The Lutheran minister I dated for a short while a few years back. He was quite anxious to get me into bed with him. I was rather puzzed by this, and asked him how he reconciled his words in the pulpit about how people shouldn't sin, and how fornication is a sin, with his own personal behavior. His response (spoken with a wry grin)... "I feel like a sinner". Whereupon he proceeded to continue his efforts to get me into bed with him.

On the subject of the hijab... I was watching a documentary about that subject a few weeks ago. One of the people filmed was the mother of a young woman in her teens or early twenties. They were a Muslim family. The young woman didn't wear a hijab, and the mother was distressed about this. The mother said that she wanted her daughter to be seen as and treated like a human being and not a sex object, and that the hijab is what would make this possible for her daughter.

I have to admit that I can understand what that mother was saying. In my younger years, I often felt that men were not seeing past the part that they appraised with regard to sexual desirability, and were not treating me like a human being.

Of course, now that I have gotten a lot older and I am now at the age when men are far more likely to see my humanity along with everything else, I don't mind so much if they happen to notice both ;-)

I was watching a documentary last night about prostitution in The Netherlands. It's a very complicated issue. There are women who work as prostitutes there because they want to, but far more of them do it out of economic necessity. One woman who was a former sex worker said that she deeply regretted her life as a prostitute. She said she cried about it every day. But, she said, its a system that sucks women into it and makes it very difficult for them to get out of it. Another woman said that prostitution was one of the best indicators of economic health of a country. In a bad economy, more women resort to prostitution in order to survive.

I was thinking that if people who are against prostitution for religious reasons were sincerely interested in eliminating prostitution from the world, they would be working very, very hard to immprove the economic condition of the women of the world, so that no woman would ever become a prostitute because she saw it as the only way she could survive.