"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." (Muriel Rukeyser)

This has been bugging me for two weeks solid. On August 17th the New York Times ran a series of articles called"Saving the World's Women." I read them online - all of them - and it was sobering stuff. To the left of the articles was a repeating series of six facts, the same six next to every article. Some of the stats were upbeat, most were desolate, none of them were attributed. I don't know if they accompanied the hard copy, so here's a link to one of the online articles so you can see what I mean (scroll down a little way and look to the left): http://http//www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?scp=1&sq=saving%20the%20world%27s%20women&st=cse

Here's what stuck with me. One of the screens read: "1 percent of the world's landowners are women." If that's right, then only 67,000,000 women around the world own land.

There are 1,163,000,000 people in Europe and North America alone. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that women are a nice clean half of that total (maybe there are more, maybe there are less, but work with me) and that half of them are children (likely inaccurate, but again, work with me). That leaves, in far less than half of the world, just under 300,000,000 women old enough to own land. And if only, oh, one quarter of them can afford to own real estate, that's 73,000,000 women. What am I missing? How can only 67 million around the world be landowners?

Far worse: "130 million women around the world have been subjected to genital cutting." Which means that around the world almost twice as many women are tortured - by this method alone - than own land.

No getting around it, life is a contact sport and people are getting hurt.