DISCLAIMER: I would like to make it ABSOLUTELY CRYSTAL CLEAR at this point that whilst I wholeheartedly support breastfeeding (and indeed advocate for it) this does not mean that I do not support the right of all Mothers/Parents to make their own infant feeding decision. This article is not intended to shame any woman who does not breast feed.

Jessica Valenti wrote this piece in The Daily recently. I totally agree with her sentiment that mothers shouldn’t be made to feel guilty. Breastfeeding is awesome and leads to much improved health outcomes both long and short term for Mothers and Babies. However, it’s also incredibly hard work and not everyone will be able to access support to breastfeed. Some women,  will have issues that mean they are physically unable to breastfeed. For some women, particularly those with premature babies in NICU’s the act of pumping breast milk can be incredibly stressful, particularly with no baby physically demanding milk to stimulate production. I get that. For these and a whole host of other reasons, which include not being mean, arsey people, we shouldn’t be making any woman feel guilty about how she chooses to feed her baby.

I don’t have a problem with any of that. In fact I salute Valenti for talking honestly and frankly about the fact that breastfeeding is difficult, and requires support which is often lacking, and without that support many women stop breastfeeding which is a why a shockingly low number of women continue to breastfeed following initiation at birth – at 6 months of age in the UK less than 1% o women are still breastfeeding exclusively as per recommendations (Infant Feeding Survey, 2005) and across the world less than 40% of infants are breastfed (WHO Global Strategy).

Yes folks thats right- us evil breastfeeding mamas, the ones who go round, apparently harassing non breastfeeding mamas, make up such a majority that LESS THAN ONE PERCENT OF UK MOTHERS BREASTFEED TO 6 MONTHS.  We aren’t some scary, self righteous majority, we are in fact an underfunded, under represented and socially harassed minority.

Anyway I’m digressing. My issue with Valenti’s piece is this statement :

“Thousands of studies have shown that breastfed babies are healthier on average than formula-fed babies — but no research has shown that it’s the breastfeeding that’s causing the better health. Moms who have the time and support to exclusively breastfeed, for example, may be more likely to support their children’s health in other ways. There simply is no proof that breast milk is the magical elixir so many of us believe it is.

“I never doubted that breastfeeding had myriad health benefits, so I was actually very surprised at what I found in the medical literature,” Wolf told me.

And it’s not just the science around breastfeeding that’s iffy — the social expectations and the dismissal of how hard nursing can be are also affecting women. “

I’m sorry, what? You know what, you can formula feed if you want to. You can claim that there are forces out there that shame you as a formula feeding mother. I’d like to argue that actually those same forces are busy shaming ALL mothers for all and any of their choices. But don’t you DARE to tell women and well, anyone reading for that matter, that the science around breastfeeding is iffy. Because really, it isn’t.

There isn’t some conspiracy where formula is secretly equal to breast milk, and nasty mean breastfeeding mamas (who make up less than 40% of the global mama populace) are lying so that poor formula feeding mamas feel bad. Breast milk is, scientifically speaking,  better for babies health by dint of it being custom made to meet the specific needs of the baby it feeds. The reason breastfed babies are generally speaking healthier is because breast milk contains immunological factors specific to each baby which protect it from disease. Breast milk doesn’t require making up with water which may be unsanitary thus exposing babies to gastreointestinal issues. Breast milk doesn’t require careful making up to ensure it is the correct strength, meaning that many babies every year become ill due to simple human error. And breast milk, unlike formula milk is sterile.

That doesn’t mean that people should always HAVE to breastfeed. People should breastfeed if they are in the privileged position of being supported and able to do so, if they want to and that’s that. I don’t care HOW you feed your baby, I care if you’re supported in doing so. I care if you have full access to ACCURATE and valid information which enable you to make your choice. No one should be shamed for parenting decisions- we do the best we can, with what we have at the time, and perhaps with different circumstances we’d make different decisions.

But, for fucks sake, don’t you dare lie about breast milk (or formula milk for that matter) when you are a publicly visible and respected figure. Don’t you dare. Because you’re contributing directly to a culture which shames women and uses shit science to justify shit social attitudes.

*Please see the WHO Report “Global Strategy for Infant and Young Child Feeding” for more details.

The recent ruling of the employment tribunal in the case of former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly is a double cause for celebration: not only does it send out a welcome message that the law will support older women who feel they have been thrown on the scrap heap for no good reason, but, at first sight, it also seems to have been a landmark case in terms of wider social attitudes. It has been interesting and gratifying to note that many socially conservative media outlets which usually dismiss campaigns for women’s rights as “political correctness gone mad” have backed O’Reilly to the hilt on this.

O’Reilly is, of course, not the first older female presenter to gain public sympathy and support after being ditched or passed over for promotion by the BBC: the dropping of Arlene Phillips as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, the end of Moira Stewart’s career as a television newsreader and the decision to hire Toby Buckland as the main presenter of Gardener’s World rather than promote Carol Klein after Monty Don’s decision to take time out after

 a stroke all caused widespread public disquiet. In the case of Gardener’s World, viewing figures dropped alarmingly after the BBC’s decision to “refresh” the show by marginalising its older female presenter, so if the BBC really does believe that the public wants its factual programming to be anchored exclusively by young, sexy presenters, then it seems to be mistaken. Nonetheless, the media kerfuffle over the Countryfile case seems to have taken the public indignation at the treatment of older women on screen to a new level.

I’m not sure, though, that the widespread public goodwill to O’Reilly necessarily indicates a new dawn of woman-friendly attitudes in society. Many of the normally reactionary, normally anti-feminist voices who have spoken out in O’Reilly’s favour are doing so because they perceive this primarily as an issue of ageism, not one of sexism (a view apparently shared by the employment tribunal itself, which, while upholding her claim for age discrimination, rejected her accusations of sex discrimination – rather puzzlingly, since they themselves acknowledged that women are more vulnerable to this kind of age discrimination than men). I suspect that, in many cases, the powerful tugs of middle-class and middle-age tribalism have merely temporarily overcome a deeper distrust of the feminist agenda.

Moreover, in many of these cases of age discrimination which have captured the public imagination, it is younger women in the media industry who have been cast as the villain. In the Strictly Come Dancing row, for instance, Alesha Dixon bore the brunt of the public backlash, not the TV executives who chose to hire her or her male co-presenters. It seemed that both her supporters and Phillips’s accepted unquestioningly that there was room for only one token woman on a panel of four judges – they merely disgreed on what type of woman it should be. That perhaps there was a place for both Phillips and Dixon on the judging panel didn’t seem to cross anybody’s mind.

It seems that, increasingly, any woman in factual programming or TV journalism who happens to be under 45 and passably attractive is dismissed as an “autocutie” who can’t possibly have a brain or any relevant experience for the job she is doing. Fiona Bruce, Emily Maitlis and Katie Derham all have Oxbridge degrees, but you wouldn’t know it, from the constant sniping about “sexing up and dumbing down” that female newsreaders face.

The Madonna/Whore dichotomy appears to be alive and well in broadcasting, with audiences apparently believing that a woman can be a young hottie or an authoritative expert, but not both. While the BBC management seems to think that women exist only as eye candy and should be banished from the screen as soon as they fail to set heterosexual men’s pulses racing (and even then they fail to recognise that older women can be “hot”, too), that a woman who is not young and sexy has no right to be on TV, large sections of the audience and media who oppose the BBC’s attitude seem to fall into the opposite error, of believing that a woman who is young and sexy has no right to be on TV.

Why can’t women be treated as people, as subjects, whose sexiness or lack of is purely an incidental factor, as it is for men, rather than a defining feature of their worth?

Nonetheless, I still feel that, as a society, we are making progress, slow though it may be. I remember when Angela Rippon and Anna Ford began their careers as newsreaders in the 70s there was much comment in the press to the effect that no woman could ever have enough “gravitas” to be an appropriate person to present the national news. I don’t think many people would seriously argue that today. And voices like those of Nick Ross (who has commented that O’Reilly’s sacking was justified, because it is “natural” for people to be attracted to older men but younger women) and Cristina Odone (who has brought up that old chestnut about this legal ruling harming women’s employment chances, as it will make media employers more wary of hiring female presenters in the first place if they know they won’t be able to sack them on a whim) seem to be being treated with the ridicule that they deserve.

I know that it is true that the media is a rarefied world and that O’Reilly’s victory does not necessarily improve the lot of ordinary women outside that charmed circle, but O’Reilly winning this verdict is still, in my view, a lot better than O’Reilly not winning that verdict.

I live in the Bristol area, where the local media has been abuzz lately with the brutal murder of Joanna Yeates. Before that, the murder in South Africa of Anni Dewani, whose husband is a Bristol businessman, also garnered several column inches in the local press. Several things about the coverage of these two women’s deaths in both the national and the local media have disturbed me.

Firstly, the salacious reporting of both cases seems to have been tailored to cater for the armchair Poirots amongst us. It is easy to forget, when surrounded by news reports which focus in lingering detail on clues and suspects and gossipy details of the dramatis personae’s lives, that the women who died and their family members and/or acquaintances who are now falling under both police and public suspicion are real people, not characters in a novel or a TV series. These women’s violent deaths seem to be being heartlessly plundered to provide the nation with a series of dramatic watercooler moments. I must admit, as a whodunnit junkie myself, I have found myself getting caught up in the lurid speculation, too, and am instantly repelled by my own crassness. It’s hard, though, when every news report seems to frame these women’s deaths in terms more suited to the Reverend Green in the Library with the Lead Piping.

Is it just my imagination or is it particularly the violent murder of young women that gets this voyeuristic treatment? I don’t recall the deaths of young men or older people being reported in this way. It seems part of a general public perception that the abduction, torture and/or murder of young women is somehow exciting, glamorous and sexy, a perception which is fuelled by crime fiction which seems to increasingly focus on the “sexy” female torture victim or dead body with unnecessarily titillating detail.

This fetishisation of female victims of violence is not only objectifying and insulting to women, it can also have negative effects on male victims of crime, whose suffering is often ignored by the media and the public – they’re apparently just not sexy enough. For example, thousands of children go missing every year, but it’s usually only photogenic white girls whose absence triggers a media frenzy, with not only the seedy, quasi-paedophiliac voyeurism that brings, but also the publicity that could potentially be helpful in finding them.

Also, I’ve noticed that, in both media descriptions of Dewani and Yeates and tributes from friends and families, the women’s beauty has been stressed above all else. Why is it that people persist in thinking that the most valuable asset a woman has, the most important thing to stress about her, the most tragic waste if her life is violently cut short, is her beauty? When a young man is tragically killed, it is rarely said about him “It’s such a waste – he was so handsome!” “He had his whole life ahead of him” – yes. “He was so talented, doing so well in his studies or career” – yes. “He planned to marry and have children” – yes, sometimes. All these things are said about female murder victims, too, and yet the kneejerk response when a woman under the age of 35 meets an untimely end is to stress the loss of her good looks first, as if it’s somehow disrespectful to the dead woman to think that any of her talents or achievements are more important than that.

Finally, I find the Avon and Somerset Police’s suggestion that local women should avoid going out alone at night until Yeates’s killer is caught staggering. Statistically, young men are far more likely to die as a result of violent crime than women, and yet I have never heard the police issue a statement suggesting that men submit themselves to a voluntary curfew. It seems unthinkable to subject men to any curtailment of their freedom to travel and socialise as much as they want, no matter how much danger they may be in. And yet if a woman is killed, especially a young, attractive woman, even if there is no evidence whatsoever that she was killed because she was a woman, the motive is immediately assumed to be sexual and all women in the area are held to be at risk and expected to make themselves prisoners in their own homes, or it will somehow be considered to be their fault if they are subsequently attacked.

I’ve just come away from a Guardian website discussion about Julian Assange feeling disgusted and baffled by the general assumption that seems to prevail on the left that liberal men who are seen to be doing a good job for the cause of free speech, civil rights, socialism, political correctness, whatever, somehow deserve a Get Out Of Jail Free card on charges of rape and sexual assault.

I don’t deny that Wikileaks has made public a lot of information that was in the public interest and Assange deserves commendation for that. I don’t deny that I’m appalled by the US’s sledgehammer-to-crush-a-nut tactics in attempting to shut down Wikileaks and arraign Assange on espionage charges. I would oppose any attempt to extradite him to the States on those, quite frankly, preposterous charges. And I must admit that the timing of Sweden’s issuing of an arrest warrant for him on rape and sexual molestation charges is suspicious, as is the fact that they are acting now after previously ruling he had no case to answer, and it may be that they are, as his supporters claim, plotting an extradition deal with the US once they’ve got him off British soil, which would be quite wrong.

But the idea that the charges on which he is wanted in Sweden are “trivial” and “trumped up” is a misogynist fallacy that I cannot believe is going unchallenged time and time again on left-wing messageboards.

I can’t believe that comments like “This shows the danger of going down the Swedish route of making it easier to convict in rape cases” and “This is another example of why women who make rape accusations shouldn’t have a right to anonymity” are getting more than 700 recommendations in the Guardian’s comment section on the Assange case.

I have no idea whether he really committed the crimes of which he is accused. It may be, as some media outlets allege, that the story of the complainants does not add up. But the way to find out is by having him face those charges in court. No woman who accuses a powerful, charismatic or brilliant man of sexual assault should be denied justice simply because he is so “important” or “doing such a great job”. No accusation of rape is a “small matter” that doesn’t really need to be pursued.

And nor do I buy the arguments that what he is accused of in Sweden “wouldn’t be considered rape in any civilised country”. I think Sweden’s feminist rape laws are a cause for celebration, not denigration.

It’s not that I believe that any man accused of rape must automatically be guilty. Nor do I believe that, even if he is guilty, that necessarily obliterates every good deed he has ever done in his life or that proper legal processes don’t need to be followed or that extenuating circumstances that would be considered in any other crime should be ignored when it comes to rape. When Polanski found himself under house arrest last year, while I agreed he should be extradited to face charges, I found myself almost as irritated by those who, seemingly slipping straight into Daily Mail-reader hanging and flogging mode, didn’t think whether the correct procedures were followed or not in his original trial mattered and by those who felt his real-life actions automatically made his films “misogynist” works that any “real” feminist would boycott as I was by those who argued that he shouldn’t face trial because “He’s such a great artist!”

Let’s separate the alleged rapist from the man’s professional role. If a “great man” is accused of a sexual crime, I don’t believe that means we should ignore or dismiss any great work he has achieved in other areas of his life. But nor, obviously, does it mean that the crimes of which he is accused aren’t serious and shouldn’t be investigated.

And if it’s true, as Assange’s supporters claim, that the Swedish authorities would never have bothered applying for extradition on something as “trivial” as sex crime charges if he hadn’t upset the US government, then in my opinion that’s a sad indictment of how trivially the international justice system treats rape.

In the spirit of sisterhood and women friendly spaces, some friends and I recently had a women and children only weekend and piled into one house for a night of cooking, chatting, recharging and connecting. Between us we had 4 school age children, one baby, three dogs and a lot of catching up to do. It was brilliant- the power of strong female friendship is something I’m starting to really appreciate as I head towards my thirties. The only dent in the weekend arose on the Sunday morning. The children were watching TV as we sat round drinking tea and trying to come too, and then an advert break came on. There were about 8 adverts in this break which occurred on a national TV channel, during a Sunday morning kids program. The adverts were highly gendered- 4 aimed at girls and 4 at boys. There wasn’t a single advertisement which wasn’t obviously gendered. The adverts didn’t even feature a single child of the opposite gender, if you catch my drift.

So, that was infuriating point number one. Infuriating point number two can be found in the types of products aimed at girls and boys. Aimed at girls were kits to make soap, fridge magnets, a doll and a toy kitchen. Aimed at boys were two types of skateboard/scooter, a gun and a set of armed forces action figures and vehicles. The clearly gendered division of those adverts can be broken down to indicate that girls make things- useful things no less, and care for others; boys do physical activities and engage in strategic and destructive games which train them to engage in ‘manly’ pursuits.

If this is what we’re teaching children with the toys we buy them then really we’ve not come that far in terms of gender equality. Boys can care and make things as nicely as girls, girls can be as physical as girls. To suggest otherwise is to further participate in a mysogynistic culture which harms children of both genders.

I’ve been interested recently to read some media reports by a local branch of the Fawcett Society on the representation of women in the media. They can be found here and here.

By counting the numbers of pictures/mentions of men and women in various media genres and analysing whether they are included because of what they look like or because of their achievements, they provide a snapshot of the very different ways in which the two genders are represented in books, magazines, newspapers and on TV.

Their findings on children’s TV and literature make particularly stark reading, because the culture children are exposed to will help shape their attitudes to themselves and to others as they grow up. The researchers found that, on the sample day, on the CBeebies channel, 100% of story narrators were male, as were a whopping 70% of characters shown. What message does that send out to girls about their importance in society and their right to have their voices heard?

The ratio of female to male characters in both adults’ and children’s TV and literature is something I tend to get very hot under the collar about, particularly the ratio between male and female central or authoritative characters.

I very often get into debates with people about this and am accused of “playing a futile numbers game”. The usual arguments I hear (and I’m sure many of you will be used to hearing these same cracked records, too) are:

(a) Shouldn’t we be focusing on serious problems, like genital mutilation, forced marriage, domestic violence, female infanticide? Isn’t how many female characters there are in a children’s book too trivial to worry about?

To which I would respond, well, no, actually. Men who feel they have the right to subject women to violence and coercion do so because they believe that merely having a Y chromosome makes them intrinsically more valuable and powerful than people without one. They weren’t born with this world view. I’m not suggesting that reading children’s books with a male: female character ration of 3:1 is, on its own, going to make someone abusive to women. But it’s one of the many things that cumulatively teach children to believe that men are “naturally” more important than women.

(b) Surely having one powerful or strong female character in a book is enough? It gives girls a role model and shows that women can achieve?

If it were the 1950s, when real-life female leaders were thin on the ground and school careers advisers counseled girls not to aim for any job more authoritative than a secretary, I might be able to buy that argument. But we are no longer in a position where girls are starved of any role models and anything is better than nothing.

Indeed, literature and TV often lags woefully behind real life in its portrayal of authority figures. For example, one of the clichés of detective stories, in novels and on TV, that most does my head in is the male-female authority sandwich. The female second-in-command, the female sergeant seems to be everywhere in detective series these days, from DS Reid in Taggart, through DS Havers in Inspector Lynley, to DS Clarke in Rebus (and, although they’re not police officers and none of them has a formal rank, arguably Harry-Hermione-Ron in Harry Potter is the ultimate example of the male-female authority sandwich). And what a depressing example of faux feminism that is! I always feel that the female sergeant is being held up as an example of how right-on the author is and how far on society has moved, that we are supposed to be grateful that’s she’s made it to the dizzy heights of the rank of sergeant and isn’t still languishing as a lowly Constable. Shock! Horror! She even has male constables working under her!

But, of course, none of this mitigates the fact that the woman is always stuck in second-in-command, that the inspector whose name is the title of the series is male, that he is the one whose maverick but flawed genius is central to the franchise and that, while she might be allowed to be bright and resourceful and sometimes even hand him the crucial clue without which the case wouldn’t be cracked, his is the central consciousness with which we are invited to identify, to the extent that even his failings and weaknesses are fetishised.

Where fictional female police officers are allowed to reach the rank of inspector or higher (e.g. in the Prime Suspect and The Commander series), the focus is usually on how hard it is being a woman in a man’s world, with her gender being presented as a rarity and a problem.

The fact is, though, that in real life it is nowadays far from unusual to see a woman in the higher echelons of the police service. There are female superintendents, commanders, commissioners and chief constables. Why can’t we see more police inspectors in fiction, as in real life, who just happen to be women?

So, no, I don’t think having one female character in a position of authority or a position of importance in the plot is enough: while it might demonstrate that women can be important, the fact that they are in a minority still reinforces the sense that it is far more likely and normal for men to be leaders, often suggesting that this is less likely and normal than is actually the case in real life.

However, I don’t think it’s always wise to get too hung up on rank and positions of authority. It is not, in my opinion, a good idea to start criticising female characters for “only” being a stay-at-home housewife or for “not being strong enough”. That would reinforce patriarchal notions about paid work outside the home being the only work of importance and set standards of “feistiness” and “strength” that female characters are expected to meet that are higher than those expected of males. Male heroes aren’t always expected to be “strong” – indeed, when they show vulnerability, we often love them even more.

For me, the most important thing is to have more female characters in central roles, more female characters who are presented as the subjects of the stories. I’d love the female sergeant if it were her name in the show title, if the stories were about her problems and concerns and her role in the investigation. She doesn’t have to have a promotion – she just needs to be shown to be important.

(c) But the author didn’t intend the text to say anything about gender or to imply that one sex is superior to the other! That’s just how the characters happened to appear in their head. It would be unjustifiably interfering with their creative control of their work and lead to political correctness gone mad if we insisted that all books/TV shows had to have exactly 50% male and exactly 50% female characters.

I will concede that, in practical terms, it would be impossible to insist, for example, legally, that books and series had to have an even gender split of characters and might make plots and characters seem formulaic and sterile.

The trouble is that it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: while male characters being in the majority is the predominant practice, most authors will subconsciously follow this practice when characters “just happen to appear in their head”, because they are heavily influenced by prior literature. Until we start seeing more books and TV series with as many or more female characters than male in the centre of the action, authors and screenwriters are far more likely to see a male face in their head when they think of the words “hero” and “villain” and a female face when they think of “assistant” or “love interest”. In my opinion, it would be good if writers voluntarily started operating positive discrimination and didn’t just go with the clichéd idea that first pops into their head. And if publishers and commissioning editors didn’t lean on them to follow the status quo.

A call for papers comes via the Filament magazine FB page, Feminst Porn Studies is looking for papers between 3000 and 7000 words from both sex industry workers and academic writers.

Oxford University’s Left Review is looking for submissions for Issue Three, which gives you two weeks to submit if you have any sociological, radical politics or economics papers.

When it comes to Filament magazine, I’m still in two minds about it. Yes, I like looking at sexy men and yes Ii think women should be able to access porn if they want to.  What I can’t actually bridge is the gap between the following-  when did I start thinking it was OK to view men as sex objects when most feminist thought dictates that women must not be seen purely as sex objects? Surely as a result,  neither should men.  What is this female gaze discussion all about?

The female gaze can be seen as  binary to the male gaze, but how do we truly know what the female gaze is?  If it is the  opposite to the male gaze then where is the space for Lesbians and Trans men? I know that all men do not not desire the slim blonde identikit archetype offered by the media, and all women do not desire the chiseled  jaw six pack ‘hunk’ also offered by the mainstream.  Nor are all women ‘secret bisexuals’, so why are the main images in this magazine oiled up and laid out for the ladies pleasure?

As a critic of post-feminism, I could simply say that this is  a new and improved way to control women’s sexuality, to mould us as sexually subservient to men. Don’t be fooled by embracing the so-called power of what I truly think the female gaze is . The male gaze is digested in the consciousness of women, who then internalise and invert this gaze because ultimately  men have power. To seize this power you must be seen as this veracious, ironic being who sees women as the media do- as a consumable product . Ariel Levy in her excellent investigation ‘ Female Chauvinist Pigs’ explores this notion within both heterosexual and homosexual culture and illustrates this perfectly.

As a woman in the ‘real’ world, having been socially conditioned to what is ‘hot’ and what is not (lets not be naive here), maybe Filament is a good  thing. I enjoy reading the feeds on FB  asking for what kind of image the readers would like to see ( I can’t help but think that it may sink into a readers boyfriends/husbands expo).  Most of the articles are pretty good and I don’t think I’d ever put it under my bed to avoid detection. That said, can any sexual objectification ever be justified?

As regular readers will know I have three children. The youngest is a baby, whom I delight in dressing as gender neutrally as I can manage, which quite often isn’t very gender neutral, because I can’t seem to find gender neutral baby clothes on the high street that aren’t brown. My older two kids have reached an age where gender is something they are exploring- we have a lot of conversations about whether boys can hold hands with other boys (yes, if they want to), can men wear skirts (see previous answer) and can women be doctors (see previous two answers!). The socialisation into a patriarchal society which is administered through the school system has a lot to answer for. Oddly enough, the worst recent example I have of all of this is what happened when I took my children shoe shopping.

Kids go through shoes ridiculously fast. Kid’s shoes are expensive. Experience has taught me that the amount of money I spend  makes no difference to how quickly my kids manage to put holes in their shoes, so I long ago gave up buying Clarks shoes, unless they are on sale. This time shoe shopping however, it wasn’t the prices that concerend me. It was the HIGH HEELS.

My daughter is 7. Like many of her peers she loves things that are a sickly shade of pink, and Girls Aloud. She thinks Hello Kitty is the best thing ever, and Hannah Montana is cool. I’m not fond of any of the above, but I can generally manage to tread that delicate line between making sure she isn’t totally socially ostracised and explaining to her why maybe aspiring to  be a pop star isn’t such a good plan. Walking into the shoe shop and being confronted with pink, sequined high heels in a children’s size 2 (they were also in smaller sizes) was a bit much.

If it had just been that one pair of shoes that would also have been ok- you can justify that as a ridiculous marketing ploy, or dress up shoes, or something. But no. There was in fact an entire range of high heeled shoes aimed at children my daughters age. Which were all also available in smaller sizes. This included school shoes.

I’m gob smacked and seething. This pornification of our kids has got to stop. Regardless of the immense social damage that dressing little girls in high heels and “Future WAG” t shirts causes, what about the damage to their bodies? We know, that high heels are damaging, and any heel over 2 cm increases the risk of twisted ankles, ligament damage and back problems. Why would you do that to your child?

There’s another aspect to this- if little girls are wearing high heels, they won’t be running around playing tag and football and more physical games. Instantly high heels restrict the games girls can play and the activities they can engage in and further hardens the gender barrier in the playground.  I’d like to ask everyone, parent or no, to write to any shoe shop asking them to not stock high heeled shoes fo children, on the grounds that they are misogynist, damaging to health and lead to the increased sexualisation of children. Maybe we can use consumer power to help end this hideous practice!

The oh so fabulous Laurie Penny of Penny Red fame is now blogging over at New Statesman and has written a fabulous piece about Breast Cancer Awareness. It’s somewhat serendipitous because I was planning on writing something very similar following an argument on my Facebook after I busted apart the stupidity of the irritating ” I like it on the..” Facebook status meme, which according to an old school friend is a “fun, flirty way to raise breast cancer awareness and wind up the boys”!

I’m sorry did I just fall into a bizzare alternate dimension? Last time I checked breast cancer is a life threatening and serious disease which according to Cancer Research UK kills around 12,000 women a year in the UK. It also kills around 70 men a year, and current figures indicate that approximately 1 in 9 women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime .

Breast Cancer isn’t sexy or flirty or pink. We shouldn’t be raising awareness by using stupid cryptic social networking messages thinly disguised as innuendo. Breast Cancer kills people. It maims them. It puts individuals through therapies and surgeries which are physically and mentally draining and grueling. It puts strain on families and kinship networks. Breast cancer is the most common female cancer in the UK, and causes the highest number of cancer related deaths after lung cancer. It isn’t a joke.

Here’s how to raise awareness of breast cancer. Talk. Talk to your friends, and your sisters, and mothers and daughters. Talk to your male friends and brothers and partners and fathers. They need to know too, because they too can get breast cancer and they too will be deeply affected if someone in their life is diagnosed with breast cancer. Check your breasts monthly and go to the doctor as soon as you find a change.

And finally, I refer to this heartbreaking letter published in Salon, from a woman named Sally who has Breast Cancer. Do as she says people and stop playing stupid, insulting games while she dies.

I’m going to marry Benedict Cumberbatch.

Admittedly, the star of the BBC’s Sherlock series may not yet be aware of this fact. In fact, strictly speaking, he hasn’t actually ever met me. But that hasn’t stopped me publicising my matrimonial aspirations on Facebook, Twitter and in numerous text messages to my friends this week.

However, don’t worry, you don’t need to buy your hat just yet. And in the unlikely event of Olivia Poulet reading this, she can breathe a sigh of relief. Because, obviously, I am not really going to marry Le Cumberbatch (he’s not really my type and I don’t even believe in the concept of marriage), it’s just one of those metaphors which women of my age find so easy to trot out about any male actor/musician/writer/sportsperson whose work they admire: “I want to have his babies”, “I love him” etc. It’s a throwback to the days when we used to doodle our favourite pop stars’ names on our pencil cases during the boring bits of Double Maths.

It annoys and embarrasses me that, after years of identifying as a feminist, I still thoughtlessly do this (although I don’t think I’m alone – many of my friends, including those who are already happily married and even some who are lesbians, are equally guilty). Because I’m acutely aware that the romantic ideal of “The Hero I’m Going To Marry” is one of the things that often holds women back, both from aiming to achieve themselves, and from fully appreciating the achievements of other women. While boys of my generation spent their Maths lessons dreaming about being a guitarist/actor/footballer, we girls wasted too much time dreaming about marrying a guitarist/actor/footballer, and that may be one of the reasons why so few of us got round to actually picking up a guitar or kicking a ball around the park. It may also be one of the reasons why so few female pop stars achieved the popularity or financial success of e.g. Duran Duran, Kajagoogoo, Bros, East 17, or even U2, The Police or The Smiths – we might have quite liked Michelle Shocked or Tracy Chapman’s music, but as we couldn’t process down the aisle with them with the sound of Mendelssohn blaring in the background, they were never really going to become an all-consuming passion.

But have things moved on for today’s teenaged and tweenaged girls? Since the rise of the Spice Girls and All Saints in the 90s, it does seem to me that young girls have been far more likely than previous generations to look to female role models as their heroes. I am ambivalent about whether this is a better attitude than that of my generation. There is no doubt that the word “career” has become firmly embedded in girls’ vocabularies in a way it wasn’t when I was eleven, twelve. There’s a pragmatic openness about the capitalist way in which the entertainment industry works, which I don’t remember being the case in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when I was growing up, and female stars seem to be at the forefront of that. In a sense, when I see eleven-year-olds idolising Cheryl Cole or Katie Price or Lady Gaga and I know that they know full well that these are hard-nosed business women who have consciously launched themselves as global brands, carefully charted and controlled their ascent to fame and riches, it does seem that girls today are more attuned to taking control of their lives and having ambitions of their own, shallow and materialistic as those ambitions so often are.

But, quite aside from the narrowly materialistic nature of the “success” and “empowerment” to which these girls aspire, there is, of course, also the body image issues that so often go with it. Girls seem to learn in the cradle that the route to a successful career is being “sexy”, moulding yourself to please the male gaze – primary school children now identify “sexy” as the attribute they most want to have and pre-pubescents dream of having boob jobs. Is there much difference between aspiring to marry a footballer and aspiring to be an independently wealthy pop star or supermodel who marries a footballer? Frankly, I’d almost rather we were back in the days when every female twelve-year-old’s dream was eloping to the Las Vegas Wedding chapel with Adam Ant. At least they were expressing an appreciation for either his art, for what he could do, or for his body and the fact that it pleased their female gaze.

But better, by far, to jettison both the belief that you need a high-octane career that brings you fame and money in order to prove your self-worth and the belief that your self-worth depends on bagging yourself an alpha male. Best to aspire to do things for their intrinsic value and for the pleasure of developing your own skills, the way that the boys in my class did when they tried to play guitar like Johnny Marr or kick a football like Kevin Keegan.

So, actually, no, I don’t want to marry Benedict Cumberbatch, I just really wish I could act like Benedict Cumberbatch. Or even better – act like Josette Simon or Fiona Shaw.