To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual - and hence social - confidence while undermining that of women.

From a constitutional point of view George W. Bush passing through the Patriot Act is no worse than Obama renewing it.

Cosmetic surgery processes the bodies of woman-made women, who make up the vast majority of its patient pool, into man-made women.

I'm asking people to think critically and not to be lazy in their thinking.

The '60s and '70s - I grew up in the Haight-Ashbury - people around me were going to school by day and all night long having these incredibly exciting meetings, mobilizing, marching, drafting statements. It was very intoxicating. It was very energizing. We've really forgotten a lot of those skills. Or they haven't been transmitted. It's useful to the people controlling us to have those skills not be available.

In 70s America, protest used to be very effective, but in subsequent decades municipalities have sneakily created a web of "overpermiticisation" - requirements that were designed to stifle freedom of assembly and the right to petition government for redress of grievances, both of which are part of our first amendment.

'The End of America' details the 10 steps that would-be dictators always take in seeking to close an open society; it argued that the Bush administration had been advancing each one.