In the in a shocking development file: The Guardian Council of Iran has rejected the candidacy of all 45 women [Independent Media Center] who applied to run for the Presidency of Iran. The Iranian constitution states that all Presidential candidates must be political men, which the Guardian Council interprets to mean: No Girls Allowed. Of course, here in the US we don’t need a Guardian Council. The power structures of the Demopublican parties, and their stranglehold over electoral politics, have done a fine enough job of blocking women from running for President over the past century despite all of the progress of women’s liberation. But you can buck the system: Vote Woodhull in 2004!

The New York Times has published an interesting article on gender differences in e-mail communications. Not surprisingly, males and females tend to show pretty much the same communication patterns in e-mails as they do normally: men tend to be more taciturn, instrumental, and transactional. Women tend to be more voluble, open, and relational. This dovetails interestingly with other findings that corporate CEOs, the quintessential alpha males, are are very terse in their e-mails whereas lower-ranking workers tend to be more formal. I suspect that this has more to do with tersity being a male behavior, and therefore valued, than tersity being valued, and therefore becoming a male behavior. In either case, though, there may be some hope yet: some researchers have also found that the disinhibiting effects of e-mail actually help some men communicate intimacies and feelings that they’d never communicate face-to-face.

Meanwhile in Seattle, the Washington authorities have proven that they take violence against women seriously by giving a Seattle SuperSonics forward 15 days in jail for attempted rape [Salon.com]. He may get five days knocked off for good behavior. Meanwhile, the state assessed $500 of restitution to the survivor and a $5000 to itself. Why the Court thinks that the state’s pain and suffering is ten times greater than the survivor’s, I don’t know.

An excellent (but depressing) AP article brings to light the horrendous abuses in the global trafficking of women [Salon.com], which has been brutally targeting Russian women over the past decade. Pimps prey on women in underdeveloped countries, who are often desperately poor, offering good jobs in the industrialized countries. They steal women’s passports and other documents, beat and rape and intimidate them, use drugs, and use every other form of economic and physical coercion that they can devise to keep the women in the most abysmal conditions. This is the world’s major remaining global slave trade. For a powerful force fighting against the brutality of worldwide sexual slavery, check out the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.