This week I got disproportionately excited by a box file.

For ages I’ve had various piles of Important and Useful Documents, waiting to be sorted out, looking at me accusingly every time I walked past them, with that ‘we’re still here…’ look in their eyes.*

And then I found this box file, for only three pounds, but which turned out, when I got to the till, to be only ONE POUND! I love it when that happens. So for just a pound I got to spend a very satisfying hour arranging all my credit card bills and bank statements into nice neat sections. I also discovered I had three copies of Bee’s birth certificate. I’m not sure how that happened, but I figured it showed I was prepared at least.

Imagine though how your life might be different if you’d never had a birth certificate at all.

If Bee had been born somewhere else in the world, then by the age of sixteen she could well have been forced into marriage already, and have been denied an education.

It’s really just luck when you think about it isn’t it?

Plan UK’s ‘Because I am Girl’ campaign wants to change this, and they’ve created a nifty little facebook app to help fight for the rights of the 75 million girls worldwide who aren’t in school. The “Plan Your Story” application takes your key facebook information and creates a personalised video story book, looking at what your life would be like if you hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate.

“The aim is to put people in the shoes of the millions of girls around the world whose births are not registered,” says Justin Wylie, Head of Business Development at the international children’s organisation Plan UK.

“Without a birth certificate, the user sees how key events in their life would change – for example an inability to prove their age could result in being married off whilst they’re still a child, or being denied the right to go to school.”

Why not have a go and see how lucky you really are?

*I do appreciate that they don’t actually have eyes. I’m not mad or anything.

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

I haven’t decided yet.

I always quite fancied being a ballerina, but I think I’m past that now. I never really had the thighs for a leotard anyway.

At school, I remember filling in one of those career questionnaires and it telling me I should be an insurance underwriter. Honestly, how dull must my answers have been that the quiz thought I’d get my kicks organising family travel insurance?? Weirdly, years later, I found myself working for an insurance company, training to be an actuary. It was the most hideously boring two years of my working life. Every day I would go to lunch and want to run away for ever. Afternoons were spent resisting the urge to smash my head into my PC screen.

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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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Today I have been thinking about orgasms.

According to New Boyfriend, the natural ratio of male to female orgasms – ‘me time’ and sex toys aside – is five to one, three to one if you’re lucky. Apparently this is Nature’s Way. Something to do with cavemen and childbirth.

I’m pretty sure he is just saying this to wind me up, which seems to be the case with 95% of the things he says, but it did make me wonder.

“Ask anyone,” he said, “it’s just a fact.”

“Rubbish,” I countered, “women are definitely supposed to have more. How about I ask some of your friends next week?”

“Go on then…” he challenged.

“Fine, I will,” I said, easily wound up as I am. “You know it’s the kind of thing I would ask…”

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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 am proud to call myself a feminist. I support the Fawcett Society, I co-edit Women’s Views on News, I try to be a positive female role model for my daughters… basically I do my bit.

But…

Sometimes I find it a tiny bit depressing.

It’s not that I don’t care about equality – I absolutely do. The fact that women earn less than men isn’t right. Underrepresentation of women in politics and business bothers me. Sometimes though, feeling passionate about an injustice means you focus on the negative, on the things you feel are wrong and that you want to put right, and this sometimes makes me sad, because I become so tied up in all the things that aren’t fair, that I forget all the good things.

So today, when I read in The Daily Mail that men are losing out to women in many areas of life, I ignored my first instinct, namely to rubbish everything the Mail says, and thought instead about how lucky I am. This doesn’t mean I think there isn’t anything left to fight for, just that I’m not in a battling mood today.

The Daily Mail are reporting on the findings of the ‘How Fair is Britain?’ report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and highlight the fact that women are less likely to lose their jobs in a recession, more likely to eat well and look after their health, less likely to be victims of violent crimes, and so on. Well that’s all well and good, but you can read that anywhere can’t you? So, instead I’ve decided to come up with my own list of reasons why it’s great to be a woman:

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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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There are some women who seem able to remain effortlessly poised at all times. Others are more like Bridget Jones, stumbling from one mishap to another. Most women though can probably remember a time when they’ve found themselves cringing with embarrassment, wanting the ground to swallow them up.

If you can remember such a moment – a glass of red wine sloshing onto your friend’s new cream carpet maybe – then you can begin to imagine the mortifying shame that must have been felt by the clumsy art student who this week stumbled and fell into an £80million Picasso, tearing a six inch hole in the canvas.

The Metropolitan Museum in New York, where the accident occurred, have kindly declined to name the student and have offered reassurances that the painting can be restored in time for the Picasso exhibition in April. It still makes you cringe though to imagine that gut wrenching, slow motion split-second where she knows she is falling, but is powerless to help herself.

I had a rather embarrassing moment this week when, driving myself and a friend to a meeting, I misjudged a corner and crashed into a verge. My first thought as I struggled to avoid a telegraph pole, was not for my safety, or that of the car, but for passenger and my ego. Fortunately no one was hurt, but all I could think was how embarrassing to make such an awful mistake and to crash your friend into a hedge.

My friend Lucy has had more than her fair share of embarrassing moments, including a late night tumble that resulted in a trip to the dentist. “I’d been at a party full of important people,” she confessed, “and was very nervous, so I had drunk quite a lot. I was late leaving and could see my bus disappearing round the corner. I ran for it, attempting to leap onto the back, but I missed, and smashed my face into the pavement. I could hear people saying “Oooh!” but I got up and felt fine. When I woke up the next day and looked in a mirror though I realised that I’d knocked out both my front teeth…”

Unfortunately, unless you can maintain a permanent air of Judi Dench like grace, these types of mishaps are unavoidable. It could be that as women we are distracted by our multi-tasking brains, but more likely it is a combination of hormones and high heels, conspiring to turn us into Bridget style stumbling fools. Note to self: the next time you’re feeling clumsy, steer well clear of galleries.

Photo credit: Andrea

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