What can education do? The somewhat shocking truth is, probably a lot less than you think, which is unfortunate given that the independent report into the causes of 2011′s riots seems to be pinning a lot of hope on schools as social fixer-uppers. The report recommends that schools “demonstrate how they are building pupils’ characters”; where schools fail to get pupils to minimum literacy standards, the report suggests there should be a financial penalty. Continue reading
Sarah Ditum
Freelance writer and journalist
A plan for the preservation of traditional marriage
I’ve had a conversion. Frankly, people have been taking the fucking piss out of marriage for too fucking long. Previously, I was of the opinion that marriage should be simply the union of two people who love each other. A public promise to care for each other – attending to each other’s needs, sharing their property, speaking for each other should one lose their voice – and a way to knit that relationship into the fabric of extended family. Continue reading
A Moomin mother’s day
It probably says something about the mature attitude I bring to the business of parenting that my favourite fictional mother is in a children’s book, but there you go. The best guide to the business of being a mum that I’ve ever read is Tove Jansson’s Moomin series, and in my regular moments of floundering under my responsibilities to the small people I’ve generated, I’ve often resorted to pretending that I’m Moominmamma.
40 Days For Life on Today
Yesterday, Robert Colquhoun of 40 Days For Life managed to overcome his severe media aversion to make an appearance on Radio 4′s Today Programme, where he was interviewed along with Ann Furedi of BPAS. The results were interesting, less for what he said than for the difficulty he seemed to have in making any positive statements at all. On this showing, although the UK pro-life movement seems to be growing more aggressive, it isn’t at all confident that the public shares its aims – rightly so, given that polling data consistently shows extensive support for a woman’s right to choose. Below, I’ve made a transcript of the discussion, with a few of my own comments threaded through: Continue reading
A conversation with a pro-life campaigner
Yesterday, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about the rise in the use of invasive tactics by anti-choice protesters. It works as a companion piece to my column in the latest issue of New Humanist about the parliamentary advances made by opponents of abortion: while campaigners like Dorries have found a way to introduce the language of the anti-choice argument to the House Of Commons, groups such as 40 Days For Life seem to have become increasingly forceful in the way they impose their opinion on women seeking abortions.
Scarlet Letter reports from the streets!
Paperhouse can exclusively publish this searing piece of lost reportage from the height of the 2010 student protests, filed by Scarlet Letter, the voice of radical youth.
Out on the streets, the children are shouting. “Scarlet!” they call, their voice wracked and squeezed by the pressure of the brutal police riot shields pressing them as tightly as a corset squeezes the body of a burlesque performer as tightly as the false consciousness of her bourgeois so-called sexual liberation squeezes her mind! “Scarlet,” the children cry, “What should we say?” Continue reading
The catcall, translated
When someone catcalls you, what are they saying? Ostensibly, it’s a compliment. “It’s worse when it doesn’t happen,” one older woman told me when I complained about being hollered at when running. I suppose the implication was that she thought I should feel flattered, not threatened. Continue reading
Tweet like a girl
A circular argument is a beautiful thing. Smooth and satisfying, and most important of all, no jagged edges to tear at your sense of security. So when the question is, “Why aren’t there more women on the Indy’s Twitter 100 list?” the answer can be, “Because women are a bit crap.” That’s Laura Davies’ take, anyway, in a comment piece for the Independent. Continue reading
Made-up babies
I have a friend. (I don’t really have a friend – this is a thought experiment, and who wants to be friends with the kind of bore who runs around making up thought experiments?) Anyway, this friend (who doesn’t exist) has a baby. A tiny, squirmy, scrunch-faced, made-up baby. My friend does not want the baby. She is so serious about not wanting the baby, that she decides she is going to kill the baby. She says this quite directly: “I am going to kill this baby.” Continue reading
After the aftermath
In this special exclusive extract from her controversial and emotionally searing new memoir, Leah Tusk explains how it’s feminism’s fault that her perfect marriage was destroyed by her freeloading husband’s completely unjustified hatred towards her.
Recently my husband and I separated, and over the course of a few weeks, the life we made fell apart into splinter-edged bits, like a self-assembly bookcase that collapses under the weight of several volumes of artfully constructed and very clever memoirs (such as How I Went To Italy Like One Of Those Romantic Poets So My Extreme Cleverness Could Find Full Expression, and I Know All About Motherhood Because I Read It In A Penguin Classic). Continue reading
