Intercom: Buzz, Buzz
Mature woman’s voice: Yes?
Me: I’m one of your Green Party candidates for the local election. Have you thought about voting Green?
Voice: (Laughs.) No. I’m a member of the Labour Party, with all its horrors….
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The other event of the day was the young gentleman who dripped down the hall from the shower, wrapped in a towel, his face covered with shaving cream.
Sorry!
Many years ago I covered the Aboriginal issues beat for a regional daily paper in Australia, and it was the most depressing subject I’ve ever had to deal with. My inability to find a legal way to report the abuse of an Aboriginal youngster counts as one of my greatest failings as a journalist. And Australia’s shame just goes on and on.
Jenissa Ryan, 15, was the great-granddaughter of the revered Albert Namatjira, Australia’s first celebrated Aboriginal painter. Was.
Police believe Jenissa was bashed by a teenage boy and a girl – almost her own age – as she walked the Alice Springs streets on the last Friday night in January. It may have been the injuries she sustained in this attack that killed her.
Attempting to walk home to the Hidden Valley camp, she collapsed unconscious in the gutter near the college. It was there that three teenage boys found her in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Police have testified that the boys thought Jenissa was drunk or dead. Instead of calling for help, they dragged her 10 metres behind a knoll on the verge of the college grounds and raped her. Discarding their condoms, they left the scene.
…Nobody knows how long Jenissa Ryan lay unconscious in the fierce morning heat as her life slipped away. But by the time ambulance officers arrived, honey ants were beginning to gather on her dishevelled clothes.
That means a number of residents of middle-class Grevillea Drive probably noticed. …It was not until around 10.30am that a female college employee called for an ambulance.
Now it has made the national media – two months later.
A Japanese feminist has beenbanned from speaking at a lecture series by the Tokyo Municipal Government:
“Last July, Professor Ueno was chosen by a citizens’ group in the Greater Tokyo district of Kokubunji as the first speaker in a series of lectures on human rights; the events were to be sponsored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. But according to the group, Tokyo officials objected to the choice of Ueno because she might use the phrase “gender-free” – a poorly defined term originally intended to mean free from sexual bias. The citizen’s group refused to find another speaker and instead cancelled the series of events. …
“Gender-free” is an imported English phrase that has been used in Japan since the mid-1990s. Some progressive teachers and local education authorities have used the phrase to promote liberal sex education, and the mixed listing of boys and girls on school roll calls. The latter is contentious in Japan where traditionally boys’ names are read out first.
Nothing like telling kids from an early age who is regarded as important…
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I eat organic food (as much as I can, while also trying to take account of “food miles”) primarily because I think the form of farming needs to be encouraged. (And organic yoghurt tastes MUCH better than the plastic non-organic stuff.) But like the author of this article whether there is any actual direct harm from the pesticides in food I’m not sure. But he offers an interesting parallel:
He cited the long-burning, but now resolved, debate about the health impact of smoking: “An official at Brown & Williamson, a cigarette maker now owned by RJ Reynolds, once noted in a memo: ‘Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public.’ Toward that end, the tobacco manufacturers dissected every study, highlighted every question, magnified every flaw, cast every possible doubt every possible time … It was all a charade, of course, because the real science was inexorable. But the uncertainty campaign was effective: it delayed public-health protections, and compensation for tobacco’s victims, for decades.”
Pesticide campaigners say that they see some parallels in their own struggle to get pesticides banned or severely restricted.
You might make the same parallel with those proclaiming their doubts about the reality of global warming.
***
Some interesting figures on immigration, legal and illegal:
* There are between 310,000 and 570,000 illegal immigrants in the UK, according to Home Office estimates
* If allowed to live legally, they would pay more than £1bn in tax each year
* Migrants fill 90% of low-paid jobs in London and account for 29% of the capital’s workforce. London is the UK’s fastest-growing region
* Legal migrants comprise 8.7% of the population, but contribute 10.2% of all taxes. Each immigrant pays an average of £7,203 in tax, compared with £6,861 for non-migrant workers
* There were 25,715 people claiming asylum last year. If allowed to work, they would generate £123m for the Treasury
A very curious afternoon of Green canvassing today, from the Regent’s Park council estate – and some lovely polite pensioners – over 100 metres or so to the extreme wealth of the Georgian mansions lining the park. Not much luck there, it seems the rich are still in Barbados, or in the office working to pay for all of this. If anyone is at home it is usually “the staff”.
Not quite as bad as Manila, where (when I was there anyway) there was a corrugated-iron shanty town in the shadow of the presidential palace, but close.
Seems an appropriate point to direct attention to this article on the measurement of poverty, which argues for adopting a poverty line that measures relative poverty. (And incidentally tells of the career of an obviously very formidable woman, Mollie Orshansky.)
I’m drooping over the keyboard, having spent my day dashing around, and around, and around Camden, helping to sort out nomination papers for the total of 54 candidates the Green Party is hoping to stand (so everyone will have the chance to give us their three votes). For those who claim civil society is dead, or that community spirit is, it is lovely to see the response of people when you knock on the door asking for their signature. They are really pleasant and helpful, even when they aren’t Green voters.
But a couple of little gems from the Inbox:
Test your ability to read 17th-century handwriting, and learn how to do it better – a great idea. There are seven documents, rated into three levels of difficulty. You type your reading in, and the site compares it to the “perfect” one. Too tired to even think about trying it, but I will. (Although whether I share the results might depend on how I do…!)
Then, we’ve already learnt to think about food miles, but this article goes further in saying we should look at the “fuel consumption” of everything we eat. Food for thought. Guess I’d better join that 10-year waiting list for an allotment…
I read a comment this morning from someone who’s been reading the new Women’s Review of Books, about the “raunch culture”, on the “sexualisation of fashion”. And in one of those epiphanies you sometimes get when half-asleep and caffeine-deprived, I thought: “But fashion has always been sexualised!”
Now I’m a little more awake, and with some tea inside me, I still think that’s the case. (Not always what happens with such flash thoughts.) The examples are far too multiple to quote, but think of everything from Tudor codpieces on men, to Victorian bustles, designed, off course, to accentuate women’s buttocks.
I find a lot of the feminist criticisim of so-called “raunch” culture offensive, because it reeks of the environment in which I grew up, in which women felt they could and should “police” the behaviour of other women to fit within very narrow confines of what was “respectable”. “Tut, tut, mutton dressed up as lamb,” was one of the favourite ones, for any woman judged to be wearing clothing “too young” for her.
And many woman lived – and some do still live – in fear of breaking these rules. I recall once being in a hairdresser’s in Walthamstow (east London) when a classic blue rinse set lady came in in a flap. She gone out without an umbrella and it had started raining. Her “set”, the armour-plated fixing of her hair into a helmet, which she paid for once a week as a sign of respectability, was in danger of being ruined. She wanted a rain hat. No one had one, but the hairdresser offered her a shower cap instead. A look of pure horror crossed the woman’s face. “I couldn’t go out in THAT. It is not the proper thing.”
She was really, genuinely panicking about not looking “right”, “respectable”.
Whereas I frequently, should I need to go out in the morning, to say walk a dog, stagger out in whatever odd collection of clothing happens to be piled at the end of the bed, with no more attention to my hair than my fingers run through it, and if anyone doesn’t like it, tough.
And I mostly wear hipster jeans, because ones with higher waists never fit my shape. (One woman at a bus-stop in central London once told me: “You should be ashamed of yourself at your age with those jeans,” and I laughed – genuinely laughed. Because I’ve been empowered to do so.)
Of course some women, particularly young women, are stressed by pressures to show off their bodies when they are uncomfortable with them, and they need to be told and retold “wear what you want”. But attacking other young women for wearing what they want, if that happens to be T-shirts with sexy slogans or midriff-baring tops, is only playing into the hands of the puritan rightwingers, those who are training their girls in ways like this, turning them into “young ladies” of VIctorian form – and with narrowed, restricted Victorian brains to match.
Wear what you like, and tell other women to do the same! And then tell them they look good!
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