Mountain Kings playing in the background. 

I'm not far off with "dig and delve" either. My doctor is digging deep for the right drug and everybody's delving for another rabbit to whip out of a hat. But remember that children's rhyme:

One, two, buckle my shoe,

Three, four, shut the door

Five, six, pick up sticks

Seven, eight, lay them straight

Nine, ten, a big fat hen

Eleven, twelve, dig and delve . . . .

The rhyme goes on, but by the time you're on your eleventh or twelfth line of treatment, they're starting the real dig-and-delve. 

The Trodelvy experience, so far, hasn't been anywhere near as bad as Avastin, Paclitaxel, Epirubicin, Cyclophosphamide, or the capacetabine or the Letrozole or the Ibrance and the Faslodex or the Everolimus/Exemestane combo. Or the Enhertu, which my lawyer twisted my insurance company's arm to get. Thank you, wonderful lawyer! If only the stuff had worked.

The Trodelvy doesn't make me feel that bad, actually. Maybe I'll even go to the gym. If it works, yay! If it doesn't, I'm up the proverbial creek without the fabled paddle. 




Friday, August 25, 2023

First Cold After Covid

I never had it and my rapid test says I don't have it now. But I do have something. I woke up with a stuffy nose, a scratchy throat and the kind of malaise that makes you want to pull the covers over your head and wake up two days later. Hoping to stave off the incipient cold, I had a glass of red wine and a bowl of chicken-flavored ramen noodles when I woke up with the feeling, around two a.m., that I was coming down with something. Both soothed my throat, but the only real cure is time . . . the cups of fruit tea with honey, lemon and ginger I will drink, the mugs of scalding hot water with salt I will gargle, will make me feel I'm battling my enemy. That feeling of being virtuous will decrease the dullness of recovery. It was so hot and humid on the trains returning from Slovenia, which has terrific museums in Llubjana, the gorgeous Julian Alps and the dreamy Adriatic sea, that I didn't wear a mask, but I'm taking up mask-wearing again. Can't hurt.

Tuesday, August 8, 2023

Favorite Three-Second Protein Salad

Colorful, too:

Assemble: two packs of cocktail shrimp, one ripe avocado, one big lemon, a handful of washed spinach, a dash or two of olive oil, salt and pepper.

Cut the avocado, scoop out by the teaspoon. Open the two packs of shrimp. (This took an extra second, since I got olive oil on my hands). Add shrimp; add spinach. Swirl in a little olive oil. Cut and squeeze the lemon; add salt and pepper. Toss.

Serve with a glass of chilled white wine