A Heroic Woman

I truly enjoy stories of women who have done heroic deeds. The stories the media tell imbue our lives so much and I would much rather hear about women who parachuted into occupied France during WWII than some celebrity gossip.

Pearl Cornioley died on February 23^rd and her obituary is in the Telegraph. The amazing story about her life is well written and focuses on her bravery. The article ends with a telling of how the British government tried to correct their prejudice and awarded her the appropriate governmental awards later in life. I hope you enjoy the read.

How Journalism Goes Bad

So there is this article in my local paper about how a woman who survived hellacious breast cancer has now lost the weight she gained as a result of having her thyroid removed due to the cancer.

I started to write about how cranky I was that the newspaper chose to focus on her weight loss, but then I realized that this woman is probably happy to have her body to focus on in a way that she has control. I can only imagine that after having the cancer run riot over her body she would be glad to have a way to get her body to work with her ideas instead of against them. I mean who the hell am I to say how she should want to view her body given the almost hysterical cultural focus on outward appearance and fear of being labeled fat even if she did survive a horrible ordeal.

My problem is with the media and that this article could have been spun lots of ways, but since we have this crazed focus on weight, this was the focus of the article. Not her ability to reinterpret and view her body as in some way good or benign. This article is then not about the strength of this woman to fight for her life, win and then reinvent herself. It is about how wonderful it is that she now fits into standard beauty norms.

I see this kind of focus as dangerous. Women have other, more important issues to be discussing. These small details redirect our conversations in ways that could be more useful.

Interestingly enough as I went to post this I found that the headline in the paper “Breast Cancer Survivor Shares the Secrets of Making Weight Loss Stick” is different than the on-line version “Weight-loss tips from a true survivor: Donna Nelson beat cancer, got fit and is now featured in a new book from Weight Watchers.”

Ever Changing Gender Roles

Ok, so Rosie Boycott, who started a feminist magazine in the UK in the 1970’s, wrote an article in the Daily Mail about how terribly treated men are now that feminism has taken hold and how much nicer things were before women got all uppity and went and got jobs. Seriously.

I think that her point is that we need to have a larger societal shift to go with the progress that women have made, but instead of making that clear she seems to hearken back to yesteryear when men knew who they were because they were the wage earners.

What she blatantly ignores is that women have always worked outside the home. Women have worked in factories and at newspapers and as teachers for many years now. What has changed is not just an expectation that the man, the father might want to have an equal responsibility in taking care of the home and the children, but also a desire by the men to have an equal responsibility.

She refers to a recent survey that says that men are unhappy because they feel they have to live by women’s rules, but she never references the survey, so we don’t know if it is a survey done on 4 men outside a pub who were drunk or what the other findings were.

I agree that we need to have a societal shift that accommodates the way families are now structured, but I have no illusions that men or women were happier when the men were just in charge of going to work and the women were home. There is definitely more negotiation now, but I think it is all for the good.

I am also more optimistic about the future than Ms. Boycott. I think that this may be a rough patch and require more negotiation between men and women in marriages, but I also know that our children are growing up with women in a wide variety of roles and while men may not have an equal share of household responsibility, they have more than before. Our children will be better able to negotiate these roles, because for them they won’t be new.

I do think it is important to pay attention to how societal changes affect those of us living in the society. However, I think that the answer has more to do with all of us advocating for changes like national child care, or health care that will help everyone adjust rather than just giving up on the progress because it has become too difficult for some, or not. I still can’t find the study.