If the messenger's smart, sassy and sexy, shoot her by Virginia Haussegger.

I found this article on the Sydney Morning Herald site this morning and found it pretty interesting. There's a lot of truth to the comments about we women judging other women for *being* women rather than looking at what they have to say first.

Sure, women need to discuss the meaningful things, but they also need to have fun and be able to take a light-hearted approach to certain things.

Quoting from the article:

Dowd's razor-sharp depiction of women who choose to parade their breasts instead of their brains (in order to enjoy the greater rewards), and who have ditched old-fashioned aspirations of gender equality for slut-culture supremacy, is just too much of an insult to delicate Australian feminist sensibilities. So what do we do?

Rather than poke at the provocation, unearthing its fundamental truth, we go for the girl. And we aim where we know it hurts most.

She's "single and childless", informs Salamon. She may be "smart, stylish, sexy and successful", but so too are plenty of other women, Salamon argues, who "have a partner and children and are fulfilled"...

...But perhaps nothing could be quite as pathetic in its moral grandstanding as the heart-stopper in The Australian, by Caroline Overington - an otherwise thoughtful journalist - who posed this question when playing with the title of Dowd's book: "But what about women who aren't married and don't have children? Couldn't we get rid of them?"

She goes on to poke fun at Dowd for living alone and being free to "pop out for a martini" every night. Then she turns a collective anger at women who are childless into a full-blown sneer: "Spending time with (a) child is vastly more satisfying - and takes more skill - than spending the longest night in the coolest bar in New York."

Overington's article isn't too bad really, and there are some giggle-moments, but I kind of got the "Oooh, I'm single and childless. I should go to my room right now and think about how naughty I've been to allow myself to be so!" feeling. Same for allowing myself to feel successful, smart, stylish and sexy. And then I should hunt me down a man! And then pop out a number of children! Psh... I dunno... people don't need to have produced loinfruit to be successful or happy.

There's nothing wrong with having kids and there's nothing wrong with not having kids. Depending on where you stand morally, there's also nothing wrong with being married or being unmarried (depending on what you get up to in both of those states).

Relationships with others are important, but we don't all have to have exactly the same relationships. We're not all destined to be the be carbon copies of each other and produce 2.5 kids and be friends with the neighbours and drive a SUV-style car that never sees the off-road it was designed for.

We're free to choose.

Or at least we were, last time I looked. And yes, kudos to the "Fab 4" as mentioned by Haussegger in the end of her article for standing up for choice.