Author Archive | Martha Shelley

The Arrogance of Empire All empires commit the same crimes. These include torturing and murdering groups or individuals that resist domination, and theft of other people’s resources to enrich the emperor and upper classes. They also have in common overweening arrogance. In this post I’ll consider the empire of which I am a disaffected citizen […]

In a patriarchal society, how far will women go to get men’s attention and approval? How much of their own flesh will they sacrifice, how much of their daughters’ flesh? In some countries and at various times, these sacrifices have included the crippling procedure known as foot binding; female genital mutilation: surgically removing lower ribs […]

Many of you readers either have had abortions or, if not, a good number of your friends have. I never did get pregnant during those times when I was trying to be bisexual. But it seems that every other woman I know had that experience. From the days when it was illegal: My mother, at […]

A brilliant article by Phyllis Chesler brings me to this topic. “Nostalgia for the Slaughterhouse” talks about romanticization of the Jewish shtetls, via the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Chesler wonders why modern American Jews, particularly those coming from Eastern European backgrounds, fall in love with this sentimental picture of our ancestors’ lives, when the […]

My last post received a comment from Esther Newton, who said she was surprised to hear that I had ever dyed my hair. Today I will explain how that came to be. When I met Sylvia in 1997, she was working as a tech writer. It’s a young field. In order to get jobs you […]

A few years ago Sylvia and I decided to stop dyeing our hair. Our hearts might still be young and gay, but the rest of us was old and gray. We thought her auburn and my dark brown locks looked silly next to all those wrinkles. I never expected to live this long. While still […]

A Crack in the Sidewalk Four Horsemen Transfixed at my desk, I stare at a window into a world of wars and lies. Three Orwellian empires —or rather their soldiers, who after all are only following orders— jockey to swallow the borderlands, to slaughter whoever dares to resist the theft of whatever they planted in […]

We’re all overwhelmed with grim stories from around the globe, so I’ll try to cheer the reader up with local news and old memories. Invasion in Portland First, our house has been invaded. I’ve been looking at the invaders and thinking of Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins, “Hope is the thing with feathers,” only my […]

Today is Purim, a good day to forget the troubles of the world and party down. If you’re Orthodox, all the books of the Bible are a true record of events. But non-Orthodox Jewish scholars, who study archaeological evidence and ancient documents, say that the Book of Esther has no historical basis. It appears to […]

Where Did the Afghans Go? For weeks the news in The New York Times was all about Afghanistan, about the sudden and badly managed (to say the least) pullout of U.S. troops, the sudden victory of the Taliban, and distress of those thousands who were left behind and are being targeted for assassination. Now the […]