I call myself a feminist.

I complain about the representation of women in politics and share my thoughts on pornography and the sex industry, but these are all big issues. I’m not saying they aren’t important, of course they are, but they are the bigger picture.

Recently though I’ve started noticing more everyday sexism than ever before. Partly I think it’s because I’m in a relatively new relationship and this always makes you look at the world in a new way, but it has also had a very tangible impact, not because of anything my boyfriend has said or done himself, (he is always thoughtful, courteous and kind), but because of how his presence impacts how people see me.

I’m used to doing things for myself and by myself. As a single mother I may not always be treated in the same way as a man, but I’ve not often found myself in situations where I am able to make exact comparisons. Now though, with a well spoken, 6′ 1″ man at my side, it has become very obvious indeed.

Here’s an example… View Post

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Did you know that one in five girls in the developing world is married before the age of 18? That means that there are 14 million under-aged girls who are marrying every year – around one every two seconds.

Child marriage

A 13 or 14-year-old girl should be laughing with her friends and furthering her education, not being forced into relationships with older men. Can you imagine having a teenage daughter and marrying them off to be pressured into sex, impregnated and then expected to deliver a child at a young age? Forced to give up their education, they are expected to be devoted wives for their older husbands – stuck in a life that they never chose and forced to watch their daughters grow up to the same fate. View Post

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I was reading a piece in The Guardian at the weekend from Zoe Williams about the new trend for women only clubs and restaurants.

Reading it through initially, I was fairly unmoved. OK, so a few clubs are opening that are just for women – fair enough, there are plenty of men only clubs after all. So what if women want to hang out together, chat to other people socially, without any risk of sexual overtones?

But then the more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed. Isn’t the whole thing that defines us as women that we are always hanging out with other women talking about stuff? Do we seriously need our own official space where we can feel safe to do this?

I thought about my average week, discounting the family I live with.* This morning I played netball – a women only team. During the week I work at home, sometimes going out to meet a (female) friend for lunch or a coffee. Most of my clients are women. Sometimes I pick Belle up from school and have a quick chat with another mum.  Wednesday nights I might go out to netball again. Sometimes I see my mum or my sister.

Do I sound like I need a woman only club??

If anything, I need to get myself into an office job in a male dominated industry. My life is practically begging for some sexual overtones.

Perhaps it’s different if you don’t have children, but I just don’t buy that women lack space or time together with other women. I certainly don’t believe, as one woman quoted in the article claims, that it’s hard for women to make friends. “In London it’s quite unusual to make new friends,” she says. “I think it’s because when you meet someone and say ‘let’s be pals’, in mixed company, that seems weird.”

Nonsense.

‘Let’s be pals’ has been my friend-making one-liner of choice for years. On our first day of college, 18 years ago, my friend Nicky and I spotted a girl we liked the look of in our French group, sat down next to her and said ‘do you want to be our friend?’ There were boys in the room. Nothing terrible happened. I still consider her one of my closest friends and I’ve been employing a similar tactic ever since, albeit more often on twitter nowadays.

What do you think? Is there a need for women only clubs and restaurants? Does your life lack female only contact or would you actually quite fancy spending an evening with just men, drinking whiskey and chatting about cars?**

Let me know…

*Not that I actually discount them in real life, I’m not that cruel, it’s just for the purposes of this musing.

**Because obviously this is all men do.

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Do you ever feel like you’re the victim of everyday sexism?

Have you ever been wolf-whistled in the street, or leered over by a gang of builders? Maybe your boss has attempted a drunken fumble, or you’ve been passed over for promotion at work because you have a young family?

Where do we draw the line?

At what point does harmless banter become sexual assault? When does discrimination at work become the stuff of tribunals?

Complain about a wolf-whistle and you risk being labelled a prude, or uptight, admit that you have a problem with normalisation of porn, as I have, and you’re labelled narrow-minded and frigid, but just because soft porn has become so mainstream, and incidences of sexism occur everyday, doesn’t mean it isn’t a problem. If anything, its proliferation makes it even more pressing.

Anyway, I’m blathering on. All I really wanted to do was tell you about a new project called ‘Everyday Sexism’, created to draw together women’s daily encounters with sexism. Go and read the stories from other women, add your own, and let’s not be afraid to stand up and say that sexism still exists, and that speaking up about it doesn’t make us all frigid man-haters.

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What’s in a name? A rose by any other name is alleged to smell just as sweet after all, so does it make a difference?

I’ve hosted a couple of guest posts recently about choosing baby names, but today I want to talk about titles.

The BBC are reporting today of a town in France that has banned the use of the word Mademoiselle, on the back of a nationwide campaign by feminist groups to ban the word everywhere.

I am behind them 100% and all in favour of a similar spring clean of values in this country.

Why on earth in a society that claims to strive for gender equality would you discriminate between men and women in such an obvious way? Why should women have to define themselves by their marital status, by calling themselves Miss or Mrs, while men are allowed to be a Mr regardless of whether they are married or not? View Post

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Today is International Women’s Day. The 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day no less.

*fanfare*

More importantly, as New Boyfriend helpfully pointed out this morning, whilst encouraging me to enjoy my day ‘being independent and thinking about voting and what-not’, it is also British Pie Week. Excellent. I can kill two birds with one stone and celebrate my release from the constraints of the kitchen by making a nice pie.

I do actually feel like I have done my bit for IWD this year, not least with my campaign for equal rights to orgasms. You may remember a couple of weeks ago I had a bit of a rant about my local arts centre’s plans for the day – a celebration of the social, economic and political achievements of women in the form of knitting, foot reading and a spot of afternoon yoga. All very lovely in its place, but it hardly felt inspirational – “that’s right ladies, reach for the sky! You can do it! Fantastic… That’s right, now bend down and touch your toes…” Hmmm… View Post

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International Women’s Day takes place on 8 March 2011, and is an opportunity to celebrate the achievements of women the world over, past, present and future. As much as we would like to believe we have achieved equality, there are still millions of women globally who are disadvantaged or discriminated against because of their gender.

But hey, let’s not dwell on that…

Let’s focus instead on the positives, the women bucking the trends, the women who are working hard, against the odds, inspiring individuals, communities, businesses and governments. Yay for women!

This year is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, and to mark the occasion, The Guardian is putting together a list of the top 100 inspirational women, and they need your help. We’re talking women who have touched the lives of others, who work to improve the opportunities for other women, and who have made a significant contribution to the fight for equality.

So who inspires you? Nominate now…

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Two different people in the last couple of weeks have asked me if I look at porn. Both seemed surprised when I said I didn’t – apparently I strike people as the kind of woman who would.

So I started to think about why I don’t, and how I feel about porn generally. I asked some liberal-minded friends too, male and female.

When I was a teenager, we didn’t have the Internet (can you even imagine it?), and there’s no doubt the proliferation of porn has been massively aided by the spread of cyberspace. It is so much more accessible, and this in turn has led to it becoming more normalised, more an accepted thing for people to do, to look at.

Now I’m no prude, and I’m not adverse to a bit of erotic fiction, but as a visual thing, porn just doesn’t do it for me. Maybe, like my attitude to car maintenance, this is a girl thing – the visual element of sex doesn’t tend to be as important for women as it is for men – but at its most basic level, being presented with the image of strangers shagging isn’t a turn on for me. I need more than that. I’m the same generally – I very rarely find myself attracted to a man based purely on looks, it is about much more than that, and sexual attraction definitely increases in the context of other things, like how well I know a person, how much they make me laugh, how they make me feel about myself.

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I saw this story in the Daily Mail today (I was looking for work reasons, not for pleasure), and just had to comment….

When I saw it, it was one of the lead stories on the home page. It showed a picture of two attractive women, one fat and one thin. By fat I mean perfectly normal UK size, not a size ten, but not some sort of fifty stone ‘the woman who hasn’t left her bed for ten years’ channel five documentary type fat. It was basically two ordinary women.

The headline next to it read “one is a virgin, one has had 50 lovers. Can you guess which is which? You may be surprised by the answer…”

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