Eccentric Seal

Way back in 1994, when I was 14 years old and picking my GCSE subjects, I thought about studying childcare. After all, I liked children, I thought I might like to have children one day, so it might be interesting to learn how to look after them.  I was called into a meeting with my parents and told I was not allowed to take this subject. Childcare, it was explained, was a subject for pupils with no other choices, who did’nt stand a chance of getting proper GCSE’s in other subjects.  Not for people like me who could take the academic subjects and might go to university one day if I worked hard.   So I did’nt get to do Childcare after all. I did Electronics instead and spent 2 years learning to solder light sensors onto little circuit boards. And it is for this reason, that I have spent the first 3 weeks of my sons life, blissfully unaware was supposed to be winding him, and indeed of how such a thing might be done.  Many thanks to the h...

I’ve recently left work at the Citizens Advice Bureau to take maternity leave. My work is primarily in benefits advice and I am a huge benefits geek. It’s a combination of the intellectual exercise of manipulating regulations along with the pleasing sense of mastery over a system that appears all powerful and capricious when you are on the other end of it. I love it.  One interesting thing about the benefit system is that every government since its inception has tinkered with it to some degree and marked it with its own ideology, so that the regulations resemble rock strata, each layer reflecting the social narrative of its time; the prevalent views about unemployment, the social contract and the minimum standards of dignity which citizens should be afforded. The majority of benefits claimants I come across at work are dealing with the most modern form of the system, the means tested benefits. Jobseekers Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance (the recent replacement ...

I have a collection of blog posts sitting uselessly on a memory stick.  They are waiting for me to polish them up.  They are waiting for me to make them "good enough" for the internet I have a list of possible blog post subjects saved on my mobile phone. They are waiting for me to have time to do them justice.  In reality they are waiting to become documents on the memory stick that will never see the light of day because they will wait and wait and wait for me to get around to making them "good enough" to be seen by the world.  Enough of this! The internet is not the library at Alexandria. My blog is not the Time Literary Supplement. There is no standard to be met. There is no "good enough." We've all seen the total crap that's out there for Christ's sake.  This is my personal blog. the whole point is to be rough and incoherent. The whole point is to put out your half formed ideas, for them to be chewed over and shot down and built...

Breastfeeding involves up to 15 minutes attempting to get a latch and you aren’t sure if the baby’s making the mistakes or you are. Getting little hands through little arm holes in vests is really really difficult. You fail to manuover a (ridiculously overlarge) pram around a tight corner and end up doing some kind of elaborate three point turn while a queue of other pedestrians build up behind you. You have no idea that getting (still ridiculously large) pram on the underground is going to be a problem until you are standing at the turnstile unable to get the pram through, hearing the platform attendant telling you to fold it up and knowing that you will never be able to work out how to do that. You spend your time thinking “is he too hot?, is he too cold?, if I put a blanket on he’ll definitely be too hot though, hang on, is he still breathing?” It takes you three days to get around to writing a blog post about being a new parent.  

OK, So I’m going to have a dive into the massive and Choppy waters of Intersectionality   Intersectionality is a sort of add on to feminism. It’s the shocking idea that gender is not the only basis on which people might be oppressed and that other thing (class, race, sexuality) might be worth looking into too. Nothing to argue with there. My slight problem with Intersectionality (and it’s a geeky one) is that adding new bits to an existing analysis (feminism) to make it encompass more things can be a little bit clumsy and can lead to some odd conclusions. Some of the limitations have been very well over here  by the magnificent Mhairi. I comepletely love this post and once based an entire gender training day on it.   As Mhairi point out, Intersectionlity (and the term Kyriarchy  used here to describe the totality of these intersectional oppressions) does not tend to deal well with class. This is because class is to do with material things. On...

Here’s a concept I like: Performance of Femininity. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_performativity Its basically the idea that gender is something we do rather than something we are. It’s the reason why I love that Caitlin Moran called her book “How to Be a Woman” because I’ve always felt that being a woman is something to be done, to be mastered, to be performed and I suspect that others feel the same way too. It’s nice for someone to say so; directly and in the title of a book. A well named book My performance of femininity is shit. I am not polished, I am not convincing. I stumble over my lines. If you followed the wikipeadia link, you will know that performance of femininity takes in the way we act as well as the way we dress and present our appearance but I’m going to focus on appearance here because that’s the part I’ve historically had most trouble with. Growing up, we were skint; permanently. I can only remember feeling actively frustrated by this for a s...

I've recently joined weight watchers, a relatively sensible weight loss plan with the emphasis on gradual weight loss, sensible eating and getting your five a day. It's something I can live with. In the sense of being able to actually stick to it without dying of hunger and giving it all up in despair. And also and in the sense of being able to reconcile it with my  shaky, but still existent  feminist principles. The written matierals,the website and the plan itself, are pleasingly free of judgement. There are no good or bad foods and you are not made to feel like eating is "sinfull" or "naughty" or shamefull in any way. Instead there is a workable system calibrated to allow you to eat just under the amount of calories you use each day, losing a sensible maximum of 2lbs per week. So far, so good. Encouragement and peer support is important so every week I go for a weigh in and a little meeting which is  both deeply naff and oddly heartening. Yesterday I g...