Why are women just tagged onto what is right for men?

Yesterday I attended a day's workshop on Tibetan Healing Exercises. Rather than coming away from it feeling healed I felt frustrated and polluted. Strong word, but that is how it felt. During the morning we did some self massage techniques but as I looked around the room full of women (not a male participant in sight) and the single male leading the workshop without a thought that the anatomy of the participants in front of him were not the same has his, all the times where women were assumed to be the same as men flooded in. It left me feeling invisible, that all the women taking notes in front of him were invisible.

I did raise this issue during the Q & A time and the answer I got increased my frustration. Apparently women are to be treated the same as men without any recognition that the ancient text were written by and for men during a heavily patriarchal age. It felt like history was repeating itself again, just like when heart attack symptoms for men were assumed to be the same for same for women until some smart inquiring person decided to start asking if they really were and discovered that women have their own and different set of symptoms. Also women's moral development was assumed to be the same as men's until Carol Gilligan decided to question and check to see if that was so, and discovered that girls and women have their own set of standards and questions in terms of deciding what is right and wrong.

What bothered me most was when the male facilitator silenced a young female participant who seemed to know a lot about Tibetan healing. He said that she should go back and re-read the ancient texts because she was questioning the ancient male texts. Questioning these ancient male texts is good! They need to be questioned if anything is going to be change to include women! Women need to start questioning what we are told to be truth and start asking ourselves, "Whose truth is it?" "Does this truth include my voice, a feminine voice?" "How does this truth feel?" and "How does this truth empower me to be stronger within myself and speak my truth?" I think I'll be more careful when I sign up for a workshop because I can no longer stomach being in a place or workshops were men think that they know what women are like because they assume we are the same as them without asking, checking, wondering, questioning and inviting. 

UK is behind in its empowerment of women

Having visited Australia, New Zealand and the US during the summer I've come back rather frustrated about how far behind the UK is in acknowledging and understanding that it isn't going to flourish as a country if it doesn't start realising that half its population matter just as much as the male half. During the last 13 years of living in the UK I've noticed some improvement but now having witnessed how much New Zealand has caught up since leaving it 17 years ago, I'm wondering how well prepared the UK really is to recover economically without the direct and equal input of its females. Study after study has shown that when women are treated as having an equal voice, companies do better, the country does better, the population as a whole is better fed and cared for, and the environment isn't exploited. This isn't rocket science but somehow in the UK it is treated as if it is. As other women who are fighting for women's empowerment and equality know, the UK and especially the businesses and politics is rather deaf to these ideas.

Female Hating in Australia's Top Model Show

Hi - The Top Model television shows are pure female hating!!!! It is time that we started to react against them. In Australia, one of the top model contestants was kicked off the show because she was "too big". She was a size 8 and her weight to height ratio put her at the bottom of the healthy range. As I looked at her on the news I couldn't understand what was "too big" about her.

This kind of message is pure female hating. They pit very young girls against each other and measure their worth and value by how they look, which obviously includes how skinny they look, and they market this show to equally young girls, teaching them to judge their worth by how they look.

During the same week on the news they interviewed Elle McPherson who had just been awarded to top spot in England's Top Model show. As they celebrated her Australian heritage, they also pitted all other women against her, making us compare ourselves with her, making her a role model that we should all aspire to and look like, without mentioning a single utterance that a body like that requires a serious time and money investment. My guess is that she spends far more time on maintaining her body than I do on writing my next book. And she certainly spends far more money. Her body is her trade mark, as she admitted, so it that needs to be maintained at all cost. How can anyone compete with that? Why should any of us want to compete with that? Making women feel inadequate against a woman who uses her body as her trade mark is pure female hatred!

Don't fit in too much because it doesn't work!

Hello - I haven't been blogging for a while because I've been writing my next book. It's going extremely well. I'm not a multi-tasker - I like to focus on one thing at a time. Today I wanted to look up and write a blog and say that I have a title and a very good introduction! I'm not going to tell anyone as yet because I don't like to jinx it. To any writer out there I would suggest you keep your writing very close to your chest until you are ready to let it out into the world. Show it only to those whose opinion you trust and  who will hold your writing voice with tender respect.

I wanted to write about how lately I've learnt an important lesson - fitting in with other people doesn't work - it only leaves you invisible and creating a normal that then becomes extremely difficult to change. Just like with businesswomen who give their time and skills away for free who then have a difficult time getting paid because they have set a normal, I without realising it, set a normal in a few situations where I did too much fitting in and fitting around without voicing my needs. I didn't realise that my bending-over-backwards would be not be acknowledged because it had become normal. 

Recently I tried to speak what I need and it wasn't welcomed. At first I was angry and shocked at how invisible my support had been and then I thought sod it - this is ridiculous, I need to return my gaze to within myself and stick to what is right and best for me and in the future be far more verbal and sure about boundaries and where an okay give and take is. I have noticed that as a woman and a woman who loves to empower other women, I hit against the expectation, most often from other women, that I don't have any needs and that my needs are their needs. Though this is frustrating, it's all part of the same issue - women's needs are invisible, as I write about in "The Silent Female Scream".

And over the last months I have realised that I still have some work to do myself! 

Why have intelligent women who defied convention been silenced from the pages of history?

I have just watched the BBC production of the Secret Diaries of Anne Lister. I recommend that you watch it because it finally gives you a woman who did what we do in our power circles, lived life on her terms. I agree with Sue Perkins, the narrator, that it is sad that bright, capable, strong, independent women have been wiped from the pages of history. Jack Holland's book "Misogyny" is full of independent women being killed just because they didn't do what women were expected to do during their day. And this is still happening. I feel that my struggles in publishing "The Silent Female Scream" is part of the "conspiracy of silence" as Sue Perkins put it. Women who write about, speak about, and do it their way, regardless of what others think get silenced, and if they scream in protest, they get silenced even further. During Anne Lister's day they would've been locked up in an asylum or in the attic away from society.  Today they get guilt tripped or just ignored.

Claim some time to watch this remarkable woman's story and draw from her energy of entitlement to live life your way!

We need to debate Oliver James's book on Mothering

Hello Everyone - I am making an official call to debate Oliver James's book on Mothering that is coming out today I think. I'm going to read it and we need to talk about it, debate it, because it is time the mothering got taken from behind the curtain and debated in a new light - one that views mothers as women, as people, with rights and lives of their own, and one that views fathers as parents, with just as much responsibility for children as mothers do. Who's with me?

Mother Blaming is back and its recruited Oliver James

Well I am clearly a BAD MOTHER judging from Oliver James's new book "How Not to F*** Them UP"! (Article in The Times, 22/5/10) I had time out for my preschool children, the equivalent of the naughty step which is apparently one of the three big no nos. I also had a strict sleep routine, another way to F*** them up apparently. I didn't put them in nursery, except for one morning a week. Does that count? Am I let off? I guess pleading that I would've gone mad without time out and sleep is futile!!?? I need sleep in order to function!! and the time out was more for me than for them.

I despair that the backlash against mothers claiming their needs, claiming their lives, claiming equal parenting responsibilities is back with a vengeance. Please please tell anyone who reads Oliver James's new book to read The Silent Female Scream. This is not a plug for my book, more a scream in the dark that is frustrated that too much media attention, visibility and credentials are given to the voices that think that its okay to tell mothers that they are the primary nurturers and that they still should judge themselves again the "Good Mother" test. Have we gone back to the 1960's?