Archives for 2010

Liza Frulla, a well-known Quebec politician and media personality, has good advice for her own younger self. I like this bit:

I am of the generation of women who put family life on the back burner to accommodate a career. The idea of work-family reconciliation didn’t exist when I was in my 20s. Today, without saying that everything is perfect, household responsibilities ‘are being shared more equitably. This means you can invest in your personal and family life now without fearing you will have to sacrifice all of your career ambitions.

Now there’s a resolution worth keeping. Happy New Year!

From The Guardian,

Isabelle Caro, a French actress and model whose emaciated image appeared in an Italian ad campaign and whose anorexia was followed by other sufferers of eating disorders, has died aged 28.

For at least the last decade, young girls in search of something to be a part of have been lulled into anorexic culture. I won’t link to any of the Pro-Ana/Pro-Mia websites, because medical studies have universally shown that simply viewing the sites can result in lower self-esteem.

They lure the impressionable and persuade them that the Pro-Ana community is providing caring and nurturing advice.

[…]

A study published in European Eating Disorders Review exposed healthy college girls with no history of eating disorders to 1.5 hours of pro-ED sites and they showed decreased caloric intake the week following their exposure.  Some participants admitted using techniques and tips they viewed on the sites and had “strong emotional reactions” up to three weeks after the study.

It’s easy to blame the fashion industry for these unhealthy ideals, promoting images of increasingly thin women, but we could just as easy blame the myth of “choice” for the epidemic, a product of a world view that sees the self as a decision one makes as an isolated individual.

What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity – and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour. (David Gauntlett, Media Gender and Identity, Routledge, 2002)

The Pro-Anorexic community claims the disease is a “lifestyle choice”, that this choice should be respected by the medical community and their family and friends.

Pro Anas who defend their anorexia not as a disorder or an affliction from which to recover, view it instead as an accomplishment of self control and a part of their identity and one that defines them to a very significant extent.

It’s difficult for me, as a women myself, to see others conned into the belief that something so terrible, menacing and deteriorating for them is something to be respected. Sound familiar?

Just had a listen to Joseph Ben-Ami on CFRA, here. If you have time, it’s worth listening to because Joseph correctly identifies that in the Morgentaler decision, the Supreme Court of Canada never said there is a right to abortion. They said it is up to Parliament to decide. (This came up again over the ruling on assisted human reproduction.)

One of the oft-repeated myths of the pro-choice camp is that the Supreme Court of Canada ruled there is a right to abortion. Since this is not true, I will take every opportunity to remind my fellow Canadians that they said no such thing!

Since abortion is currently socially acceptable, a “woman’s right,” an “easy, safe procedure,” bla bla bla, graphic photos are offensive, possibly doctored and must not be shown. But once there is a consensus that something is bad? Well then, bring on the graphics!

The federal government is announcing new, larger explicit warning photos on cigarette packages.

(This article wonders whether graphic photos might not decrease the number of abortions, something many who are pro-choice claim to want to do.)

It will come as no great surprise to regular readers that I am against forcing corporations to hire more women. This is the proposal of one Senator, Celine Hervieux-Payette. Meanwhile, Senator Linda Frum also opposes the measure.

What’s annoying is that Hervieux-Payette was in business for many years. One would think she’d have an idea about how business works as a result.

This long story is about surrogacy: After multiple rounds of failed fertility treatments, the woman decides to use two surrogate mothers at the same time, resulting in a son and a daughter. She calls them “twiblings,” I guess because they are not quite twins, and not just siblings.

How did we get here? Well, she explains:

When Michael’s [her husband’s] parents adopted his sister in the 1970s, there was an abundance of babies in the United States in need of homes, but the widespread use of birth control and abortion, among other factors, has caused the supply of infants available for adoption in the subsequent three decades to plummet to a fraction of what it was then.”

And for the rest of the article, I can’t shake the idea that surrogacy and desperate attempts to conceive are intimately connected to our abortion-friendly culture, which seems counter-intuitive, really. At one end you have someone who really wants life, and at the other, the person who kills. But in the end, it seems, control is the unifying factor: We don’t have babies when we don’t want to, but when we do–come hell or high water, we will have them. (Please note this is a statement about our culture at large, not individual women who really want children, or individual women who aborted. It’s a sense that we are, as a culture, on the wrong path when it comes to how we treat life.)

What better way to come back from a Christmas break than with a short article about what women want. This is a topic of great interest to many men, I’m sure, and possibly women, too. According to the author, a woman wants to be loved by a man she can admire. This is apparently controversial; alas, I don’t find his thesis offensive or politically incorrect in the slightest. Here’s my favourite part:

And what is it that women most admire in a man? From decades of talking to women on the radio and, of course, from simply living life, I have concluded that an admirable man is one who has three qualities: strength, integrity, ambition. All three are needed. Strength without integrity is machismo. Integrity without strength or without ambition makes a man a milquetoast. And ambition without integrity makes for a successful crook.

Well put. That said, what this woman wants right now is something much simpler: Otrivin, on tap, on the train alongside the complimentary wireless. Who knew a cold could change this much over the span of one relatively short train ride?

Last night I had dinner with a charitable group that helps support men who have been in jail, to ensure they stay on the straight and narrow. It was a church basement affair and my sister and I sat with four men we’d never met. It was almost impossible to tell who was a mentor and who was being mentored and amongst the four men I got to know, I wasn’t sure.

There is an element of internal tension for me in such gatherings. I don’t want to raise an awkward topic of discussion. So questions about work (if they don’t have any) and family (also if they don’t have any) are out.

I did at one point ask whether anyone had any nice Christmas memories from their childhood. Two of the men shook their head quite passionately, and another told how on St. Nicholas Day (December 6) he and his brother would leave their shoes outside their room and in the morning those shoes would be filled with a fruit and chocolate.

Later that evening, we sang some carols and concluded by standing in a big circle around the edge of the basement with candles. And one person lit the candle of the person standing next to them and so on, until it was a big, bright circle, while we sang Silent Night over and over. And then someone prayed for the whole group. It was quite moving, and this will now be part of a Christmas memory for me, as I hope it might be for those men who shook their heads in saying they didn’t have any Christmas memories from their youth.

Merry Christmas Eve.

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals. It’s a book about how pharmaceutical companies are involved in identifying/creating diseases in order to cure them. I haven’t read the book and therefore can’t recommend it, but I’m intrigued. Here we learn of the process with “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD), apparently a new disease for women who don’t feel like having sex:

The difficulty with FSD was that no one was really certain exactly what the condition was, and some people even questioned whether it existed at all. So part of Vivus’s role, Darby Stephens explained, was to sit down with the experts, the ‘thought leaders’ in the field, and work with them directly on developing this new dysfunction in order to be clearer about what it was.

Of course, those of us in the know, know that another little product of Big Pharma causes women to lose their interest in having sex…The birth control pill. They couldn’t come out and say that, though, so instead they’ll identify a new disease, and brand a new line of pharmaceuticals to fix it. Fan.Tas.Tic.

If that were my only takeaway from this column, I wouldn’t blog about it.  Still, I thought it was a catchy blog post title and I’m sticking with it. The column is actually a good assessment of the season–how we give, what we give and how our giving generally misses the point.

To this end, my family can look forward to the fact that come Christmas morning there will be no Volkswagens or diamonds, just a rendition of my favourite John Denver hits on guitar. Oh yes, I’ll sing along as well. What a treat.