Happy International Women's Day! Today and every day!

Today is International Woman's Day.

Stuff like this matters to me.  I am a feminist - no doubt about it.  I believe as a woman, you really have no choice; after all, feminism is basically just saying you want a slice of what everyone else has in the world and that you deserve it too.  And you know what?  Women definitely do.

We fight from such a young age against a dominant patriarchy, who are determined (whether they are aware of it or not) to keep us pink and weak and submissive.  Which, trust me, we are not.

From babies festooned in sugar-pink clothes, to pink 'girl' Lego, books 'Just for girls'  and the idea that women have no other choice than to raise a family at home while the man goes out to work - negative stereotypes are still very much prevalent in our day to day lives.

Personally, I believe we need a day like this, not only to recognise the progress we have made as a society, but also to flag up the attitudes and practices which still exist to degrade us.

Of course, in the Western world, we are very lucky as far as feminism goes.  A majority of things have at least been under the microscope even for a short amount of time, even if they still aren't good and right yet.  It can seem like such an overwhelming thing to think of all the horrific and barbaric practices which still face women in other parts of the world.  But we can make this better by starting where we stand.  By doing this, we raise the bar and we make it even more difficult for other countries to ignore what goes on in their backyard.  And maybe we can help contribute and highlight their causes too.

We can look at it on a high scale and champion the causes of forgotten women who made amazing contributions in their lifetimes, and were pushed aside simply because they were women.  We can become involved in our communities and engage in Women's Festivals, charity events or even celebrate femininity in it's different forms by attending lectures, educating ourselves further and helping ourselves.

Let's not stop at one day though.

How about we celebrate women every day?

Let's champion the women who do stay at home and raise their families and let's not have in-fighting when it comes to parenting.  We all have different ways of bringing up our kids, whether that be breastfeeding, formula feeding, baby wearing, using a pram, co-sleeping or separate beds.  Please, let's start with the basics and look outward instead of in to each other.  Let's stop damaging each other and let's start attacking the things that really do matter.

Let's fight for more support for new mothers.

Let's challenge childcare policies and get better results for our kids.

Let's ask the toy manufacturers to give our kids equal playing opportunities and to stop engendering toys and books.

Let's give our young girls and ladies opportunities and ideas about work and careers and education which suit them rather than what society thinks they should do.

Let's support women in whatever they want to do in life.

Let's make it easier for women to have a career as well as children.

Let's help our women become equal in academia, education and sciences.

It's a tough gig being a woman.  Let's celebrate today, yes.

But let's also remember our contributions every single day and champion them.  It's so important.

Shouldering Some Weight

It's a Man's World...

Being a woman in an all-male environment is tough.

I was brought up in an all-female house.  My mum, my sister and me - so it was always going to be hard to live amongst the guys.

We weren't 'typical' females though.  Oh no.

Part of the deal about being in an all-female house is that there are no stereotypical 'male' and 'female' roles.  Indeed, our mantra in our house was always, and I mean ALWAYS 'I'm just as good as any guy and I can do it too.'

And we did.

We took out the bins, we put up shelves, we all helped to paint our rooms when we moved house, we were shown by my mum how to lay carpet, how to do basic DIY and how to craft, hang a mirror, fix a leaking tap.  The things I know about cars, machinery and basic medical problems are so innate - it's as common knowledge in our family as how to breathe.

I wouldn't thinks twice about stuff like 'female safety', or 'female roles' or any of that utter bullshit.  I kept myself safe as a person, never thought about how my vagina might make me more vulnerable or how it might stop me from changing a light bulb.  My problems were never really exclusively female.  Until I started dabbling in the adult world.

It never clicked on for me until quite late on - as a young woman I worked three jobs, walked home on my own at night and drank pints of lager because I bloody liked them, and never had a quandry about it.

When I started to live with my boyfriend (who is now my husband), I never broke on any of these things.  I still carried on, business as usual - indeed he looked to me to hang the shelves, fix the washing machine and cut the grass, purely because he didn't know how.  And he would never have been pig-headed enough to claim he did.

He knew the difference between taking the bags from me because I was a woman and just taking his share of the load because he is bigger and stronger than me.  But he would never dream of patronising or hindering my motivation.  If he had we would never have ended up together.

But sadly, not all are like him.

As is the case with a lot of girls and women who have grown up in all-female homes, I began to crave a more male environment.  For some reason I was more comfortable here.  Whether I was hankering for missed male moments or I just simply didn't register with more feminine groups of girls, that is subjective.

In these male environments, I was more comfortable, yes.  But it was here that I also found my challenges and my anger.

I took jobs in bars, and as a physically small, yet surprisingly strong person, I took great joy in exercising my ability to lift full beer kegs around the cellar, or carry boxes of beer up from the cellar and across the bar, in front of my male colleagues, who would only lift half of what I forced myself to carry.

Why did I do this?

I guess I was trying to prove myself.

It is especially tough, as a small, young-looking female, to pull weight with the guys if you can't, well, you know, pull weight with the guys.

So I made sure I could.  And I did.

I also put up with a lot of sexist banter, drunken flattery from older male customers and some pretty lewd comments.  And never thought twice about it really - those were guys.  This was how they acted, right?

I never fit in with girly groups.  My language was always too coarse, I didn't paint my nails (and have no interest in doing so), I use make-up in the most minimal of ways and I find skirts and heels too impractical for the stuff that I have to do every day.  The stuff that I like to do every day.

Yet, I had a yearning to be female too: to be utterly feminine.

I wasn't bad looking - I got a fair bit of male attention - and I enjoyed the sweetness of flirting with the opposite sex. Some guys liked me for my looks. Some, or so they told me anyway, liked my take on the world and loved to talk with me for hours about Philosophy or Art or Literature.  I enjoyed flaunting my female charms and was utterly aware of how to use them.

I also craved female friendships, without really being comfortable in them.  I agonised as much over my relationships with supposed 'friends' who used to never call me back, or openly giggled about me behind my back, or were just  plain mean in front of my face for no discernible reason.

I began to hate female friendships - I found them to be hard work, completely nonsensical in places and found that the undertones were too stressful to maintain; girls have an entirely different way of working and a lot is purely based on subtext, which I neither enjoyed nor embraced.  I liked hanging out with guys - there was never anything too deep or superficial.  For some reason, the majority of dudes just can't even read subtext, which was fine by me.

But here lay the problem.

There was a very strong line between being a strong, powerful female who could huckle grown men out of bars and the sweet lady who would giggle coquettishly at terrible jokes told by potential romancers.

There was an even stronger line between the girl who sat and talked about boys that they fancied with their friends and the girls who hung out with all the guys - apparently girls like that get a name.

And it wasn't nice.

But I didn't even fit the mold of a 'slut'.  So, go figure.

I was literally in no-man's land.

The amount of times I used to cry when I was around 19 or 20, having not fit in with the latest group of girls.

I'd sit with Dave, in my bedroom, comedically sobbing 'Why does nobody like me?  I never fit in!' while he just shook his head and patted my back.

It was awkward.

  I thought I'd found my group at college, but they were really too dramatic (not surprising really - it was a drama course!), then at University I was bowled over by everyone's openness - but again I was slightly too old, I wasn't living in halls, so I didn't get that  group bond. I spent my nights working or hanging out with my flatmates who were my oldest and bestest friends, and I already had a boyfriend, which at that stage in my life was apparently akin to being married off.  The majority being fresh out of school, a lot of them hadn't even kissed a guy, let alone lived with them.  I was already an oddity.

The one time I met a really nice guy in my Uni class and he invited me out for lunch afterwards, he was more than a bit put out when  brought my boyfriend.  I naively didn't realise he was chatting me up - I thought he was trying to be my friend.  I was actually a bit gutted - especially when he slipped off halfway through drinks and then never spoke to me ever again, even in class.

Fast forward around ten years and a shed load of life experience and here I am, the only female in a house full of dudes.  And never has my femininity been more of an issue.

As a mother of two boys and a wife to a pretty laid back and feminist husband, I have had to defend myself over and over again.

Not only have I had to prove myself continuously, but I have to be this strong, powerful female all the time.  I am no longer the young girl shifting ten times her body weight in beer kegs any more, but I certainly feel a lot of weight on my shoulders.

I carry the weight of showing my sons how to be good, honest and equality-aware men.

I carry the weight of proving myself as a working mother.

I carry the weight of challenging stereotypes every goddamned day in front of my children, who are constantly fed all kinds of stereotypocal pish through various channels; the books they read, the cartoons they watch, the colour of the toys they play with and that they see other children play with.  It is my job, and my husband's job to show them that there is no stereotype.  That in this man's world, we can challenge and question and argue and be right and true and honest.  And that it's okay to be strong and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being weak.  And that we can be weak.  And hard.

And that my husband isn't weak for supporting me in this.  And that it's his own idea!

Is he 'under the thumb'?  I must be pushy, a bit of a pain in the ass, a bit too outspoken, a bit bossy...no?

I will carry these weights my whole life.

Ye gads, that load is heavy sometimes.

With age has also come some sort of settlement within myself.  I am no longer fraught when I realise that some girly acquaintances have gotten together over a bottle of wine without me.  I'm safely out of the game, and that's cool by me - it's usually more bother than it's worth anyway.  Nowadays I save myself for old friends and vintage banter - folk who don't care if I speak about the things I speak about, or the fact that I don't like to watch docu-soaps and prefer a nice cold lager or malt whisky over pink wine.

I suppose sometimes I do yearn for close female companionship.  In reality, I really just want a girly friend to hook up with now and again to shoot the shit with.  No matter what anyone says, being female in a house full of guys is hard going sometimes.  and yes, you do need some affirmation from your own kind in some form.

Being Female is a unique and awesome experience.  It is a constant fight, in the sub-texts, in the borders and in the mainstreams of everyday life.  It's proof to your sisters, your brothers and your elders that you have indeed got this.

It's a tough gig.

Bursting the Pink Bubble; why pink is dangerous

Photo Credit  Gender division in the toy aisle has become more apparent in recent years 

Has anyone else noticed how gendered everything has become in the last five years or so?

I know there's always been 'girls' and 'boys' stuff, but lately, or I reckon just around the time Thomas was born in 2008, the girls stuff has become a lot pinker, and the boys stuff has become a lot less colourful overall.

It's something I have particularly noticed because I am a mother who was raised  in a female-only household and has therefore been brought up in a space where there were no 'boys jobs' or 'girls jobs'.  Everything was everyone's job - and if the girls didn't paint the room, fit the carpet, take out the bins, mow the lawn or take the dog out in the pissing rain, it didn't get done.

Having said that, I feel like I have been fighting for my gender my whole life.  From the well-meaning family members who insisted on buying me 'girls' magazines like Mizz when I really wanted to read The Beano and told me things like 'a lady doesn't behave like that' when they caught me digging in the mud, to being told at school that I should 'just settle for being a nurse, honey' when I really wanted to be a Veterinary Surgeon because 'girls make better nurses', I've been confronted at all points in the road with the fact that I am a girl and therefore should be doing 'girly' things.

 Anything else made me 'a tom-boy' apparently. Grr!

My gender never felt more apparent than when I first fell pregnant with Thomas though.

'Do you want a boy or a girl?'

It's the question every woman who falls pregnant is asked.
An odd question - only the extremely rich and scientifically minded can choose the gender of their child.  Yet everyone is asked in hushed tones almost; what would you prefer?

I was huge! That was all baby!

With Tom it was fine; I couldn't even conceive in my mind what it would be like to hold an actual baby that had come out of my body - that there was going to be something small that had my genetic traits - never mind care what kind it was.  To me, a baby was a baby.  I would just be relieved to get it out of me in one piece. When we eventually found out that he was a boy, I was just happy that I could begin to visualise a bit better what was growing inside me.

Everyone else was suddenly very concerned about buying lots of things in blue.

And , for the first time in my 'tom-boy'ish life, I was being treated like a fragile piece of china, and I did not like it one bit.

Worse - I felt like a fragile piece of china.

I found that being pregnant and having a new baby was the only time I felt completely vulnerable because of my biology.

Pregnancy is the ultimate female act, and it suddenly divided me from a lot of my guy mates, who didn't want to hear about Trimesters and Breastfeeding and Prams.

Breastfeeding info here

I became invisible to them because I had become female in their eyes, whereas previously I was 'funtime Genna' who could be silly and get drunk and have a good laugh down the pub, matching the guys capacity for pints of beer.

Once I became a mother, it also became my weakness.

I felt very lonely.

I was also quite young, and a lot of my female friends hadn't even formed long-term relationships,never mind broached the idea of having a baby.

Their experience of babies were very much that you could buy 'stuff' for them, and so began a series of well-meant shopping trips with different friends for various pieces of baby equipment.

Everyone on those trips, myself included, cooed over the newborn stuff, all lamenting the fact that we couldn't buy the tiny, oh-so-pretty dresses.  Some even said to me 'pity you aren't having a girl, Gen!  Girls' stuff is so much nicer.'

Photo Credit  A beautiful dress from Mothercare

I don't think I'd ever noticed until now; I'd spent my whole life turning my nose up at girly pink and frilly dresses.   And here I was admiring a tiny little headband for hairless babies and tiny little mary-jane shoes to accesorise with their tiny little taffeta skirts.

I blamed it on the hormones.

But the truth is, it starts before birth, all of this pink shit.

What's so wrong with it?

Well, I think the real question should be, what's right with it?

Sure, I have no problem with girls who pick pink as their colour of choice amidst all of those colours in the rainbow.  A lot of girls do it and enjoy it, and as a colour it can be all sorts of things; powerful, pale and gentle, happy and free.  And that's good.  I'm a huge advocate of letting your kids choose what makes them happy.

My real problem with the colour pink is that it has become a label for what society is telling young girls that they should be.

And that is so. not. cool.

Infact, I am going to go all out and say that pink is DANGEROUS.

A study conducted by Polly Curtis for The Guardian  reached the verdict that:

'There is no scientific evidence that boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink. Up until the early 20th century the trend was the opposite and baby boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue. There are also some - small - studies suggesting that adults of different cultures have different tastes in colours. It's clear that colour preference is learnt rather than innate.'

Read the rest of the report here.

Children learn by repetition.  And what we are all unaware of is just how many times a day that it is being repeated in books, in adverts on television, in children's television programmes, in supermarkets, clothing, toys, games, films; girls, you like pink.

Pink means you are pretty, popular, happy, princesses who never get dirty and don't do all that silly 'boy' stuff.  Pink is your label.  Everything you like is pink.

So stay in your pink bubble and conform to your stereotype.

If I'd had a girl, she would have been damn brilliant!

And there's where the danger lies.

By the time I was pregnant with Ethan in 2010, pink had filtered it's way down into things like prams, car seats, cots and every plastic toy now had a 'girls' version - in all hues of plasticky pink.

I now had friends who had had boys, who were now ditching their old prams and cots to buy a whole new set of pink versions for the 'pink flavour' growing in their bellies.

When I got to the time where I could find out the gender of my baby, I was inclined to decline; part of me really wanted a daughter and I was as yet undecided what my response would be when someone asked me the dreaded question, 'are you hoping it's a girl this time?'  I didn't know how to feel about it.  Some folk even commented that a girl would 'complete my family'.  What a crazy comment to make!  Oh and don't forget the classic 'if it's a boy will you keep trying until you get a girl?'

Spoiler: They gave us this pic for free because she captured his willie in the photo!

I decided to find out in the end, to satisfy my own curiosity, and was quite relieved to find out it was another boy.  I felt happy for Thomas that he would have a brother (Dave and his brothers share a remarkable bond and I'd love the same for my kids) and actually,I was quite relieved that I wasn't going to have to deal with the barrage of pink stuff which would surely have descended upon me.

Heads up folks, I would not have been grateful.  I might have been rude about it.  And given my hormonal state I probably would have struggled to be rational about it either.

I would have had a lot to say because passionately, I feel that it is so easy, far too easy in fact, to unconsciously let our daughters slip into the tight boundaries set by the patriarchy.  We all buy into it; because it's pretty and nice and fun.  We do not wholly investigate what the pink is telling us.  We are not asking what it means.

What we are not addressing, is the fact that by separating girls and boys by labeling them in this way, we are narrowing their horizons and putting them into boxes.

Children should be free to follow their own path in life.

In not having a daughter (thus far) I haven't avoided the problem.

Having two boys has not meant that I am removed from the pink issue altogether; indeed it has been an issue quite a few times.

Like, when my son wanted a doll and pram for his second birthday and people raised their eyebrows at him.

Or when I went into the toy-shop to pick a multi-coloured playhouse for the boys and the shop assistant basically overrode my choice, shouting at her colleague in the middle of the store to get me one with a blue door instead of a pink door, because "boys don't have pink"

My ideal playhouse - sadly, way out of budget! 

"You'll thank me later when their friends don't make fun of them"
I couldn't speak.  I was too shocked.  My response was definitely about three days later once I finally got my jaw off the floor.

They are being told from all angles that pink is a girls colour.  Pink is a weaker choice.  Therefore, pink is a girls thing.  Therefore, girls are weak.  Therefore boys are better than girls.

And I now have a hard and difficult task, as one tiny little woman, to counteract all of this stuff they are being exposed to on a daily basis.

When my 3 year old son points to a pink toy in the shop and says 'You like that mum, you like pink' and I say, 'No, mummy's favourite colour is green' and he gets upset and insists that it can't be because I am a girl, I don't like green, it's wrong.

Read again: Gets UPSET.  Like, emotionally upset with tears and stuff, because mummy is not conforming to what he has been told by everything, everywhere, all of the time.
That is wrong.

That's why I am backing campaigns like the one being fought in the Uk just now by Let Toys Be Toys, who have actually managed to convince some big-name retailers like Early Learning Centre to change the way they display toys in their catalogues and to change the labelling of 'girls' toys and 'boys toys.

Let Toys Be Toys is an amazing campaign - please check out their page and their blog and get yourself wise to these issues.  Too many of us are letting ourselves and our children sleepwalk into these constricting labels.

If you pay attention, it's filtered into adult stuff too.

Seriously, do we need it to be pink before we can figure out how to use it?  How condescending!
 

 Ellen sums it up quite nicely in this video.  Seriously, watch it, it'll brighten your day!

 



I promise to myself and my children that I am going to be aware and raise the issue with them all through their lives.  I have always known I'd strive to be a good, strong female role-model for my boys.  I just didn't know the fight was going to be so tough!

Come at us!  We're ready for you!