"Attention everyone! All menstruating women go home immediately!"

That's the first thing Kenneth the page announces in the TV comedy 30 Rock when he takes charge of the office while his female boss, the great Liz Lemon, is away on jury duty.

A pig farmer's son, Kenneth is a member of the Eighth Day Resurrected Covenant of the Holy Trinity, which meets in the basement of a Cuban restaurant.

Aside from certain odd restrictions, like the one on all hot liquids, including coffee —"That's the Devil's temperature!" — the central tenet of Kenneth's religion is the banning of women. To him, they are Jezebels, temptresses, Satan's handmaidens luring men into the loins of sin.

If women were truly like this, I'd be all for banning them too, Kenneth! What a sex, as Jeeves and Bertie Wooster said. P.G. Wodehouse wrote that before that Second World War, which welcomed women into the factories and taught them that there was a world outside the home.

Eraser heads

Luckily, for the Kenneths of this world, there are all kinds of ways to erase women from the landscape.

There are two women in the current Israeli cabinet, for example, but when the group portrait appeared in ultra-Orthodox newspapers, they were gone, digitally eliminated.

Adios, sayonara, good-bye. Israeli tabloids had a field day mocking the papers that blacked out Limor Livnat from the Likud party and Sofa Landver from the Yisrael Beytenu party. In their place were two short men chosen to match the heights of the offending women so as not to block the faces of the men behind.

Of course these two additions may be the loveliest of men, and they didn't Photoshop themselves into the limelight, but I have searched in vain for their angry denunciations of the Women-Be-Goners.

Women deletion is everywhere, but for pure audacity it's hard to top the new Sharia law passed by the Afghan government, that shack of an administration that Canadian soldiers have died to prop up.

Currently "under review," the proposed law would allow Shia men to rape their wives if they were denied sex. It would also prevent women from leaving the house unaccompanied by their husbands. And wives would inherit nothing in the will, including the children, who would be left to the custody of Grandpa.

In Kabul, the soon-to-be campaigning President Hamid Karzai blamed the Western media, particularly Britain's Independent newspaper, for "mistranslating" and "misinterpreting" the law. In fact, he went ape over the story.

(In Ottawa, Karzai's explanation would be called fudging, followed by flailing, followed by a total meltdown and craven concessions. But we don't often see all that because in Canada we rarely confront our own politicians anymore.)

Karzai said, in effect, hey, women can leave the house if they have a bloody good reason and they don't have to consent to sex if they were sick or something, which I don't think means vomiting or a gammy leg. I think it means "not dead yet."

It is a perfectly fine law, Karzai said, and besides it's for the Shia minority only and we're a young democracy and so on and so on.

Essentially he said you have to break a few eggs to make a complete permanent hash of Afghanistan.

Lay off my sweater

This law is a good reason for Canada's military to get out of that nation. Should I have perhaps not said that? Um, have they Photoshopped a guy into my mugshot yet? Is someone with a beard wearing my purple sweater?

This is what we're asking Canadian soldiers in the mountains of Afghanistan to say as they breathe their last: "I died to shut the ladies in the hut."

Even NATO objected to this law. It made the war in Afghanistan seem a waste of time, if not jets, and the Harper government, which wants to keep fighting that pointless war, was put in a tight spot.

Ottawa now says that Karzai has promised to get back to them on changing the law.

In rural Afghanistan, they don't yet have Photoshop but the women-erasers are everywhere.

Many men are women-erasers and, to be fair, I must concede that many women join in, tormenting members of their own sex in order to get ahead in a male world.

I would advise you not to watch this video of the Taliban flogging a 17-year-old Pakistani girl for the crime of having been in the company of a married man. The Taliban now rule in the once-bucolic Swat valley of Pakistan, as the CBC's Adrienne Arsenault reported.

If you think this video makes it clear why we should be fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, I would say that there is a sliding scale when it comes to women hating, and we all place somewhere on it.

But I don't see a great deal of difference between the Taliban and the Karzai government we are spending billions to support. We are Canada and these are not our values.

Don't get smug

In this country, we don't Photoshop undesirables out of photographs the way the Kremlin used to do at May Day military parades. We don't turn our homes into prisons for our wives and daughters and we don't proudly film the torture of girls.

Women hating is not rational. It is primitive and deranged, part of a primal fear of female sexuality.

Imagine the scale in your doctor's office as the weight slides across the bar to define you. Imagine that scale being a measure of hatred of women. The men torturing that screaming child in the video are only a notch or two away from Ted Bundy, a serial killer with a long winning streak because he seemed, more than anything else, superficially plausible.

I'd like to say that at the other end of the scale is Canada. But we are a country where women have almost no presence in the House of Commons and where the current government erased the word "equality" from the mandate of the Status of Women Canada (and then snuck it back in only after women complained loudly enough) and where the last budget killed female pay equity efforts for the civil service.

We have a Canadian public landscape increasingly denuded of women.

We let women out of the house in this country, but they don't tend to reach great corporate and public heights once they get there.

"Her Indoors" is British slang for wife. It's still very much a Her Indoors and Him Outdoors in the Western world, too. Don't get smug, Canada.