Trying something different ...

When I'm not being pretentious, self-absorbed and a feminist, I like to do a spot of cookery. Okay so technically no cooking was required in the following recipe, but I really felt I had to post this for several reasons - all of them feminist - that goes without saying.

The main reason is I hate salad. I also suspect that women who say they like it are liars. To me it was an 80's invention engineered to make women feel bad about themselves. Indeed it is a conspiracy used to fill them with false hope that they might end up with a body like Cindy Crawford's after a couple of tomatoes and lettuce leaf.

But this salad is different. Its incredibly moreish if you like sweet, salty, spicy, crunchy things. And let's face it who doesn't?

Also I've been reliably informed by my vegetarian flatmate, who when she's not giving out interesting bits of information, can be found scouring the shelves at Holland and Barratt, that carrots contain Vitamin A and Beta-Carotene. Good news for the eyes and the skin!

So here we go, this is my attempt at a Japanese Carrot Salad.

The recipe is by Allegra McEvedy and it can be found in The Guardian, here - http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2007/apr/18/foodanddrink.recipe

(I didn't bother to toast the cashew nuts. You can if you want. I was just too busy reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex)

Image by Dora Petherbridge

And here's the obligatory flash-photography shot. No food blog post should be without one ...

Image by Dora Petherbridge

A Feminist's First Dinner Party

In a slight twist on a blog which to be fair is quite hard to pin down - thematically at least - for I am not solely interested in one topic, I have decided to post a few pictures of my flat warming dinner from Friday night.

There are several reasons for this exciting turn of events. The most important is this - regular readers (whoever the hell they might be) may have noticed I've been somewhat given to introspection of late. I blame this on the fact that I am getting older, and everyone knows that a direct consequence of getting older is that you become wiser and more philosophical. That's just a fact. And just in case the irony hasn't translated thus far, it is also a fact that with age comes the ability to laugh at one's self. Admittedly I'm still working on this one. But honesty is also another wonderful grown up quality.

Anyway I'm given to anxiety with regards to this blogging lark. Like all good things in life I thoroughly enjoy it when I'm on a roll. When the writing flows its like good wine, just keep pouring the bottle I say. But when your not writing it can feel like creatively speaking, at least, you are on the wagon. Translation being, 'bad times.' But the other night I was talking this through with a fellow feminist friend and I came to the unfortunate conclusion, that one of the reasons why feminism gets a bad rep is because it takes itself too seriously. Now I'm not one to extol the virtues of a happy-go-lucky existence and certainly there is a lot about equality issues which simply just isn't funny, but I am willing to concede that we could all stand to take ourselves a little less seriously. Sometimes.

One of the wonderful things about this blogging business is the amount of time and effort my fellow bloggers invest in their blogs. They really have managed to create spaces where they can explore ideas, food, fashion, frivolity in all its wonderousness. The visual blogs particularly astound me and this has made me acutely aware that I don't illustrate my points often enough. The main reason for this is the old chestnut rearing its ugly head that 'others do these things better'.

But If I continue with that attitude I'll simply never get anything done, no matter how rubbish the outcome. And like I've said before its a process. This is all a process. So in a bid to explore my creativity further I give you a feminist's first dinner party.

Turns out that despite Betty Friedan's best intentions, this feminist at least wanted to be a good hostess because I spent the best part of last week devising, concocting and creating a dinner party befitting of my fabulous friends. I blame Nigella Lawson.

These are the results:

Here's the dining table -

Image by Dora Petherbridge

And here's a close-up

Image by Dora Petherbridge

And now to the important bit - the food. Deciding that I didn't want to make things easy on myself I went with a Thai/Asian theme. Here for starters we're having Japanese carrot salad (which I would like to dedicate a blog to because it was so easy and delicious), tempura prawns (these were a real baptism of fire and I have the oil-splatter burns to prove it!) and chicken satay skewers with peanut dipping sauce.


Image by Alice Turner

And so to the main - Thai Red Prawn Curry with coconut rice. My friend Alice, who is an excellent photographer, photographed the food. But having consumed a jolly amount of red wine, she forgot half-way through the evening that this was her designated job for the night, and so this image is of her dinner half-eaten. Still, that's realism. And in some ways that's feminism.

Image by Alice Turner

I suppose I've blogged about this because I think the little things, the minor triumphs, the well-executed meals, the hilarious jokes over wine, the putting together of a lovely dinner table, which, although not earth-shattering in and of themselves, are still important. Yes there's doom and gloom around at the moment, but not enough to forget that there are good things to be done. Some of these things are worthier than others, but that's just life.

With this in mind I'm now making a concerted effort to emphasise the lighter side of life too. Indeed it will be a feminist's take on frivolity.

To that end I leave you with a foodie related quote from the sharp-witted (and tongued) Lionel Shriver;

'I'm not a subtle person, and I cook the way I write. In the kitchen or at a keyboard, I push flavour towards an absolute limit. Food, like fiction, should leave an after-burn. As a good novel should make you cry, so a good main dish should make your eyes water and your nose run.

In neither books nor cookery is Shriver nice. I would no more concoct a bland, cautious dish with half a teaspoon of rosemary and a "pinch" of cayenne than I would write a novel about a kind lady who knits and her exciting trip to the post office. Although the hands-on physicality and instant gratification of cooking provide a merciful antidote to a mere-words manuscript of two years, both projects hew to the same directives. They both benefit from the drama of the triangle. They should both lead with a dominant theme. And both food and fiction should knock your socks off.'

From an article which can be found here -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/06/recipe-swap-spicy-pork

A Room of One's Own?

Logging into Facebook has become a daily part of my routine. I don’t know what I did in the mornings before it existed. Now over tea I find myself rummaging through the news feed searching out snippets of info, crazy observations and funny musings. There can be real diamonds in the rough, for every update that goes along the lines of ‘3 DAYS to go before my WEDDING!!!’ or ‘OMG cannae believe I drank SO much last night ...’ or ‘Lady Gaga WTF’, there are moments of sheer brilliance. This one comes courtesy of one of my friends, who shall remain nameless (you’ll understand why when you read it)

‘Gordon Brown does have a sexy voice’

Not sure I’ll be closing my eyes during the next televised debate. Should this person’s observation prove to be in fact correct it could create the existential crisis to end all existential crises, and I just don’t need this when my soul is already wavering, and we are so close to a general election.

In other news I am acutely aware that this blog might just be a tiny bit lame. ‘Feminism’ is in my title yet I have to admit I’ve let it slide over the past month. This is not because the cause has fallen by the wayside, only last night I was having a discussion with a friend about what I will call, the ontological problems related to being a feminist in the world at large. But it is sometimes difficult to maintain the momentum, especially when despite what some broadsheet newspapers would lead us to believe and the recent BBC Four documentary series ‘Women’ discussed, I do believe that there is a massive gulf between my feminism and any sort of real activism. And it is impossible for one person to address this, let alone rectify the situation.

Earlier this year the Reclaim the Night march was cancelled in Edinburgh and before that, the only murmur of discontent was the lovely Gude Cause Procession which to be fair displayed no discontent at all. The procession to mark the centenary of the Suffragettes movement was very much a celebratory affair, certainly not one riddled with anger. Indeed despite a call for women to bare banners with slogans calling for action on the work that still needs to be done with regards to equality, there were very few young participants willing to stick their necks on the line.

I don’t think this means feminism is dead. Perhaps young people have just become more self conscious and feminism seems a bit old fashioned. I do think there is an argument to be had about how much the older female generation are actually doing to promote empowerment, selfhood and women’s rights amongst their daughters. For its all very well to argue that they’ve done their bit and the baton must be passed on, but this doesn’t hold up if our young women don’t feel a part of the re-lay race let alone inclined to pick up the baton. And womanhood carries its own set of burdens. While manhood for me at least conjures images of ego and individualism, womanhood seems so intermingled in every aspect of that which makes up the bare bones of society; birth, marriage, child-rearing, domesticity, cooking, the home and the hearth. We’ve still got a long way to go before this is a realm of equality. And this is the generation who are most spoiled by their choices, for we can now choose our careers, choose to have or not have children and whether to get married. But all these choices merely mask my fear that there really is no choice at all. For my experience of being female is that there is always a compromise to be made.


In a very small and insignificant way I want to see this blog as my own act of feminism. In literary circles this term is often bandied about – it certainly was when I was at university – but it does hold up - that is the ‘room of one’s own’. On feminist literature courses we were taught that the very act of putting pen to paper, or tapping keys on the board, was the act of writing oneself into existence. This is especially significant for those who feel marginalised. And this argument holds up today. Is it any coincidence that these election debates are headed by three men, that the hyperbole, jargon and sound-bites are uttered mostly from the mouths of politicians? The whole thing leaves me not only confused, but utterly isolated. So I suppose that’s why I write. Well that, and my propensity towards introspection. But that’s for another blog post ...

To finish and if only to revitalise myself – why not a quote or three from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own -



Image courtesy of guardian.co.uk. Photograph.AP.

‘All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.’

‘The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’

‘The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she [her aunt, Mary Beton] had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important.’

Yay for Iceland!

Iceland might just be the most feminist country in the world. With news this week that they have passed legislation that will ban all strip clubs in the country, they are leading the way in challenging the sex industry. You can read all about here -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/25/iceland-most-feminist-country


Closer to home from the 1st of April it will be illegal to purchase sex in the United Kingdom. Still it remains to be seen what effect Iceland's decision to ban all strip clubs will have here where the debates rage on over lap dancing clubs. Even in feminist camps there are huge disagreements about the sex industry, whether it can ever be a woman's choice to be a sex worker and indeed whether it can ever be empowering.

Well, I know in which camp I firmly sit. The sexual exploitation and comodification of women's bodies does not make for a progressive and supposedly civilised society. The conditions under which the vast majority of sex workers conduct their work, many feeding drug and alcohol addictions, is a far cry from the glamorous tales recounted by the likes of Belle Du Jour and fictionalised series such as Billie Piper's 'Secret Diary of a Call Girl'. Its time that as a society we woke up to the realities of the industry and refused to allow women's bodies to be used for commercial gain.

Arguments that prostitution is the oldest industry in the world are hardly excuses to allow this to go on. If it were that simple then there would be a case for continuing other forms of slavery. And I am sure all civilised people would agree that we should never return to a racist past. So why should sexism be any different?

Until the EU passes blanket legislation banning the purchase of sex and the use of strip and lap dancing clubs from all our societies then real progress can never be made. Having said this, Iceland's stance is a huge one up for feminism.

Emancipated. Not Emaciated.

Last year while working as a Book Correspondent at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, for ThreeWeeks (the festival reviewing publication) I had what I thought was at the time, the good fortune to attend Susie Orbach's discussion of her latest book 'Bodies'. Suspecting it was a now or never moment, at the end of the discussion I plucked the roving mic to ask her a question: what had happened to the feminist movement since the 2nd wave and could it possibly be resurrected to promote greater unity amongst women?

As her initial pleasure/surprise that someone under the age of 30 had asked her a question melted from her face, she rather stony replied, 'it can't be [resurrected] times have changed'. In short she advocated randomised acts of feminism, much like this blog I suppose (which would probably be more effective if more people read it ...) and posting YouTube videos. 'The days of pamphlets are gone' she proclaimed with a knowing air that rather took for granted the assumption that I thought the 3rd wave was going to march merrily along off the back of photocopied, handwritten leaflets. I'm ever so slightly technophobic, but I'm no Luddite.

'But what about demonstrations?!' the lefty inside me cried -for a lefty loves a good protest. 'I've been to many of these events' I said, 'and they are disproportionately made up of bespectacled middle aged people', well I didn't say that but I did say this 'people keep saying my generation doesn't give a toss about politics, that we're apolitical, that we don't care. I was 18 when our government invaded Iraq and I was out on the streets months before an impending invasion, alongside what looked like at least 60% of the population who sure as hell didn't agree with the war.' I drew for breath and wiped the sweat from my brow. Forgive me I was nervous, Susie was after all Princess Diana's psychotherapist.

'I know' Orbach said soothingly, 'but they didn't listen to us'. Sensing she had little time for waving placards I handed back the mic. All I had wanted was an answer to how we might unify the women. To be told that New Labour's foreign policy might have damaged this irrevocably came as a bit of a shock to me. In seriousness perhaps it is understandable. Orbach felt that at this point in her life she had done her bit for the feminist cause, it was up to her daughter's generation and the like to set the wheels in motion, to figure out the 3rd wave.

Perhaps I could have come away with a renewed sense of faith in the female, if not propensity, at least potential to subscribe to a feminism, if it hadn't been for something a girl of high school age, a couple of rows back, went on to say. What started off as a relatively sound recount of her experience of the pressure to look a certain way and her determination to subvert the so-called conventions of female beauty, finished up as a criticism of the girls in her year not so strong-willed enough as to say no to the pearlescent lip-gloss. 'I call them The Plastics!' she laughed with a knowing air Orbach clearly didn't pick up on, for she latched onto this term as though it were some kind of cyber-punk, post-apocalyptic anti-feminism were men have done away with real shitting, pissing and bleeding women and replaced them with robots - The Plastics.

For you or I young enough to remember when Lindsay Lohan had a successful acting career, we know otherwise. The Plastics are a group of bitchy, image-conscious girls who terrorise their high school peers in the teen movie 'Mean Girls'. This possibly 'mean' girl had simply appropriated the term to denote the more vain amongst her peers. Its old fashioned, but I grew up with the principle that 'two wrongs, don't make a right'. How all this fits in with Orbach's campaign to promote healthy body image beats me, but she seemed to enjoy this girl's rant and even invited her to contribute to her website Any-Body. You can read my review of the discussion here http://edinburgh.threeweeks.co.uk/review/8856

Coincidentally, today I read in The Independent that Susie Orbach has been listed amongst the top 100 most influential British women of the last one hundred years. Its International Women's Day tomorrow and later I might be tempted to draw up my own list of women of substance and achievement and post it here as my own randomised feminist nod to the ladies who put pen to paper, who said or sang things that have renewed my faith in the cause.

For now I want to show you a few pictures of a female activism demonstration I attended on October the 10th 2009 in Edinburgh, organised by the Gude Cause. The Gude Cause Procession staged a reenactment of the historic Suffragettes march which went along famous Princes Street one hundred years ago. In a bid to not just celebrate one hundred years of female activism, they invited young women to construct placards and banners highlighting the issues and causes still effecting women today, as well as highlighting the work still needed to be done to make society a more equal and fair place for all women.

With this in mind, in a not so subtle nod to my meeting with Susie Orbach, I decided, partly on her behalf, to highlight the issue of body image, under the slogan 'EMANCIPATED. NOT EMACIATED.' For we are women who can vote, so we are women who can eat!

Here's a picture of my friend Sarah who took to banner wielding like a dolphin to water. I love the candid nature of this shot, the black and white is almost reminiscent of Suffragette imagery, whereas the timeless nature of her stance could have come straight from a 2nd wave Miss World protest. Although you can't appreciate it in this picture, Sarah dyed a section of her hair Suffragette purple for the occasion. Now that's dedication.

Below we're taking the banner along North Bridge. To the left we were overlooked by nature's compelling gift, the dormant volcanic rock of Arthur's Seat. To our right we were flanked by the majestic Balmoral Hotel. Once again Sarah's taking up banner holding duties. Picking it up from the right we have Dora (my flatmate and best friend). I was rather pleased that we'd surpassed the banner behind us for the Scottish Socialist Party. Marxism has its place. But this day was about Feminism!

And here's our banner in the glorious sunshine. I'm on the right rocking super cool Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Who says feminists wear dungarees?

Dr Jones' Feminist Film Nights: A Question of Silence.

Image from Wikipedia (VHS cover).

I graduated in 2007 with a pretty good degree in English Literature and Classics and unfortunately ever since this momentous achievement absolutely nothing in my adult life has quite matched up. This is probably why I still hang out at all my old student haunts and feel comfort just knowing that the uni library is only a stone's throw away from my flat. Its probably also why I agreed to go to a feminist film screening at my old Eng Lit department the other night. Well that and the promise of the booze afterwards - old student habits die hard, after all. But oh how I was hit with a wave of nostalgia as I entered the huge cavernous lifts of DHT, thrilled by the prospect of 95 minutes of gritty 80's militant Dutch feminist cinema in a windy Soviet classroom, so in keeping with the style of Edinburgh University's 70's architecture.

The film in question was conveniently called 'A Question of Silence'. No I hadn't heard of it either. And a film set in 80's Amsterdam that revolves around a single day when three women who have never met each other before kill a male boutique owner doesn't exactly sound like the most exciting prospect, and put it this way it was no Beaches. And yet despite the questionable acting, the stilted choreography of many of the scenes, the unintentional humour (a particular favourite was the doctor describing the poor boutique owner's injuries, 'his genitals were unrecognisable') and the 80's safety video music, there was something to be said for this wee film.

Sure it was completely saturated with all the themes us feminist/post-feminist/post-apocalyptic ladies are well versed in; sexism in the work place, domesticity, voicelessness, the tyranny of body image, ruddy male condescension (and from the Netherlands no-less, a place I'd always considered quite civilised)- I could go on. But it occurred to me that it had to be this way in the 80's because our second wave sisters were coming up against the sort of misogyny that's now taken for granted. These days its simply unfashionable to say the word we inherited from our foremothers' struggle - Feminism. And why and for what? So that we could champion Cheryl Cole as 'the nation's sweetheart', so Kate Moss could be lauded for having the 'perfect' body, so Katie Price could be crowned 'Mother of the Year'? None of this is feminism.

Now its feminism through the back door and we come out the other side holding hands with Susie Orbach and spouting nonsense about 'body issues'. So in light of this 'A Question of Silence' is a painful reminder of the hard-fought - not won battles - of a feminism which wasn't afraid to be a little bit difficult, a little bit political, hell a little bit angry with men! But if all that's just a little bit too difficult for you there's always the lesbian/sexual tension subplot and as previously mentioned, the awesome 80's safety video music soundtrack.