As if we wouldn't notice

I didn't notice at first.

The Bet Shemesh municipality outdid itself this year with the annual booklet showing how it would have us think it is spending "my" arnona contributions.

(This is where I should say that no one in this town save ChadashAsur and a few friends actually pay arnona, but you could shake any building in Sheinfeld and get 20 Bet Shemesh List posts saying the same thing.)

Page after page of new parks, politicians with real smiles, kids with fake smiles, construction cranes, the mayor glad-handing government ministers, serious-looking guys with black hats sitting incongruously behind power desks, the usual BS fare.

A lot of this:

And this:

After a few pages, I started getting a déjà vu from the first day of 5th grade at the Hebrew Academy in my Californian hometown. That was the year that the classes were segregated, and I found myself in an exclusively male environment. No big deal when you are 10 years old, to be honest.

And so it was that I discovered that females of all ages were excluded, cropped, deleted, banished and expelled from the Bet Shemesh pictured in Mayor Abutbul's PR booklet. To sadly quote Ecclesiastes/Koheleth 7:28 - "וְאִשָּׁה בְכָל אֵלֶּה לֹא מָצָאתִי".

Furiously ChadashAsur flipped back and forth through the glossy pictures, hoping that a hint of double-X genetic material had survived the purge, and perhaps not unsuccessfully. You can decide whether a member of the unseen gender is hiding here (apologies to the person with the sunglasses if he's a guy!):

And maybe a Jewess is riding this bus whilst demurely concealed by the strategically placed flags (the ones with the city's sun-god namesake):

So, while the Saudi meidelach fret and sign facebook petitions about not being allowed to drive around their Kingdom, their sisters in RBS will need to wait patiently, in their wifi-less homes and pashkevil-plastered streets, for recognition by a more liberal coalition in City Hall.

It'll get worse before it gets better.