personal political

best birthday card ever

Guess who? For half a second when I took it out of the envelope, I thought it was Princess Margaret (it was the cigarette!)

girlistic: fashion

This past issue of Girlistic magazine looks impressive - enough reading to fill a couple of hours, about feminism and fashion.

a joke

"I'm going to tell you a joke that's a bit sick", he announced in a rush. As I was making some food at the time, I assumed it would concern bodily functions. Not exactly...

brides

Stories like this make me feel simultaneously horrified, bemused and incredibly glad that I've never been anywhere near doing this type of thing.

[I know there was supposedly an anti-feminist backlash in the 90s, but lately I've been feeling like not only is there a backlash going on, it's almost as if feminism never happened, for a large segment of young women, and that's very depressing. Last week in the job-which-never-speaks-its-name, I came across an advice article for a major women's magazine which told young women that they *must* wear make-up to work. Full stop. That's what women do.]]

working women

When I ride home from work, I pass through an area which usually has women on the street seeking to sell themselves for sex.

abortion ship

This woman is really remarkable and admirable - the doctor who provides abortions on board a ship in international waters for women in countries where abortion is illegal.

late

The experiences of women who've had late-term abortions.

carnival of feminist blogs

The latest carnival of feminist blogs - the 37th - is up and provides lots of weekend reading.

next feminist carnival

The next Carnival of Feminist Blogs will be hosted by Katie at KitKat's Critique and she's inviting people to submit posts to be included - posts from your own blog or something else inspiring which you read in April.

boys into men

A woman I know who is pregnant has found out she's expecting a boy. Initially both she and her husband were not sure how to respond to the news. The man worried that their son would be a sporty, macho type, which he adamantly is not. She felt surprised that her female body could be producing a male - but now she's moving towards relief, relief that she won't be able to totally replicate the entwined relationship she has with her own mother.

After the initial surprise when I learnt I was pregnant with a boy (surprise that was mainly based around the realisation that the baby was real), I felt relief too. I was relieved that my narcissism would have a boundary placed on it - that there'd be a limit to my identification with the child. Before the baby had even been born, I could imagine the intense, contradictory feelings I'd have for a daughter. I think I would have had impossibly high expectations of a girl and of myself as feminist mother of a daughter. A boy felt like an unknown, in the positive sense - he was free to be whoever he turned out to be.