A friend recently told me that she knows some people nearing middle age who hesitate to apply the word “woman” to themselves. They still consider themselves girls. It’s been rolling around in my head since, so I wanted to blog about some of my thoughts on the matter.
As with anything, once you start thinking about it, you see examples everywhere. A poster advertising a TV program seeking a new models refers to the (at least mid-twenties) contestants as “girls”. Marketing executives insist on referring to “females”.
I am a thirty year old mother of one. Married for nearly 6 years (6 years!). And I find I also hesitate to use the word woman for myself. Why? Girl certainly doesn’t apply, and lady is just wrong. Perhaps part of my problem is that I don’t know where the boundary between “girl” and “woman” is; I have never had a rite of passage that explicitly confirmed my new status. Do you stop being a “girl” when you have your first period? When you hit 18? When you get married, or have a baby?
The TV show I referred to above is (I think) called “Are you a model citizen?” (I can’t find it online) and it proposes to take some number of hopefuls and choose one to become a model. Thinking about why they used the word “girls”, I realised that “women” is not a word for attractive (read sexually-objectified) females. The word “woman” conjures up an image of a strong, stable, independent person, but perhaps also dowdy and unsexy.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, vast audience.
Tg
I am currently wearing one sock. This is because the other has poo on it, as does the bed, and the urine sample bag*. What the urine sample bag does not contain, is urine. that is on my jeans, my phone and my watch. Please God, spare me from ever having to catch a urine sample from a baby girl again.
I am hungry, there are pissy/pooey clothes on the floor of several rooms, and here I am, writing a blog entry.
Tg — won’t miss her twenties that much
* K is fine, by the way, the doc just wants to make sure the temperature this morning is nothing to worry about.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it, vast audience? Where should I begin?
Makes me kind of wish I has something interesting to say.
…
Did you know that propylthiouracil tastes disgusting?
Or that wordpress can get viruses?
Or that the plural of virus is viruses?
<looks around>
<wanders off>
Many thanks to whoever wrote this page: http://www.samba.netfirms.com/sambconf.htm. We now have a working Samba server, set up by little old me! C did a very good job of deflecting me towards man pages and so on, rather than answering my questions directly, so I feel pretty chuffed with myself for getting it done!
In other news: I’m still waiting to hear from my PhD examiners. The bound thesis has to be submitted by next Friday, so it’s getting fairly urgent. I sure hope they’re not on their holidays or something.
P.S. I know this isn’t a terribly exciting post after such a long hiatus, but that’s all you’re getting for the moment. I bet you can’t wait for all the “the baby burped today, and it was sooooo cute” posts.
1. One movie that made you laugh Kill Bill
2. One movie that made you cry The Notebook
3. One movie you loved when you were a child The Jungle Book
4. One movie you’ve seen more than once Grease 2 (not by choice, mind you)
5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it (I can’t think of anything. I guess I’m not that easily embarassed.)
6. One movie you hated The Producers (the remake — I loved the original)
7. One movie that scared you The Grudge (I thought I was going to puke with the tension)
8. One movie that bored you Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (so much so, I only managed to watch about half an hour of it. Or maybe it was ten minutes and felt like half an hour)
9. One movie that made you happy Little Miss Sunshine
10. One movie that made you miserable Requiem for a Dream
11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see Das Boot
12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with (I don’t fall in love that easily either)
13. The last movie you saw Iron Man
14. The next movie you hope to see Kung Fu Panda
Eh, five people who a) read my blog b) have a blog c) will actually do this? Let’s try:
Birdie Mr-Wombat Saoili Tanya
That’s all I can think of. If anyone would like to volunteer ….
Zoomie’s most recent post, though only tangentally related, reminded me of a topic I wanted to blog.
As I was thinking about arguments I could have used in that debate*, I realised that “theological enquiry” (for want of a better phrase) is much more like historical enquiry than it is like scientific enquiry (for one thing, much of it is historical enquiry). Many of our peers have somehow been convinced that if science doesn’t show it, then you can’t know it (for any useful value of “know”). That’s not actually the way they live though. Not only do they accept the word of people they trust, but they also believe the history books.
We all know that science must be open to revision based on new evidence, but history is open for debate in quite a different way. It’s okay for us to have differing opinions on historical events even though it actually only happened one way. In a sense, this is because we have accepted that we are working with limited evidence. Within science, the reputation and trustworthiness of the source of any given claim has very little relevance. Experiments can be repeated by other teams in slightly different circumstances to see if the same results are obtained. You can’t re-run the fall of the Roman Empire. Either you were there, or you weren’t (I’m assuming you weren’t).
Historians differentiate between primary evidence (effectively eye-witness accounts), secondary evidence (close in time and relation to the event), and tertiary evidence (usually interpretations of primary and secondary evidence). They must also try to account for the reliability of the witness in question. Should we take Caesar’s account of the gallic wars literally, or can we assume that he was trying to portray a particular angle for his own aims? The historian is treading on much less sure ground, but that doesn’t make her work irrelevant or useless.
When we enquire into the nature of God we are often asking historical questions: “Did Jesus really rise from the grave?”, “Did Jesus actually walk on water?”, “Did many of the first Christians really give up their lives for what they believed?”. Many of our other questions are historical in a much more personal way: “Does God answer prayers? Can I believe the accounts of other people who claim their prayers were answered, and can I believe my own memories of answered prayers?” Historical questions have to be answered with the right methods. Who are the people on whose testimony we are relying? How reliable are they? What can we assume about their agendas and contexts? How close to the event were they? Is there a contradictory testimony? Can we come up with alternative (viable) explanations? And so on.
Well I’m not sure I’ve made my point very clearly, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
* Just because I’ve decided not to participate, doesn’t mean I can stop thinking of arguments I would have used
Have you ever had one of those conversations where you’re doing your level best to be polite, articulate, sensitive and winsome only to be told that you’re condescending, insulting and annoying? If so, it was probably on the Internet. Adding little smilies and self-deprecating jokes will only get you so far. Eventually, unless you’re on a different ‘net than I am, your “opponent” will completely misconstrue all of your carefully worded arguments and take them as a personal affront.
Is there any way to break out of this cycle? When I want to say “actually, you are the one who is being condescending”, is it time to let the thread die? If I walk away now, will all my hard work come to naught? Is naught the very best I could possibly hope for anyway? Perhaps the lesson here is never to get involved at all.
Sadly, I don’t have any answers to these questions. But, as C said, writing them down is probably more constructive than responding to the thread that gave rise to them. It’s going to be hard, vast audience, to resist that thread. I offered to leave several times, and was repeatedly asked to stay. The things they are saying are crying out for a response. They need a sense-injection! But, alas, they cannot recognise sense in me. I am a Christian and therefore necessarily preaching, rude, aggressive, insulting and condescending. But not wrong, no, no, they would never say I was wrong.
Despite all appearances, this is not a cookery blog. I have been thinking about, and experiencing, things other than food in the last few months, but none of them have made it onto your screens. Some of them would be inappropriate, some of them would be boring, but mostly they would be my PhD. Yes, I am in the final phase of the final phase. My deadline is the 31st of October. It is particularly unfortunate then, that the only “writing” I managed to do today had to be undone because it was wrong. *sigh*
Well the icecream van has stopped playing the incessant tones of a nursery rhyme I can’t quite place, or else has moved out of earshot. The Boy Next Door is not playing his guitar, strains of AC/DC riffs degenerating into random twiddling. So why am I writing this, instead of writing that? Responsibilities in the morning and celebrations in the evening are sandwiching my day, and the sandwich filling (work) has all squeezed out the sides. If only my work were more like jam. I do hate that feeling of doing a few domestic bits and pieces, grabbing a bit of lunch, reading a few mails to settle in, and then realising that there’s one hour till I have to get ready to leave, and nothing on my todo list that could be satisfactorily done in less than two.
Rest assured my friends, when I have fallen off the cliff of graduation, doggy-paddled in the sea of directionless-despair and swum to the shore of whatever’s next this blog will return to its standard, scintillating service.
Tg - in the court of king Caratacus
Last night we had the kind of dinner that you see on cookery programs and go “yeah right”. Chicken and goat’s cheese pizzas, lamb & veg skewers, and home-made coleslaw. The coleslaw was based on the one my Mam used to make, and it was such a strange feeling. I grated the carrot, and thought “that looks right”. Then I grated the cabbage, and it mixed a bit with the carrot in the food processor and I couldn’t believe how right it looked. Then I added the salad cream and I was right back at number 55 (before the council changed the door numbers) with the little fridge by the arch into the kitchen. I couldn’t believe how good, and homey it smelled So here’s the dead-easy recipe for “coleslaw 55″:
Ingredients: 1 large carrot 1/4 of a white cabbage Heinz salad cream
Method: Grate carrot and cabbage in food processor (the bigger the holes in the grater, the better) Mix thoroughly Add salad cream sparingly to taste
MMMmmmmmm
P.S. I made the stuffing again the other night with olive oil, and it was actually nicer
