Knitting your own yoghurt aint much fun when you do it cos you can’t afford Muller, fact.

I don’t hate the Pope. I don’t hate religion. (And from the Catholics that I know, I don’t think there are many – if any – who actually agree with many of the Pope’s views on current issues.) What I dislike, what I think is harmful, is allowing a person in a position of power to make false and influential statements that are potentially damaging to people who are not in positions to fight against them or educate themselves otherwise. I also do not think that there is an effective argument in ‘because it is God’s will’, or ‘because the bible says so’. Most Christians will concede that the Bible is a historical document and the general agreement is that there are inaccuracies in its content. Therefore, it is important to look, as with any historical document that we wish to make relevant in modern times,  to relating the issues put forward within in a modern context.

Homosexuality: While there is a call in many religious circles for the rightful inclusion of homosexuals into positions within the church, Ratzinger has other ideas. He refers to homosexuality as an ‘intrinsic moral evil’, stating that it has no place in the Catholic church and that unions of two men or two women should not be blessed by the Catholic faith (he cheerfully calls this ‘pseudo-matrimony’). And goodness forbid those pseudo-couples who want to adopt children – they are, of course, ‘doing violence to these children’ by simply being a gay couple.

AIDS and condom use: Did you know that condoms actually serve to increase the spread of AIDS in developing countries? No, me neither. And most of the Catholic church disagrees with this, too, having proposed that condom use be an acceptable form of education in preventing the spread of disease. The Pope disagreed. I should probably, at this point, bring attention to this article here which describes the appalling suffering that young women undergo at the hands of their own mothers (who have the best intentions) to prevent them from becoming sexually active and potentially pregnant. This is currently seen as a form of ‘contraception’ – the only one they know of, in some cases. But, of course, condoms are the bad guys here.

Women: Along with his anti-abortion and anti-contraception stance (which I don’t even need to get started on…I’d be here all day), he also attacked our Government’s Equality Bill, which included protections for women in employment. Apparently creating a bill to ensure equality for all people goes against the natural order given to us, by which we are created unequal. I can’t even make sense of that as I type it, let alone read it.

I don’t believe that the Pope speaks for modern day Catholics; I don’t believe that his words have any relevance to those who are not Catholic; and frankly, in the same week that OAP’s are told they should perhaps choose not to use their free bus passes because every little helps the economy (yes, they’re associated with Tesco now…) the last thing we need to hear is that the cost of this visit is going up. The National Secular Society are estimating that, with the level of security involved, the cost could be in the region of £100million. The UK does not officially recognise the Vatican as an independent state, so Cam’s got a nice get-out clause there. We spent years, various groups of us, fighting for our rights to equality, fighting for groups to help those who are unable to strike out against the countries and groups who oppress them. So why are we lending a public platform to views such as these, views that cloak simple bigotry in a shroud of supposed moralistic rights?

And this, this is why I will be protesting the Pope.

Of course, the push for more alternatively sized/looking women in the media is, as ever, used as a buzz-word. It’s the new ‘in’, the new radical. And, unlike it’s title professes, ‘real’ beauty is actually not that ‘real’ at all. As evidenced by the Dove casting call for models for their Real Beauty campaign. They’ve even gone so far as to plus-size their text, the little fashionistas…Caps off, guys.

Realistic portrayals of beauty are not going to be soon forthcoming from the fashion industry, simply because like the clothing, body-shapes go in and out of style. What needs to change is our attitudes towards other women’s bodies: they are not a commodity that is there for us to pick, poke, pry and criticise. Pressuring other women to conform to a certain standard serves only in turn to pressurise ourselves as we are reinforcing the idea that our appearances are there to be judged. It doesn’t matter one iota what that standard is.

My suggestion: if you are advertising clothing, pick a woman whose body shape it will look amazing on, or colouring it will look good with. Make her feel gorgeous and look gorgeous. Let other women know what will look amazing on them, too. Let’s not pretend that every body shape will look good in every style. In a maxi dress I look like I’m wearing my bedding, my friend with a rocking cleavage and plentiful bum looks great. Equally, I’m lucky that I can get away with short-shorts. There’s a summer for everyone, eh!

We all know that you are not supposed to smoke during pregnancy, it’s right up there at the top of the ‘fyi’s’ in Getting Knocked Up. There is staggering evidence that tells us exactly how bad it is for baby and for us, etc. etc. We. Know. Please give pregnant women enough due respect to assume that they are competent enough to make their own decisions regarding their and their baby’s health during pregnancy. Spend the money on something that is going to make a positive difference, not a bullying strategy that assumes all  women have something to hide and need the facts pointing out to them in words of one syllable.

If a woman is going to lie about it…she’s also not going to stop, whether we spend money on getting her to blow into something or not.

The one that really gets parents’ goats? ‘Isn’t he a lovely little boy!’ This is used as the standard for all children. I have both a son and a daughter, both of whom were dressed in fairly unisex clothes from birth. Not once has my son been called a girl. But if I had a pound for every time my daughter was – and still is, at the age of two – called a boy…well, I wouldn’t still be renting, that’s for sure.

I tried dressing her in pink: didn’t work. A dress? Didn’t work. Short of piercing her ears with enormous hoops and writing ‘I’m a girl’ in marker across her forehead, there’s little more I could have done. She was still called ‘he’ and a ‘little boy’. Perhaps there is a cultural nicety, where it is more insulting to refer to a boy as a girl than a girl as a boy? After all, there are far more derogatory terms for men with feminine attributes than there are for women with masculine attributes (although I would argue that those aimed at women are more vicious, but that’s another issue).

Really, what it comes down to, is setting those little girls up for what they will experience in later life: being other. It’s a boy! Nope, it’s the other thing –  a girl.

ETA Coincidentally, just found this on Guardian.

Now we get to the buts (butts? Can I go there?). Why oh why is it that when the media turns pro- something it immediately sees it as yellow card to go and rip on everything that is its opposite? Do we have a quota of discrimination that has to be readily turned on something at all times? Just because ‘we’re being nice to fat people now’ doesn’t mean that ‘heck, we better find an outlet for this now unrequited and unprovoked cynicism…it’s okay to turn on the skinny ones now, right?’

Let’s get this straight. I am skinny. I am not skinny by choice, two pregnancies stole my arse from under me, and subsequent breastfeeding and having no time to cook meals took care of the rest. Couple that with an attitude to food that the French would throw their hands up in horror at. That equals skinny. I don’t have a problem with it. Other people, increasingly, do – and I can see where it’s coming from. Stories of catwalk models dying of anorexia are horribly sad and wrong, just as anyone dying of a disease is horrible. The fact that we celebrated their disease is abhorrent. It doesn’t, however, mean that every skinny woman is anorexic. It doesn’t mean that thin women can be attacked. Low body weight is one symptom of anorexia, not the whole disease, and simply attacking women even if they were anorexic is going to make things worse, not better. And women who aren’t, are going to be fucking offended. because that is their body, their physical being that they present to the world and it is NOT for people to pass comment on.

Every woman has insecurities, thin, fat, inbetween. And you know what makes you feel pretty shit on a bad day? ‘But you’re thin, you shouldn’t complain. Eat more. Go on, eat more.’ Because this says ‘It is your fault you feel this way, you can solve it or shut up. Your feeling this way is invalid, because you are thin.’ This is probably something that fat women have been told for many years too, and it’s just starting to shift. So let’s shift this attitude for all women, eh? How about a bit of support. How about, we don’t pass judgement on others’ physical appearances, because how we present ourselves to the world in terms of appearance is a small part of who we are, but feeling insecure about it can have a huge impact on us.

Thin people aren’t any more secure than fatter ones. Our jeans just have a different number on.

Like this? This is awesome.

Non-physical violence is defined by the same underlying concepts as physical violence; it marginalises the person, it can make them feel threatened, it has the intention of belittling the person, or removing their agency. The general effect is that of treating the person as a lesser being and making them feel that they are a lesser being in some way. Conversely, this creates a false sense of increased agency in the attacker. The only difference is that this effect is not achieved through the use of physical attack.

Violence can come about either through positive action or through inaction. For example, I see it as violence when a family does not have a way to provide for itself, and when there is a more powerful body who is causing this to happen. Denial of rights is a common form of non-physical violence. I would argue that something that is seen as minor, such as a woman being cat-called, is also violent, as it again removes the woman from her position of respect as a fellow human being. She is the object, She is lesser, and He as perpetrator of the violence, is in a position of power. When it happens again and again, these positions are reinforced.

It should be simple, really. After all, this is what we’re telling children all the time about bullying: you don’t have to be beaten up to be bullied. But somehow in the complexities of adulthood, this sense is lost and we allow things to happen because, in isolation, they don’t seem so bad, they don’t bother us, much, or they don’t affect us. But they are part of a bigger problem. A bully stealing your pencil might not give you cause for concern – get another pencil. But this action reinforces his sense of being over others and he can then go and punch the kid smaller than you. Saying yes to the small things is saying yes to the bigger things that stem from them as a result. Let’s stand up to the playground bullies.

My reaction to her views…a mixture of relief and anger. In one sense, she is taking some of the guilt that I mentioned before away. If you don’t follow a certain part of an ideology, you are not a failure, and you cannot expect to be the perfect mother. I must admit to also taking heart in the ‘don’t let the little buggers wear you down…you’re still you’ part.

However, here we go again. Another attack on breastfeeding. I don’t know why there is always such focus on this link between breastfeeding and self-sacrifice, or the notion that it means you are constantly tied to your baby. When you have a newborn, like it or not, you are tied.  If you are bottle feeding, you are tied to the dishwasher (if lucky enough to have one) and microwave, your outings limited by how many sterilised bottles you have and enough kitchen equipment in your buggy to shame Heston Blumenthal. If you breastfeed you are tied to scaffold-like bras and the sofa.

As for breastfeeding and co-sleeping being a sex-killer, I would argue that they are quite the opposite. No sleep is a sex-killer. An infant sleeping in your bed will generally wake up less, for shorter periods and will have ready access to boob, rather than you having to drag your arse to the cot or the kitchen. Let’s also not forget that the majority of fully breastfeeding mothers experience a cessation of periods for at least the first six months. So less natural pregnancy-fear.

So, Elisabeth, I hear you. I sometimes lament the fact that it is a struggle to find the ‘me’ in me anymore. I curse the price of childcare. But let’s leave the boobs out of it.

NB I wrote this a while back and forgot to click ‘publish’. Clever, yup. Rachel Power now has her response here.

Dirt is always with us, in one shape or form – I often think that the adage ‘death and taxes’ should be dirt, death and taxes’. In her book Purity and Dangers, Mary Douglas puts forward the notion that dirt is simply matter out of place. So earth in the garden is a-okay, but on the dining table it isn’t so good, which all makes sense. The thing is, we all have a different notion of ‘place’ and with much of our household work being a hidden activity, we have no metric by which to judge what others see as in place, or out of place, or how much time they spend moving things from one place to another (Ann Oakley’s Housewife is a good read on this front). Because, let’s face it, that’s all we are doing. Matter can never be destroyed, after all, so we are just taking the dirt from an undesirable location to an acceptable one.

Our relationships with dirt are variable, both between individuals and throughout our lifetime. Before I had children, for example, I didn’t see food as dirt, as it was never out of place. It was on the dishes, it was washed off the dishes, it was put in the bin if not wanted. Now, food is the New Dust. It is on walls, floors, windows, ceilings, clothes, people, cats…places that it has no business in residing. Equally, I have found people aghast at the fact that I do not (actually, make that WILL not) iron. There are also those who tell you to enjoy parenthood and leave the dishes. This rarely comes with an offer to wash said dishes for you.

There is no such thing as ‘enough’ when it comes to dirt: it keeps on coming, we keep on removing it, and the more we remove it, the more we see smaller bits of it. It is a constant cycle of moving it around and when we see that others can move it around more effectively than us, we feel a bit ashamed. I am genuinely admiring of people who do not clean. Beyond hygiene, there is really no need to be doing it.  As Quentin Crisp pointed out, the dirt gets no worse after the first four years, you’ve just got to stick with it.

That's Ma'Boy.

‘Oppressing’ may not be the word I’m looking for here: ‘stressing’, may be a better word for the sake of argument. I’m going to start off by saying that I am a fully paid up member of hippydom…if I had to put a signature on a baby forum it would read something like: ‘Breastfeeding, home birthing, slingwearing, cloth nappying vegan mama of two.’ The whole hog, right? I’d have been able to add ‘placenta burying’ to that too, if only my darn uterus didn’t refuse to rid itself of them. I also have a subscription to Greenparent, the earthmother’s bi-monthly mini-bible. (Shameless plug, it’s a good read for those of us in the baby-making way.)

In all honesty, I never intended for things to turn out this way. My main motive behind all the parenting decisions I made fulfilled the criteria of ‘cheap, easy and intuitive’. The prices of disposable nappies and formula milk are beyond what I’d call reasonable, and everything else was done to maximise opportunities for sleep.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t have a wholehearted belief in what I’m doing as a mother (sometimes halfhearted, but that’s generally when the sleep opportunities have been rare): every mother and father has to have some kind of faith in their parenting decisions, or we’d all go a bit mad, wracked with sleeplessness, guilt and self-doubt, speed-dialling the Health Visitor ever hour.

I soon discovered, of course, that the world of parenting – particularly the online world of parenting – is a huge and sometimes scary place, whose primary goal is to help you and whose secondary goal is to provide you with reasons to feel guilty. There is also a third goal, which is to unite select groups of women in bitching against other mothers, but it’s best to ignore that.

I discovered that my seemingly intuitive decisions were actually in line with a wider ethos of ‘natural parenting’ and that actually there was a Lot More I Could Be Doing. In some respects, this was helpful: it was heartening to know that I didn’t just have to wing it and that there were people and instructions out there that could aid me in doing the things I wanted to do. But what also struck me was an almost competitive element to be the most *whatever* mum you can be. I have heard mothers lamenting that their births were natural and straightforward, but not painless and beautiful, that they didn’t have an ‘orgasmic delivery’, that the hypnobirthing just didn’t do it for them…All in all, there’s one fuck of a lot that can make you feel like you’ve failed. I imagine the number of women who fulfil the criteria of the perfect birth and baby-raising experience is pretty small, but when you’re reading about it, it sure doesn’t feel that way.

Way back when, you’d done pretty well if you’d had a baby and both survived. Sadly, this is still the case in too many parts of the world. Here, we are exposed to such a glut of child-rearing information, that it is easy to get lost in it, and often makes a lot of sense to simply find a parenting ideology and stick to it. But like all ideologies, not everything is going to work for everyone within a particular consensus. There needs to be give and take. But when you are insanely tired and hormonal and, in short, feeling like inhuman crud, it can be hard to sort the sense from the ‘aint gonna work’.

What concerns me with so many parenting ideologies is that there is one hell of a lot of room to feel like you’ve failed. While information is a fantastic, liberating thing, and while choice is the essence of happiness, the last thing that new mothers need is more pressure, or anyone suggesting that a harmless decision is somehow her ‘doing wrong’.

I also feel somewhat ired at the distinct lack of Earthfathers around. I’ve obviously missed them somewhere, they’re probably busy loading nappies into the washer and massaging their partner’s back as she feeds their newest born (actually, they’re starting to sound pretty good, huh). But there seems, as always, to be a distinct lack of competition and expectation surrounding fathers. I must profess to being a big fan of the relatively new ‘Homedad‘ trend, long may it continue and hopefully thrive. It would be interesting to know if these men feel the same pressure as their female counterparts.

As a final point, I’m also beginning to consider whether some of these parenting movements (I’m not confining these things to earthmothers, I must add, I simply speak of what I know!) are a way of better engaging intelligent women in what is effectively necessary drudgery. Much as I love my children with a terrifying intensity, scrubbing hardened porridge off the table isn’t exactly scintillating. Inextricably linked with the wonder of watching your kids grow and thrive are the crappy nappies, the incessant floor-washing, the sick-cleaning, and oh lor the food debris. Feeling that you are fulfilling an important ideology while performing what we now see as tedious but essential work does admittedly help, I notice it myself. Living in a culture where we are encouraged to strive to be everything we can, I think we all need a reminder of why we’re a little bit amazing while we do the dirty work.

More like this? Is the Green Movement in France forcing women back into 50′s roles? And a step beyond competitive parenting is competitive birthing. Yup.

Also, my new blog crush, Fertile Feminism.