I remember a science fiction story - can't remember the author (Bradbury?) - called "In the House, an Other" in which the other in the house is described as an alien, and only at the end is it revealed that the other is the wife. As a woman, it was quite scarey to read that. I had grown up not thinking that there was that sort of difference between men and women.

Now I become aware of the appalling differences in attitudes between some men and women, I have to accept that men are not like women at all. But nothing of those differences makes me accept that they make men superior in any way, for women to be "joyously obedient" to, to acknowledge as their spiritual heads. I know it isn't all men who objectify women, dominate them, abuse them and children, and see the satisfaction of their sexual and reproductive wants as the only reason for our existence. I know it isn't all men who fear those traits in themselves and blame women for them. Grown-up men aren't like that. I can't call them adults, because the others have hijacked that word for the own puerile ends. I resent the word adult having been taken so that it doesn't apply to women.

I don't like the way the company who provides my Freeview access has on its website, as if perfectly OK and normal, reassurance to its customers that, if they pay for "adult" content, it will not appear on bills as such. So it's OK for said customers to cheat on the person most likely to see that bill. And the company assumes that their reassurance will not be read by women?

In Christopher Hitchens debate with Tony Blair, Hitchen's raised the way in which the churches have done nothing to eliminate the abuse of women, by endorsing the view of women as inferior. Blair linked this with discrimination against homosexuals as a fault in the church, and I felt it revealed that he felt that women were a minority group of similar size, not half of humanity and over half of church attenders. Apparently as PM he discussed women in dismissive ways with Alistair Campbell. It was interesting that the atheist clearly recognised that women are as human as men, and the supposed Christian did not.

Penny