You might recall the news item from a couple of weeks ago about the Iranian hard-line cleric who said women who dress promiscuously were to blame for earthquakes. “When promiscuity spreads, earthquakes increase,” Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi said in a video posted on YouTube.
So, in reaction, American student Jennifer McCreight organized a ‘boobquake’ last Monday. She encouraged women to join her and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. She added that short shorts would also work as a means of scientifically testing the cleric’s hypothesis.
The 22-year-old science student at Purdue University in Indiana said that after changing out of her immodest clothes, she would look at the earth’s seismic activity and compare it to the norm. “If an earthquake reduces only my bedroom to rubble, I’d also take that as sufficient evidence for God’s wrath. I’m not too worried.”
By Monday, more than 55,000 women signed up on the official “Boobquake” Facebook page where McCreight vowed to put her D-cup breasts to the earthquake test.
So what happened? Well, there was an earthquake. A 6.5 Richter-scale boob-shaker rattled Taiwan prompting on-line suggestions that the cleric might be right. We don’t think so. But it made a great little trickster synchronicity. By the way, there were 159 earthquakes in 2009 registering 6.5 or larger, and already 71 this year.
Another great book recommendation! Thanks, Debra. Boobs on the cover and all!
A Jungian named Edward C. Whitmont wrote a fascinating book: The Return of the Goddess. It's about the consequences that a society that represses & suppresses the feminine has to face (fascism, violence, rampant materialism). He also indicated that one of the vehicles for the return of the feminine is the grail mythos. He wrote it in 1982– long before Dan Brown and the Da Vinci Code.
Warning: there are boobs on the cover.
I can't resist this one. Another example of the supernatural power of breasts.
If you were a legislator in session on the floor during a discussion of abortion – a bill in the Florida Senate that would require women seeking abortions to pay for and view the results of ultrasound tests–you probably wouldn't think it's a good idea to be looking at bare-breasted women on your laptop computer during the debate. So you would think.
Yet, that's exactly what one Republican legislator did recently, and Sen. Michael Bennett of Bradenton, Florida was caught on camera by Sunshine State News.
Bennett says it was an e-mail attachment sent to him by a woman constituent. He was 'shocked' and quickly flicked it away, he says.
Ironically, Bennett is one of the few Republicans in the state senate who opposes the bill. He says, "If you don't ovulate, stay out of the debate." Which he did!
As one pundit pointed out: at least, he wasn't one of the "holier-than-thou senators who thinks he has the right to insert his religious beliefs between your legs."
I'm not a fan of Saudi culture…for all the reasons stated above. Basically, its a religious police state, but the leaders are hypocrites because Saudi princes are known to participate in drunken debaucheries and orgies on the French Riviera and yachts in the Mediterranean. They also drink alcohol in secret and I've even heard some U.S. sailors say that they had been hit on by Arab men.
Repression is never a good thing, especially seeing how they can't seem to live up to their strict Sharia laws.
This sounds awful beyond words. You hear stories like these and then wonder why saudis are considered "allies." Well, we know the answer to that one.
I didn't ask a question of my friend until I had visited the country. Women are treated like children. In a mall in Jeddah, Saudia Arabia a woman wanted to buy some underwear in a lingerie shop. She had to sit in a chair and pick out what she wanted, tell her husband who approved or disapproved of her choices and only he interacted with the clerk.
Two women from my ship came out w/o head covering. They bought scarves, but had not put them on when they were accosted by the fashion police (religious police) and ordered to return to the ship. When they tried to put on the scarves they were told it was too late.
Except for the married couple in our crew, men and women were not allowed to be seen together off the ship.
A poster of a female diver in a short wet suit had the arms and legs blacked out with magic marker at a combination dive/video store.
At a book store Newsweek had an issue mostly about gay men the store owner had to cover all the pictures of two men together with computer lablels. Oddly the labels could be peeled off. None of the pictures were risque in the least other than men with arms around each other or holding hands.
Worst of all when I was in a public square during the call to prayer on a loudspeaker I had the feeling that all of a sudden I was a character in a science fiction movie.
Ray
Given the emotional ties between health and illness, I wonder if arab women in the repressive arab cultures suffer from lower self esteem and have a higher incident of certain types of diseases. It can't be a good thing to consider your body so sinful that you have to cover it constantly.
Sadly in a culture such as Saudi Arabia it is the young unmarried men who contribute to the dress codes.
A British woman with a Canadian passport I knew worked in the King Faisal Hospital in Rhiyadh. She sent me a picture of herself decked out in the kind of robes Arab women wear in Saudi Arabia.
I asked her if she resented the dress code. She said that dressing like a local kept her from being harrassed and groped.
The Arab men should be the ones subjected to stricter rules.
Ray
Some of these word verifications are funny!
No question the guy is a neanderthal. But what must it be like for women who live in this kind of environment? That's the horror.
The Muslim cleric must be the Iranian equivalent to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, as both of those men blamed 9/11 on "homosexuals, liberals, and feminists."
They obviously have a political agenda by connecting unrelated things and saying that people's "immorality" or "disobedience" leads to "punishment" from God/Allah.
As one who has read a lot about karma and how it supposedly works, there's usually a direct connection, sometimes with a bit of irony thrown in.
This cleric obviously has a Mother Complex that has degenerated into a medieval style superstition. He needs to be sent back to boob camp for reprogramming.
Breasts are powerful. Just ask my grandson, who loves all breasts on all women. I think the time will come, however, where he's going to get in trouble sticking his hands down blouses…
i'm not at all surprised! and yes, mother nature certainly has her own ways of dealing with things!
By 9 a.m. EST, we had more than twice the usual hits by that time. So maybe the supernatural power of breasts alters Internet activity as well as shaking the Earth.
(I think the Taiwan quake was Mother Nature laughing at the cleric.) – R
hmmmmmm…..ok, now this is really not news at all – i've been aware of the supernatural power of the bosom all my life – and while my own bosom is replete with stories of miraculous happenings it would be a bit immodest of me to publish them here 😉
bosoms and ankles and we ALL know how some male cultures perceive our little monthly thing – the fear that triggers rivals only a nuclear warhead! but, alas, those same fearful little men [i'm sure most of them are short – but that's another story] all traveled head first right through that same valley of darkness and evil to get birthed!
fabulous post, you two!!!
and dear goodness, wv=feastro – can't even go there!!!!
How hilarious! and what a coincidence that an earthquake did occur. However, the earth is a big place and we have had a lot of earthquakes recently, so maybe it's not really a coincidence. However, it is just possible! What a backward opinion that cleric has.
Blessings, Star
Ah, bosom power!
Girl Power!
I thought this story was great. It is amazing how much they fear women.
wv-sonantr – sinatra LOL-so not true
I remember reading this story, it also got into the British press – and the subsequent earthquake.
Good title for a post, should bring you some extra hits!
I have to wonder about the workings of these minds to equate these two things. I'm sure at the turn of the nineteenth century women showing their ankles caused World War I.
I heard about Jennifer McCreight's experiment on NPR news over the w/e. It was a very amusing story. Since there are earthquakes on a daily basis there is little reason to believe the cleric. However believing the cause and effect could make just about anything happen.
Ray