Women – Page 16 – Prog Gold

Sex Workers Vote Too…

Published on July 27, 20077 Comments

So why shouldn’t they be represented on their local council?

Knowing my home county as I do I suspect that, aside from allowing the likes of Guido Fawkes to make totty jokes, that this latest Lib Dem sex hooha in Bideford has more to do with simple snobbery than any real ethical issues with sex work.

Lester Haines in The Register:

Three Devon councillors have quit the Liberal Democrats after discovering that a fellow party member is offering herself as a £75 a pop topless stripogram, the Telegraph reports.

Myrna Bushell, 34, secured a seat on Bideford council in May, along with hubby Mel. Voters were probably unaware, however, that she leads a double life as “Jessica”, a “very sexy auburn professional multi-talented adult & non-adult entertainer” who’s shamelessly punting herself online.

She also apparently runs a £1.50-a-minute sex line from her home, which proved too much for Tony Inch, his brother Simon, and deputy Mayor Caroline Church who harrumphed out of the Lib Dems and now sit as independents. A joint statement issued by the three declared: “We believe that our integrity and principles will be compromised if we stay.”

Bushell retorted: “There are elements here that run deeper. The reason I do them is to pay my bills and be able to spend quality time with my family. It’s not incompatible with being an elected councillor and it’s not illegal. Three people seem to be upset but no one else is – I’ve got to earn a living somehow. Caroline Church hasn’t liked me from the beginning.”

Council clerk George McLauchlan confirmed Bushell had “not breached the councillors’ code of conduct because her business activities do not impinge on her duties as a councillor.

Personally I see no reason why she should not do this work and be a councillor so long as she’s honest and upfront about it, and she obviously is. If the electors are happy with her who the hell are her fellow couincillors to judge?

On the other hand I can’t see how it can possibly said conclusively that her activities do not impinge on her council duties, unless she has some way of proving that no-one with any business whatsoever before the coiuncil has ever looked at her website or called her chatline or attended a party at which she has performed. There is certainly potential for a conflict of interest even none has yet occurred.

That said this attempt to stop a young, active and engaged citizen in the joint enterprise of running the local community just because of her sexual activity is narroiw-minded and snobbish and has only served to make Bideford and the Lib Dems look ridiculous.

Given the current crop of politicians’ proclivities for political whoredom I’d say Ms. Bushell’s ethics may be superior to theirs; at least what she does is, as she says, legal.

Parasite or Paragon?

Published on July 25, 20072 Comments

It’s a dry day, I’m not feeling too bad, St.Salaria has visited and we need Frontline and flea spray if I’m to avoid being eaten alive so I’m going to take advantage of these freak conditions and get some things done while I’ve got the necessary oomph and also take some pictures of houseboats if possible. That’s the trouble with this warm wet weather, perfect incubating conditions for all manner of bugs and parasites.

Speaking of which in the meantime here’s a blast from the past about another sainted personage, this time Our Lady of the Progressive Blogosphere, Arianna Stassinopolous-Huffpo.

I’m republishing it because a commenter at TBogg reminded me that it’s not only Republicans who use politics to social-climb, and not just cats that have parasites. Ironically enough it’s by Christopher Hitchens, who should know a thing or two about both.

Enter the gifted Greek
Evening Standard (London), Jul 27, 2000 by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

IF you are standing in a circle of political types, in Washington or New York or Los Angeles, and the name “Arianna” is mentioned, everybody knows at once who is meant. This saves a lot of time, because there’s no need to pronounce either of the other names under which she’s already been celebrated: Arianna Stassinopoulos, Arianna Huffington or Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington. (During the brief reign of the third, it was no extra trouble to throw in a Puffington as a suffix and have done with it.) She’s Huffington now.

I was at a smallish dinner at her understated but beautiful house in the Brentwood area of LA a few nights ago. Nothing special; Norman Mailer and his wife Norris Church (in honour of whose first novel the bash was given), putative Presidential candidate Warren Beatty, several columnists and the man who might be the first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles. The next day, both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran quite extensive accounts of the soire, emphasising the fact that there will be “Shadow Conventions” at both the Republican and Democratic gatherings this summer, and that “Arianna” has organised them, and that she’s already booked more interesting speakers than the two parties have.

How did we get here? Readers of my age will remember Arianna Stassinopoulos
from the late Sixties: arriving from nowhere like one of the daughters of Zeus, she was one of the first women to be elected president of the Cambridge Union, and followed this up by writing an against-the-grain counter-feminist hit entitled The Female Woman. She was a star of the chat-shows and the social circuit, kept company with Bernard Levin and produced biographies of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. Interested in “New Age” spirituality, she held evenings for an outfit calling itself “Insight” and was mocked a bit in consequence, by me among others.

The magnet of America always exerts itself on such people, and by the mid-Eighties Arianna was to be seen around New York and Washington a good deal.

She’d become more decidedly political by then and married a junior figure in the Reagan administration named Michael Huffington. A nice but slightly ineffectual chap, young Huffington had access to pots of money through his father’s Texas oil business, and Arianna was very much at his side when he ran successfully for Congress on a conservative ticket. He used his time in Congress mainly to run for the Senate in California, against the incumbent Democrat, Diane Feinstein. By this time, Arianna was a positive blur of energy. She held upscale political dinner parties in DC, at which there were prepared topics for discussion (and according to rumour, a tape-recorder of hers running under the table). She was often closeted with Newt Gingrich, the supposed conservative revolutionary who had captured Congress from the Democrats for the first time in decades.

WHILE back in the Golden State, she was standing in for her husband at public debates, writing his speeches and directing his campaign. From nowhere, he came to level pegging in the polls with Feinstein and is said to have spent almost $30 million of his own money. The joke was – and it was told seriously – that Arianna would ride him all the way to the White House.

Two things unhorsed this plan. The Huffingtons were found, in the last days of the campaign, to be employing an unregistered immigrant as a domestic servant. And Michael, well, it looked as if Michael wanted to lose. He probably did want to lose, at that. It turned out that he’d been an unhappy secret gay man all his life. Arianna divorced him amicably, retaining custody of the two lovely daughters and receiving a pretty decent settlement. Then she moved sharply to the Left.

I was not ready for this. Nobody was. Suddenly the avenging figure of Huffington was everywhere, on her own radio spot in LA and in a nationally syndicated column, denouncing conservative America’s cruelty to the poor. She started a think-tank, the Committee for Effective Compassion, which seems to have given Governor George W Bush the idea for his campaign slogan of “Compassionate Conservatism”. She wrote a book called How to Overthrow the Government, in which she denounced the corrupting role of big money in politics. To her home came all the aspiring liberals and radicals. She personally floated the short-lived but much-publicised idea of running Warren Beatty as Hollywood’s liberal answer to greed and glitz.

SHE has persuaded Senator John McCain, the most popular politician in the country and the man most Republicans wanted in the Vice- Presidential spot, to open her “Shadow Convention” in Philadelphia this weekend. When the Democrats gather in LA on 13 August, they are to be shadowed by a “rapid reaction team” to include (as I gathered when I reeled from her dinner table) Gore Vidal (Al Gore’s cousin), Warren Beatty and perhaps your humble servant.

At last, the Press will have something to write about.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

Old as I am and with a history of several decades worth of reading Private Eye, It’s a matter of continued surprise to me that a woman who ascended to career socialite-ism by flitting about London’s salons on the arm of reactionary Times columnist Bernard Levin, who peddled spurious psychological group therapy (and even became a minister in its ‘church’) to the London literati and who then wrote several, allegedly partly- plagiarised books, one attacking feminism, should be so feted by the sensible American liberals.

But then I suppose they have to: if an Arianna can be in the big tent too, surely so they can they, be they movie star, trust fund baby or hedge-fund manager. Her rise to progressive prominence shows them they need have no qualms about being obscenely rich, just as long they say the right things and butter up the right people at the right time.

Here she is in 1994 arguing for the proposition that the woman’s movement as a disaster:

The main news in these agreeably contentious two hours is the emergence from the campaign closet of Mrs. Huffington, a sometime head of Cambridge Union, the debating society at Cambridge University, as a well-prepared, fast-thinking advocate, even of as murky a cause as “the spiritual dimension of life.”

She is responsible for the evening’s hottest moment, incited by her denial of credit to the women’s movement for the 19th Amendment. When Judge Burstein suggests that Mrs. Huffington is not up on American history because she did not go to school in the United States, this Greek-born, British-educated, naturalized American citizen retorts that the judge can get away with that sort of put-down of immigrants only because she is a liberal.

[My emphasis]

Bestest friends with Newtie?. Progressive, my ass.

Mrs S-H is a flip-flopper par excellence who’s always managed to take advantage of the political zeitgeist to advance her own career. I’d trust her political convictions as far as I could throw her private jet, because as soon as the Right look to be in ascendant again she’ll be bigging them uip as the best thing since sliced bread. If she is to be sainted perhaps it should be as St Arianna of the Opportune Moment.

In that respect you could say she is an epitome of the Democratic party – self-made, but not; liberal, but not, principled, but not, a parasite on the body politic.

Comment of The DayWeek

Published on July 19, 2007

Well, it’s comment of the week, really, because it feeds into a topic that’s greatly in the news this week, lone parents and benefit cuts. It’s been announced that in the UK women with children as young as 7 will be forced into low-paid jobs or face benefit cuts, emphasis on the women (I don’t see any mention of men). The blame culture strikes again, setting ‘good’ women against ‘bad’.

So this, from kactus, who’s been guest-blogging at Feministe, was sytartlingly apropios:

kactus Says:
July 16th, 2007 at 4:45 pm

I was going to ask the same question as anonplease. You’re literate, well-spoken-I can only assume it’s bias against your colour and disability.

Actually, I’m white, JPlum. I do have a mixed-race daughter, whose picture I plaster all over my blog, and I live in a mostly-black community, but no, actually being white has helped me navigate the welfare system much more than my sisters in poverty who are struggling against the racism in the system.

Look, being well-spoken and educated is no fail-safe protection against poverty. Neither is being white. Although those things help, they are not a guarantee of a middle-class life. I was raised working class, which used to mean something. Now it means almost nothing, except that you still have illusions about what used to be called upward mobility.

I have a quote on my blog from Johnnie Tillmon, a great early welfare rights activist. She says that welfare is like a traffic accident: it can happen to anybody. But especially it happens to women, which is why welfare is a women’s issue.

Women go from middle class comfort to unpredictable poverty all the time, just from something so simple as losing their partners, either to death or divorce or other calamity. As long as the wage gap between women and men is so huge this will continue to be an issue. Women raise children alone all the time, without the benefit of child support. Women often end up working low-wage, dead-end jobs. Women lose jobs because of their children.

Poverty is absolutely a women’s issue. That is why it is a feminist issue, and a human rights issue. And in the end it really doesn’t matter why somebody is poor, or what brought them there. What matters is that it could happen to every single one of us. One slip and bam–we’re in that traffic accident called welfare.

I’m literate and well-spoken too and I’ve been on welfare too: intelligence is no predictor of misfortune and being well-spoken does not negate the effects of institutional misogynism – in fact if you are well-spoken and literate you are considered to be all the more culpable for your own poverty by the ‘caring’ agencies.

This overt equation of poverty with moral failure in the US is becoming more obvious in the UK too as Labour’s neoliberal economic policies create an ever-widening poverty gap by giving tax breaks to the richest and making life ever harder for the poorest.

It made me livid yesterday to listen to the posh voices of the bourgeois ‘left-wing’ think tank wonks on Radio 4 , talking about Labour’s swingeing, unfair cuts to lone parent benefits as taking a ‘carrot and stick’ approach to ‘recalcitrant’ mothers, as though women raising small children alone were lazy, shiftless animals.

Why is it that motherhood is a worthy full-time job for them, the smug middle-class Yummy Mummy marrieds, with their 4X4 baby buggies, Tumble Tots and their insatiable Daily Mail-fed terror of the icky urban poor – but not for mothers bringing up children alone?

Aren’t less well-off children entitled to the same quality of parenting as those born to the luckily well-off? Why does addition of a man to the equation make their children more worthy of a decent upbringing?

Is the government saying that married mothers are morally more worthy than unmarried? It certainly sounds like it. You’d think the Labour sisterhood’d be up in arms, wouldn’t you?

Hello….? Harriet Harman? Anyone?

Nope, didn’t think so. Labour sisterhood never was for shit, except as it furthered certain women’s political careers, as I and many other ex-Labour members can testify. That those women would now sit back, mum, while the Treasury thumps the most overtaxed, most vulnerable families in society, the people who voted for them to be where they are because they thought Labour and Labour wonen would be a voice for women and children…

I was a good lone parent. I did everything I was supposed to, even though I was sick – I went back tio University to got a degree, I went on training courses, I took low-paid jobs to get on the ladder. I’m not unique in this, it’s what a lot of women do, because we have to and we don’t like being un-self-supporting.

When I first graduated I worked 3 years for 60-70 hour weeks for nothing getting an anti-poverty campaigning and advice agency off the ground and funded, a] because I was committed to it, having seen myself what an impenetrable maze bureaucracy can be for the uninitiated b] because legal aid is hard to get and c] because I knew that doing it myself was the only way I’d ever get a legal job . I know because I tried but no-one wants someone with a patchy medical history and I can understand why. No problems with jobs as a part-time temp, yes, but that doesn’t feed children or pay the rent…

Then a man was given the paid post I raised the money for, over my head, because of local political infighting, aka the sexual appetites of prominent Labour councillor’s partner. I walked out and the organisation went tits up later when a deal was done by the very same councilllors for the land it stood on.

It knocked me right back on my heels, three year’s hard work down the tubes, but I did manage to get an antipoverty strategy put into local council policy, albeit briefly, which is something, I suppose – every decision made by the council had to be considered in the light it would have on those on low incomes. But not for long, cheers, New Labour. Once back in power they always forget who put them there. Lone mothers. Poor people, people like me ho’ve seen the injustice poverty causes.

Blaming lone mothers for their own poverty and accusing them of being leeches on society iis very useful to the government because it enables the real plight of the poor to be disregarded. But poverty can hit very quicly and few women are immune.

Say you have a husband, a house, a mortgage and two children under 5: you’ve left your job to go part-time, or you’ve had to leave to look after the children. One day your husband just ups and leaves you for someone else, shutting down all the bank accounts, taking the car and barring access to money. As happened to my sister one Christmas Eve.

How do you feed your kids while coping with the aftermath? But milk, or nappies? How do you pay the childminder to go to your part-time job? What if you have to leave your job, what then?

These are the current UK benefit rates for a lone parent on means-tested benefits:

Lone parent
under 18 35.65/46.85
18 or over 59.15

Dependent children 47.45

Family premium 16.43

Max total 170 pounds, plus housing and council benefit if in rented accommodation (nothing at all if in your own home, you’ll have to find the mortgage payment out of the 170) say, around another 100 pounds a week if not living in London, less elsewhere.

That gives a maximum weekly income of around 270 pounds a week to find everything out of – food, electric, gas, rent, travel costs, school lunches, school uniforms, books… It certainly looks generous on the face of it, but not when you consider what has to come out of it and that the national average weekly household income is 570 pounds. Lone parents must do all the parenting that two parents do on around half the income.

Lone parents are disproportionately women and for some reason people think women can cope with poverty, that we don’t need a decent income, that we’ll manage, because that’s what we do – and that our lot in life is to just shut up and take it, wait until someone deigns to hand us some charity and then we must be duly grateful and publicly so.

What is conveniently forgotten is that these meagre benefit entitlements have been paid for several times over by ours and our parents’ and grandparents’ National Insurance contributions and will be by the future contributions of our children, should they be able to get a job and not be trapped in poverty.

This attitude illustrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of the welfare state: the Brown government, as the Tories did before it, would like the public to think that social security is charity, and that those seeking alms from the charity can somehow be sorted into the ‘deserving’ and undeserving’. You can see how well this has worked by reading the comments to this Scotsman article onthe benefit cuts, of which this is a representative example:

I am in complete harmony with the principle that individuals should be accountable for their actions, and see no reason why I should help someone to raise a child if they are not prepared to work, even if it’s part time. The welfare system in this country was never set up to fund lifestyles, and sadly that’s basically what it does now, fund lazy eegits, criminals and slappers, and other wasters.

Delinquent fathers is another topic of irritation, and we should be relentless in finding them and forcing them to contribute to the childs up bringing expenses.
Rant over!

State benefits are not charity, they are an arrangement between the citizen and the state to provide support out of work in return for contributions from income when in work. Why? So that no more generations of children would be raised in poverty. That was why we voted Labour.

The British media would have the public believe that lone parents get more benefit than couples: not so –

Couple

both under 18 35.65/46.85/70.70
one under 18 46.85/59.15/92.80
both aged 18+ 92.80

Even though lone mothers have to do the work of two parents on less money iand less time and the cost of running a household is the same for a lone parent as it is for a couple.

Instead of enabling lone parents (and isn’t it odd how the public discourse has slipped back from ‘lone parents’ to ‘single mothers’? – talk about feminising the situation for blame purposes) to raise their children in a way which does not exclude them from participating in society – after all children do not choose the families they are born into, why should they suffer? – the less morally worthy single mothers must be made to work and work hard for their charitable handout, even if it means spending time that should be spent raising children properly in filling out constant, pointless forms and doing empty busywork preparing for jobs they won’t get anyway because there are a thousand younger, more qualified new graduates or recent economic migrants with no children or other baggage right in line before them.

The jobs that are available to lone parents don’t pay enough to cover the loss of housing benefit or are in low-paid shift work, or on-demand hours, requiring the most minutely arranged time-management, transport and hugely expensive and precarious childcare arrangements for very little reward after direct and indirect taxation are taken into account.

And where’s all the extra childcare to come from? The government is planning that schools should become child-care centres and children should attend from 7 am till 6pm, with drastically reduced vacation time. I wonder who’ll be forced to apply for the childcare jiobs at these childcare centrres? Lone parents forced out to work…

We’re building a nicely circular low-paid system of poor women looking after other women’s children while having to put their own into… paid childcare. But hey, at least they’re not scrounging.

With all this in mind it doesn’t help at all that that women who do currently, temporarily, have money and security look down on lone parents as moral failures. No – we were sick, or our partner turned out to be an asshole, or the condom broke or the pill didn’t work or we got made redundant. Some of which has happened to me at some point as it can happen to any parent. That’s the whole point of the benefit system: there but for the grace of whatever deity or randomness go you.

And don’t talk to me about relative poverty. If you can’t pay your bills you can’t pay your bills whether in pounds, dinar or Zimbabwean hyper-currency.

A family is a family, one parent or two and deserves state support. families are what makes the state – but as Gordon Brown so constantly reiterates, it’s only ‘hard-working’ families. Well, lone parents are hard-working too: they’re working hard at raising the next genration of taxpayers that will help fund the currently comfortable’s pensions.

It’s they who are the bedrock of a very unequal society, doing all the shit unpaid jobs no-one else will, for bugger all reward except the blame of the tabloids for causing all the ills of society.

But blame is useful it enables the currently comfortable to ignore real poverty, to feel smug, to have someone to despise: not only that, it sets women against one another and is yet another way of dividing and ruling.

So True….

Published on July 15, 2007

….especially on yet another rainy, dismal summer Sunday full of wet washing, when you may have to get out the chainsaw just to alleviate the stir-craziness…

Mariella Frostrup in answer to a reader on the agony page of the Observer:

[…]

Let’s talk about the difficulties of sharing a home with a man – a subject that I’m sure will double my mailbox next week. What is it about the opposite sex that makes them so adept at filling space? Whether it’s a bedsit or a mansion, men, with their all-pervading presence, seem to squeeze you into a corner. My opinion is, I admit, marred by my own experiences and therefore subjective, so forgive the gross generalisations. Women do colonise small corners of a shared home with enthusiasm. The bathroom cabinets will be brimful and the wardrobes full. But men manage to fill not the obvious storage spaces but the air itself. Why does making a pot of coffee involve saturating the entire counter? Why does having a shower leave more water on the floor than can have emerged from the showerhead? Is it impossible to lift the lid of the laundry basket instead of depositing discarded items on top? And then, even if you’re lucky enough to have found a tidy Virgo type, there’s the noise pollution: radio, TV, their opinions, their favourite CDs. The only thing men seek out privacy for are their phone calls, and ironically that’s the only part of their lives you may have a minuscule interest in eavesdropping on.

[…]

It doesn’t matter whether the male in question is a partner, parent, child or sibling – I suspect most women who read that today did so with pained recognition.

Girls Just Wanna Have… Fairies?

Published on July 12, 2007

It may be unfair to judge a book before it’s published and before I’ve even read it, but I did hear the author on the radio this morning and on hearing what she had to say my feminist radar immediately went “Spung!! Twee stereotype alert!”

And I speak as someone raised on Arthur Mee’s Childrens’ Encyclopaedia and Enid Blyton. But I also read Swallows and Amazons and Ursula LeGuin and knew when I was being talked down to by condescending adults.

The book in question is called ‘The Glorious Book For Girls’ and purports to be a riposte to that best-seller to middle-aged men, ‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’. There’s certainly room in the market for a book that teaches girls survival skills – it’s just not this one.

I must say my hackles went up right away just at the title: The girls’ book is called ‘Glorious’. But why not ‘Dangerous’? Don’t girls want to tie knots, ckimb trees, collect coins and stamps, start campfires, make their own microscopes and cause small explosions too? I know I did and I still do.

Here’s the publishers’ blurb:

Homemade scones, pom-poms, daisy chains. . . The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls will take women back to a time when we made cup cakes with our grandmothers, when girls weren’t obsessed with all things pink, when they didn’t wear ‘hot to trot’ t-shirts aged eight and when a bit of sticky-backed plastic and a tissue box could be the answer to your dreams.

Perfect for mothers, grandmothers, aunts and godmothers (as well as daughters, granddaughters, nieces and goddaughters, of course), this is a book for all women who secretly, or not so secretly, loved playing French elastics, dream of making elderflower cordial and need reminding of how to play cat’s cradle.

Sounds quite tempting, doesn’t it? I certainly enjoyed doing those things when young.

So despite my misgivings about the title I was quite interested. But as the discussion progressed between the author and the feminist lawyer who’d been invited to give the opposing view – because as any fule kno, any BBC radio news discussion must be reduced to two opposing views- the book’s actual content became clearer and my heart sank.

Glitter and ponies. How to talk to boys and pluck your eyebrows; how to bake a cake, sew a hem and what? How to sulk?.

Surely it couldn’t be so regressive, could it? The author couldn’t be trying to turn girls into little po-faced, fairy-loving Violet Elizabeth Botts or embryo Fanny Craddock memsahibs, all flowery pinnies and high maintenance hairdos – could she?

Oh, yes she could.

The Telegraph (what a surprise that the Tory papers should love this book) gives a little more insight into the book’s topics:

10 Things Every Girl Should Know

1. How To Deal With Boys
2. How To Have A Best Friend
3. How To Cope When Your Best Friend Gets A New Best Friend
4. What To Do When Introduced To Older People
5. How Not To Be Fazed By Other People’s Strange Habits
6. How To Keep A Secret
7. How To Tell If An Egg Is Fresh
8. How To Sulk
9. How To Have A Crush
10. How to Set Your Inner Alarm Clock

To which I might add, 11. How to tell when someone with no conception of girls’ lives today other what she gleaned from Enid Blyton school stories is talking down to you. Or 12. How to tell when you’re being flim-flammed by your own side.

I could go on, but you get the drift.

This is the corresponding publisher’s blurb for The Dangerous Book For Boys:

The Dangerous Book for Boys gives you facts and figures at your fingertips – swot up on the solar system, learn about famous battles and read inspiring stories of incredible courage and bravery. Teach your old dog new tricks. Make a pinhole camera. Understand the laws of cricket. There’s a whole world out there: with this book, anyone can get out and explore it.

That’s the book I’d’ve wanted to read, not some twee advice about fairy cakes or ballet shoes. If someone had bought me a book like the Glorious Book when I as a girl, I would’ve thanked the giver and immediately ‘lost’ it (the book and my temper) the moment I came across this :

Build your own fairy house

Fairies usually live in hedges and little bushes, so you should look out for them and help make their houses more comfortable. Choose the tree or bush you think is most likely to be a fairy’s house and carpet it with moss and flower petals.

Acorn cups make good bowls for water and basins for the fairies to wash their faces and clothes. Small fluffy feathers are very soft for pillows; if you live in the country, find some lamb’s wool – fairies love to sleep on it.

Empty snail shells make good sculptures for fairy banqueting rooms. Find pieces of wood to make a grand dining table and benches for the fairies to sit on.

You can leave tiny things to eat. Fairies like small garden peas, berries and rose petals.

Mark out a garden path with tiny coloured pebbles and make a fairy garden with flowers and twigs. If you dig a little hole and place a small bowl or cupcake tin in it, this could be a garden pond.

Fairies don’t like to be seen, so usually come out at dusk, just before bedtime so they can find your gifts and eat their supper while you are sleeping. In the morning, when you go back to the fairy house, you might have a little clearing up to do to get it spick and span.

So when climate change starts to hit, our female young will be perfectly prepared to build shelters, find food and care for ~~themselves~~ fairies.

I think that speaks for itself as to what the authors think it’s useful for girls to know. Not how to deal with bullying by SMS, or keep yourself safe on the bus, or what to do if your friend’s Dad gets a liitle too friendly or your house gets flooded. Nope, the answer is glitter, pompoms and fairy cakes. Oy.

Feminism may not be quite dead, but some of us women are doing our best to kill it.