Otters

This otter has been stolen from the internetz, but tonight driving home a real live otter ran out in front of my car (and didn't die). It wasn't a baby, but it wasn't quite fully grown. I am so excited... a real live otter....

That is all.

Fat Acceptance

Over at Bitch PhD, Ding discusses her decision to actively diet and lose weight, choosing to place her health above 'fat acceptance'. In her post, she talks about her struggle with choosing to diet, due to its implications for her feminism and her desire to accept her body the way it is. The fat acceptance movement is about helping women to love their bodies despite living a patriarchal culture that places a premium on being unachieveably thin. It is supposed to liberate women from obsessing over their body's seeming imperfections and to give them solidarity in that choice. It is meant to put women back in control of their own bodies; to wrest it from the grip of a patriarchal culture. Yet, increasingly, fat acceptance has come to mean never doing anything about your weight or body shape; never being allowed to change it. It is as if we are expected to imagine that our bodies just exist beyond or outside our control and we must just accept them, and never be actively seen to be adjusting them. If we do, we must dress up this choice as 'healthy' or about 'fitness'.

This is problematic as it once more removes a woman's body from her control. She is denied choice over what her body should look like or what size it should be. And, while our bodies can be frustratingly resistant sometimes to change (and certainly we are limited by our physiology), we do have some choices over what we do with our bodies, how we want them to look and behave. If we want to diet, we shouldn't have to say 'it's for health reasons', we should be able to say 'I am dieting because it's my damned body and I'll do what I like with it'. What this does not mean is that our bodies should be dictated to or that, because we can, we should change our bodies. It certainly doesn't mean condemning woman who have different bodies from us. It's about recognising that feminism is about putting us in control of our lives and our bodies and that we shouldn't have to apologise for what we do to our bodies.

Happy International Women's Day!

2009 is the year of ending violence against women, so I thought a message from a victim of domestic violence may be appropriate.

Mrs Maud Coleman, Dundrum, to her husband, James Bryne Coleman, during their separation proceedings for his cruelty in 1906.

"If in the event of my death, you should marry again, take my advice and do not go to lawyers and friends to ask how to behave to your wife, but remember that she is a human being."

Droll.

Blatant copyright infringement: I found this here.

My First Meme.

Via Anastasia

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.

2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.

3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien Tried, but failed to finish.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X +++

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X

6 The Bible - X

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+++

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X+ (plus the rest of the series)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (at school so hated on principle)

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare* Read some, should read more, and will as I like.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (I think I read this at school, but not counting as fuzzy)

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X+

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot X

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy X

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Started but never finished.)

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Started but never finished.)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X +

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X

34 Emma - Jane Austen X

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Bought for my gran, so flicked through, not read).

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X +++ adore

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins X

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy X

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert - X++

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov* (Own, but not read).

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt * (Almost bought the other day, prob will).

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X (Hated).

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Started, but never finished).

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie* (Bought this last month, so should read)

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce* (Started but never finished, will probably try again one day).

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath X

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome X++

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray*

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (Started, but never finished due to remnants of childhood rebellion)

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks X (not his best by miles!)

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - X

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think I counted 52 read, and another five started and abandoned, but I may have miscounted. Evidence of a mispent youth. Six I hope to read, and one day I plan to get through the rest of Dickens and Shakespeare, but I may need to retire first!

SNOW!

Everybody gets a snow day, but not me. I work from home.

We Hate Children.

This is a topic that I have posted on before, but it has been highlighted today by a report showing how much we hate our children. Apparently more than half the UK population think that children behave like animals; more than a third believe that the streets were ‘infested’ with children and 43% thought that adults needed to be protected from children. The report coincided with an advert to raise awareness of our attitudes to children, using phrases from websites that describe children as ‘vermin’, ‘animals’, as walking in ‘packs’. And, as if to illustrate the point, a visit to the comments on the article highlighting this news on the BBC’s website, includes an invective of hate towards children. A couple of examples include:

‘Curfew for school aged kids NOW.’

‘Do some children behave like animals? No - animals tend to behave better. I have never seenan animal that would smash your car for no reason, make false accusations backed up by lies and manipulation. Yes children are more 'dangerous' than before because (a) their behaviour is worse (b) they are protected by an absurd system of 'human rights'. The Barnados video was accurate except for one fact - the hoodlums roaming the streets were about 20 years too old.

Even those comments which try to take a more moderate perspective comment that it is not ‘all’ children that behave like this, or that if we could just discipline our children more, then ‘bad’ children would not exist.

Our hatred of children is enacted everyday, not only in comments to websites, but in our attitudes to children. I mean, what is the problem with children playing on the streets or even hanging round street corners. As a society, we have become so intolerant to children that if we seem them in groups we condemn them, regardless of what they are doing. Of course, we should condemn vandalism, bullying and anti-social behaviour, but being visible is not a crime. Even in the [probably mythical] Victorian period, children should be seen and not heard. Yet, even to be seen is now a crime. We complain if our children spend too much time in front of the TV or computer, but chase them outside and we condemn them as lazy, useless, and a nuisance. Time and again, we hear complaints of children ‘hanging around’, of ‘being on buses’ [so what?], of blocking doorways- only very occasionally do such complaints actually involve actual anti-social behaviour [and are young people not part of society- do they not get a say in what is anti-social?]. We remove spaces for children to play and hang around; we cut funding for initiatives to provide young people with place to go; we even are increasingly intolerant of children in productive roles, prohibiting them from working, and allowing their exploitation through the refusal of a minimum wage for under 18s and a lower minimum wage for under 21s.

We criminalise behaviour that in past years would have just been perceived as ‘childish’. Despite a belief that children go unpunished in the twenty-first century, studies suggest that children are more likely to receive a criminal record now than ever before and that a much broader range of behaviours are now dealt with by youth panels and the court than ever before. This is not because children have got worse, but because we are more inclined to use the state as a form of discipline for the young.

We also increasingly expect all parents, including single parents and both partners in a couple, to work, a policy actively pursued by the Labour government through tax benefits and restrictive benefit allowances, but provide nothing for children. We saw no corresponding increase in child-care facilities to provide for the children left unsupervised by such a policy. We saw no extension in school hours, or even after-school activities to compensate for absent parents. The state chose to turn a blind-eye to the needs of the next generation. This, of course, made parents lives more difficult, but how much more did it reflect the complete disregard we have for children that they didn’t even feature in our thinking on an issue that so directly impacted on their lives.

The fact is that concern over the behaviour of children is not new. Read any newspaper for the last three hundred years and you will find an article bemoaning the youths hanging around street corners, pick-pocketing and robbing stores. Concern over knife crime is not novel; the anti-duelling legislation of the eighteenth-century arose out of a belief that groups of young men were swarming the streets challenging honest citizens, left, right and centre, to duels, which inevitably ended in death or severe injury.

Young people are scary because they are a social group whose rights we are reluctant to recognize. They are human beings with personalities, attitudes, opinions and needs. Just like misogyny arises out of a fear of women exercising their human rights; hatred of children arises from our wish to subordinate children. Why we have a need to subordinate youth is less clear. Is it from a fear of the new: new ideas, new attitudes, new fashions? If so, we shouldn’t be too concerned. Most children are actually surprisingly conservative in their values; after all, they take their values from their parents [it takes a bit of life experience to open your mind to new ways of thinking- which of course some children have]. Is it from a need to repeat the hatred that was enacted on us in our childhood; a reactive belief that we are right and to produce people like us we need to behave as our parents did? If so, perhaps it’s time for change- hating children is hardly a healthy way to live.

Recognition of children’s rights is a step forward for humanity, because children are us; they are our future and they are a product of our imput into them. If we want to have our human rights recognized (and we do), then we need to recognise theirs. If they behave badly, chances are it is because we taught them to behave badly. If they reject us, it is because we rejected them. If we want them to have good values and good behaviour, then it is on us to teach them. If you have a problem with young people, then it is probably your problem.