Quicklink: Clementine Ford on NGOKC and double standards
A few weeks ago a controversial tumblr was started which highlighted the OK Cupid dating profiles of certain men who claimed to be Nice/Decent Guys, but whose answers on optional stock questions set by OK Cupid revealed various degrees of Not-Nice/Not-Decent attitudes. Clementine lays out the back-story, analyses some of the criticisms, and comes to some conclusions.
Bananas in Pyjamas teaching you to like ‘bad boys’ and clean up all their mess
File this one under: Don’t let your cranky, feminist mother watch your TV shows. So, my three year old son was watching an episode (‘Super Bear’) of the Australian children’s show, Bananas in Pyjamas the other day and I walked past and caught a scene that began to irritate me. I was so bewildered by [...]
Deveny! Deveny! Deveny!
According to the angriest keyboard pounders in the Twitterverse, Catherine Deveny rudely interrupted & talked loudly over the top of everybody else on Q&A on Monday night, and was especially disrespectful to the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen. What a frightfully boorish display that would be if it were true.
Raising daughters to have high self-esteem and the problem with that
So much good analysis in this piece from Jessica Valenti in The Nation – “The Upside of Ugly”: But this is the problem with teaching young women that the key to happiness and success is self-esteem. If our end goal for girls is simply to have them feel “confident”—especially about their looks—then we create a [...]
Why I will go easy on the ‘save yourself’ rhetoric with my daughter
Reading Clementine Ford’s piece in Daily Life on teenage sexuality something struck me about the young girls she was describing. The arrival of One Direction certainly took Australia by storm – mostly because nobody outside of the 12-17 year old teen girl bracket and a handful of their mothers had ever heard of them. But [...]
10 rules for women blogging about their relationship woes
Before beginning your rant, and it will be a rant because you’re a woman writing this, always start that post with an apologetic, introductory paragraph about how truly nice your partner is and how he (and he will be a ‘he’) ‘helps’ you around the house and ‘helps’ you with the kids, a lot; really, [...]
Living as a feminist
When Rachel Cusk wrote about motherhood in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother, I felt heard. It wasn’t my story, exactly, but it was closer to my story of the early days of motherhood than others were writing. This time she is writing about her divorce. It isn’t my story either, but I suspect [...]
Big Shiny Public Tech vs Little Nifty Domestic Tech
Which sort of tech actually makes the most daily difference to the largest number of people?
Redux: The 21st Century Motherhood Movement – book review
I’m not going to go into spoilers, but I can say if you like bluemilk’s blog you will enjoy her writing which is simultaneously distilled essence of bluemilk expanded tenfold into a really fantastic chapter.
This week in Spooks related obstreperation
In a world where women who are about to become royalty can go shopping in exclusive boutiques wearing ballet flats without upsetting the world’s incredulity meters, why the fuck do you put a woman who is supposed to be an active espionage agent in six inch fucking heels to go and strew misleading evidence around a very ordinary flat?
Today in essentialist claptrap
Sample headlines:
*Career women enjoy doing household work
* Housework not a dirty word
* Majority of Working Women Like to Perform Household Tasks
* Working Aussie women refusing to share workload at home
* Some career women still enjoy doing household chores
Tim Minchin’s ‘Storm’, and one quick thought on sex/gender
I’m letting other people’s writing do the secular sermon heavy lifting this week.
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