Feminism

It has taken more than seven decades, but the grievous wrong done to Ruth Ellis has finally been recognised. Ellis was the last woman to be hanged for murder in the UK, the victim of a pitiless justice system that was uninterested in her history of horrific domestic abuse. The announcement of a posthumous conditional pardon is a tribute to the tireless campaigning of her family, including her granddaughter, Laura Enston. But it also highlights continuing shortcomings in how the criminal justice system deals with women who commit crimes after being treated horrendously by their partners.

She really did murder the bloke.

Ah, yes, sorry, this is Joan Smith, isn’t it? Feminism means strong independent wimmins aren’t responsible for their actions.

At Menopunkapalooza, riot grrrls sang and rallied around a topic still taboo today: women’s health during midlife

Srsly?

We never stop hearing about it. Especially from those enjoying women’s midlife…..

Talk is of newlywed Taylor Swift taking a break from music. Did I take a nap and wake up in the 1950s?
Laura Snapes

What if she did? Actually said, well, now I’ve found my man I’m stayin’ home to bake cupcakes and have babies?

Victoria Coren actually wrote articles about how she was doing exactly that.

Just think of the explodin’ heads…..

According to my Instagram feed, I am not doing enough. Not spending enough, not saying enough, not taking enough care. I feel more sure of this than anything. And it’s bringing out an irrationality I’m not proud of: one afternoon, in between screengrabs of masked men snatching civilians from their homes, videos of wellness influencers evangelising “anti-trauma” hip stretches, and carousels of political action items disguised as catchy memes, I am served a targeted ad for a “Don’t Talk to Me About AI or I’ll Kill Myself” crochet pattern; and even though I have never crocheted anything in my life, I find myself looking up the materials to get started … on Etsy to avoid supporting any big, Maga-oriented corporations.

It’s overwhelming, this general pressure, palpable not only on social media but throughout the larger culture: today’s most urgent issues, from technological end times to tight hips, can only be solved by squeezing as much into the day as humanly possible.

Could be done, you know? Rather than writing angsty stuff for The G’s wimmins pages.

Ah, yes, forgot, they’ve got to fill the space between the ads with something or other, don’t they?

So, estimating our expenses for the next year, I included £300 a month for the jabs, plus £200 as an estimate for my gym, hair, cosmetics, contacts, nails and clothes budget. It is a chunky ongoing cost for sure, and even I was shocked at what it adds up to.
I did mention to him that his horrible vape habit costs just as much as my jabs, but he seems to think my meds are less important.
How do we avoid this tit-for-tat type negotiation and achieve a more dignified way of meeting our joint commitments without doing inventory and confessions every month?

Can you actually spend £300 – or £500 – on vaping?

My boyfriend and I have been working out a joint budget because we have recently moved into a flat together.
Since I earn less, we’ve always agreed that to move into our nicer flat, it would need to be subsidised by him. Going 50/50 would mean I’d be spending more than I paid living alone, so I’m just going to contribute the same amount as I have been.
However, as part of all this, my spending has come under the microscope.

See headline for what is really going on here.

Manages to whinge about how bad maternity services are – and they are, it’s a fair whinge – and not once mention that it’s all female led. It’s really the madwives of course – and to note that a toxic culture, even many toxic cultures, come from wimmins wouldn’t be politic, would it?

It’s all a very useful test. Anyone talking about that madwife culture is at least taking it all seriously. Anyone not ain’t.

As an unbaptised agnostic raised with no religion, the closest I ever really come to a spiritual experience is when I’m standing in front of an artwork. Last week I went to Florence to do exactly that, drawn there not by Michelangelo’s David or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but by the works of Mark Rothko, that titan of US abstract expressionism whose work seems, on the surface at least, distinctly secular and un-Florentine. Yet seeing Renaissance art there had a profound impact on Rothko and his painting, as the exhibition Rothko in Florence makes strikingly explicit. Taking place at Palazzo Strozzi and two other satellite sites, it has been curated by his son, Christopher, and the author and independent curator Elena Geuna.

Is it embarrassing to admit that when confronted with the first large canvas I was drawn to I felt tearful? It was an emotion born of appreciation and astonishment but also – and this startled me – a feeling of gratitude. I felt profoundly lucky to be there, in front of this painting, not long after a time in my life where for various reasons I had been not been feeling all that fortunate at all. To have the chance to take in the paint on the monumental canvas, and absorb the ways the colours – purples, reds, oranges, yellows, blues – blend and in places seem to glow felt hugely significant to me personally. And then, as I continued to look – and as ever with Rothko – I stopped thinking about myself at all.

Column in Guardian written by a bird isn’t about the bird writing a column for The Guardian.

Or is it?

For as long as I can remember, I have known I am a girl. That certainty is as instinctive as knowing I am right-handed. It is difficult to explain to someone who has never been transgender or loved someone who is, but I have never lived this way to gain an advantage or take something from someone else. I live this way to honor what I know is true.

I transitioned at four years old. By sixth grade, my identity was public. I grew used to the double takes, the questions, the quiet skepticism. Most of it did not bother me. Curiosity, even when clumsy, is human. People understand gender differently, and I was taught to respect all ideas, just as I hope others respect mine.

That someone has so perverted this young mind as to think it’s in the “wrong” body. Yes, I do get vicious about that.

At 4, sure, kids have ideas over who they are. Pink and dolls and all that. Boys and girls are indeed, on average, different too. But that someone’s gone on from well, why shouldn’t a lad be interested in pink princess dolls to they’re the wrong sex?

Grr.

A law proposed by Nigel Farage to “strengthen women’s rights” could cost female workers money by removing equal pay for work of equal value, unions have said.

Killing that very idea of equal value is a dman good idea. Getting judges to set wages really does not have a good track record.

It’s the direct cause of the bins strike in Brum for example….

Under Reform UK’s plan, Farage’s party has suggested women’s rights are better protected by laws made in the 1970s and 90s. It has said that the Equal Pay Act 1970 ensures that women and men receive the same pay for the same work and that the Employment Rights Act 1996 ensured rights to parental leave and protection against unfair dismissal.

The same work? Werl – but “equal value”? Naaah.

A BBC presenter lauded by the corporation for his appeal to young male audiences has a history of making abusive and misogynistic remarks about women, whom he has variously called “slags”, “sluts”, “psychos” and “bitches”, the Guardian can reveal.

Apparently he’s been reading the lyrics off the back of the rap albums….

Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, women’s bodies have been the business of the state. In the 1950s, labour for state-controlled work units was organised according to women’s menstrual cycles. Then for decades, there was the one-child policy.

Across vast swathes of the country the policy was enforced with a brutal severity. As well as fines for additional children, women were forced to have abortions and subjected to forced sterilisations.

Now, women in China are facing new forms of pressure from the government as China battles a fresh challenge – a falling birth rate. Women are under pressure to devote their bodies to childbearing as the government tries to encourage more pregnancies. Increasingly, women are pushing back in ways that weren’t possible in the past, while the painful legacy of the one-child policy continues to echo and reshape expectations around family today.

Limited government perhaps?

A telling critique of the sexual revolution of the 1960s is that it mainly benefited heterosexual men,

When birds were free to spread it about there was lots more being spread about. Thus committment from men was not necessary before getting nookie. True, birds got a choice of nookie too. But that general societal insistence that men choose one and that’s that disappeared – so, fewer men did.

Adrill with a speed of 35,000 revolutions per minute sits on Alina Huck’s orderly work station. The drill bit is the length of an almond, and as soon as it touches the client’s nail it whips up a fine dust of dead skin.

“It’s definitely a satisfying experience,” says Huck, a Sydney-based nail technician who has spent nearly a decade specialising in e-file manicures, also known as Russian manicures.

Light machinery might seem out of place in a glossy nail salon, but it is the key to an e-file manicure. Over the past year, more clients have been requesting the once-niche beauty treatment, says Huck.

Well, if it’s all the birds going leftie, the lads right, the leftie newspaper does have to run the pieces for the little darlin’s, no?

For years, I have been caught in a tiresome, expensive cycle: when I’m bored (or sad, or insecure) I scroll through my phone, looking for stuff to buy. In those moments, it feels like the right purchase will relieve me of ennui or unpleasantness. These shoes will make my life more glamorous! This face wash will make me feel forever beautiful!

Sometimes this rush lasts up to two days after I receive my item. But the excitement fades – sometimes as soon as I click “confirm purchase” – and I inevitably think: “Why did I do that?”

So how does one start shopping less? We asked experts and people who have pared down their own spending.

One of those essentials to snag a spot in The Guardian – a neurosis or two.

“As a barrister, I have stood in family courts and watched judges normalise abuse, trivialise trauma and silence survivors,” Dr Charlotte Proudman, a co-director of Right to Equality, said.

Ah, there we are then.

A report has found “widespread and concerning evidence” of bias and victim-blaming in the family courts – primarily disadvantaging women.

Bin it, it’s nonsense.

In his own statement, Sullivan said: “After a lifetime spent building businesses in the adult industry in which I have met thousands of women, it is sadly inevitable that a small number of improper conduct claims are being made against me.

The strategy has, after all, worked elsewhere, no?

A Mumsnet report drawing on a decade of users’ posts from the site paints a picture of a system where women fail to get the healthcare they need, with symptoms “brushed aside, treated as psychological, or simply not believed”; in a survey published with the report, 64% said they had been explicitly told pain or symptoms were “normal” or “in their head”.

Nursing is 91% female, madwifery no doubt more than that, doctoring is majority female and ob/gyn I would assume much more than that.

So who is it ignoring the birds with their uteri hanging out? ‘S Not us men, is it?

Perhaps patriarchy is better than being ruled by the boss girls?

Or even not thinking about them enough? 30 years of talking to a sofa? Really?

The Irish singer-songwriter CMAT has responded to ongoing abuse she has received about her body and her weight following an appearance last week at BBC’s Radio 1 Big Weekend.

The things that get reported upon.

CMAT pointed out to “well-meaning” commenters that her body size was not a choice: “I am not being defiant. I am not choosing to look like this or weigh this much as some kind of punk rock act of liberty. I simply have a body, one that I would of course like to change in order to fit in and avoid all of this abuse, but I have had extreme difficulty in doing so. I don’t get a say in whether or not I want to be brave, I simply have to sit here and take it.”

She said that though she was grateful for her success, it is “increasingly becoming tarnished by the fact that I would be allowed to enjoy it so much more if I was thin”.

The Guardian – you know, national newspaper – is running a story on how big girl says it’s unfair how she gets called a big girl.

Ho Hum.

Bloke writes careful, competent, book about the real differences between men and women.

To be clear, when Stewart-Williams argues that there are innate differences between men and women, he is quick to add that this doesn’t imply that one sex is better than the other, that we have a moral imperative to uphold or enforce sex differences, or that they are completely fixed. What he does believe is that if you give people freedom to choose their jobs and lifestyle, men and women tend to gravitate in different directions. Men tend to prefer working with things, women with people, for instance. Men are more motivated by status, women by relationships. Various studies add weight to Stewart-Williams’s claim by finding that many sex differences – from occupational preference to personality traits – are more pronounced in more gender-equal countries.

Very grudging, the Lassie is.

So, she’s got to find something to disagree with:

Stewart-Williams believes an underacknowledged contributor to women’s under-representation in Stem, or in leadership roles more generally, is innate differences in professional ambition and interests. Which I suppose is a more convenient response to the problem of unequal representation than trying to understand how offices, research institutions and leadership roles would be structured if women hadn’t been excluded for much of human history. (I note for example that men’s apparently weaker verbal abilities haven’t held them back in literature.) It’s important to understand the role that nature plays in making us who we are and shaping relations between the sexes – but it’s a small part of a big, complicated story.

Phew! She manages to find something to disagree with!