Feminist Pub 15: The Bluestocking hangs up its, err, stocking and hopes for a chatty Christmas and a Feminist New Year

[YonicSleighdriver]

Festive greetings!

This is the 15th incarnation of the Pub and is meant as a place to drop by with random thoughts and meandering chats, on feminist or other related themes. Anything you want to mull over but not necessarily start a thread about. Alternatively, get some booze and snacks and hang out! Lurkers, newbies and oldbies welcome.

We have a pub goat, a feminist cannon for firing at crazy sexists and we cheer each other up when patriarchy grinds us down...

Last pub drinkie linkie:

Pub 14

I can offer a stay with my family. My mother will speak to you at great speed in her own language while piling food up on your plate; that's while she's not busy berating me for oh I don't know, failing to do my hair up or give her grandchildren. My dad will hit the wine like it's running out of fashion and I will make myself smaller and smaller and try to get through the next couple of weeks as intact as I can.

Solidarity, fibonacci.

Jeanne, god knows. Apparently DH is on it, and I am resisting the temptation to ask him about it every 20 minutes or so. I have a feeling that once the weather bucks up, I'm going to be BBQing everything.

Buffy, I'm in for that, as long as we all promise not to have a food fight. I couldn't cope.

Congratulations Kim!!! I'm so glad this has been a good year for you work wise, let's hope 2015 is just as good.

I refuse to do any more of the Christmas wifework than dp does. I buy the dcs presents (because I enjoy buying children's presents), we split present buying for everyone else as his family/my family and we jointly wrap the presents for everyone. We don't do Christmas cards because we're lazy, we make no apologies for this, we just don't bother. He will be cooking, but we always make sure that Christmas day is just us 4 in our own house, so we don't do fancy, elaborate dinner, just an ordinary dinner really. He will also do a big clean (as big a clean as our house ever gets) while I take dd2 to visit Santa, etc. The only thing I do more of than he does is driving to visit relatives, but he has the very good excuse that he actually can't drive, so I don't mind that.

Jeanne it would drive me mad to still be passing messages on to an ex. Surely people should be speaking to him directly.

My rant of the day is: we have a non-uniform day at school today. One of the boys in my year 10 class arrived wearing a perfectly normal hoody. He then took it off in my class, to reveal a large photo of a young woman wearing only a Santa bikini . He received a long and informative rant monologue about exactly why this is an inappropriate tshirt to be wearing, then I sent him to his head of year. Why on Earth he thought it would be fine, I have no idea.

I was going to say, maybe his twatbadger DF bought it for him, and then realised how old the boy must be. Ick!

congratulations kim!

buffy i would love an honest e-card like that! i'm afraid i only send them to people who send them to me

my friend's dad, when he receives a card, writes on it "and a merry christmas to you too" and posts it back to them!

dragonlette it's quite depressing that a lad would see that as acceptable. or was it deliberately to provoke?

I had an absolute meltdown on Christmas Eve last year. This year we have only sent cards to close family, DH ordered gifts for his family and I did mine, we're doing DD's and each other's together sometime in the next week.

He didn't do decorating, but he did carry all the boxes up & donw as I still can't walk upstairs without coughing up a lung.

Christmas day we'll split doing different bits of cooking/entertaining DD/having a nap.

I enraged my mother last year by telling her that I was reading a book and relaxing. Apparently there isn't time to relax, I should have been in the kitchen. I pointed out that the turkey was taking care of itself.

I really, really, can't keep doing all the crap every year, and if any of the family decide to disown us because of that, then I can live with that.

Good news kim .

We are having my parents for xmas day which should be pretty relaxed, with all the work shared between me and DH.

I am going to my parents with Dp. I have insisted offered for us to do the meal on Christmas Eve instead of my mum organising every meal. What is the betting that any of my brothers will have offered to do anything similar?

It's awful Poinsettia isn't it? I think it was designed to provoke, and he only opened his hoody for female teachers.

I've never yet hosted Christmas. Guessing from what's been said here that I'd be wise to keep things that way. The toddler's paternal grandmother won this year's "who gets the small person for Christmas" competition. I will miss my dad's leg of lamb, but it should be a pretty low stress affair.

Our christmas is pretty low key. MIL caters but doesn't go overboard. Everybody loads the dishwasher. I don't do Christmas cards and DH does his relatives' cards and I shred the envelops with Mr and Mrs DHsurname on. I think that's fair enough. I do buy the DC's presents but then I like that.

buffy What weirdo academic thread? Missed that. Academics are highly normal people. It's the rest of the world that's odd.

And YY to FWR Christmas meetup. Or winter solstice, or spring equinox. Or Chinese New Year. Or Valentines' day. Or any excuse. I missed two meetups ...

Can I just crawl into a corner of the pub and rock gently whilst downing mulled wine?

Do you ever have days where it gets too fucking much? I mean, the background is a non sleeping Chick who whinged for three hours. But it's not about that. That's just my reserves are low. The story about the Taliban massacre in a school has just hit me right in the gut. Those poor, poor terrified children watching their beloved teachers being killed. And those bloody stupid, violent fucking men. I am not Muslim, but I can tell you for a fact that they aren't in paradise having sex with virgins And that Sydney siege. And that stupid, violent fucking man. And the fact that we fail to connect the dots again and again and again.

Sorry, penguins.

Do you ever take a break from news? I do - I avoid the papers and twitter and sort of glaze over on the outrage. I know some people would be judgy about that, but I think sometimes you have to, or you go around in a state of permanent rage.

Sorry the chick isn't sleeping, too.

Ooh, yes, and please to a FWR Christmas meal, I'd love that.

I'd actually love to drag you all to mine, because I have twice the MN quotient most of you do. But I accept it might be a wee bit of a squeeze!

I'd love a FWR meetup of any kind, meal, drinks, whatever

Remember my outrage at the Vogue UK article about women in tech? This is how it's done, by Vogue US

That's a great article Fib. Depressing stats though.

Couldn't get to the end of the article. Short attention span.

And a bit bored...

The stats are totally depressing. In my sector, graduate intake is around 22% which is not bad at all, but when you get to senior Vice President/executive director, it drops to 8% and at managing director level, 3%. Women get discouraged by a million paper cuts and drop out. I had to take time out for my own sanity and now, even though I'm raring to go back part of me is dreading it because it's just too damn hard to see the inequality day in and day out. But what's the alternative?

We have around 50% at undergraduate level and 4% at professorial level. How about that?

I decided against a career in academia when on my first week in the engineering department of a Very Famous University, someone told me very excited that the department was diverse, they had a female student who was a Page 3 girl!

(No, that wasn't why I didn't go into academia - I just didn't have the brains or the endurance for a PhD)