“I refused to fetch, but I wasn’t strong enough to tell them why.”
Well played! That sounds like the perfect response to me. You didn’t let yourself in for accusations of aggression/bitchineness/tactlessness/being a ballbreaker/humourless feminism. And you didn’t fetch their coffee.

As I understood the hijab ban in French schools, it was Muslim girls and women who were first in line to be harassed by zealots/nasty teenage boys if they didn’t cover their heads.

“American culture”? That policeman in the first photo has to be British. Look at his helmet.

“American culture”? That policeman in the first photo has to be British. Look at his helmet.

All of Jia’s writing sounds as if it’s done in a bit of huff, including the original posts. So when she says she’s “literally never personally upset” I guess righteous indignation is her default mood. It seems normal to her.

In Spain just about every convent produces sweets/baked goods to sell. In Salamanca about ten years ago one convent had a sign out accusing a different order of nuns of imitating its cakes.

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If it makes you feel any better, cajones are drawers, as in chest of drawers. Testicles/balls are cojones. Maybe because American English speakers tend to pronounce the letter o as “ah”, testicles have somehow become drawers on their journey from Spanish to English.
I have heard people say of a woman in Spanish “What…

I know you posted ages ago, but I've just realised how condescending I must have sounded. I'm sorry. But it really is interesting to know where you had those experiences.

Mariella Frostrup's advice column is my favourite ever. She's really insensitive and always ends up going on and on about herself, and then loads of commenters come along and say what how useless she is as an advice columnist, and some of them will give much better advice.

In a lot of places it would be scandalous. Eating habits really are different in the anglosphere. I leave you this lovely piece by a very interesting young woman who used to write about life as an Australian of Asian descent in France.

That sounds terrible. There must be a happy medium. Where does this happen to you? Bear in mind that "Europe" has 27 countries; you could be referring to anywhere from Luxembourg to Romania, and I expect that wages and working conditions vary considerably for airport staff in those countries.

This is where it gets hard to argue because it's sounds so unreasonable to say, "it depends how you stare". But it does depend how you stare. I walk down Sydney Road, Brunswick, (Australia) and all the older Greek and Lebanese and Turkish and Syrian men look me slowly up and down in a way that says very clearly: "I…

You're probably not the guy that's hearing everything. A very popular tactic where I used to live is to quietly hiss or mumble things just as a woman passes by. When I told male friends about strange men who hissed "show us your gash" and "suck my dick" as they passed by, they were astonished because, like you, they…

We forget how recently Spain became a democracy. It's still too fundie to be called civilized.

Sure we feel infinitely different about the two teenagers who are both 17, but it is too complicated to have different definitions for "adult" depending on what they did.

That's one thing about the video that bothered me: what if people end up thinking that's the worst behaviour that women have to put up with while they're trying to walk down the street?

The people complaining are not so much squeamish ninnies as totalitarians who would like to see all evidence of Palestinian humanity censored in the US.

Yes, I was wondering about that. The adult goats on the farm next door have been baa-ing like mad for the last week. They sound really distressed, but it's not the same kind of distress as when they get their heads stuck in the fence. So now I know; this is the time of year when the kids are taken away and the males…

... Live with a woman or a person