Termination or abortion - it's all about choice

There’s a lot of talk, yet again, in Ireland about TFMR – termination for medical reasons. People who have had the misfortune of having to go through this experience are writing blog posts and articles campaigning for new, proper legislation in Ireland to make the procedure legal, and opinion writers are producing powerful pieces in response to Ireland’s human rights record review in Geneva, begging for abortion to become a choice for all women, or if not that, at least in the case of TFMR.

There is no limit to my sympathy for those who have had to travel to another country in order to give birth to a baby that would never survive outside the womb, told by the powers that be that said horrifying experience would make them a criminal. I went through this while under the care of the NHS in the UK, and I think I would’ve burst out laughing if somebody had told me, at 21 weeks gestation, to keep walking around looking pregnant and answering well-intended questions about the due date, waiting for our baby to die. It is such a barbaric thing to ask of anyone that it seems absolutely ridiculous.

Yet: while I hated the word abortion, while I wanted everyone to know that we really didn’t have a choice, that we had planned the pregnancy and already loved this baby, this debate pains me. Campaigners are making the point so very clear: this is not an abortion; this is not about aborting an unwanted baby. They’re saying that if we can’t grant all women the right to choose, then we must at least grant it to these poor women – because this is different.

But is it different? Explain the difference to the woman forced to carry, give birth to and look after a baby she isn’t ready or able for.

This is only different if we don’t believe in choice, if we are happy to deny women the right to make decisions about their own bodies, if we accept that there is a limit to the amount of responsibility a woman is capable of carrying. If we legislate based on narrowly-defined criteria, suggesting that abortion is murder and criminal unless there is foolproof evidence that the baby is indeed already with certainty destined to die, we are still calling the shots, depriving women of bodily autonomy. In essence: we know better; they should do what they’re told.

It doesn’t matter how mind-numbingly nightmarish that experience was and how much I feel for every other couple that has the experience of an ultrasound scan turned into the most nerve-wracking, scary thing in the world; just because I can sympathise with them, that’s not to say that the decision of those whose experience I haven’t shared is any more straight-forward. We have to accept that if we value a woman’s right to make decisions about her body, that right has to last the whole way – and we have to trust her to be able to carry the responsibility for that decision, whatever that may be.

Some say that it’s a step-by-step process: if we legislate for TFMR now, people will get used to the idea, and some day, the rest will follow. I think, sadly, that those are the words of people who have given up on the possibility of Ireland ever legislating to support and empower women, instead settling for the second best. That’s a fight for sympathy and understanding – not choice. But a rhetoric that further demonises the informed, personal choice of having an abortion is not a step forward – it only plays into the hands of the pro-lifers, cementing the status quo.

It's your own fault you feel shit, ladies

‘Women are their own worst beauty critics,’ says Dove in the latest instalment of its Real Beauty campaign. In other words, women are those whose insecurities are most effectively exploited by an industry that unashamedly rips apart women’s looks in general and bodies in particular every chance it gets. Shocker.

Luckily, Dove is here to show women that they are more traditionally beautiful than they think. How? An experiment that sees an FBI artist sketch the faces of women he hasn’t met based on descriptions by themselves and people they meet respectively demonstrates that the drawings based on strangers’ accounts result in skinnier women with lighter hair, straighter noses, fewer moles and less droopy chins.

The lesson? ‘You are more beautiful than you think!’

Or:

1. How you look IS important.

2. It’s your own fault that you feel shit. Relax and stop being so hard on yourself and maybe you’ll be happy.

3. Beauty is what it always was: see, you’re not as fat as you thought you were, and your eyebrows are actually very well-formed, and your lips could almost be described as full and sexy!

I respect Dove for trying, I really do. The problem is that a beauty product manufacturer depends on its audience wanting to be beautiful. And try as it might to convey that beauty comes from within, that’s not where it’s going to make its money – and, actually, it keeps failing miserably, every single time.

LOVELY, said a choir of clued-in, sensible, politically-conscious women on Twitter, and I died a little inside. ‘Dove is committed to building positive self-esteem and inspiring all women and girls to reach their full potential,’ reads the copy on the campaign site. It’s bullshit. Don’t buy it, girls. They’re part of an industry that makes money off your sense of inadequacy, and no matter how beautiful you are, they’ll keep doing it.

Women are their own worst beauty critics – mad, eh? No, not remotely. There’s nothing mad or surprising or shocking about the fact that people who are bombarded day in and day out with images creating an unobtainable ideal become experts at finding and focusing on their own flaws. It’s no wonder if, in a world where modelling agencies find their future stars outside anorexia clinics, women start to become both paranoid and neurotic.

I won’t judge anyone with an interest in beauty, but let’s not pretend it’s anything but shallow. And Dove, don’t you dare suggest that the hatred comes from within. It’s being handed down to us from a never-ending supply, sustained by companies just like you.

Angry, impolite, shrill-sounding, hysterical women

Calm down, dear. David Cameron was undeniably patronising towards female MP Angela Eagle, but there’s more to that phrase than just superiority and arrogance. I’ve done a lot of thinking lately about my own tone, particularly on online platforms like Twitter, wondering if I should indeed calm down. I’m furious with the Tories over the cuts; I’m sick to death of the widespread sexism in media; I tell brands who cement old-fashioned gender stereotypes to piss off; yes, I’m pretty sure that if you ask any of my followers on Twitter, they’ll say if not that I need to calm down then at least that I seem pretty angry a lot of the time.

So I thought to myself that maybe I should take a chill pill. Maybe this is not how deliberative politics should work, after all. Michael Kelly of The Irish Catholic certainly finds the anger a bit much: people should be able to disagree on various issues without the debate getting out of hand, he insists. We must be polite.

There you go, I thought, an Irish Catholic who has more sense than I do – I definitely need to calm the hell down. So far so good. But Kelly uses the word ‘calm’, too. Senator Ivana Bacik claimed during a hearing that the Catholic Church’s anti-abortion stance was based on sheer hatred of women, an opinion which, according to Kelly, wasn’t expressed quite calmly enough:

‘Calm? Hardly. … A gentleman is one, the old saying goes, who can disagree without being disagreeable. The same surely applies for ladies. Shrill caricatures have no place in mature debates.’

See, I don’t think this is about civilised debate.

‘Many Irish people passionately believe that gay couples ought to be allowed to get married, many others believe that marriage should be a unique institution between a man and a woman. This should be a point that people of good faith can legitimately disagree about. … Sadly, however, it usually descends into name-calling and charges of homophobia.’

This is a bit like the neoliberals who don’t like to be called neoliberal, not because they aren’t, but because the word is sometimes used in an accusatory manner. You know, thinking you have the right to tell someone what they can or can’t do simply because they’re gay is homophobic, at least in my vocabulary. Calling a spade a spade is not name-calling.

But when Cameron tells Eagle to calm down and Kelly refers to Bacik’s voice as shrill, they consciously or subconsciously evoke the idea of female hysteria. What Kelly fails to understand is that the abortion debate simply cannot be polite and civilised – that’s the nature of the debate – and this is the case with most women’s rights issues. We can disagree politely for all eternity, but politeness is not – I’m sorry, Caitlin Moran – what gave women the right to vote. Asking politely is not what changed this shocking situation in the 1970s in Ireland.

‘Any woman trying to speak about [sexting] will be greeted with a volley of “you’re just jealous as no one wants a photo of your fanny”,’ as Grace Dent put it. Or you’re not polite enough. Or you need to calm down. Or your voice is starting to sound a bit shrill. Or you’re just hysterical and need a good seeing to. ‘Too often in our political discourse reasonable voices are shouted down by shrill opponents. It’s not a sign of maturity when some voices are silenced or bullied out of the public sphere,’ says Kelly. Or, maybe, voices become shrill, loud and angry in a discourse that keeps silencing them. Because you can say a lot of things about the climate for the current abortion debate in Ireland, but you can’t say that the conservative, anti-choice voice is being bullied by a bunch of progressives in a liberal left-wing hegemony. You can try, but with only 15% women in the Dáil and a constitution that still talks about women’s duties in the home, as a middle-aged white man you’ll only sound pathetic at best. When one group starts telling another to calm down, you can be pretty sure that they’re not in any major rush to challenge the status quo.

So am I angry? No, I’m well beyond angry, and no, I won’t calm down. I’ll calm down and be polite when women are treated as equals – in political debate and in society as a whole. Until then, I’ll be as shrill as I want to be.

Pretty in pink and cool dudes in blue

‘Pretty in pink’ and ‘Cool dudes in blue’ read two of the three headlines in my first ever mailout from Mamas & Papas. High on excitement about becoming a parent, I had somehow gone and allowed myself to hope that it wouldn’t be like this, that things really can’t be quite as bad as they seem. The mailout, then, came like a slap in the face of my ideas about gender-neutral parenting, and I tweeted Mamas & Papas and told them to grow up and piss off. Needless to say, they didn’t respond.

A friend did respond, though, saying something along the lines of ‘no shit, they’re still playing that stupid colour game’. No shit. And sure, it is hilarious that in 2012 you still can’t go to a kids’ clothes shop without being told that it’s great that you know that it’s a boy so that you can stock up on blues and forget all about the yellows and other in-betweens. It’s laughable that Mothercare, despite having a non-gendered newborn tab in their drop-down menu for baby clothes, feel the need to add a caption below the picture of babygros in pink saying ‘for girls’ – just to make sure you don’t misunderstand and, god forbid, buy pink clothes for your unborn son. But it’s not about the colours, really, is it? I’d happily dress my baby boy in head-to-toe blues, even if it happens to be one of my least favourite colours. Frankly, I think good parenting is about much more than fashion.

But what’s in a colour? ‘Pretty in pink’ and ‘Cool dudes in blue,’ read the headlines. And no, it wasn’t the colours per se that made me explode in a tweet. The colours, of course, are just signifiers for gender stereotypes and the expectations we put on little girls and boys of what they should grow up to be. Dress your girl in pink as much as you like: it’s not until you start telling her how pretty she is that you really start to tell her what matters. When your son is labelled as ‘tough,’ it’s no longer about the colour of his t-shirt. And as Mamas & Papas describe your daughter as ‘precious’ and your little boy’s jeans as ‘durable,’ we’ve gone way beyond fashion as simply a visual experience.

Last year, it was discovered that Lindex, a big Swedish high street chain, produced clothes for boys that were bigger than the same size clothes for girls, despite using ‘centilong,’ a size directly related to the height of the child in centimetres. The rationale, a Lindex staff member explained, was that boys like to mess around more and need loose-fitted clothes. In other words, parents can’t be trusted to know their own children and decide how tight-fitted clothes they need; instead, a boy centimetre was made bigger than a girl centimetre. Pure logic.

So boys need durable, loose-fitted clothes, because they mess around; softer fabrics will tear, and tighter clothes will be restrictive. Girls, the implication becomes, are calm and quiet. And as a friend warned us that boys can be a handful as toddlers, more so than girls, I realised that this is a widespread preconception.

I’ve been told countless times since having my son that boys are more ‘hard work’ than girls, and that may be true – I really don’t know, and frankly I don’t care. I may be of the belief that we are pretty good at living up to society’s expectations of us, and that even kids become a lot like what people tell them they should be, but the thing is that even if I’m wrong, even if the majority of boys are born louder, messier and more active than girls, there will always be exceptions. There will be bold, lively girls and calm, quiet boys – so why the need to tell them to change, to presume that deep down they’re not naturally like that? Why the need to make them feel inadequate only because of their gender?

I don’t know what happens when we tell boys that they are tough and cool, but I can guess. I don’t know how girls respond to being complimented on their looks, but research on body image tells a tale. ‘Pretty in pink’ and ‘Cool dudes in blue’? Grow up and piss off, Mamas & Papas.

Let's talk about having it all

There’s a debate on twitter at the moment around the hashtag #havingitall: about the women who want to have it all, and about whether or not they can.

It’s funny how the having-it-all discussion gets stuck at greedy, career-hungry women who are stupid enough to think that they can do well professionally, lead a good life, and have a family at the same time. No one talks about the greedy, career-hungry men who are stupid enough to think the same thing. And, much more annoyingly, no one gets that, really, the discussion we should be having is about choice as opposed to greed.

Can women really have it all?, people ask. How about we change that to: Why can’t women choose from it all? Or, even better: Who’s allowed to choose what they have?

Arguing for women’s right to the opportunity to create a rewarding career for themselves while also having a family, or for men’s right to decent paternity leave and the opportunity to be a real presence in their children’s lives, is not the same as advocating a rat race kind of lifestyle where more and faster are better. Zen and mindfulness are popular enough at the moment for me to guess that most people have begun to think that less is more. You could almost say that most people probably don’t even want to have it all.

What we should be talking about is how to create a society in which every individual and family can choose for themselves. We should enable careerists to climb the ladder they want to climb and family people to spend a lot of time with their family, whether they’re men or women, while making sure that it’s actually possible to keep a job and do it well without having to neglect your children while you’re at it – if that happens to be what you want, that is.

Let’s not kid ourselves: the way things stand, not even men have that much freedom.

Is choice still choice with strings attached?

According to the documentary The Right Child [Det rätta barnet], which was broadcast on Swedish television recently, a prenatal screening programme in Denmark has started a trend which, if it continues, will lead to no more babies being born with Down’s syndrome. With more advanced screening technology, more and more parents are choosing to terminate pregnancies when the condition is diagnosed.

In a leader editorial about the documentary, Hanne Kjöller raises her concerns for the kind of society prenatal diagnostic testing creates. Highlighting that she is a pro-choice advocate, she asks what will happen when screening programmes that can detect autism in foetuses are introduced. How narrow can the perception of the perfect child get?

Kjöller’s problem is in the qualifier. She insists that she is pro-choice, but the choice, it seems, is only really valid under certain circumstances – if you choose to have an abortion, your choice must be justified using principles acceptable to intellectuals like Kjöller. “I want the decision to be the parents’,” she maintains, continuing: “But I want everyone who stands before the decision – about testing or no testing, and about abortion or no abortion – to see that the choice in the long-run is also about the kind of society we want.” Now that’s what I call choice with strings attached.

I feel Kjöller’s pain. Of course it’s about what kind of society we want, and by making abortion services readily available we open up choice to people whose decisions we can’t control. It’s as scary as democracy, really. I used to be keen on the “I’m whole-heartedly pro-choice, but…” phrase too. Until I ended up in the situation where the sonographer turned away the screen and got that look on her face. It would be easy for me to say that in our situation, it wasn’t about choice; we didn’t have one. But that would be to dodge a difficult conversation.

See, I have a problem with Kjöller’s argument, and my problem, too, is in the qualifier. She is pro-choice, but only on the condition that she retains the right to judge those taking advantage of that choice. She is pro-choice, but she reserves the right to blame parents making that choice for creating a narrow-minded, judgemental world. Truth be told, she is not really pro-choice at all, because she is not prepared to be open-minded enough to take the consequences.

It should be said, of course, that Kjöller’s reservations reside primarily within the prenatal diagnostic testing realm and not within that of abortion services. Naturally, if parents don’t know whether their babies are healthy or not, the choices they make are completely blind to unjustifiable justifiers, and as such, their decisions can be considered pure and innocent. But modern technology doesn’t allow for an opaque veil of ignorance, so where do we draw the line? And, really, aren’t there plenty of other ethically questionable justifiers? How, for example, do we feel about termination for convenience? Whose moral compass gets to decide when we’ve crossed the line? Kjöller’s?

The abortion debate is difficult for a reason, and yes, it has to be nuanced. But surely the basic principle of choice (though I must reiterate that the parents facing it are unlikely to feel like they’ve got one) is based on the belief that only the parents themselves know whether or not they are ready and able to be parents? I highly doubt that giving them the right to make that call only once it has been proven that their baby is 100% healthy, or only if they can assure us that they are completely and utterly ignorant in regards to their baby’s health, simply because we have agreed that aborting a baby with a chromosomal abnormality would be evil, would somehow lead to a more open-minded society.

It has been said that the personal is political, and that is true. This is why we legislate around these issues. But Kjöller’s definition of choice, making it into an ethical stance like any political decision, is problematic in this situation; when the toughest of decisions becomes more personal than political and the rest of society stands there watching with its politically correct and ethically romanticised fists in the air, open-mindedness goes out the window.

It’s not easy, but you can’t have it both ways. After all, choice isn’t really choice if it’s conditional. The same way that Kjöller finds some abortion qualifiers problematic, I find that pro-choice qualifiers of any kind sit quite uncomfortably alongside the context within which the fight for universal abortion rights has been and is being fought. No, I don’t want to live in a society where the perception of what is normal gets narrower by the day either. But that doesn’t mean that I’m prepared to sign up for one where even pro-choice campaigners sneer at the choices made by women who simply couldn’t cope.

[All Swedish-to-English translations are my own.]

A new opium for the masses

Three children die, because they don’t get the medicine they need. Three children die, but not because there is no medicine and their illness can’t be cured. Three children die in vain, because their father, a religious pastor, chooses not to bring his children to the doctor but to stay at home and pray.

“Prayer is,” Swedish blogger Lisa Magnusson writes, “humility, submission. But its consequence is that all suffering is, if not self-inflicted, at least something that can be rectified by believing enough and praying sincerely enough” [my translation].

Reading this, it hit me: absurd as this situation seems to many of us, it is all too familiar to a system in which we, as consumers, are ourselves omnipotent, and we, as consumers, have only ourselves to blame when the suffering strikes. Because with choice as the all-pervasive solution to all problems, who can we blame other than the person who chose wrongly?

Zygmunt Bauman writes that our fears have been privatised: in the neo-liberal world, individual problems and risks never add up to collective matters. We stop asking for help, start feeling insecure, and assume responsibility for our misery. “There is no such thing as society,” Margaret Thatcher famously said.

Perhaps neo-liberalism isn’t all that different from older forms of Christianity, lingering still today in some parts of the world, which preach about original sin and forgiveness. Perhaps, in an increasingly secular world, neo-liberalism is our new religion, an opium for the masses, the fear of a strict, condemning god replaced by the fear of individual failure.

We laugh at the thought of prayer as a substitute for scientifically-proven medication. Why is no one laughing at the idea of the hero-like, omnipotent, self-sufficient consumer in place of community and solidarity?

The norm, the exception, and a fragile bridge

Is Dame Helen Mirren an actor or an actress? In the Guardian, she’s an actor, and a recent article on the subject explains why. While readers wondered why the profession of acting wouldn’t deserve the same kind of distinction between male and female as titles such as duchess and duke, the style guide editor explained: “We described Harriet Walter as one of our greatest actors. Calling her one of our greatest actresses is not the same thing at all.”

This is of course something he’s put a lot of thought into, and I’m sure there’s fine egalitarian reasoning behind his decision. The irony is that through his statement he pinpoints exactly why this is complex: if saying that someone is one of our greatest actors seems like more of an all-encompassing compliment than suggesting that they’re one of our greatest actresses, we suggest that the latter is the exception, that one can be our greatest actress without for that matter necessarily competing with male actors at all.

In a recent episode of Stephen Fry’s new linguistics show, Planet Word, he pondered how our linguistic identity affects our world view, and a guest on the show explained how the word for ‘bridge’ carries different qualities in different languages. Germans, for example, are more likely to describe a bridge as beautiful, slender, even fragile, while Spanish people tend to talk about bridges as tall, strong, and solid. Why? Because in German, the word (die Brücke) is feminine, while in Spanish it (el puente) is masculine. Further to making me want to avoid German bridges, this says a lot about our psyche. Just think about the implications of our linguistic make-up for our world view!

There is of course nothing wrong with distinguishing between traditionally feminine and masculine, and I doubt anyone would suggest that we should get rid of these distinctions altogether. What this highlights, though, is that these traditional values and properties are deeply ingrained in our culture, and if we are likely to judge a bridge by them, we are probably very likely to do the same with people. Moreover, the fact that there’s always a norm means that there’s always an exception. That the norm is more often feminine in regards to professions to do with care, physical weakness, childcare and tidying won’t come as a surprise to anyone, and I’ve argued the case for dentists and surgeons before.

I would never dream of criticising a bipolar homosexual (that’s Mr. Fry) for a lack of understanding for those deviating from the norm. In fact, I’m not trying to criticise anyone here: expressing cultural heritage through the use of our dear language is not only a necessary exercise, but one can prove very interesting. I am merely hoping to act as a spotlight on that cultural heritage. And I’m hoping that the next time you cross a German bridge, you will think about this whole thing with masculine and feminine, norm and exception, once and for all.

The token woman and the panel show

Four episodes of this season’s BBC1 panel show Would I Lie To You have been broadcast so far, and they all had one thing in common: a token woman.

Please forgive me. I don’t mean to underestimate the value these female guests bring to the show, or suggest that they don’t have what it takes to join forces with the regulars who take up a majority of the panel show air time available today (and there’s plenty). In fact, I’ve avoided writing about this simply not to do that, not to make them into a token, a gender and a box ticked. Until I read Elin Grelsson’s column on the topic, that is.

Grelsson writes about the artist Marie Capaldis, whose paintings were displayed at the Gothenburg museum of art alongside a sign explaining that the museum since 2005 has a gender awareness policy which is taken into account when art is purchased.

Gender perspective? Well done. But in describing a woman’s art while boasting about the institution’s gender awareness policy, all they do is highlight the fact that the male artist is still the norm, completely undermining Capaldis’s work.

“How can you promote marginalised groups without making them into exceptions, which in the long run only reinforces the norm?” asks Grelsson. I think the answer is that it’s incredibly difficult, and this explains very well my reaction to the Would I Lie To You trend.

Friends who work in the industry will say that it’s not due to lack of effort. The few successful female comedians around are approached indeed – but they don’t want to take part. You can’t get women on the panel shows, goes the explanation.

I think they’re telling the truth, but I don’t think it’s good enough. When you week in and week out invite a relatively unknown female comedian to take part in a show with a male presenter, two male team captains and three famous male guests, you’re merely ticking a box, while the culture that stopped other female celebrities from accepting the offer remains as strong as ever.

All the token woman does is clear the conscience of production companies that should be asking themselves where it all went wrong.

How the predictable can be sad

Who would have thought that some sympathy would face so much criticism?

When Amy Winehouse died on Saturday, we didn’t just lose one of the greatest singers of our time. Her parents lost a daughter, many lost a friend. Yet, most of Amy’s obituaries, along with endless angry tweets and facebook updates, were preoccupied by pondering the apparently surprising scenario that her death left thousands if not millions of people shocked, sad, almost speechless. Amy’s destructive lifestyle had been well-documented by the media: we shouldn’t be surprised, so we shouldn’t be sad.

As if the death of a young person could ever really be comprehensibly predictable, because of addictions or depressions or self harm or long lists of pills you don’t even know the names of. I knew back in 2006 that my sister was thinking about killing herself, because she told me. Still, when she did, it shocked me to the core. Because no matter how sick you are, how many demons you’re struggling with, the unthinkable remains unthinkable.

As if the predictable can’t be sad; as if fact equals acceptance. Would you have said the same thing to me the day before I went in to give birth to my fatally ill son? I knew that he wouldn’t survive, but that never stopped me from mourning the loss of my firstborn.

But Amy was just a drug addict. She brought it on herself. (Or, as someone said on facebook, “I couldn’t give a shit about Amy Winehouse. She was an idiot and she brought it on herself, so zero sympathy.”)

Focus on Norway. Now that’s a tragedy. (Yes, many people were seriously offended by the amount of attention given to the death of the troubled singer, because they felt that it should have been over-shadowed by the much more devastating events in Norway.)

As if an addict doesn’t deserve being paid tribute to. As if losing a miserable, self-destructive daughter would somehow be easier than losing one who is happy, generous, blissfully unaware of what’s to come. As if it’s a competition and you have to choose: pick no more than one terrible incident at any one time, and grieve that. And don’t you dare mention that mess of a drug addict called Amy.

People can be as cynical as they like about it all and say that sad things happen all the time. I’m aware of that, and I don’t mind them taking the piss out of people like me, who are shocked again and again by bad news. I don’t even mind if they feel the need to compare and say that Norway is worse – because even if I don’t see how comparing loss is possible or even appropriate, I understand that it comes from fear and not ignorance: it was a deliberate attack on democracy; many victims were innocent teenagers; and, that notion that’s so hard to digest – that they were all just normal, sane people, just like us.

What bothers me is the narrow-minded view of addiction: the idea that a girl who goes from eating disorders to self harm and addiction only has herself to blame and that she’s somehow worth less than other people, in extreme cases the opinion that she actually deserves to die. It makes me feel physically sick that there are people in my online network who genuinely don’t understand that self harm and addiction are more complicated than the thing we call choice. It’s not only a heartless stance, but one that says a lot about the society we live in.

The death of a 27-year-old woman is a sad thing no matter how predictable you insist that it was. The death of Amy Winehouse was perhaps particularly sad, because of the hostility and ignorance it exposed in us.

What the royal wedding taught us

1. You are what you wear – if you’re a woman

If I hear one more fashion editor’s orgasmic praise of the stupidly expensive creation of some ‘it’ designer of the moment, or see another picture of a ridiculous headpiece that does nothing but hinder its owner from entering a building with normal doors (as if that would ever happen on the day of a royal wedding), I think I might throw up. Seriously. The stupidity of one commentator’s outbursts fades in comparison to another’s, and the scrutiny of the bodies and dress senses of the women who were invited to today’s big event seemed endless. Was anyone betting like crazy on what colour suit Prince Charles would wear or what stylist would get the honour of doing Harry’s hair? Did anyone really care that Nick Clegg looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks?

2. A veil is a veil is a veil

As the burqa ban in France is dubbed “a victory for tolerance” on the basis that covering one’s face is an act against liberal values and openness regardless of its motivation, and similar laws are considered in other European countries on grounds of equality and women’s rights, Kate covers her face with a silk ivory-tulle veil as her father walks her up the aisle. Not as an act against openness or because she needs it to protect her, nor because her future husband refuses to share her beauty with the world, but maybe to invoke a sense of purity and innocence, or perhaps simply because of tradition. But as she is handed over to the prince and her veil is lifted, rightly or wrongly, the fact that a veil is a veil becomes painfully clear; us westerners suddenly seem hypocritical at best, and I can’t help but wonder: what’s behind the veil, when does it stop being beautiful and start being controlling, and who am I to decide what another woman can or can’t wear?

3. The monarchy, along with the wider aristocracy and the church, is patriarchal through and through

The royal wedding was like a satire of something from the early 1900s, where women are good for nothing but pleasing the eye. While no one will be surprised that The Very Reverend and his buddies were all male, I was surprised and disappointed – perhaps naively so – by the fact that not one single woman bar Kate’s sister, who mainly got to run around like a servant, got to participate in the ceremony in an active way. The interiors were thought out by a male designer, the music was provided by a boys’ choir, and the wedding song was composed by a man. And as much as I hate to sully the fairytale tradition of a father walking his daughter down the aisle to hand her over to the new man in her life, the restrictive, almost aggressive way in which this was done as Kath’s father lifted her hand and put it into the priest’s, whereby he grabbed it and lifted it across to put it firmly in Will’s, made me wonder why she bothered at all to remove the line where she would vow to obey her husband forever.

4. Britain’s class system is as strong and present as ever

That a well-educated woman who went to a private boarding school and whose parents are successful business owners is repeatedly referred to as a “commoner” is just one of many signs of how protective the aristocracy is of its status, but as millions of Britons of different backgrounds clearly think that it’s perfectly normal to watch these two random people get married, spending billions of tax payers’ pounds, I’m forced to admit that it’s not just the well-off themselves who seem keen to preserve status quo.Some people have eagerly suggested that Kate, the commoner that she is, will change the image of the royal family forever. I wouldn’t hold my breath. As Guardian writer Amanda Marcotte was quoted to have said, “I’m glad that the royal family has caught up to the 1920s. I look forward to an exciting new future when the women start wearing pants and the men learn how to hold infants.”

Baby on board - shout it from the rooftops!

“I like to think I’m a fairly tolerant person. I’m not, obviously, but I still like to think it. In truth, as I get older the list of things that disproportionately annoy me gets longer. Grammatical errors. Tourists who walk too slowly down busy London thoroughfares. Pregnant women who wear “Baby on board” badges when travelling on public transport. That kind of thing.”

I read the first paragraph of Elizabeth Day’s column in The Observer last weekend and thought: I like her; she’s a bit like me. Because not only am I a notorious grammar stickler, but I used to think exactly that – in fact, I still feel a bit like that – about those stupid badges.

Still today, I refuse to wear one. Despite finding out that the back pain and exhaustion that comes with pregnancy can turn up way ahead of the neat little bump, nine weeks on from being diagnosed with pelvic girdle pain and spending a week completely housebound with pain, I still don’t wear one.

What is it that the ‘Baby on board’ badge says that’s so offensive? Does it communicate weakness? Is it something about the blatantly ticking biological clock that our career-minded society can’t stomach?

A nice, middle-aged lady stood up as I got on the tube the other day and gave me her seat. Then she smiled and said, “You should get one of those badges. You’re only very tiny, and people can’t tell.” I’m sure it came from a good place, yet I felt attacked. After all, she clearly could tell, couldn’t she?

“You’re only very tiny,” what does that mean? Is it a compliment, meaning that I’m skinny (in which case it’s a lie)? Does it mean I don’t actually look that pregnant after all (in which case it feels a bit like a slap in the face)? The bump will bloody grow, won’t it? And, as much as I appreciated her giving me her seat, who is she to decide whether or not I choose to publicise my current state in order to get comfortable during my commute, and how I choose to do so? Is it really that embarrassingly awkward for people to stare at my belly for a few seconds to try to figure out what’s really going on, and if so, is that my fault? I’m not moaning, am I? Or am I ruining the rush-hour peace with my sheer presence?

Of course she’s got a point. Elizabeth Day may be a fantastic writer with plenty of self-awareness and an ability to laugh at herself, but at the end of the day it’s not the middle-aged woman on the tube who is pathetic for thinking that a simple badge might help. Maybe I should learn to laugh at myself too, and get over what seems like nothing but a superwoman complex.

(By the way, a clearly blind woman with a walking stick got on the bus this morning. I waited for a second, but no one, not a single person, gave up their seat. So I got up. You know, I’m only very tiny, after all. But what do they want from her? A “Watch out! Blind person!” badge?)