Switching it On

I haven't blogged much recently.  I've been grumpy. I've not eaten enough vegetables, moved enough, I've watched too much TV and I'm reading a book that I'm not enjoying. Twitter is bonkers and although it is still making me laugh, reading Donald Trump and Vincente Fox Quesado's tweets are making me feel a little uneasy.  The idea of Wikileaks publishing the personal details of anyone with a blue tick (including their family) is terrifying me, so much so that I suggested that my daughter might want to refuse her pending verification and I spent one early waking morning deleting any Facebook profile picture that I wouldn't want to be used if I was murdered. (I left the pictures of cheese.)

I've been trying not to inflict my grumpiness on the rest of the world but this week something has really bothered me.  I was teaching a song on SingUp called Switching it On, about the invention of the lightbulb.  It's a great song with two part harmony and is perfect for a Victorian Topic.

The lyrics are:

On a dark and stormy night,

Ben Franklin flew a kite.To the tail he tied a metal key —Now it wasn’t down to luck,He was sure when lightning struckThat he’d shown the world e-lec-tric-i-tee.
Of course he didn’t think one day he’d switch it on, 
Of course he didn’t count on Volta, Mather and Swan,
Of course he didn’t count on Thomas Edison,
Thomas Edison —

I knew about Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison and Joseph Swan and I had heard of volts, so thought that Volta might have invented the battery but I'd never heard of Mather.  I googled "Mather," and the top results were a law firm, an architect and an engineering company.  "Mather light," took me to a light railway in Sacramento.  I checked SingUp's teaching notes, which told me to pick out the inventors' names and discuss what each one did.  Luckily, they gave their first names, so I googled "Sarah Mather," and found Eminem's half sister and a singer from American Idol.  I was beginning to think that this was SingUp's little joke, to see which teachers were paying attention but "Sarah Mather inventor," gave some answers.  

On April 16th 1845 Sarah Mather submitted a patent for an submarine telescope with a lamp attached.  It was designed for examining the hull of a boat from above the water but in her patent she thought it would have various uses, the lamp being used to light items for inspection under water.  No website knew anything about her, as a person.

I was stunned. Why do women get written out of history? 

The children just shrugged when I said that I could find lots of information about the men but none about the woman.  They weren't as horrified as I had been.  

"Would you like to see pictures of these people?" I asked.

They all agreed that it helps to see a picture of someone.  They suggested that Joseph Swan should have invented the electric razor or better still a lawnmower and asked, "How does someone grow a beard like that?"

When they saw a picture of Sarah Mather there was a stunned gasp.

"Oh, she's quite pretty, actually."

It was my turn to gasp.  Equality is such a long way off if the next generation can only see a woman's worth in terms of how she looks.  

Statues (again): a campaign

Girls need role models. They need to see that women have become things that they could aspire to and they need to see that women don't have to be perfect.

Yesterday, the LSH told me he'd bumped into his colleague at work who manages the Moot Hall in the town and she'd mentioned that she's not seen me in a while, "She should pop in, we've got Queen Elizabeth I visiting on Saturday."

"She's dead," I told him.

"Oh, she knows because that's what I said."

Both feeling slightly guilty for being so flippant, we decided to show our support.

As we were going in we met two children that I teach. They had already been in to see the Queen once before walking to the toy shop to spend their pocket money. The little boy had bought a dinosaur and the girl purchased two matching toy rings. She was going back to present the Queen with one of the rings; she was smitten and stated her ambition to become Queen when she grew up. Obviously, this is an unrealistic dream but her brother wanted to be a dinosaur, so I think it's fine.

It it any wonder that little girls role play is still based around being Princesses and getting married, when these are still the only ways they can gain recognition.

It made me think about my visit to London and the statues again. Boys have so many more role models to choose from. There are statues of men who seem to have done something no more significant than be at a battle. 

Our town has several statues of men but not one of a woman. Last time I blogged about statues someone offered to recommend putting a statue of me on the Prom. I know it was a joke but I was terrified at the idea. I would hate it. "But I'm not perfect," I thought, "I've done nothing significant, a statue of me would scare the birds and I'm still alive." 

I do think statues should be of people from history but there is a problem of women thinking they need to be perfect to be shown. They haven't even been able to get a statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square, despite her obvious historical significance as the first female Prime Minister because lots of people didn't like her and they can't agree on the handbag.  The most famous statues of men in our town are of  Byrhtnoth, a Saxon leader who got his head chopped off in battle, allowing the Vikings to invade and Edward Bright, a grocer, who is famous for being 47 stone and dying at 29. 

The last time I visited the Moot Hall was to watch a drama about Captain Ann. The children from school had been and the girls had been wide eyed and enthusiastic when they got back. 

"You have to go," they said, "she was brilliant. She got all those people food and then she was hunged up by her neck to die. The judge said that he could hang her because people called her Captain, which was a man's title. It changed the law, though. She was amazing."

Most people don't know her story. I was telling a neighbour the other day, who was home for the Summer from Uni, where he's studying history. 

"Is that the grain riots?" he asked, "We studied them last year and I was really shocked to find out that such an important person came from here and I'd never heard of her."

Ann Carter married her husband, a local butcher, at St Peter's Church (now the Maldeune Centre) and as his wife wouldn't have been hungry at the time she led a raid on a grain ship. She put herself out to help the cloth workers in 1629 who were not earning enough to buy one loaf of bread a week. She led women and children onto a Flemmish grain ship to fill their caps and skirts with just enough grain to feed their families. The fact that she was sentenced in her own name, rather than her husband taking responsibility for her crime as was the policy at the time, probably had more to do with the fact the town didn't want to lose their butcher than changing the policy on women's rights to be an individual. 

After watching the drama we discussed the history.

"We should have a statue of her," the Moot Hall manager said.

"Oooh, I don't know. I can think of better things to spend money on," someone else said.

I explained that I thought it was important. That girls need role models.

People agreed with me.

"There will be opposition, though. Some pubs wouldn't stock the Captain Ann beer because she was a thief."

"She wasn't!" The actress that had played her was indignant.

She was, though and that's fine. It's impossible to be perfect. It took someone who was prepared to break the law to make changes and without that we wouldn't know about her (even though her story has been suppressed for years).

During this visit to the Moot Hall we resumed our conversation about a sculpture. We talked to the Mayor. Maybe we could commission a local artist? Maybe a woman? It could go in the grounds of the Maldeune Centre and be sculpted from the remains of the holm oak that had to be cut down recently.

It sounds like the start of a campaign. Who's with me?

Exam results and statistics

Statistics worry me when it comes to exam results. Somehow, they take away the individual acheivement. On A level results day someone tweeted a link "everything you need to know about this year's A level results." I clicked on it and saw stats that compared subjects, schools and gender but it didn't tell me how incredibly hard my son had worked or how disappointed he was with a mark on one of the papers. 

Today, the GCSE results came out and the director of Teach First posted this tweet.

I was confused.

Why does it matter that when you group the GCSE population by gender, girls do slightly better than boys?

I asked and he seems to think it's a huge problem and that something needs to be done about it. He might be right 

but again, I find I'm worried by statistics.

I'm always worried about any statistics that divide the population by their sexual organs. Men and women are the same species and the spread of good exam results crosses the sexual divide. If all girls got the top grades and all boys the bottom grades I would agree that there is a problem. I asked if he would be so concerned if the statistics were grouped by eye colour. I mean if they analysed the results again and discovered that blue eyed children did 10% better than brown eyed children would that be a concern? I also suggested that in this year's group the girls might have been 8% smarter than the boys.  He asked me if I thought that girls were genetically smarter than boys, which was a bit tricksy. Of course that is not what I was saying, quite the opposite, in fact. I think there is no genetic difference between boys and girls intelligence and that we need to stop pitting one gender against the other as if life is some huge male/female war. 

 Was he suggesting that blue eyed children will be 10% better because of genetics? If so, that is dangerously close to the idea of an Ayrian super race but that's a different argument. We could group children by a preference for red or green or whether they like tomatoes or if they have a tree in their back garden and one group will statistically outperform the other group because that's what happens. Not one person would suggest seperate schools for tomato eaters, as they have done to solve this 'boys underperforming' problem.

I understand the rhetoric. I've been around long enough to have heard the theory that schools are letting boys down and I agree there are boys who would learn better in an outdoor environment or benefit from starting school a year later or be removed from the temptations of the female form to a single sex establishment, where they could just bully each other to be better.

I wonder if the outrage would be as huge if the difference was the other way round?

And does it matter anyway? Girls do better in school: men get all the top jobs. Maybe girls work harder to get better exam results because they have to. If exams were weighted in favour of boys I suspect the girls would just work even harder because their opportunities are more limited without the top grades.

There is so much division of men and women in society and this happens from birth. Schooling isn't going to change much if we refuse to believe that both sexes are equal and keep using statistics to compare them.

Always Angry

"You're always angry lately," the Long Suffering Husband said after he had tripped over his shoes, made a loud huffing noise and dropped his spare clothes for the fifth golf game of the week (yes I know it's only Wednesday) on the edge of the bed.

"It's all this stuff about women. Oh, and the fact that you just woke me up from probably the only sleep I'll get tonight."

Newsnight had been on the TV and they were discussing how the 'women's vote' was going to decide whether Trump becomes the next President of the USA. 

"There's no such thing as a women's vote," I growled.

"More women vote than men in America."

I kicked the covers off my sweaty, flushing body.

"But they don't all vote the same way. It's not like women are born with a womb and a hive mind. We can think differently from each other, you know."

"See! You're always angry."

He's right. I do feel more angry than usual. I'm sick of the news, of politics, of people, of pianos. None of them are making me happy. The weather finally decided to give us Summer all in one day , it's the end of term, I can't remember when I last slept for more than 4 hours and all of this has made me tetchy. 

I was cross yesterday. The Labour Party, rammed to the gills with rampant mysoginistis, decided that the woman who challenged Corbyn for the leadership couldn't win because of her gender so they found a man to replace her. Then the press found it necessary to further humiliate her by suggesting that she had lost the plot by shouting, "porridge," on live TV when everyone knows the standard sound check question is, "What did you have for breakfast?"

I was also furious with the man who refused to serve under the new Justice Secretary because she had no legal experience. Well, that's what he said but look at this list of Justice Secretaries he served under and their backgrounds. Can you spot the difference?

Liz Truss Degree in PPE and work as an economist

Michael Gove - History degree and journalist.

Chris Grayling - History degree and tv journalist

Maybe history and journalism are closer to the law than economics. That's it. Absolutely nothing to do with being a woman. 

To be a woman today, it seems as though you all have to think the same and be perfect. I can't do either of those things so I resign.

That's it. I resign from my position as 'woman'. I don't want the job anymore. I feel as though I am no longer adequately qualified for this role.

 From now on I'll just be a person and maybe I will start to be less angry.

Popular Psychology Killed Feminism

I've always thought that I was a feminist. I believe that women are just people, like men and that having a womb, boobs and a whole sack of complicated hormones shouldn't mean less pay or worse treatment. 

I always thought that separate playgrounds for boys and girls at my junior school was stupid, I saw no reason why I shouldn't take science A levels and I couldn't see why everyone was making such a fuss about a woman Prime Minister. 

Then I became a mother and as a mother I think I lost a little bit of my brain. 

During my pregnancies I hoped to give birth to girls. I was a girl, I understood girls so I knew how to raise a girl. Boys were some terrifying unknown creatures from outaspace. 

What?

What was I thinking?

Looking back now, it all seems so odd. Twenty five years of believing that men and women are equal gone like the dew on the grass on a sunny morning. I can't explain it, except to blame popular psychology. 

These were the days of John Gray. This American pop-psychologist was riding high in the book seller's charts and had convinced the world that men and women were not only different but were so different that they came from seperate planets. Not the same species even but worlds apart. I read the books, of course I did ( I read everything) but I also believed them. There was much to commend. He had noticed that human's communication isn't always very effective and suggested ways to solve it. For example he suggested that women were accused of nagging because they weren't very direct when asking for what they want. There are obviously long standing cultural reasons why this could be more true for women than men, however it has nothing to do with a fundamental neurological difference between the two aliens. Once our daughter was born we noticed that this particular 'nagging' habbit was more likely to be adopted by the Long Suffereing Husband than me. 

Me:  "Pick your toys up and put them away......NOW.....1...2.....3. Well done."

LSH: "You never put your toys away." "It's such a mess in here." "I really think it's time those toys went away" "Ouch, F**in' Lego." "It's no good coming crying to me now. It wouldn't have got broken if you'd just put it away." "Ugh! The toys are still all over the floor." "Why don't you ever listen to me?" "I only asked you to put your toys away."

As a parent, I was more confident. It never occurred to me that she might not love me if I told her to do things that she didn't want to do. 

The principal of effective direct communication from the Mars and Venus book applied equally well to men and women. It's almost as if men and women are the same.

I didn't learn though.

When my son was born that fear raised its ugly head again. My daughter had fitted the 'girly' stereotype, showing a preference for pink. She liked what I thought were typically female games and toys but truthfully she just preferred to play with people. We played games where we acted things out and she interviewed me. She had imaginary friends and found out all about their lives and she played with her globe and dreamed of going to Peru (which just happened to be one of the pink countries). I was terrified because popular psychology was talking about a male crisis. Feminism had destroyed men, they had lost their place in the world. They were buying guy liner and moisturising their faces and this was all because they were helping with the washing up. It was an identity crisis of epic proportions and something had to be done. 

Not wanting to contribute to the crisis I bought a book. Raising Boys by Steve Biddulph. 

It told me that boys are different and my parenting had to be different. My boy was different to my girl. He didn't much like people. He preferred to play with things. He chose the dolls, bricks and trucks but preferred animals and imaginary creatures, although he was (luckily) placid enough to be a prop in my daughter's games and would submit to being interviewed whenever she decided it was necessary. He became a lifelong Pokemon fan (probably because they don't talk) Neither of my children were physical; they didn't like to kick a ball around and catch terrified them but they both liked a good walk. According to my latest guru, Steve, most of boy's problems weren't my fault anyway. It was a book bought by mums but aimed at dads, who he blamed for being too distant and not a good role model. It was alright then I could relax because the LSH was present, being a good role model nagging about toys being left on the floor before picking them up himself. 

I noticed that he was a good role model for my daughter too. It was almost as if you could do the same things to raise boys and girls and that they were the same species.

But I still didn't learn.

My daughter had started school and had a group of bright friends who could be quite mean to each other. They were all jostling to be noticed; they all wanted to be the best and if they had to stand on each other to get to the top of the pile then so be it. My little girl was struggling. These were hard lessons. They were harder than maths, which she just didn't get the point of. 

So, guess what? Yes. I bought a book.

I bought Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons, which was later re-branded as Queen Bees and Wannabes and became the basis for the film, Mean Girls. When our girls were being mean to each other us parents pulled that sideways smile and said, "Well you know, girls can be so cruel." We didn't do anything about it. We didn't sit our girls down and say, "treat people how you want to be treated," Actually, I did but I don't know if she listened to me. Schools accepted the reality that 'girls' were mean. 

Then my boy started school. There was a mean boy. He called him names and pinched him under the table. I don't know what was said in return (as a parent you only get one side of the story) The school seemed less inclined to believe this was happening. Parents said, "It's so much easier with boys. They just hit each other and it's over with, not like girls. Girls can be so bitchy." I didn't think there was much difference in the way my son's friends spoke to each other than the way my daughter's friends spoke but there was a difference in the way us adults reacted. 

As I've done more work in schools I've seen that boys can be equally mean, especially when they are tired and emotional.  You'd think girls and boys were from the same planet.

The problem is that I'm still hearing all the things that were in these books. People still believe that men and women are different. Parents are still consoling each other with, "Girls can be so bitchy" Boys are still frightened to say that someone is being mean to them just in case the worst insult of all gets lobbed at them. 

"Oh, honestly, Fred. You're such a girl!"

(and that is probably their mother speaking)

I'm happy to notice differences but if you divide the world in two then one ends up being the opposite of the other. Boy:girl. good:bad.

As a mother

It was coming.

I knew it was.

A leadership contest between two women could only end in tears. Where were the men to save us from all this? Sensible men, who wouldn't need to be perfect. Men who didn't need to be everything. Men who could make mistakes and that would be fine, in fact it would make us like them more because they were human. Men like Boris: he's still a dick but that's fine. (Luckily, Gove is out of the contest because he's a cunt and no one wants to think about that bit of female anatomy) Men who might have children (or not) but don't  have a womb to worry about. Honestly, if there had just been one man left, none of this would have happened. He could have become leader and we could have all pushed those bloody wombs to the back of our minds. 

As soon as Andrea Leadsom appeared on our screens for the Leave Campaign TV debates her constant refrain of, "as a mother," was ringing in journalists' ears. It    was one of those dissonant chords that jarred and bought an uncomfortable lump to the throat. Anyone, and yes I do mean anyone, who interviewed her would be compelled to ask about it. 

I've had children, am slightly younger than Andrea Leadsom and I was baffled by her constant referral to herself as a mother. Being a mother was my main job, anything else I did was part time work. It was a choice I made because I was lucky enough to be able to and I loved it. It's probably the only job I've actually been any good at but now that my children are grown up I wouldn't reference my mothering job at an interview to run the country. It would be like saying, when I was in reception class I liked playing with Lego and so now that I'm 18 I think I'd make a good banker. It was also odd because it implied that unless you had pushed a baby out of your vagina (oh wait, that might be a step too far. Was she one of the too posh to push brigade?) you didn't care about the country.

Rachael Sylvester from the Times asked the question.

"During the debates you repeatedly said as a mum. Do you feel like a mum in politics?"

Good question.

It could have gone in so many different directions. 

But it didn't. 

It went down the direction that would make a splash. I can just imagine the journalist texting her own mother after the interview. "Can't say anything yet. Got a really big story. So excited."

She said, "I'm sure Theresa will be really sad that she doesn't have children so I don't want this to be 'Andrea has children Theresa doesn't' because that would be really horrible but genuinely I feel that being a mum means that you have a very real stake in the future of the country, a tangible stake. She probably has nieces and nephews, lots of people but I have children who are going to have children who will be part of what happens next."

She offered it to them on a plate. The conflict. Remember, conflict is always the story. Set childless women against those of us with baggy wombs and the story is sold. And she's right. It's really horrible.

The reporter filed her story. Twitter went mad. Women were fighting in the aisles of the supermarkets. It was a bloodbath. Andrea Leadsom cried, "it's not what I said! This is gutter journalism!" Theresa May kept quiet (although it might be too early to say that as she's not on Twitter)

I don't agree with Ms Leadsom but we should be very careful about dividing women into two groups. Look what happens when we give the world binary choices. (Chaos over Brexit)

Vote Mothers! Vote Childless Women!

These are not the issues. 

Vote for the person that can do the best job. Remember that no one is perfect. Stop buying the line that women can have it all, do it all, be it all. Women are just like men, with a womb. Remember that the press is there to entertain us; be entertained, enjoy the hilarity of the comments but don't base your voting decisions on it. And above all, don't take a side and join the fight. This is not about defining womanhood.

Brocialist

I learnt a new word today.  If it is, in fact, a word and not one of those made up things that Ofsted invented to catch out six year old children who think they can read.  I saw it on a tweet, which said something like, 'the brocialists are out in force to tell me what is sexist or not.'

Wow.  "That's handy.  There are people called brocialists who know what is and is not sexist," I thought.  Because it can be so hard to tell, can't it?  Sometimes you find that you have been unintentionally sexist without even knowing.

A friend and I sent each other pictures of people we hoped would be on the Police Commissioner ballot last Thursday.  We went through everyone from Frank Drebbin to Officer Dibble.  Everyone except Jane Tennison, Scott and Bailey, Cagney and Lacey, the woman from the Gentle Touch and any other female TV cop.  After the excitement of the wobbly wooden booth and stubby pencil on the string and after the Long Suffering Husband had complained that the pencil had run out and the string was too short to vote to cheer up the bored election officers, we were cross with ourselves for not even considering a woman.  When we saw each other we discussed our disgusting betrayal of the female role models and our abandoning them in preference for the men.  She told me about a friend of hers, who is a politician, who had not won the seat she had contested.  This politician had sent in her nomination papers without telling her husband.  We laughed that not winning had probably saved her marriage.  Later, I started to wonder why we had thought that was funny.  Surely men apply for jobs without telling their wives all the time?  Most of the the time I expect that even wives who are unhappy about it will go along with the idea and those who don't will be accused of unfairly holding him back.  Why, I wonder, do we think women should ask permission?

I was thinking about how I might have been unintentionally sexist when my Facebook timeline filled with people signing a petition to get Laura Kuenssberg sacked.  Ms Kuenssberg is the Political Editor of the BBC and people think she has shown a lack of impartiality in her reporting of the the local election results.  The facts are that Labour won lots of seats and Jeremy Corbyn is the leader of the Labour party.  The BBC reporting has focused on whether that is enough and whether the results are an endorsement of Mr Corbyn's leadership.  Whilst I agree that it would have been nice if the BBC had reported the results in a more positive way before undertaking any analysis I'm not sure it's a sacking offence.   I listened to her analysis, which was quite anti-Corbyn and thought that I disagreed with almost everything she said but couldn't help be impressed by the way the words were put together.

People in positions of power (and BBC Political Editor is a position of power) often come in for public criticism and people will often call for them to be sacked when they don't agree with them. The thought occurred to me that people were being harsher with Ms Kuenssberg than they had been with anyone else they disagreed with and I wondered if it was because she was a woman.  This wasn't the first time I heard people say things about her.  I heard two women talking in a coffee shop.
"That Laura Kuenssberg"
"Oh, I hate her."
"Me too.  She has such a funny mouth."
"And I can't be doing with her accent."
"Who does she think she is, anyway?"
"I know.  Always on TV, flicking her hair and telling us what to think."
I wanted to say that she thinks that she's the BBC's political editor and that apart from the hair flicking (which I had never seen) it was her job to tell us what to think.  I could have pointed out that it's their job to decide whether to agree with her or not.  I didn't because it wouldn't have been polite to show that I had written down their whole conversation. They continued,
"I don't expect she has children."
"No she can't have.  She's probably a lesbian."
"Do you think?  Well, it would be very difficult to have a husband when you are on the telly all the time."
"It's a good thing then.  Think of her poor children if she did have them."


The language around this petition had the air of a 'witch hunt' Twitterers post things like, "She seems such an awful, horrifying person but it's her lack of bias that warrants her dismissal."  The attack seems personal.

But I wasn't sure.  Some Corbyn supporters see quite angry.  Maybe they would be just as personal about a man who said anything nasty about Jeremy.

If only there was someone who could tell me whether it was a campaign based, partly, in sexism.

It was time to find out more about the Brocalists.

How disappointing! There is no group of people who have the answers on sexism, rather brocalism is an invented insult word that combines the word Bro and Socialist (I think) and describes a male socialist who believes in equality and fairness for everyone but still treats women like sex objects and belittles their thoughts.  I found this definition: Richard Seymour: My experience is that ‘brocialists' don’t openly embrace patriarchy; they deny it’s a problem. Or they minimise it. They direct your attention elsewhere: you should be focusing on class. You’re being divisive. You’re just middle class (quelle horreur!). Or they attack a straw ‘feminism’ that is supposedly ‘bourgeois’ and has nothing to say about class or other axes of oppression. Or they just ignore it. To me that’s quite straightforward. Obviously it would be difficult, given their egalitarian commitments, to openly defend a gendered hierarchy; but their defensiveness about this issue suggests they associate a challenge to patriarchy with some sort of ‘loss’ for themselves. The question is, what do they have to lose? 

So, if I asked the Brocalists they would say that I'm making it up.  Laura Kuenssberg isn't being picked on because she's a woman, that people, of course treat women in the same way as they do men.  The problem is because I'm looking at the wrong thing.  I should be looking at class and how the middle classes, like Laura, are not taking Jeremy Corbyn's desire to protect the working class seriously.  They will tell me that there have been petitions to sack other BBC political editors, which is true. The one to sack Nick Robinson received 1600 votes in it's lifetime, while the one for Laura currently stands at 30,625 and is rising.  I'd love to live in a world where men and women are treated equally but for now I will just think carefully about all the possible  reasons we are being asked to sign a petition.

Where are all the women?

After a very lovely day in London, I have been putting off writing this blog. I've put it off because it is going to make me sound like a tub-thumping grumpy old feminist. I know that you know that already and you may be fooled into thinking that I don't care what people think of me but I have been brought up well enough to know that 'nice girls' don't bang on about things that don't really matter. I mean, look at how that woman who got Jane Austen onto a bank note was treated although that was no surprise because she was an ugly lesbian that no man would want to sleep with anyway. She probably deserved it for getting so worked up about something that didn't matter; who actually cares about Jane Austen, anyway?

But it does matter, doesn't it? It matters that girls grow up with role models. It matters that women are commemorated not just as men's sexual playthings but for their own contribution to the world. It matters that we don't just see men on banknotes. It matters that girls know they can grow up to be important other than by being the Queen, which is unattainable for everyone living in the country today (unless Charlotte plans a fatal accident for her brother)

I left my son, who was having an interview for a summer job and walked up Whitehall. There were lots of statues and I started taking pictures.

I didn't recognise many of the names but their statues made me want to know more about them.

They were all men. "Of course they are," I told myself, "they're all military leaders, there weren't women. They didn't exist then."

In fact, all the women disappeared at war time and just left their clothes behind, so that they could appear naked on the edges of buildings.

There were lots of men on horses. I understand now. Horses make great statues and women and horses don't go together at all. Never once has a little girl devoted her whole life to her pony or ridden in any kind of event, the horses all make it perfectly clear: they will only be ridden by men.

Then I found one.

but on closer inspection it turned out to be a pretty Roman, with exceptionally nice legs.

I looked up. Was that a woman?

Don't be silly. The highest and most important statue in the whole of London is, of course Nelson. I was beginning to get a bit grumpy about the whole thing.

Even the lions are male.

I made it my mission to find statues of women. There have to be some that are worthy enough for bronze or marble. 

I started in theatreland, thinking that as women have always excelled in the arts there would at least be a Nell Gwynn or Sarah Siddons somewhere. I found this captivating dancer outside the Royal Opera/Ballet House.

However, she has no name. 

I found Oscar Wilde, Charlie Chaplin and Shakespeare, in  fact I think I found several Shakespeares.

I had walked all morning, I was tired and my son was soon to finish his half day interview (jobs are hard to get these days, even if they are only for 6 weeks), so I walked back up Whitehall to sit by the Thames for a few moments. 

There she was: Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, tucked in the corner of Victoria Park, next to Westminster, quiet and unassuming with a gesture that said, "What did you expect? This is how it is. Say something if you don't like it."

Thinking that only Queens could be famous, we made our way to Buckingham Palace. The Queen Victoria memorial statue is a good one. It has balance. Victoria looks regal and never has to squint into the sun.

She is surrounded by balance. Where there is a man as a warrior, there is a woman. There are both  male and female farmers and there are no nipples on display. 

Behind Victoria is a memorial to women as mothers.

I liked this. Being able to grow a foetus into a baby and then nourish it to toddlerhood is nothing to be ashamed of.  I think it's part of a woman's magic and why men are so scared of us.  If we can do that, we can do anything.

I discussed the whole statue problem with my son. We decided that on our walk we had seen more statues of animals than we had of women. He told me that it didn't make sense as only 42% of the U.K. population is male.

Then we found one more making my statue count 3% female 97% male, I'm so pleased that we live in such a representative society. (Just in case you hadn't noticed: this blog contains a lot of sarcasm)

Determinism

I'm not a huge fan of determinism. I like to think that people can achieve whatever they decide to despite their name, sex, social background or where they come from.  Determinism is, however, a really attractive narrative and in a world that is increasingly subject to words (through social media) the story is often more important than the truth. 

We believe that girls like pink and can't enjoy science, boys are tough, the poor will never be good at school, Northerners like flat caps and whippets, and Batman will save Gotham City. 

It's rubbish though. Batman didn't save Gotham City. Everyone thought she would. She believed in the narrative that the poor in London were doomed to failure within the school system and persuaded governments to give her lots of money. Even though I know her charity did good things I can't help wondering how far that £3 million would have gone in a Social Services department.

I have really enjoyed Radio 4's broadcast of Helen Scales' book Spirals in Time and although I was initially excited by the nominative determinism of a person called Scales being a Marine Biologist she could have had any name and it would have been just as brilliant.

And while we're on the subject the only thing your sex defines is which body parts you have and whether you can carry a baby in your body. My friend tried to buy a pink birthday balloon yesterday for her son and had to have a very strange conversation with the Sales Assistant, who clearly thought she was a very bad mother. I'm going to stop writing now before I have to change my name to Mrs Rant.

Rape

A young woman was raped yesterday. It was a terrible crime and our whole town is shocked.

The local newspaper picked up the story quickly and reported the facts and social media responded by sharing and retweeting the story. As the day wore on I found myself getting a bit irritated; an irrational response, surely? People wanted to help; they suddenly stopped feeling safe in our super-safe little town. 

The first shares of the story came from women, who added captions such as, "stay safe" or "be careful." Wise words, except that this particular woman wasn't throwing caution to the wind by walking home from the supermarket on a well used footpath at 5.30 in the evening. In fact, she wasn't culpable in the slightest. She couldn't be blamed for what happened to her and that worried people. Rape is horrific. We don't want to think about it but if we can somehow say that the woman was asking for it then it makes us feel safer.

The next round of social media on the subject came from people requesting that someone (although I'm not sure who) makes our footpaths safer. Ah, yes of course, it must have been the footpath's fault. Those bloody footpaths going round a raping women!

Now we have the racist angle. One of the men was described as 'of Indian or Asian appearance, wearing a green Superdry top' and now the tweets are very much focused on 'sending them home'. If these men had come to England and our little town to rape then I agree they should be sent home but personally I think proper punishment for any rapist would be better. I can see the benefit of blaming the rape on the ethnicity; it makes us feel safer. Not many Asians (or Muslims if you believe the EDL's take on it)live here and we can spot them. Avoid all people of colour and you will never be raped. White middle class men never attack women, do they? I'm pinning my hopes on the green Superdry top and am going to run, quickly, in the other direction whenever I see someone wearing one. 

The truth is, we are not safe from rape. It is the only crime where the statistics are rising and the convictions are falling. We live in a world where approximately 35 women a day are raped (some men too)  and where we make excuses for the men who commit these violent crimes. These criminals feel quite safe. They know that even if they are caught they will probably get away with it. If they are caught and prosecuted then they will serve a short sentance and quickly get back to their old life, where they can tell everyone that it was the girl's fault; she led them on, wore a short skirt, was drunk but not too drunk to consent and anyway it wasn't rape they were only cheating. They might even get their mates to set up a website to name and blame the victim, so that men everywhere give her a hard time. 

We also live in a world where women are sexualised to an extent we've stopped noticing. It's a world where women's sexualised bodies are used to sell even the blandest of items. It's a world where women who want to have their music heard must dance in their pants. The subconscious message many young men are getting is that women are on this planet purely for their sexual amusement.

 

          This is just how I use my trainers!

I know that everyone wants to help and make us all feel safer but the best thing we can do is to stop giving excuses to men who attack sexually. These crimes should all be taken seriously and properly prosecuted. 

Sometimes, the Long Suffering Husband and I discuss sexual crimes that have been reported in the press. His default position is to defend the man as he feels a solidarity with people of his gender. When I point out that he is not the same, that he would never treat a woman like that he feels let down. Please men, remember that when I ask you to take the crime of rape seriously and stop making excuses for men who have raped then I know that you are not the same. You couldn't accidentally fall on a woman and rape her.

This is a small town and someone must know something. These men do not deserve to be protected. The only thing that we can do for victims of rape is take them seriously and hope that their attacker is caught and prosecuted quickly and effectively.

Do we still need it?

Last week there was a big fuss in the press about longer school hours and shorter holidays.  It was the result of a few 'churnalists' (I can't claim the word - it's my daughter's), who had read a blog by a former government adviser, who really couldn't see the point in short school days and long school holidays. Instead of going and interviewing people and getting a real story they then recycled the story into a piece designed to worry and scare ordinary middle and working class parents.  Some people would argue that with the invention of social media and blogging, journalists don't need to get out and report any more.   But what about the people without this kind of public voice? Think of all the stories they are missing.

Whenever I read this type of blog by rich men I wonder why they had children in the first place.  They don't like children and see them as an obstacle to their favourite thing; making money. Reading Paul Kirby's blog http://paulkirby.net/2014/01/26/is-this-the-perfect-2015-election-promise/ I suddenly realised what is going on.  Rich men have children to pass their money onto.  They want them fully grown, and full of 'grit', so that they can take care of their money and make more of it.  He thinks that everyone wants to work 70 hour weeks and have their children make as little impact on their lives, until they are ready to inherit,  as possible.  He thinks that spending time with children is no longer needed.  Unfortunately, most people don't have children for the same reasons.  Most people don't want to work all the time and the truth of it is, even if they did, they wouldn't be making the kind of money that would make procreation about transfer of wealth. So, short school days and long school holidays are still needed by most people because it's all we have.  We had our children to spend time with interesting and funny growing humans - we have no wealth to transfer.

We so often hear people say that feminism isn't needed anymore.  They argue that women have equal rights in this country and so it's time to stop fighting and occasionally I agree until I read an article like this http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2014/01/29/the-de-piero-fantasy-cabinet/ or see a picture like this and think it's a joke.

Harriet Harman on the Andrew Marr show this morning, dared to make the suggestion that the sacking of Baroness Sally Morgan might have been more to do with the fact that she's a woman than her allegiance to the Labour party.  Michael Gove, said that it's good business practice to 'refresh' jobs and that it is a sensible thing to replace someone who is doing a good job.  Luckily for him, after a year longer in his job than Sally Morgan had in hers, he isn't doing quite such a good job, so there's no fear of him refreshing himself.  Twitter exploded and despite the fact that Harriet had properly mocked Michael with her, "Conservative Cabinet is raining men," comment, she came off the worse for it.  Her name was changed by several people to 'Harperson' and comments were made on her appearance.  They pointed out that the only female prime minister this country has had was a conservative (as if one woman thirty years ago is enough)  I thought that of the two politicians sat on the BBC sofa, Ms Harman was the more attractive to look at of the two but Twitter was full of remarks about her personal appearance.

Although people do make comments about Mr Gove's appearance I have never seen it suggested that because he looks like a Pob, all men should be excluded from public office.

This afternoon I went to the cinema and watched American Hustle. It was a good film, with some amazing acting by Jennifer Lawrence, in particular, that thankfully, didn't dumb down or leave out the importance of the women in this piece of history, or did it?  I grew up in the Seventies and I can confirm that men dressed like that, with ridiculous hair, and that wallpaper was just as hideous but I never saw quite so much female flesh, which the male costume designer justifies by saying that it represents the women's naked vulnerablity. 

 So, I would argue that we still need long school holidays, proper reporter journalists and feminism.

Tart

This morning I had a conversation about feminism with some friends on Twitter.  This week's Secret Teacher article in the Guardian  discussed why 'feminism is still  a dirty word in the classroom.' http://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2013/nov/23/feminism-classroom-dirty-word-secret-teacher and I am really encouraged that people are starting to discuss the linguistics around the word feminism.  I am glad that we are starting to have these conversations.  Until there is global equality between men and women and girls and boys then feminists still have work to do.  The secret teacher notes how women do not appear in the History curriculum but we know that there were women in history.  Women have always been there and doing things.  It's just that no one ever thought that what they were doing was important enough to write down.  That's why it's called his-story; half of it is missing.

We know (those of us discussing the subject on Twitter) that if we admit to being a feminist then many people, who we know to be intelligent, well educated, thoughtful individuals will look at us as though we are strange beings from outer-space.  They say, "You can't be one of those, you have such nice shoes."

The solution could be to change the word.   We could call people who want to fight or argue for gender equality personists but we shouldn't have to. The word isn't the problem.

I pointed out on Twitter that all female words are considered to be bad things.  In our society, male seems to equate to good and female bad.  My friend questioned, "All of them?" and so I've been trying to think of any female word that was good and so far I've failed.

Cow, sow, bitch, pussy, queen, vixen and mare are all female animals that are used as insults.  The only female animal names I can find that don't seem to be particularly insulting are Jill, hen, tigress and pen.  Male animal names are less often used as insults and often seen as compliments; buck, bull, ram, stag, macho (male llama) and stud.  Sexual part words from both genders are considered to be insulting but the very worst words are female.  Given a choice, you'd rather be called a dick than a cunt.  It was hard to type that second word, which just shows how bad it is.  There are more euphemisms for female parts too, so there are more choice of insults available. Even worse, words that just mean female person are insults.  "You throw like a girl," "Just a little Princess," "That woman,"

Some things that are bad have male attributes and therefore end up seeming good.  Any boy who dares to show his emotions is told to 'man-up' because bottling everything up and being emotionally retarded is a male characteristic and although we all know it is really bad, it therefore becomes good.  Being sexually promiscuous is bad for a woman and good for a man.  Women are tarts, whores, sluts, slags and men are studs.  The line in Grease where she says, "Tell me about it stud," would have been a whole lot different if he'd said to her, "Tell me about it tart!"

Tell me about it, stud

I recently read a very interesting paper about gender representations in children's literature by Janice McCabe http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/socy428/McCabeFGPT11.pdf, where they found the balance between male and female characters is skewed towards the male.  This was particularly noticeable when the character was an animal and that when animals were not assigned a gender then parents reading the book would automatically call the animal 'he'.  

We all do it and you may be reading this, thinking that I've gone totally crazy, focusing on the use of a words in this way.  After all what does it matter?  There are good men and excellent women who use phrases like, "throw like a girl," and it doesn't make them not want equality.  I know that but it doesn't hurt to understand how ingrained into our language the negative connotations of being female are.  We need to remember that it's good to be a girl, a woman, a princess and that tarts are wonderful.

Sticky Walnut Tart