The royal ticking bomb

I posted this yesterday on my other blog, The Forbidden Sister, but as the comments on that blog are broken, I thought I'd repost it here, and share it with you. Here goes.

We can now breathe a huge sight of relief – but ten days ago, unbeknownst to us, forces were at play to destroy us. Not only did they want to destroy us, but they picked a time when we were at our most vulnerable, basking in the glow of royal love vows and cartwheeling vergers. But the dark forces were very much at work, as we are now finding out.

There was a bomb. Not only was the wedding itself being targeted but it was done from its most vulnerable point – planted inside the bride’s womb! Top lifestyle/career blogger Penelope Trunk explains to us, step by step, how it came to be there and how it was defused. She tells us that Kate was indeed a ticking bomb but that her timely wedding was enough to defuse it, and that we should all be grateful to her.

Just in case the same terrorists decide to plant bombs inside of us too, Ms Trunk advises we follow the same steps as Kate.

1. Don’t bother about a career: it will only interfere with your finding a husband, and you’ll have to give it up anyway.

2. Have children young, before thirty, as otherwise they will have birth defects, and they will probably become terrorists.

3. In order to have children before thirty, you should be married by twenty-eight, which means that you must have found your prince by twenty-five. Ms Trunk links to ‘scientific research’ that proves this and quotes ‘zillions’ of books that back it up.

4. Relocate, relocate, relocate. Give up your career, if you were stubborn enough to start one, and follow your husband. It is a fact (scientific research, zillions of books, etc.) that women do not care much for their careers and that men do not care much for their family. Hold on, that’s not right. Of course men care for their family, it’s just that women care more. Or care better. Or are too stupid to say they care for anything else. Or whatever.

If you follow all these steps, disaster will be averted and the bomb will not go off.

I think we can all learn from this near catastrophe, and avoid making potential terrorists of ourselves by following Ms Trunk’s advice as closely as we can.

International Women's Day - Judge a book by its cover.

This post is in honour of International Women's Day: a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future, every year on 8 March, since 1911.



As part of my job, I occasionally review books. This is good, because I get free books, a publication of sorts to my name, and I get to find out what some of the other people in my field are thinking.

The latest one is a book by Robert Kane called Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom. Cool title, I thought, when the editor first contacted me about doing the review. A quick look at Amazon told me that the book seeks to revive certain ancient ethical beliefs and apply them to contemporary problems in social and political philosophy. Nice, I though. My kind of thing.

Then, a few weeks later, I received the book. Here it is:

Men, men, and more men. Fat men, skinny men, old men, young men, bearded men, bold men, men. Is this what the quest for wisdom looks like, I asked myself? If so, I might as well give up. Now.

Let them bleed

I've been following the anti-abortion debates in the United States with a growing sense of horror - which is why I was grateful for some light relief from The Feminist Philosophers' blog with their cartoon: The Mombies!!!
But what are these people thinking? Do they really think it's ok to sacrifice a mother's life in order not to kill a fetus, even though the fetus will probably die if the mother dies before the fetus is big enough to survive?

Salad Bar Philosophy, anyone?

I was listening to woman's hour again today. It was a program I'd meant to catch on the day it came out but didn't in fact listen to for a while because my computer got virused (and all...) So I listened to the podcast here. The reason I was so keen on listening to it was that they'd announced it on twitter as being about women in philosophy. As in academic women philosophers. In actual universities, teaching in actual jobs. Why there are so few of us.

So the women interviewed were saying, surprise surprise, that it's all down to cultural stereotype. Women aren't supposed to be good at abstract reasoning, and cold stuff like logic and maths. Which is sort of what Rousseau said. And Aristotle, those pillars of the sexist bastards community.

Day of remembering

I asked my daughter whether she'd done anything at school on 11 November. She looked at me in that way she's wont to now she's a pre-teen, full of disdain and shock: 'No, she said. You're wrong. It was 10 November we celebrated'.
And of course 10 November is an important day in Turkey - it marks the death of the first leader of the Turkish Republic, Ataturk. But I'd thought that in a French school they'd at least mention Remembrance Day. So I told her, briefly that it was the date of the Armistice signed at the end of WW1, my husband added something about veterans and poppies, and that was it.

Then I read Julie's post at the Mom Slant, in which she gets a little annoyed with  Penelope Trunk's claims that there shouldn't be a Veterans Day.

I like Julie and I'm not terribly impressed by Penelope Trunk. Julie was in the US army, as was her husband, so she's got a thought or two on the question of whether Veterans should be remembered.

Now my one clear thought about the army is this: I don' t like it. At all. Get rid of it, please. I get a sick feeling whenever I see a person carrying a gun with a purpose other than killing rabbits (or other edible animals - for some reason hunting does not bother me in the slightest, and I like a good rabbit stew).

I've called myself an anti-militarist in the past. Not a pacifist - although, to my ears, that sounds more attractive - because I'm simply never sure  what to say if someone asks me whether I think I would fight back if I were under attack, or if someone else was under attack.

So I know, it's not a terribly consistent position to find oneself in - unless you believe rather implausibly that if there were no armies, there would be no wars...
But there you go, that's how I feel about things.

Now that's a very different position from one that denies that veterans are worthy of rememberance.

I'm happy to remember that a lot of people have died to deliver Europe from the Nazis. I'm happy to remember that in any war, many young men and women go through incredible hardships and give up their lives because they want to protect us, to protect justice, and they are told that this is the right way to do so. I am happy to remember that a huge number of people died in the first world war because they were sent there by superiors who valued the lives of soldier very little indeed.

So when I do remember, it's never with pride, sometimes with gratitude, but more often with sadness that lives should have been wasted and gambled by men playing little soldiers from the comfort of their armchair.

Publish Post

Mean people are dumb

I was listening to a Women's Hour podcast this morning at the gym. While I just love Jenny Murray, I sometimes get pretty upset at the things I hear, especially now everything is going pear-shaped in Britain with the conservatives and all.

So I just wanted to remind myself and you all, that not only are the bastards trying to put us down mean, they are also pretty stupid. So here goes.

La femme francaise...

So the Global Gender Gap report 2010 says that France comes 46 out of 114. The New York Times interviewed some people to try and figure out why that might be. Some of the stuff that's reported on the video makes me sick. As does some of the stuff that isn't said.

No one, apart from the journalist conducting the interviews, remarks that one reason for gender inequality might be that there is no equal division of labour in the home. French women may know how to carry a handbag, but French men don't seem too adept at changing a nappy or loading a washing machine.

So maybe women stopped in the street or interviewed at the park don't want to bitch about their partners on film. But from a woman who is a politician, and a minister of economic affairs, business and employment you'd expect better, wouldn't you? Not if she's Christine Lagarde, apparently. Here's what she says about the gender gap:

Either it requires so much sacrifice that they're not prepared to commit, or they find it unpleasant, not rewarding based on their values, and essentially they say, you know, thank you very much for the glass ceiling, we've cracked it but there's not enough air up there, so I don't want to go.

So basically, women don't make it to the top because they can't hack it. They're not like men. They're soft. And this despite a prompt from the journalist suggesting that maybe the lack of equality at home would be a good explanation for women's lack of success at work!

But what am I thinking. Of course, if women do all the housework and childcare it is simply because they find it more rewarding based on their values! What an unnatural French woman I must be. Me and most of the others I know. Thank you Christine Lagarde for reminding us of our true nature.

Tcha.

My children and the rest of the world.

Before I start, let me tell you that my kids are perfect : they’re beautiful, smart kids : the spitting image of their mother. But they’re kids. As in, not adults. As in, unpredictable. As in, my daughter telling me at the Chinese restaurant that she feels nauseous, asking me to hold her, and puking inside my T-shirt and on my hair. As in my son still having tantrums at 6 years old, screaming on the street, throwing himself on the ground for no reason (well, no adult reason, anyway).

A few years ago, before I had my first child, my husband and I considered going away on vacation in one of those adults-only resorts.

Why I prefer to take my kids to 'people friendly' places.

There's been a lot of debate over the American interweb as to whether children should be seen and heard in public places. People have been indignant, moderate, and some commentators got pretty heated (sorry Kristen!).
So the sisters and I decided that what this debate really needed was the balanced and unprejudiced perspective of the Paris-Ankara Express. Here goes.

Probably the very best piece of childcare advice ever given us - hold on, actually the second best, the best was about how to share the burden of night feeds equally (I kid you not!), and probably prevented our marriage from going into self destruct mode within weeks of our daughter's birth.

Boys will be boys will be autistic ... my arse!

Let me just say outright that I'm not a psychologist. Never have been, never will be. And I am rather more familiar with the work of Sasha Baron-Cohen than that of his cousin Simon Baron-Cohen. But I have read one book by him: Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

Hold on, that's not it. It's called: The essential difference: men, women and the extreme male brain. It argues basically that men and women think differently, and that autistic people's minds are like extreme versions of men's minds. So the female brain is 'hard-wired for empathy' and the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems'.

Please take a moment to reread the first sentence of this post.

Now put together a few choice words as rude as you like (come on, you can't outdo me on this one). This is what I think of SBC's theory of men, women, and autism. Maybe he's got a good theory of the animal mind. Although as far as I know, the only scientist who's gone anywhere with that is Temple Grandin, who's autistic herself, and happens to disagree rather with SBC's characterisation of her mind. She says thinks like a cow, not a man, thank you very much.

Prof. Baron-Cohen, to be fair, does present the reader of his book with scientific evidence to back up his theory. He interviews a woman who has had a boy and a girl. Under strict experimental conditions, the woman recounts how her little girl really liked organising teaparties and such like with her friends, whereas her little boy preferred to play with cars. She declares, also under strict experimental conditions, never to have encouraged such behaviour in either of them. There you are then! Evidence that boys are abstract thinkers and girls nurturers! Oh, you know what? Rousseau said that too! Women can't do abstract thought, and men don't care about silly emotional things (because they're too busy having important thoughts about systems).

From there it is but a small but perfectly logical step to observe that yes, autistic children like things that go round and round, that car wheels go round and round, therefore that autistic children are like boys.

The contrary of empathy, SBC tells us, is mindblindness. You just can't figure out what another person is feeling, because you can't gather all the details, or put them together. It's like being really insensitive. Like telling your girlfriend she's just looking a bit pudgy when she asks you if her dress makes her look fat. And then not getting why she's upset. It's like being a man, really. Except not. Autistic people aren't very good at saying the right thing. Heck, some of them aren't very good at saying anything at all. But this doesn't mean they don't understand how you feel! It doesn't mean they don't get you, or that they don't feel your pain.

The word autism means, literally, to be on one's own (hold on there, I'm talking about etymology, not about what autism really is!). Autistic people are supposed to be locked up in their own little world, incapable of interacting with the rest of us, normal people. Sometimes they are. On occasions, a lot less now that he's older, I would have huge difficulties distracting my son from playing with a wheelie toy. He wouldn't look at me, hear me. But other times - again less now - he would cover his ears, as if in pain, for a noise I barely heard. He would refuse to look a person in the eye, going to huge trouble to avoid having to do so, always aware of where that person was, when they might be trying to look him in the eyes. Why on earth would he, and other kids like him, behave like this if their awareness of other people's minds was minimally functional? Why be afraid of something you're not noticing?

Now, if you ask an autistic person, they might tell you this: autistic people tend to be extra aware of everything. To the extent that it hurts. So sometimes, the easiest thing is just to block the input and retreat into a world of their own. When they grow up and they learn to negotiate all the loudness and brightness, they might spend less time on their own. My son tends to pick up on the slightest noise - the buzzing of supermarket fridges used to bother him, and he can hear a plane or helicopter a long time before we hear it. But he also picks up on any tiny emotional disturbance in the family. If he feels that we are stressed about something, he worries, gets stressed up himself. If he feels we are tired, sad, sick, he becomes cuddly, he looks out for us. He certainly doesn't lack empathy.

As far as I can tell, all the little autistic and asperger kids at the centre he attends are like that. They're kind, they're tuned in to what people around them feel. They can really pick up, among the parents and relatives in the common room, who's uncomfortable with them, or who's trying too hard. A lot of the older kids usually make a beeline for my handbag, and look for whatever electronic piece of equipment I happen to have on me. They can just tell I'm a fellow geek!

What these children seem to be not so good at is reacting. My son still thinks people like it when he tries to lick their ears. He keeps on doing it. But he'll only to someone who wants to play with him in the first place, and someone who's not going to respond harshly. Any social interaction works better on a one to one basis, where he can really concentrate on doing what he's supposed to do. A large group of kids wanting to play with him is just a bit too much. He only recently started going to birthday parties again, after a two year break. Allright, so he's afraid of balloons as well, which doesn't help. But perhaps more importantly, he just couldn't cope with all these kids being excited at the same time. His emotional radar, a bit too finely tuned, was going on overdrive.

So as far as I'm concerned, not only does Sasha's 'clever cousin' succeed in rewriting Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, giving it a scientific gloss that is bound to reinforce sexist prejudice, but what he says about autism really flies in the face of the experience reported by autistic people, and by those who care for them. Maybe Simon should try going into comedy. Except right now, I'm not laughing.