A warm welcome to Rochelle Gribble, here with an insightful analysis of the recently-introduced, highly controversial ‘National Standards‘ that New Zealand primary schools are now required to report on twice a year. Rochelle is a once-was, sometimes-is, may-be-again secondary teacher. She has a Masters degree in Education and sometimes even gets to use it! However, […]
[Trigger warning: if you have experienced sexual assault, please just be aware that rape and rape culture are discussed in this post. Many of the links similarly lead to pages that need a trigger warning.] Sad, sickened, shocked, triggered, appalled, horrified, not-actually-that-surprised. Most New Zealanders could tick most of those boxes this week as our […]
Trigger warning for discussion of rape and child marriage. The tragic, terrible death of an eight-year-old Yemeni girl made international news this week. You might have read reports that a little girl died from injuries she received during wedding-night intercourse with a 40-year-old man who had just married her. Coming from a much more fortunate […]
Page Five is almost the same as Page Three, but only one breast at a time is on show. SBJ and I are in this week’s Cook Strait News, along with a bunch of other fabulous breastfeeders, gathered for the Big Latch On. Around the world, 14,536 people were breastfeeding a baby at a registered […]
What if Barbie dolls had the same proportions as normal women? This: Nickolay Lamm has recreated a typical blonde Barbie, but at the average proportions of a 19-year-old American woman (he took the measurements from the Centre for Disease Control). And you know what? Real-girl Barbie looks amazing. The project was at first an experiment […]
I had a nightmare recently, where my husband and I were both sent to prison – separate prisons. I don’t remember what we were convicted of or whether we’d done it. I just remember the horror of realising that our punishment was the break-up of our family. How appalling. I did a criminology paper at […]
Indulge me in a little linky celebrating. This is the 200th post on Sacraparental, and I’m sitting in Bristol feeling pretty good about that. Thank you, all. A gaggle of guest writers, a civility of commenters and a quietness of readers (like my collective nouns?) combine to make a welcoming lounge conversation. If you’re a […]
At number one on the toddler playlist this week is ‘Beans! Beans! Beans!’ – Weezer’s geek-pop anthem ‘Pork and Beans‘. Including pop culture pieces like this in our kids’ lives doesn’t exactly provide media balance – the tide of body hatred is too overwhelming – but it can open conversation and give a theme tune […]
Is it fair to say we all want our kids to have better, healthier, happier feelings about their bodies than we have about ours? How can we avoid passing on our own insecurities? Alex linked recently to this bawl-inducing letter Kasey Edwards writes to her mother in ‘Passing on Body Hatred,’ excerpted from […]
Thanks to friends and RSS feeds, I came across a few different articles over the weekend that all stayed with me. I wanted to blog about each of them, briefly, but now my thoughts about them seem connected so I thought I’d just lay them out together and see what you think. The common thread […]