Finding my focus in a sea of cranky

Today I had a hard time deciding what to focus on.

First thing this morning, there was the Vatican, busily dissing Amnesty International for their endorsement of a policy that stands by girls' and women's right to be free from threat, coercion or force when exercising their sexual and reproductive rights; that is, to back their right to have an abortion, if a girl's been raped or if the pregnancy endangers her health. The Vatican, of course, feels that even this limited access to abortion - a provision that follows the use of mass rape as a political weapon - is intolerable. They have denounced AI and called on Catholics worldwide to boycott the organization.

So there was that.

And then around lunchtime, there was the CTV.ca report on a Chatelaine survey of "Canadian women" (oh the homogeneity...), with the screaming headline: "One in Five Canadian Women Has Cheated."

+sigh+

I guess I'm not surprised that any of the other, less prurient survey findings did not make the heading. Like the fact that there's huge solidarity between women (48%) on what the most important issue of our time is (the environment). Or that 80% would rather become CEO of a major company, than getting famous on Canadian Idol. But CTV is right: woman-as-duplicitous-slut (and its implied counterpart: victimized man) is much more interesting.

But tonight's "moment" takes the cake because I was so very surprised by the source - and being surprised like that secretly delights me to no end. While watching a segment of the latest and greatest of evening game shows, Power of 10, the host - Drew Carey - asks the contestant, "what percentage of Americans do not want women in the Armed Forces to go into combat?"

After much hemming and hawing and audience-polling, Drew goads the player a bit, tossing out the following tasty bite, delivered with (what I imagine must have been) an unintended, delicious, building sarcasm: "would you want your daughter to fight in combat? i mean, a woman might say she'd want the right to fight, but she wouldn't want her daughter to fight. Or a husband wouldn't want his wife to get hurt. People in America have this real phobia about women being hurt. Unless it's in a slasher movie. Then we think it's great."

I never thought Drew Carey would be one to ease my crankies. But today he did. And for that, I thank him.