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Not Even Your Money Belt Is the Last Bibelot of Privacy You Have Left

Not even your money belt is the last bibelot of privacy you have left. Industry has even snatched your 1980-style sanitary belt and handed you a bullet with which to torpedo your last private cavern. And your apartment or affordable home is shrinking in space. The number of square feet allowed a woman in her home is about two-thirds less allowed to the man. At home he hogs space, assuming the home is his, particularly if he has paid the greater share of down payment or mortgage payment on it.

Your phone isn't simply tapped; it's wirelessly webcasted. Does the world seem smaller and travel shorter? Is the West Nile virus now in Missouri and Fresno? Did airport security make you remove your underwire bra when it set off a metal detector? Space is closing in on you. But in the next generation, you'll be colonizing Mars.

In a one-bathroom home, the bathroom belongs to the man and his possessions. The woman cleans his toilet. He'll knock on the door and complain if she stays too long, but she'll never knock on the bathroom door and complain loudly if he stays in too long.

It's the woman with pain who stays in the bathroom longer (pain of hemorrhoids, pain of healing after childbirth, pain of arthritis inflamed more by repressed anger than joint wear and tear, pain of migraine from estrogen fluctuations before each period, pain of ovulation, pain of menopause and reactions to medications taken to "keep her quiet." The man or family assumes she's reading in the john.

The less space a woman has in her home, work, or private life, the larger her purse. Inside a woman's purse is a private and personal world, like a fishbowl universe. The insides of a purse can take on the essence of a science fiction universe. A man's space reveals the need for a small wallet. The woman who wears a money belt instead of carrying a purse, has felt more personal space than the woman who carries a large canvas purse.

The world of the bag lady is her entire universe, her corset, and her only semblance of privacy and personal space she has demanded and the world allowed back. Woman-space, the size of the corset a woman is forced to contract into is also the glass ceiling beyond which no woman has gone before.

So do men take up more space in public than women do in order to get equal space with women whose wombs provide expanding space? You can't corset a pregnant creator. Creative Minds also need to expand and grow. Who invented the silver-plated or whale-bone corset? Was the tightening of the female waistline in reaction to the expansion of the female brain line?

Or is the issue privacy and equal space in latitude? Perhaps the answer lies in the horizontal expression of a vertical desire? As mankind reaches with his knees and outstretched arms across the seat of a bus or train for more space laterally, women reach vertically for the new glass ceiling and eventually become astronauts. There's no such thing as privacy left, only a world on camera because life is show businesses.

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