USAToday's "OnDeadline" blog finds some choice morsels from newly released transcripts of Henry Kissinger's 1973 meeting with Mao:

You know, China is a very poor country," Mao is quoted as saying during the exchange. "We don't have much. What we have in excess is women. So if you want them we can give a few of those to you, some tens of thousands."

The Chinese leader drew laughter when he returned to the proposition a few minutes later. "Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you 10 million." he said, adding: "We have too many women ... They give birth to children and our children are too many."

It's not clear whether Mao is at all serious -- he was a pretty crazy dude, after all -- but Kissinger's response is precious:

It is such a novel proposition, we will have to study it.

HENGHAMEH FAHIMI/AFP/Getty Images

A couple years ago, FP published an article about an Iranian magazine called Zanan ("Women," in Farsi). Written by Haleh Esfandiari of the Wilson Center, who was imprisoned in Tehran for several months last year, "Iranian Women, Please Stand Up" told the tale of Shahla Sherkat, who bravely courted controversy as the founder of a glossy women's magazine that covered topics both political and personal. Esfandiari wrote:

Zanan has run articles on the latest theories of feminism in the West, the unjust treatment of women in Islamic societies, and the significance for Iranians of international conventions on human rights and the rights of women and children. ... Not all articles in Zanan incite such strong reactions. The glossy has [also] published stories about Iran's first woman pilot, its first female cab driver, and the country’s first woman racing car ace.

Despite harassment from government officials, periodic censorship, and budget woes, Sherkat managed to keep the magazine open for 16 years. But last week the government shut down Zanan, this time for good. Iranian authorities, according to an editorial in the New York Times, claim "the magazine was a 'threat to the psychological security of the society' because it showed Iranian women in a 'black light.'"

A "black light"? Give me a break! Zanan was one of the very few media outlets in Iran dedicated to women's issues, and one of the only places where women could actually be heard. Because of numerous run-ins with the government in the past (past contributors to Zanan had been jailed at various times for their writing) Sherkat was always very careful to toe the line with the magazine's editorial content. The shuttering of the magazine is an outrage, it's a tragedy, and most of all, it's a crime against Iranian women. Tehran should realize that by closing down Zanan, it's only displaying its own weakness and fear.

And here I was thinking that "courting the Cuban-American vote" was just a metaphor. Mitt Romney appears to have taken the phrase rather literally:

On Sunday, in Sweetwater, the Mormon candidate who has been married to the same woman for almost forty years found himself trying to explain the appeal of Florida's sun-soaked fairer sex. "Why are there so many beautiful women here? I haven't figured this out," Romney said, innocently enough. "Cuban American women are gorgeous."

Iran may be an international pariah, but the country is nonetheless eagerly suiting up for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this year's biggest international event. In the Athens Games of 2004, the Islamic Republic allowed just one woman to compete and won only six medals. This year, nationalistic Iran is investing greater resources in its team and hoping for a stronger performance.

An unlikely boost for Iran's "Go for the Gold in '08" strategy has come from the conservative religious establishment: a "special religious dispensation" that allows more women to compete, as long as they wear the proper attire. Check out Haaretz's translation of an al-Jazeera report here:

Couple this with news that Hamas is recruiting women police officers to serve in Gaza, and you have to wonder what's going on in the region.

Anne Applebaum rightly condemns Saudi Arabia's treatment of women, but I think she misunderstands the political dynamics in the kingdom. Writing about a truly abhorrent case in which a Saudi court ruled that a woman who had been brutally gang raped had to face  a punishment of 200 lashes and six months in prison, Applebaum opines:

Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has pardoned the woman. And now? In Saudi Arabia women still can't vote, can't drive, can't leave the house without a male relative. No campaign of the kind once directed at South Africa has ever been mounted in their defense.

The comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently the journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren't kicked out of the Olympics is that the "Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly." Islam, she points out, does take other forms in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn't dictated by religion at all but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.

If you meet Saudi officials, you soon realize that many of them are actually Western-educated liberals. The oil minister, for instance, went to Lehigh and Stanford. The ambassador to the United States attended Texas and Georgetown. Before 9/11, more than 60,000 Saudis came to the United States each year. That number is now down to around 25,000. Still, in 2006, more than 11,000 visas were issued to incoming Saudi students. Think most of those kids don't absorb American culture and values while they're in college? Many of them go back and become high-ranking officials in Saudi Aramco or the government. They will tell you that widespread, systematic discrimination against women in their country is a tribal issue and has nothing to due with Islam. 

Some top leaders, such as Interior Minister Prince Naif bin AbdulAziz, are basically religious fundamentalists. But in general, the "Saudi ruling class" is a relatively liberal group sitting on top of a deeply conservative population. It's an elite that constantly jockeys with the religious establishment for power; sometimes the liberals win, and sometimes they lose. Certainly, Saudi Arabia's reformers move more cautiously than we in the West might like. But they know far better than we do what the traffic will bear. Remember: Before oil was discovered in 1938, Saudi Arabia was largely a land of tribal nomads and subsistence farmers. Just 70 years later, the country is a modernizing state and one of the linchpins of the global economy. This is a lot for any country to absorb. Give the Saudis time. They'll get there.

AFP/Getty Images

In India, what was supposed to be a promising "e-government" service has been withdrawn after it became misused as a tool for harassing young women.

Last year, the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh started out with an innovative service that was supposed to promote transparency: People could use their mobile phones to text-message a car's license-plate number, and would then receive a message with information about the vehicle, including its date of purchase, the taxes and fees paid on it, and the name, address, and phone number of the owner. The details could assist someone buying a used car or a police officer who quickly needed information about a vehicle involved in an accident, theft, or other crime. (Sounds like it could've also been used to track down someone who cut you off in traffic.)

Instead, it became a way for men to get the contact info of young women drivers and then harass them. The state's Transport Department received a number of complaints from women who were being harassed. Those complaints—along with the fact that the volume of messages sent to the department had jumped "several fold"—caused the texting service to be withdrawn.

The whole story raises questions about how much information should be made publicly available in this day and age. Records of people's births, divorces, house sales, crimes, and, in some cases, even incomes have been publicly available in many places for a long time. But accessing those records usually required a trip to city hall, filling out forms, and paying photocopying and postage fees. Now, in more places around the world, we can access the juicy details of people's lives—such as whether their houses are in foreclosure—all while wearing our pajamas in front of our home computers.

A study recently featured in FP showed that rural Indian women who watched satellite TV came to have more liberal attitudes and behaviors. For example, they became less accepting of spousal abuse, their bias in favor of having boys declined, school enrollment among girls increased, and the women were more likely to be able to spend money without a husband's permission.

Now, a similar "TV effect" could be occurring in Saudi Arabia, the only country where women aren't allowed to drive cars. Women's right to drive has now become a growing topic of debate, and Saudi women are saying that this debate stems in part from what women see on satellite TV and read on the Internet.

Not only do they learn about the freedom that women abroad have, but they see depictions of Saudi women themselves living lives of freedom. The country's most popular show, Tash Ma Tash (No Big Deal), a comedy that airs during Ramadan, addresses controversial social issues and shows episodes with Saudi women driving and going to the movies (there are presently no cinemas in Saudi Arabia). Another popular show, Amsha Bint Amash (Amsha, Daughter of Amash), is about a Saudi woman who disguises herself as a man to drive a cab.

On Sept. 23, Saudi Arabia's national day, the League of Demanders of Women's Right to Drive Cars in Saudi Arabia delivered to the king a petition signed by 1,100 women demanding the right to drive cars. The king hasn't yet replied, though.

And the women shouldn't expect an affirmative reply anytime soon. Advocates for women's rights concede that much preparation and public education would be required to ready both women and men for this relatively profound social change. Similarly, the producer of Tash Ma Tash says regarding women driving, "There will be a time [when] we will accept it, so now is the time to get prepared for that."

Too much social change too quickly in any society can backfire and produce a backlash and other destabilizing effects; Saudis must be slowly eased into this new world of liberated women. When it comes to women's rights in Saudi Arabia, slow and steady wins the race.

Back in March, Passport highlighted the achievements of Australia's first Muslim lifeguard contingent and the ability of Muslim women to participate in this lifesaving program thanks to the "burqini"—a two-piece, full-body, lightweight swimsuit designed by Sydney's Aheda Zanetti, a fashion entrepreneur. Now the burqini, and "Splashgear," another brand offering full-length swim gear, has made it to Time's fashion page along with an interesting report about the growing popularity of the swimsuit.

It not just Muslim women who have taken to the burqini, Time reports. Conservative Christians, cancer patients, the elderly and others have found the burqini liberating, and demand for the product has grown in places as distant as Malaysia, South Africa, and the United States. But with its growing popularity, the burqini has also attracted its fair share of critics. Conservative Muslims have denounced the swimsuit as un-Islamic (for revealing curves), while some feminists have decried it as dehumanizing, just like the traditional burqa.

"Clearly you're not considered a full human being if you're mandated to cover yourself head to toe in this tent," says Taina Bien-Aimé, the executive director of the women's rights organization Equality Now.

In spite of these condemnations, the burqini has succeeded in filling a gap in the market, and has been lauded an "export success" (pdf) by Austrade, Australia's international trade promotion body. As Zanetti puts it,

I'm a very small business with a product the whole world wants."

Correction: "Splashgear" was mistakenly referred to as the "scuba equivalent" of the burqini. It is actually a loose-fitting, nylon/lycra surfer rash guard shirt coupled with a polyester swim bottom that are a pants version of the popular men's board shorts. While some Splashgear wearers like to use it for snorkling, it can also be used for regular swimming in pools and the ocean. Apologies for the error.

"They're drop-dead gorgeous and can take apart an Uzi in seconds," touts the laddie magazine Maxim about its July pictorial of women from the Israeli Defense Forces.

Apparently thrilled that Maxim has decided to engage the crisis in the Middle East in such a thoughtful and substantive fashion, the Israeli consulate in New York decided to throw a party celebrating the magazine's efforts. Tonight, 9:00pm, at the Manhattan nightclub Marquee.

Not everyone, however, is happy about the event. Seems the consulate's formal invitation featured a photo of 2004 Miss Israel Gal Gadot wearing, well, let's just say the 22-year-old was out of uniform.

Back in Jerusalem, female members of Israel's Knesset are furious. "This pornographic campaign sponsored by the Foreign and Tourism Ministries is an outrage," said MK Colette Avital, who was formerly Israel's consul-general to New York. "It's unfortunate that the Israeli consulate chose to emphasize Israel's relevance with a portrait of a half-naked woman, instead of with one of women of substance and accomplishments," adds MK Zahava Gal-On.

The consulate remains unapologetic. They see the country's image slipping among the crucial demographic of New York men aged 18 to 38, explains David Saranga, consul for media and public affairs. "So we thought we'd approach them with an image they'd find appealing," he says.

We'd be more sympathetic ... had we been invited.