(no subject)

[tinyjo]

I'm feeling extremely low today. I don't really know why though. I was in tears last night trying to talk about attitudes to child free women in society with Alex (triggered by that obnoxious Observer article white_hart linked; they'll be getting a letter to the editor from me). It is something I find very frustrating but not normally something which would reduce me to tears, even when tipsy. And just now, I suddenly thought; what if this is PMT. What if I'm about to have a period for the first time in years? Just the thought is enough to make me want to cry on it's own. Still, I won a minor victory. I managed to decide that there was no point in making myself feel more depressed by going over to the snack machines and buying chocolate or a pack of carbohydrate-y sandwiches to cheer me up and then not losing any weight either. Instead, I'm treating myself to a crispbread from my desk drawer stash (!) and have just noticed a cup-a-soup in there which I might also have to supplement my breakfast (a banana).

I'll be able to get Zetti's review finished at lunchtime I think, which should give me a sense of achievement and then after work, there'll be a pub meetup, which always cheers me up. Chequers again? I'm not eating this time (I have cooking plans) so if anyone who is wants to go somewhere else, speak now and ye shall be heard. Well or anyone else of course, but I think the eaters probably get the final say - after all, anywhere we go is likely to serve drinkables :) Then I just have to get my Brownie planning done after dinner so that I can go to roleplaying tomorrow with a clear conscience.

It occurs to me that if I do have a period I have literally no stuff for it. And to be honest I have kind of deliberately not got round to buying anything in a kind of "bury head in sand about possibility" way. Perhaps I should go out at lunchtime and buy some panty-liners just in case. Also, I think I may be likely to post a lot today.

Comments

Swimming against the tide

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I read the Observer article with interest on Sunday and thought that the bulk of it was interesting and reasonably well balanced. I can hear the calls of "Well of course you think that, your situation is the same as the author's". Which is true, but the substance of the article is objective fact - Gordon Brown's revolution in parental leave, the SureStart initiative, later motherhood, the huge growth in the middle class parenting pound and the corresponding growth in businesses exploiting that.
Sure he's putting a personal spin on this stuff, but at least he's making it clear where he stands and not trying to pass his stance off as unbiassed (and where his interviewees are picked from the people he meets at his kids playground he makes that clear rather than pretending that they are fully representative (a frequent crime of that sort of journalism)).
However, when I got to the last bit I groaned "They'll get letters" partly because the level of abuse overpowered the rest of the article (he tried to lighten it up with the flip "anything this guy's for, I'm against" comment, but it was still a big failure of tone) but mostly because people would inevitably (IMO wrongly) interpret it as a blanket attack on the childless/childfree rather than this particular bloke.
In his defence, stuff I've read from the pro-childfree/anti kid movement can get very annoying. They always start with really good stuff like the appalling things people say to childfree women and the lack of flexible working for people caring for parents/spouses and end by moaning about perfectly reasonable stuff like parent and baby film screenings (at 10:30am for heaven's sake), family carriages (aka ghettos) on trains, and the demise of the Routemaster bus. I don't know whether they've been embittered by society's undoubted bad attitude or whether only someone who was a miserable git to start off with would go to the effort of starting this sort of campaign.

To change the subject - I recommend vitamin B6 - I've been on it for years and haven't knifed anybody

word from the child free !

[cleanskies.livejournal.com]

I think mother-and-baby screenings are *such* a good idea. No longer having to be delicate about chatting about lastest films around new mums -- they can go see 'em. Plus, think of all that valuable culture being soaked up! Mother and Baby screening of Sin City, that's what we need. I'll suggest it to the Phoenix.

And family carriages are a lot better than the carriages full of twenty-year-old men smashed on overpriced lager.

I don't really see why either side has to get so polarised -- kids grizzle a lot less the more neat, comfy and convenient stuff there is for them, so everyone's a winner. Of course, I'm a big fan of the brightly coloured plastic aesthetic ...

Re: word from the child free !

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, stuff like that never bothered me - it's just when people suggest that I should be providing users for them (or that because I'm a woman they're for my benefit) that I get annoyed.

Re: Swimming against the tide

[tinyjo.livejournal.com]

It's true that things have got a lot better for parents and I don't object to that in general. The suggestion that letting children into pizza resturants was a sign of new child loving Britain was mostly what made it seem like someone very self absorbed to me - children have been eating in pizza resturants since I was a child, I assume that pre children he just wasn't eating in pizza resturants.

Why is the demise of the Routemaster bus parents fault? I've not heard of that one? Seriously, I don't object to any of the examples you give - in fact, I would say that mum/baby screenings and family carriages benefit both sides because it gets the tired and grumpy toddlers who are either grizzling or screeching or running around (not that they all do, but there's always one, I find) out of the way of those of us who really need to catch up on our sleep :) Its one of those debates where both sides tend to get represented by really annoying people who take it much further than rational adults should. In fact I can't think of any public debates that aren't like that. Ah well.

The one thing that *does* tick me off with family friendly policies as it's nearly always portrayed as "our good record on womens issues" or "appealing to our female customers" or whatever - nearly all family friendly policies are parents issues, not womens issues!

Anyway, rant over. None of the actual people with children I know are child-evangelical and most of you have rather cute children. And I do like them, as long as I can pass them back when it's nappy changing time, or whatever :)

Re: Swimming against the tide

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of unreasonability on this subject is a question of perception. People who are not interested in children (mostly men) literally don't see them unless they are completely unignorable, which is mostly when they are behaving badly in a public place. New and impending fathers are often shocked by how many young kids there are on the streets because they'd never noticed them before. Likewise childfree men tend to believe that all under tens scream all the time because these are the only ones they notice - they typically are overimpressed by their friends' totally normal kids when they happen not to scream all the time.
On the other side, parents of small kids rapidly gain the sanity-saving ability to screen out noisy children, and only react to noises which require them to take some action. Tiny in particular is a very noisy baby, but I don't register this because most of it's happy noises which needn't concern me - I constantly find myself taking him somewhere with lower noise levels and realising slightly too late that he's making disgusting raspberry blowing noises.
Routemasters were killed off for two reasons - they needed conductors, which made them expensive, and they are not accessible to wheelchairs and unfolded pushchairs. In practice, the wheelchair bays in modern buses are used far more often by pushchairs than by wheelchair users (the situation is similar for other disabled facilities, lifts, ramps, large doors, large ground floor loos etc). Jonathan Glancy wrote a deeply obnoxious article in the Guardian a long time ago which still makes me seeth when I think of it - he seems to want a London which is a combination between Hollywood Dickens and Logan's Run, full of fit, thin, childless young people - the aesthetic qualities of the Routemaster far outweighing its actual virtues for people transport.