'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Men behaving very badly...

... and what women think of them:

First, from Saudi Arabia, the horrific news that the eponymous royals have decided not to let women take part in the (partial) municipal elections scheduled for next February-March.

Those elections will will fill only half of the seats in the renewed municipal councils in the kingdom. (The other members will still be appointed by the eponymous royals.) But still!!! It is truly amazing that even with those highly--as we might say-- emasculated forms of election, they could not let women run in them.

I don't know why they bother to go through this whole charade of pretending to move towards democracy at all...

And then, from the US, we have this great piece of commentary in the NYT today: Being President Means Never Having to Say He's Sorry, by the sociolinguist and gender-studies expert Deborah Tannen.

She writes,

Many men learn, from the time they're children, to avoid apologizing, because it entails admitting fault, and that's risky for them. Boys have to be on their guard against appearing weak - either literally, by losing fights, or figuratively, in the way they speak - because if they act or talk in ways that show weakness, other boys will take advantage and push them around.

But refusing to apologize infuriates women because that makes it seem as if the guy doesn't care that he let her down, and if he doesn't care, there's no reason to think he won't do it again. This is the negative effect - the collateral damage - that Mr. Bush's "certainty" is certain to have on many women: if he won't admit he made a mistake in his handling of Iraq, it seems he doesn't care about the American soldiers killed and maimed, the civilians beheaded, about the Iraqi children blown up by insurgents' bombs...