What Woman Means

            On Friday morning I was pretty sure I'd finished working out the chords for "J'suis snob" by Boris Vian. I nailed half the chorus and I think the other half is the same. I find out for sure when I write them all down over the next session or so.

            I finished memorizing the first two thirds of “Les capotes anglais” by Serge Gainsbourg.

            I didn’t get any cleaning done in the living room because I wasted the morning arguing on Twitter with people that don’t think transgender women are women. There were arguments that transwomen shouldn’t be allowed in women's spaces because men have more likelihood of committing sexual assault and sexual offences like pedophilia. Someone presented a statistic that half the transwomen in prison have committed sexual offences. I looked this up and found that this was a single count down at one time and the way the tally was done would count anyone charged with separate types of sexual offences more than once. Most feminists support transwomen but there is a small but radical old school feminist faction that thinks that feminism should never include anyone that’s ever had a penis. They also accused me of gaslighting for calling them bigots.

            The fact is that the word “woman” in its present form is only a few hundred years old and the word “female” is even younger and isn’t even a real word. “Woman” came from “Wiman” which came from “Wifman”. “Wifman” did not come from “wife” as we understand it now either but “wife” came from “wif” which was a word that defined the general skill set of what we now call women. A “wifman” was simply a man that weaves and biological women tended to be better men for the job. What we now call “Men” applied to both masculine and feminine people. The masculine specific was “Werman” which basically meant “strong man” because masculine people simply tend to be stronger. The word “Male” is much older than female and simply means “masculine” but “Female” is a Christian corruption of “feminine”. They just added “male” onto it. None of these names relate any way to body parts or to reproduction and so in the original sense anyone that’s feminine is female and anyone that weaves is a woman.

            I had a bowl of squash soup with potato chips for lunch.  

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I did some exercises and took a bike ride to College and Ossington, south to Queen and then home.

            I had three little potatoes, a pork chop and the rest of my gravy for dinner and watched parts 16 and 17 of Victory at Sea.

            Part 16 was about the conquest of the German u-boats. In the beginning of the war they were invincible but as more and more Allied planes took to the air the subs were more easily located and sunk. There’s footage of Hitler giving medals in fancy boxes to men and shaking their hands rather than pinning them on. The Allies bomb shipyards where U-boats are built. Special planes are built to kill submarines and special pilots are trained to fly them. Small aircraft carriers named flat tops are built to escort convoys. The pilots are taught to land on the smaller boats. There is a new mission to capture a German U-boat for study. It’s located on June 4, 1944, bombed with depth charges and U505 is forced to surface. The crew are forced to surrender. After the sub is studied they plan to use it for target practice but the city of Chicago buys it for a museum. 866 Axis submarines were sunk during the war. Six were captured. The U505 had sunk eight ships. After surrender the crew were locked in a cage just below the flight deck. The heat from the engines was so intense that the crew lost 12 kilos each. They became prisoners of war at a special anti Nazi camp in Louisiana that was not covered by the Geneva Convention. They were denied International Red Cross visits because the US didn’t want them to be interviewed. They didn’t want the capture of their sub to be leaked to the Germans because a codebook had been found on board. They were forced to work on farms and logging camps until 1945. They were transferred to Great Britain and not released until December 1947.

            Part 17 was about the initial loss of Guam to Japan and the later recapture of it. Guam is a US territory. The Japanese capture it in 1942 and keep it for two and a half years. In June 1944 the US returns. The Japanese send planes with inexperienced pilots. It is one of the easiest victories of the war. So easy it was referred to as a turkey shoot. It takes months before the last Japanese soldier is found. Guam is rebuilt and turned into a supermarket for the Allies. It becomes the biggest base in the Pacific. Five large airfields are built for the new flying fortress B-29s that can fly 5000 kilometres and which will be used to bomb Japan.

            The US clearly had Japan on the run in 1944 and Japan just kept right on losing so I don’t get what motivated the US to slaughter 250,000 people with atomic bombs just to end the war a few months earlier.