Filed under: Generalizations | Tags: baking, Canada, Canadian women, cooking, culture, feminism, independence, lifestyle, sewing, social, women's movement
Doris Hilda Anderson, CBC: Life and Times
Her autobiography “Rebel Daughter” was absolutely fascinating. It outlined her life growing up in Calgary, Alberta during the Great Depression and her continued fight against the status quo. Pretty much, you’re freaking lucky this lady was around, girls. Women have only really truly had their equal rights in Canada since 1981. Yeah, only thirty years have gone past and yet my own generation is completely in the dark about how it was. But I think we lost something when we gained feminism.
I think we lost an essential skill set: domestication. My own generation of women are, well, sort of useless. Oh sure, we hold down jobs and are good at things, but how many actually know how to cook? How many can cook without a recipe? How many of us bake? How many of us can sew? Yeah, not very many. And why would we have to? Dinner is a phone call away. You can have that pretty dress for the office Christmas party for $120, in all sizes and colours. This is capitalism, and this is feminism.
When we gained the freedom to pursue our own interests, we forgot how to do those things our grandmothers spent a life doing. So ladies, have we really helped ourselves? Or have we traded in our over mitts and sewing machines for computer screens and drive-thru? We have lost what made us the queens and conquerors of our homes. We have lost autonomy from mass-produced, capitalistic, shit.
So ladies, remember the women who lived through the Great Depression, who saw the fight for our freedom, and who watched us forget all about it… do them a favour, Ok? Let’s learn to do those skills that are taken for granted; that are needed, but unappreciated. Let’s learn how to do this stuff because if we don’t, we will never be able to gain back what we’ve lost.
Edit: We’ve already kicked men’s asses in the workforce, so let’s kick their asses at home again. Cool?
Filed under: Generalizations | Tags: autumn, candy, children, costumes, fall, halloween, holidays, humour, life, lifestyle, parenting, parents, social, social behaviour
My pumpkins are better
But then, that was when I was a kid and living in Ontario. We would turn out the lights after 200 kids had depleted our stash and yet still the knocks would come. One year, my father (who has a deep opera-like voice and is irreversibly tone-deaf) recorded his own spooky tape. It worked… Kids were too frightened to come up to our house. Those were some of my favorite memories. Nobody did anything half-assed. If you only had one lame pumpkin, the kids and neighbours mocked you. My street was like The Avenue of the Dead.
And then I moved to Edmonton, where I consider it an excellent accomplishment to get over 30 kids at my door. Maybe it has to do with the size of the city, or with maybe the Mall only a few blocks away, but nobody trick-or-treats anymore. It makes me sad.
Halloween is a uniquely North American holiday, only falling behind Christmas when it comes to sales. So why have we let it go? Are we that big of wimps that walking around on a not-so-cold autumn night makes us reconsider? I can remember my mother making our costumes a few sizes too big, just so they fit over our snow suits.
All I’m asking is that we bring the true Halloween back. The one where youthful shouts fill the streets and all of the neighbours participate (except for that one jerk whose house always gets egged… you deserve it jerk).
Recall if you will your own Halloween memories. Isn’t it sad that a lot of our own children wont have memories like we did? Instead, they’ll have a memory of fluorescent lights and food courts.
LAME.
Filed under: Generalizations | Tags: CBS, culture, hurtful, jokes, love, obesity, pop culture, sensitivity, social, social etiquette, television
I'm sure the producers actually live in a box.
There are a few new developments that have happened recently I’d like to share with you. However, they’re going to have to be put on hold until I get this off my chest. Every few weeks A.M. gives me her left-over gossip rags. I rip these apart and use them for numerous communications projects and some of them end up in that little magazine holder in the bathroom. Is there anything more horrifying that those grungy magazine holders full of water-stained MacLeans’ and People?
Whenever I get one of these stacks of celebrity magazines I leisurely take my time browsing through and looking at how well all the clothes look on Skeletor. An image caught my eye. It was of an obese young woman in a bathing suit looking unbelievably embarrassed and uncomfortable. My heart ached for her and my eyes travelled upward until I came across the word “HUGE”… Yes, apparently this is going to be a new TV show. I vehemently voiced my disgust to Mike and promptly forgot all about it.
Forgive me, I don’t think sitcoms are funny. The only ones that have ever (and I mean ever) made me laugh were Seinfeld, Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm (which I had to give up watching because I kept yelling at Larry David to “NOT DO IT!”). As I was winding down from a pitiful performance at class last night a commercial for a new sitcom on CBS caught my attention. Mike and Molly it’s called. From what I gathered (through my open-mouthed horror), it’s about two very obese people who fall in love and what not. It is full of chair-breaking jokes and fat-people love.
Ok, so what bothered me so badly about this show (enough that I actually chose to blog about it), was that it feels as if CBS’s producers were told they need to be more sensitive to over-weight people and stop showing all these skinny people leading lives normal people want. So instead of, oh I don’t know, having women who wear a size 12 and men who are absurdly short on television, they have opted to go in the complete opposite direction.
It’s hard to offend a person like me. I normally don’t care enough to dwell on slights and insults, but I was completely infuriated at the assumption that only obese people can love other obese people. WTF IS THAT ABOUT?!?!?! You may as well say that Jewish people can only marry other Jewish people, and hell, there’s no way that interracial relationships can be acceptable either. You know, since we’re going to pair people together based on their physical appearance.
I’m not sure if CBS is trying to be “sensitive” to its audiences needs, but I really think it’s going about this in an oblivious, insulting way.
Get out and be around normal people you stupid, money-crapping, producers and see what life is REALLY like. Maybe after that you can keep your chair-breaking fat jokes to yourself.
Jerks.
Edit: First, Thank you Word Press for allowing me to become Freshly Pressed. I believe EVERYONE is entitled to their opinions. However, I will NOT allow any comments that are just plain rude or derogatory.
The Lifespan of a Fly 