Okay, this won't be a surprise to some of the more observant, but to a few who say called me a cunt and suggested my repeated postings on feminist topics were only driven by identity politics and my genital makeup (would that be L'Oreal or only Avon?), this may come as a bit of a surprise.

I'm a man. Not gay or a trannie (though God knows I've tried - I actually look - or looked - quite hot in a good fish-net dress, and have been chased through the streets of New Orleans by frat boys assuming too much from my purple tights - but I digress). Simply heterosexual male. Okay, scratch the "simply" if you like.

It's been odd here at how much I can talk about hockey and thrash music and engage in banter and expressions and topics that I would assume to be decidedly male, but because I champion some female issues, I've been shrouded in gender ambiguity. Well, I've always loved androgyny, from Bowie to Cure to Marilyn Manson, so bring it on, but still it strikes me as peculiar and a little too easy.

And I'm continually amazed by the attitudes I see around me. I wasn't raised among feminists like in the story I'll point to. I didn't have a seriously impressionistic childhood like Quinn. I simply made a few observations and reacted in what I thought was a rational manner. In college I met a very cute petite blond, majoring in Mechanical Engineering. Her father had worked in the auto  business in Detroit for umpteen years, and she could strip down and rebuild an engine in about 2 hours. "Now that's clever", I thought to myself, "you don't need a beard or a beer belly to do that job after all". And that was it.

In one of my jobs I noticed all the big decisions were made on smoke breaks, so decided I better learn to smoke or pretend real good. And came to realize there weren't any women on these breaks either. "Funny, I wonder if that's how most companies work?" I thought. Well, not quite - it's also how politics and clubs work too.  And that was it.

I remember a female journalist who was a chatterbox, couldn't stop talking, quite wearing. And then one catastrophe happened, an earthquake, and she was the one who walked up to the police line, slipped under the tape, got into the sites and got the story. And after that I realized she was the one who got to work early and left very late. Even a week after her 2nd childbirth. And then she was fired. Some important guy that no one liked, who did little, and who only caused trouble wanted her slot. And that was it.

So it's rather odd to me that it would be unusual to look at the world and pick out patterns and notice imbalances and unfairness and to comment on it. If I look at the bailout or mortgage crisis, I look at who it affects, note where new black homeowners might be more affected, the poor in another, businesses in another. I put together a montage of impressions. And if that montage starts to show female qualities, would it be normal to lose interest, to dismiss it, to put it away, to say it's just a  "chick thing"? There have been studies of imbalances in schools, where girls were encouraged away from math, for example, and now it looks like the imbalance has swung more to bias against boys, including their energy and less focus. Should one side of the pendulum interest me more than the other?

I watch kids play with toys - some with blocks and cars, some with dolls and paints. Both are chattering away creating a variety of patterns, excited about their play. Should I find one more interesting than the other, or ignore that their choices of play toys differ significantly?

So it's rather odd to me that there's this assumption that a man wouldn't naturally want to identify with female issues, that straights couldn't have a natural interest in gays as people and a culture, that a white couldn't live in a black world without running into any obvious walls or requiring some heavy training to understand "the black experience".

If someone's beating someone in the street, is it normal to say, "oh, it's only a gay, just a gypsy, just a black, just a woman"?

A few weeks ago I mentioned the horrid war in the Congo - brutal, massive, and never-ending, but somehow overshadowed by the smaller (but not unimportant) events in Sudan. I noted the prominence of rape in the ethos there, to which one of my stalkers labelled my attitude, "ONLY WOMEN MATTER". Which I don't think was my specific point, but yes, there are occasions when what is happening to women matters more than what is happening to any other group. If it were happening to an ethnic group, we would call it "genocide" and be horrified. But if it happens to women, we call it "war" and take it in stride. Or at least some of us.

So I thank Zuzu at Shakesville for bringing up a speech by  Stephen Lewis (a Canuck, Quinn, you must have the most sensitive hockey players in the world up there) on the Millenium Goals. Should I say "failure of the Millenium Goals" (thanks, George). In which he mentioned the recent reporting of Eve Ensler - author of "The Vagina Monologues" - on entrenched rape in the Congo and expanded these to the reality of war and other typical behavior everywhere - that it always has a "sexicide" (my term) component, and this kind of inevitable lunacy towards half of the human race just can't continue while expecting significant progress anywhere else. If half the blacks were tortured somewhere, we'd scream bloody murder, if half of Christians were traumatized and marginalized we'd be withholding aid and contemplating invasion, even in Muslim Kosovo when presented with behavior a 10th as despicable we organized bombing raids and a takeover by the UN. But for the women of the Congo to be pawns in a sick game of rape and work slavery we simply pass by as Africa being Africa.

I'll let Stephen speak for a few sentences and then click on through for the rest (scroll down for the transcript).

I live in a feminist family, I love it. I believe to the end of my days that the feminist analysis of the exercise of male power is probably the most insightful analysis to explain much of what is wrong with much of this difficult world. And I must say that the more I've had the privilege of working in the international community, the more I have come to the conclusion that the struggle for gender equality is the single most important struggle on the planet. You cannot continue to marginalize 52% of the world's population and ever expect to achieve a degree of social justice and equity: it's just not possible.

And when you look at the damage that is done to the women, particularly of the developing world, through so many perverse realities whether it's international sexual trafficking or female genital mutilation or child brides or honor killings or an absence of inheritance rights or an absence of property rights or an absence or laws against rape and sexual violence or an absence of microcredit to give women some sense of economic autonomy or a lack of political representation - whatever the panoply of injustice, discrimination and stigma visited on women it seems to have no end, and it so profoundly compromises their existence.

And what has happened through the developing world latterly in many parts and which is so unsettling, unnerving, so profoundly compromising are the patterns of physical and sexual violence. The World Health Organization just did a quite astonishing study. It interviewed twenty-five thousand women in fourteen countries about physical and sexual violence. It found that the lowest levels of violence were in Japan at 14%, and the highest levels were in rural Ethiopia at 71%. And when they looked at the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada they found interim levels of 30-35%. So they saw that this was a pattern so deeply entrenched, whether it's marital rape or sexual violence from intimate partners or domestic abuse, these patterns are overwhelmingly entrenched.......... (transcript + audio).

And while people complain about "Identity Politics", identity politics makes a lot of sense when your identity is being erased and marginalized. Our identity is not just as individuals, but as an aggregate of different profiles we belong to. And if any of those profiles gets wiped out, we lose part of our identity as well. Just like those backwoods of my childhood that I can't go back to, or the bustling Jewish-enabled cultural boom of 1920's Berlin, it's erased from the human experience, from human possibility.

So here's hoping that over the coming years these obvious issues will stop being a chick thing, a black thing, a gay thing, a Muslim thing, a Christian thng, a white thing - and simply start being a human thing.