Why have kids if you don't want to spend time with them?
‘All this never-ending talk of me time. I hear it everywhere,’ the writer complained, insisting that the fact that a crèche even needs to remind parents to spend time off with their kids is a sign that our need for ‘me time’ has gone overboard.
Down Syndrome, reproductive choices and the need for a social welfare state
How narrow can the perception of the perfect child get? It’s an interesting and important question from a philosophical point of view, but when asked in the context of the reproductive justice discourse it becomes puzzling at best – not least because monitoring pregnant people’s motivations is tricky.
Normalising hate speech – on John Berger, the Irish Times, and the recontextualisation of meanings
We are often fed a hands-off interpretation of our media outlets, told that involvement and meddling equals censoring, that no-platforming is discrimination, and that a laissez faire approach is always the most democratic. After all, the public reads what the public wants; as was pointed out, readers have the ability to make their own minds up. And it’s no coincidence, of course, that a media exposed to market forces adopts the language and logic of the market.
A feminist childcare model - and mammies doing it wrong
Such is the game of pitting mothers against each other: you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. This of course is nothing new; the stream of new studies seems never-ending, and media loves reporting on them – likely because new mothers never fail to fall for the clickbait, desperate for some sort of evidence that they’re doing something right in this most difficult job they’ve ever tried their hand at.
Rest in peace, invisible woman
“Killed in their pyjamas by father in frenzied attack – before mother-in-law found note,” reads another headline. The narrative, of course, is from the viewpoint of the murderer: she was his mother-in-law. She was the children’s grandmother, the murdered woman’s mother. The murdered woman, then, is most often referred to as the murderer’s wife – relevant only as what she is in relation to the man who killed her.
