He said, she said

I was born in 1977, 57 years after women were given the right to vote in the United States. Aside from receiving unequal pay and promotions, cringing at Sarah Palin's distortion of historical facts while she pretends to be a feminist, and fighting conservative efforts to keep their hands and superstitions off my body, I generally don't think about gender issues as they affect me. Middle East women's issues are a different story, however, since I've worked in the Mideast field for more than a decade now and have encountered women who truly face oppression. The other day, a fully burka'd figure who got into my elevator caught me by surprise. This is Beirut, after all, not Kandahar. The shadowy figure not only wore the burka with gloves, but you could not even see its eyes. What had once been a human being had ceased being human; it was an object, a nothing. It creeped the hell out of me. I wanted to shake it into the twenty-first century. I wanted to rip th...