Advertising Sexual Health.

In what is a rather confusing article on the BBC, apparently the Archbishop of Westminister has responded to a public consultation on allowing advertisements promoting safe sex and sexual health services on TV and radio, by asking for all adverts from organisations that refer women for abortions to be banned. “Archbishop Nichols urged Catholics in England and Wales to respond to the consultation, saying that the country would not expect abortion to be advertised "alongside a packet of crisps".” Somebody else, or perhaps him as well (bad writing journalists!!), ask for organisations that refer women for abortions to clearly state that in their ads. The need for such advertisements on TV and radio is due to the dramatic increase in STDs amongst under 16s and a desire to tackle these issues.

It seems to be that there are number of problems with this issue. First, seeing as in the UK, the vast majority of (but not all) sexual health services and sexual health advertisements are provided by the NHS, who also provide abortions, this would mean that the NHS could not advertise, so no stop smoking ads, no stop drinking ads, no phone the NHS hotline, not your Dr, ads etc, etc. Alternatively, they may just have to state that they provide abortions services in their ads, so look out for: ‘Stop Smoking Phone 0800 *****, ps you can also get an abortion with your nicotine patch’.

Second, the fact is that equating the advertising of sexual health services with advertising abortion is really just a bunch of scare-mongering to turn a rather banal issue into a hot topic. These adverts are to stop STDs, not ‘encourage’ abortion. By providing info on contraception it might even help prevent the need for abortion. But, if we must imagine that advertisers are lining up to sell abortion: How exactly does one advertise abortion anyway?

‘Hey, you’re pregnant and you thought having a child was the thing for you-Stop, have an abortion, it’s an experience of a lifetime’.

Or perhaps,

‘it’s a Saturday night and you’re bored- you were going to have a packet of crisps, but instead, have an abortion?’

Perhaps the adverts are to make sure people are aware that organisations that provide abortion exist and to ensure they can make an informed choice, but it seems unlikely, and frankly demeans women, to suggest that they will or will not choose to have an abortion based on a TV advert. Abortions are not life-style accessories (perhaps unlike children?). They are a necessary service that prevent women’s deaths, help protect their fertility, and give women control over their own bodies. The only way that an advert will improve the likelihood of a woman having an abortion is by offering her information to get one that she previously lacked. And, do you really want to argue that you think enforced pregnancy is a better option that a 30-second advert, next to the one about a packet of crisps?

Perhaps, I don’t want to know the answer to that.

Blaming 1920s Style

These are my summary of an article, with quotes in apostrophes, printed in the 1920s in Ireland on women's rights within marriage, suggesting that perhaps our blaming has not moved as far forward as we imagine. Sorry for not copying it word for word, but that's time-consuming, and I'm lazy. Now, you also get to see what I get to do all day...

The Great Unpaid: State Endowment of Motherhood,

from the Irish Times 28/11/1922

This article is replying to something written by Evelyn Grogan (a man) who attacks the idea that wife and mother's have economic status. He says 'Most people consider a home and a husband of one's one worth something.' The article replies : 'Agreed. But unfortunately in its actual working the marriage contract means that a woman must consider these appendages worth everything- worth her leisure, her economic independence, her interests; all in fact that goes to the composition of the individual and differentiates it in some degree from the herd.' Before marriage, woman (who do not live in poverty), had friends, interests, ideals and leisure- a personality that made her desirable in marriage to at least one man. After marriage any quality not necessary to the maintenance '(not economic maintenance- the other more arduous kind)' of a home is crowded out and atrophied, excepting of course patience, endurance, self-sacrifice, which neither attracted your husband in the first place, nor will keep him.

'"Few husbands" (we are told) "deny something spent on amusement or special desires." (Oh, beyond praise these beneficent ones and blest their handmaidens who have found favour in their sight!.) Imagine the sensations of a man confronted with the privilege of "something to spend on special desires and amusements!" Imagine the temerity of her who would suggest that men could exist without clubs, hobbies, drinks or tobacco! 'No the money and leisure to spend on special desires are not a man's privileges- they are his inalienable rights; and by all the standards of an outworn convention the more "special desires" a man has and the more he cultivates their gratification, the more manly he is.' It is curious and instructive to realise that it is by the diametrically opposed process we get the conventional 'womanly woman' - 'one who has no interest apart from the care of her husband, her home and her children.'

The writer [Grogan] also comments that it costs a pretty to keep a wife, when what he means is a home, and this is true, but it costs more to keep a housekeeper.

There are exceptions- women who are not unduly handicapped by marriage- they are the well to do women, the women without children, endowed with a talent, that like murder, will out '(and incidentally command an economic market).' But nothing can redeem the majority of woman who depend on another's bounty, which marriage inevitably means. The contributor's suggestion that a financial agreement should be arrived at before marriage is fair but does not go far enough- it is not possible for those in straitened households. The only solution is the state endowment of motherhood- not 'a miserable dole like maternity benefit', but something that would prove of substantial assistance, not only to parents but the child- that "most valuable asset to the state", about whom so much is talked and so criminally little is done. KM. [Note: we have received several other articles on this subject and they will be published in due course.]

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!