Great British Bake Off

[Doodlekitty]

DH Thinks I'm going mad. Sat watching GBBO and all contestants are introduced. Female contestant is described as 'Full time Mum'. This is a term which boils my piss at the best of times. All for choice etc, but I'm not a part time Mum' because I work.
Next contestant is a male 'Stay at home Dad.' Why isn't he a full time Dad? Why the implication that mums are full or part time but dad's are merely location based?

DH Thinks I'm overthinking it. Am I?

Maybe they asked each person how they would like to be introduced.

Any mother, working or not, can call themselves a full time mother if they wish, and I didn't hear anyone refered to as 'a dentist and part time parent'.

This totally wasn't the subject I was expecting it to be about.

Perhaps they have just gone with how the contestants describe themselves?

I agree though if the descriptions have been chosen by the production team, it's annoying, in a way that makes you sound paranoid if you point it out.

This annoys me too. I couldn't give a shiny fig how many pets or children or grandchildren the contestants on Bake Off have. It's so tedious

Never even occurred to me that it might be the contestants own words. Which it could well be.
Seems DH is right :)

YANBU! I have NEVER heard a man described as a 'full-time dad'!

It exposes unconscious bias of course. No one has deliberately chosen words that imply the role is different for men and women. It's all unconscious.

I like to mentally swap the sex of the person doing the speaking and see if their words still make sense. Usually it becomes nonsense..

By which I mean YANBU!

Maybe each contestant is described in their own words?

It boils my piss when people object to other people's role descriptors because they assume the descriptors refer to them. No, they don't. They refer to the person described.

Saying that Anne is a Full Time Mum does not imply that Betty stops being a mum when she's at work. It doesn't say anything about Betty at all.

I never liked calling myself a SAHM, because I didn't stay at home all the time. It didn't reflect what I did. I considered myself to be a FTM because that's where my main focus lay. Calling myself a FTM had nothing to do with what other parents were doing, it simply described me in my own terms.

Maybe those terms reflect how the competitors think of themselves.

Oh I see what you mean. Can't say it bothers me. I suspect they chose the labels themselves. But anyway how are the actual labels harmful? How does one imply pejorative connotations and one positive?

BTW - We refer to my male friend in this role as Dave. But if we describe his role we say he's a stay at home Dad.

Hm that didn’t bother me as much as the casual “surrogate in Palm Springs” angle. DH has to get a bit of my “commodification of female bodies to suit the agenda of men” rant when he was happy just watching people make biscuits.

Brash

It's OK though, because one of the other contestants thought the baby in his biscuit self-portrait - which was lovely BTW- looked 'like something else' (what was not made clear, but I strongly suspect penis).

I remember watching the Weakest Link years ago and one of the contestants, when asked by Anne Robinson what she did, said "I'm a mum".
Anne ripped her apart - so what? I'm a mum, it's hardly an acheivement, lots of people are mums.
I do think when women describe themselves as mums, they're reducing themselves to that role aolely, but lots of women do it.

I did notice the SAHD say something along the lines of the fact he wanted to do Bake Off because he wanted a sense of achievement you don't get at home. And that struck a chord with me, because I think that when I was a SAHM and in the thick of the relentlessness and repetitiveness of it, it is hard to feel a sense of achievement. Enjoyment - yes, but achievement - not much. Until they are teens and you can take credit for the good things about them, and blame the not so good on them

Am I 'off the mum clock' when I'm at work! Goody!

'Muuuuummmmm'
'I'm at work and really busy - what is it?'
'I can't find my trainers and...'
'I'm going to have to stop you there - I'm off the clock...'

I remember watching the Weakest Link years ago and one of the contestants, when asked by Anne Robinson what she did, said "I'm a mum".
Anne ripped her apart - so what? I'm a mum, it's hardly an acheivement, lots of people are mums.
I do think when women describe themselves as mums, they're reducing themselves to that role aolely, but lots of women do it.

Anne could have said they same thing to her if she said she was an accountant. 'So what, lots of people are accountants, where the achievement?'. Or if she said she runs or works in a shop.

I don't think when women describe themselves as mums (particularly when asked what they do) are reducing themselves to that role anymore than a dentist is. No one assumes a dentist only perform dentistry and does nothing else with their lives, why would anyone assume that from a parent?

Aren't reducing themselves to the role.

I need to start checking my typing.

Off the mum clock.

Yes, I have done exactly this to my dc. "I can't talk to you right now. I'm at work. This is not an emergency and it will wait until I get home." I've also told them yo call their dad at work, as he is more interruptible than me.

I thought the thread was going to be about surrogacy as well.

Zutt -

"Anne could have said they same thing to her if she said she was an accountant. 'So what, lots of people are accountants, where the achievement?'. Or if she said she runs or works in a shop."

I totally cannot imagine a quiz show host sayinng "'So what, lots of people are accountants, where the achievement?" lol

Thinking about anne robinson - and attitudes to women / mothers.

There's that thing isn't there where when women have babies a certain type of person says what's the big deal women do it all the time.
Also the ones who say "I refuse to give up my seat for a pregnant woman even if asked as they're not ill / brought it on themselves".

There does seem to be a strong urge in general to really minimise all the stuff around pregnancy / childbirth / childcare. Which is sometimes quite "in your face".

I see the phrase full time mum slightly differently. I think it's usually an answer to "what do you do" when the asker is referring to work. It's a shorthand way of saying I don't work atm as I'm raising the DC fulltime. It's not implying anything about working mothers, merely referencing your individual work choices.

I also struggle to get worked up about these descriptors.

I think that it's not the words but the underlying attitude to mothers that is the issue. Whatever words are used, can be interpreted one way or another, as long as mothers are in the very complex and often contradictory position that society says they are in.

Plus because of all that stuff a lot of women feel sensitive / guilty etc and so the words become even more loaded.

I think men are generally judged less on what they do & decisions they make are more accepted as he's a grown man and knows what he's doing type thing. I do think men who work PT / don't work and raise their kids are seen as unusual but I don't think there are the same attitudes that it will be somehow damaging for the children, which is what women seem to get whatever we do.

OP are you me? We had exactly the same discussion in our house last night.

How about the fact that the Stay at Home Dad rented the inside of a woman's body to buy a child?!

Obviously had to go abroad to do it as it's illegal here but he showed no sign of shame there.

They wouldn't have had the part time DJ talking about how many drugs he'd taken in a more liberally lawed country, but surrogacy? Fine.

That hit me. More than the role descriptors.

It's a euphemism.
"Full time mum"
Because saying "I'm a human of appatently lesser value and achievement and work ethic who burned my commercial bridges by staying at home after maternity leave to give 24 hour a day care to my children whilst my husband worked abroad and who discovered after child number 2, whilst now financially dependent that it is terribly difficult to get back on the ladder after a decade long career break that I never actually intended to happen"
...makes me feel a bit rubbish about myself.

So I say "I'm a full time parent"

Of course, it could be that I call myself that to subconsciously imply that working mothers are Not Mothers All The Time Unlike Me.

But that doesn't sound like me. I think it's the first explanation.