On Women's Rights, For StreetcredMusic: Katya.

Katya Kassima, is a friend of mine for about five years. I met her at a jazz club in New York City.
She is from Odessa, in the Ukraine. A graduate of one of the foremost schools on the planet, Odessa University (health and rehabilitation) in 1990. 

She is not a musician or in the arts at all. She is a anesthesiologist. She will hate me when she reads this but~~~I have never met a woman who is so 'up' on the politics of the world. She sees the hypocrisy in all of it, and coming from a childhood in the Soviet Union, to the USA, has not fooled her at all. This is why I asked her to write some words for me (and you) on women's rights.

Here she is:

Katya

 "Peter, Peter, Peter.....only you could turn a music blog into a forum for woman's rights. And by the way, I am insanely hooked on Greta Panettieri and her music, I want to meet with her!"

Katya:   дерьмо!!!   Women's rights a term that I never had spoken in 22 years under the Soviet Union. A woman was a woman, was a woman. You had babies, you cooked, you kept you 'quarters' in order. But you know what, I don't want to talk Soviet, that was oppressive and everyone knows it.

To put it in the most simple terms as we always do you and I....I do not wish for women to have power over men, but to have power over themselves.

 My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

Peter, we have talked about this before, I have told you that I am looked at in America as a 'tough cookie', when in reality as you know I am a softie! People here see my political views and my resistance to corporate and government bull shit as something they should run from.

Anyway Pete, as an anesthesiologist, I would like to pass on something I read in college...
      it's laughable, but at the same time, it shows how men walk away from the horrors they create
           and women are left to 'mother' the worlds problems...
                                          ****************************
 ~~When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol Tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the pain of childbirth should be shared, so the mother would hold on to a string tied to her husband's testicles. With each painful contraction, she would give the string a yank so that the man could share the burden. Surely if such a mechanism were more widespread, injuries in childbirth would garner more attention.~~

Thanks Peter, for asking me to write!  xoxo