Shopping

I just did the weekly grocery shopping. It was quiet exciting. 

I have decided it is time to make public my new years resolution, which is to move our household to more sustainable patterns of living. I think I need to say it out loud and have it eternally recorded for the world to see because: 

1.) I am starting to struggle to separate online and offline worlds and have overwhelming urges to tweet every thought that passes through my head.

2.) It is a way of keeping myself accountable and motivated.

3.) Politicising housework might make me feel less demotivated about the whole thing.

So the first big project is grocery shopping. Today I went shopping and went only briefly into 1 supermarket (co-op) which didn't anyway have the mustard powder I was after. The whole process did take longer than had I popped to the local supermarket however I came home without a headache and a well exercised and now sleeping toddler. There where many other pleasing aspects too for example:

• When queuing to pay for my shopping at no point was I presented with an array of chocolates and sweets carefully positioned at children's eye view. In fact the only thing my daughter asked for was bread and a banana, both of which I was happy to supply.
• At the butcher (not quiet ready to tackle meet consumption yet) I witnessed one of the staff tacking the time to have a nice long chat with an older man who was sat having a cup of tea, I guess during his weekly shop. 
• I discovered at the green grocers that truffles are currently selling at around £4000 a kilo. I've got to find me some of them I thought. (I am aware that they are probably not growing in my garden but who knows!)
• The veg was considerably cheaper and better quality than it would have been in a supermarket, and not packaged.
• The fair trade rice and porridge I bought in the whole food shop was also cheaper than supermarket equivalent even though it was organic - mostly because I bought it lose. 
• I had a very nice chat about the relative ethics of two cleaning products. 
• No one asked me repeatedly if I wanted to use the self service check-out and then look at me baffled when I asked them if they realised it was taking their jobs.
• Everyone looked happy with life.
• I can be sure that the majority of what I spent will stay within the local economy.

So I appreciate these are very humble beginnings and we have a long long way to go, but it's a start and it's about habit changing and that takes practice. I'm aiming for a place where sustainable living is second nature. I'll keep you posted and would welcome guest posts on the subject. 

It's not a shortage of knives in the kitchen!

I believe in good men. I am married to one. I read a great blog today from a good man. It moved me deeply. It is profoundly feminist to believe in good men. We wouldn't do what we do if we didn't deeply believe in the whole complete humanity of men. 

I also believe in human men. Men who stay silent or laugh awkwardly at rape jokes. Men who feel nervous about the inevitable loss of power equality will bring. Men who have a serpision that they have privilege but aren't sure how to find out how it functions or what they should do about it.  Men who believe in the equality of women but still regularly speak over them.

Just as I don't understand what it means to be white, don't always take every opportunity to empty myself of that privilege because I'm human, fallible, selfish and negligent. But the call on my life is to move forward to grow, to change, to learn.

The challenge and offer of the women's movement  for men is full humanity because while some of us aren't free none of us are free. 

Bellow is an extract from a speech Andrea Dworkin gave to a group of male politicians. This international women's day I thought it was a great appeal that powerfully explains the relevance of the women's movement to men.

'The things the men's movement has wanted are things worth having. Intimacy is worth having. Tenderness is worth having. Cooperation is worth having. A real emotional life is worth having. But you can't have them in a world with rape....

You can't have equality or tenderness or intimacy as long as there is rape, because rape means terror. It means that part of the population lives in a state of terror and pretends--to please and pacify you--that it doesn't. So there is no honesty. How can there be? Can you imagine what it is like to live as a woman day in and day out with the threat of rape? Or what it is like to live with the reality? I want to see you use those legendary bodies and that legendary strength and that legendary courage and the tenderness that you say you have in behalf of women; and that means against the rapists, against the pimps, and against the pornographers. It means something more than a personal renunciation. It means a systematic, political, active, public attack. And there has been very little of that.

I came here today because I don't believe that rape is inevitable or natural. If I did, I would have no reason to be here. If I did, my political practice would be different than it is. Have you ever wondered why we are not just in armed combat against you? It's not because there's a shortage of kitchen knives in this country. It is because we believe in your humanity, against all the evidence.'

Two Books on Women

 

I recently read 'How to be a Woman' by Caitlin Moran followed fairly immediately by 'A year of Biblical Womanhood' by Rachel Held Evans. I'm glad I read them this way round! It struck me that there were some interesting differences and notable contrasts that I wanted to share with the world.

I think I might start backwards. Both authors conclude that there is not and shouldn't be a prescribed way to be a woman. For Evans book this felt like the natural conclusion to her discussion. I felt the narrative learnt from the experience of other women from a diversity of cultural experiences and approached such learning with a humble heart. Yet it stayed authentically itself and gave me as the reader permission to do so as well.

Moran's book however irritated me most of the way through. It was essentially an autobiography but despite it's beginning and conclusion about the diversity of female experience I couldn't help but feel I was being told that this was or should have been my experience as well. Especially the stuff around adolescents. 

Both books reference other women who have fought similar battles before and have begun to forge a way and in who's path we follow as well as contemporaries. Evan's does so with great respect and gratitude to those 'Women of Valour' both past and present. One of her final resolutions is to identify and praise women of valor. 

Moran by contrasts dismisses most of her contemporaries, including Object and even Greer as having become irrelevant.  The only woman who comes of relatively well is Lady Gaga.  While Evans writing humbly acknowledge's the work of those who have gone before. Moran writes 'When Simone de Beauvoir wrote one is note born a woman one becomes a woman - she didn't know the half of it.' Hmm.

Moran repeatedly says that woman have done very little (even nothing) over the last 100,000 years, while men she claims have made great achievements in science, art politics and repeatedly in her long lists she includes empire. I find it very problematic to list empire in with a list of great advancements without any deconstruction or critique of the very idea of empire. Evan's by contrast retells the stories of many great women's achievement both biblical and extra biblical. She also on occasion broadens her critique not just to hierarchy between genders but the idea of hierarchy at all in any context.

Both repeatedly use the word 'Lady'. I have written about my dislike of the word here. Evans however only ever used it in contexts where, had she been talking about men she may well have said gentlemen. Generally when she was talking about people and only once directed to the readers. Moran however got right up my noise by continually giving instructions to her readers preceded by calling them to attention with 'Ladies!'. 

Both authors while not writing a book about violence against women and the global situation do reference it. Evans to put her own struggles and difficulties in perspective. Moran to explain that the problem with modern feminism is that it is focused on these things while ignoring things like glossy magazines and pants being too small.

Both authors once mention the Vietnam war, both use it for illustrative purposes. In the case of both books I have forgotten what was being described! Evan's I remember said that some group of people discussed something - "Like veterans talk about 'Nam" I can't remember feeling it was inappropriate or offensive. I cannot remember the details of what Moran was talking about either save that it was about running away "faster than a Vietnamese boy covered in Nepalm". I wasn't expecting that sentence it kind of sprang at me from no where and made me feel positively sick.

Both authors discussed having children. Evan's wrote an honest and reflective account of her worries and fears about having children. She also explored issues around women's relationship with parenting and the difficulty of living in a world which defines women in relation to children and explored the duff theology in parenting as a woman's highest calling. Moran on the other hand wrote 'Childbirth gives women a gigantic set of balls'. To be fair on Moran this is not all she said and she did also point out that there are a variety of life experiences that can change and shape us. But it's almost that that makes these bizar one lines so problematic there is an inconsistency in her writing.

Both authors mention their vagina's. Evans in a discussion about teenage experience of church teaching on sex.  Famously there was big discussions about how that would affect christian bookshops and whether they were willing to stock the book or not. As far as I am aware there where no such discussions as to the inclusion of the c word which I can't even bring myself to write, but that's apparently what Moran calls her vagina.

Both books made me laugh out loud. Moran's book also made me shout and swear. Evan's book also made me cry. Moran's book left me with an overwhelming sense of frustration. Evan's book left me peaceful and wiser.