The Honour

International Women's Day is on Monday, and to celebrate, our town had its annual IWD event to add the names of exemplary local women to its Honour Roll. In this photo, midwife Sally McCrae is accepting her honour. Under extreme political pressure, Sally fights, and walks the talk for women who choose to birth at home.

Later in the night, the keynote speaker from the International Women's Development Agency spoke. In her speech she pointed out that although women have so much to celebrate, we still have a long way to go until equality for all is reached. I agree. She read out some statistics including: only 3% of the CEOs in the ASX companies are women.

This percentage represents an enormous gender inequality and reminds us that although women may vote and live independent lives, we should remember who really holds the power.

I say, you can shove your corporate power up your ass. This statistic is not a measure of women's deficiency, but of their virtue.

The planet is in serious trouble because of greedy CEOs, so why would we want to participate in the corporate model? When decisions are made because of shareholder profits instead of forests and air and flowers and fish, why would we want to play with you? We don't value you what you value. We value what you cut down, what you poison, what you maim.

Some might argue that the system needs more women in order to turn it around, but I don't think that's true. What we need is a brand new systems approach; not one that is measured by a disembodied GDP, but one that functions within in a steady state economy.

I hope you have a great International Women's Day on Monday!

May our hearts be strong, and our vaginas, happy.

Growing Up With a Sister

From The Times:

Growing up with a sister makes people more balanced

Growing up with a sister makes people more optimistic, more ambitious and better balanced, psychologists have found.

A study of 571 families comprised of brothers, sisters, a mixture of both and only children found that having a sister in the home led to siblings of either sex scoring more highly on a range of standard tests for good mental health.

They were found to be better at coping with setbacks, more highly motivated, had more friends and a better social life than those who grew up with just brothers.

The rest here. 

(Thanks for the link, Becky!)

Because I Said So

As part of my research on stepmothering, I put the prefix step – stepmother, stepfamily, stepchild – into our library's online database and borrowed or reserved every title that I found.

I have just finished reading Because I Said So: 33 mothers write about children, sex, men, aging, faith, race and themselves.

Although not just about stepmothering, I decided to borrow it anyway in hope that there would be one personal essay by a mother with inherited kids. And there was – there was one, the sole reason this book came up in the database search.

According to www.stepfamily.org, over 50% of US families are remarried or re-coupled and 1300 new stepfamilies are formed every day. Considering the statistics, I was very surprised there was only 1 out of 33 essays written from the perspective of a stepparent.

Despite this prejudice or oversight or bias or whatever you'd like to call it, I really enjoyed this collection and would happily recommend it to anyone looking for a book that sticks its hands into the guts of life in the hope it will come out bloody. Some of the writers put a glove on first, some describe their hands, their chipped or manicured nails, their calloused fingers, their moisturised cuticles. Some mothers thrust their mitts right in, while one achingly describes her stump. Some of the mothers are solo, some are partnered, some are young, some old, some with babies, some with children older than me. Some write beautifully, others barely limp along. 

Although some of the pieces were more sentimental than others, and some engrossed me while others brought on the yawns, they all felt honest as each woman described the complexity, beauty, darkness, powerlessness and utter amazement of the daily expedition she pioneers.

All About the Kids

I once had a fight with someone I had known for a long time that caused the demise of our friendship. She was considering applying for a job in the marketing department of the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. I encouraged her, saying that when she gets in, the first thing she should do is get rid of the McDonald's that's attached to the building. She vehemently disagreed, saying the multinational donated a lot of money to medical research.

I have always been crap at maths. But I know what it means when I read that obesity rates in Australia have more than doubled over the past 20 years and that we have overtaken the US as the world's fattest nation.

In 2011, the Royal Children’s Hospital will be relocating, a date that also signals the end of the lease for the McDonald’s outlet there. Let's hope the hospital sees the figures – 26% of the Australian adult population are now obese (compared to an estimated 25% of Americans) – and doesn't renew the leasehold.

But but wait, there's definitely more! And I am not just talking about the centimeters around our waistlines. I am talking about the wondrous specimen of evolved humanity that is Premier John Brumby, who, we are told in today's paper, "...has not ruled out fast-food companies getting involved in school canteens or classroom programs in a revamp of the public education system."

Not only is Brumby deluded about the alleged benefits of GM crops, but he is also happy to turn a blind eye to the corporations who want to feed these so called foods to our children, denying companies would take advantage of their position to promote their commercial interests. 

"If you're asking if this is an opportunity for commercial promotion, it is not," he says. "This is where businesses and where industries want to do more for the children. It's not an opportunity for business to use this as an opportunity to lever their products."

Of course not, My Brumby. It's all about the kids.

My Dad & Ronald Hollowell

Happy birthday to my dad who today is celebrating his 61st birthday. Happy birthday to my dad who is one of the most ethical and dependable people I know. 

One of the qualities I inherited from him and my mum is the need to make sense of things in my own way.

If you have a look at the very bottom of this page, you'll see I have an Add Free Stats logo that when I click, takes me to a page where all my blog visitor info is listed: how many page visits, how many return visits, what browsers people are using, their IP address, what keywords they googled to find me etc.

And so, I was able to see that at 4.38pm yesterday, someone in St Louis visited the Land of Meg using a Netscape browser and that they googled the word Monsanto to find me. Following the thread of their IP address, I was able to discover that it was a man named Ronald Hollowell, who touristed this site from the Monsanto world HQ in Creve Coeur.

Hello Ron! If you like what you read on my blog, you might also like to check out my dad's blog. He, like me, or should I say, I, like him, am a proponent of human rights over shareholder profits, of the natural over the unnatural, of good over evil.

Want to know what other beliefs I champion, Ron? Come back and visit my blog tomorrow.

I'll be able to tell if you do.