Their Bad Mother

Well, most of us. Pneumonia and stomach flu - yes! both! at the same time! - have knocked me and my husband and Emilia right off of our feet.

But not Jasper:



Jasper believes that there's no plague that can't be made more interesting with a little light jazz. He might have a point.

Kinda the last person you'd expect to meet at a women's social media conference, but apparently he was attending a Tea Party or something and the rest is history. We are, like, total BFFs now. Me and Bill O'Reilly, too. Maybe later I'll have dinner with Sarah Palin. YOU NEVER KNOW.

So when I said, the other day, that I avoid getting myself into a state of outrage? I might have lied, because it seems that nearly every day these days there is some fresh evil provoking me to outrage. Last week, it was non-consensual nether-probes being performed on Canadian women; today, it's disturbing diaper ads and PETA, who never fails to offend.

(I discussed the disturbing diaper ads over at the Bad Moms Club. I'd boycott Huggies, but we don't even use Huggies, so it wouldn't exactly be the strongest statement. Still. Ugh. Am sickened.)

PETA is up to its usual trick of exploiting women for the purposes of defending animals. I'm all for defending animals, but PETA's trademark gimmick of doing campaigns that riff on the idea of women being 'meat' or property or in some manner comparable to pets or farm animals or ferrets or whatever is offensive in the extreme.

It hit a new low this past week:


I don't care what you think of the Duggars: it is not okay to compare Michelle Duggar - to compare any woman - to an un-spayed dog. You know: to a bitch. Such comparisons demean all mothers. They demean all of us.

Stop it, PETA. Find another way to get your message across. Saving animals at the cost of demeaning women involves too high a price. Stop it.

100 Miles For Tanner: I ran 8k on the weekend, pushing a jogging stroller in -15C weather. I'm pretty pleased. I think that I can do this.





 

I don't get outraged about a lot of things. It takes a lot of energy to get outraged, and I don't have a whole lot of energy to spare, what with wrangling two manically spirited children and training for half-marathons and what-not. A few things are more or less guaranteed to provoke me to ranting - breastfeeding mothers being shamed, the exploitation of women and girls, the defense of rapists, that kind of thing - but otherwise, I prefer to save my energy for constructively raising awareness about issues that I care about, rather than railing against things.

Today's an exception. The issue - and you tell me if this doesn't make you angry, regardless of whether or not you're a woman, or Canadian - is this: if you're a Canadian woman, and you've had surgery, you might have been been given - while you were under anesthetic, without your knowledge, without your consent - a pelvic exam by medical students in training. Without your knowledge or consent. This is illegal in the United States and Britain, for obvious reasons, but is, apparently, standard practice in Canada. I'm horrified. I've been ranting about it over at the Bad Mom's Club, and I ranted myself into enough of a state that I needed to actually do something.

So I set up an open letter/petition, demanding that the relevant Canadian medical authorities - and lawmakers, if necessary - put a stop to this practice immediately, and make it a matter of policy and law that hospitals require women's explicit consent for such training exams. I'd love it if you'd support it - regardless of whether or not you're Canadian - and help me get the message out that our bodies - women's and men's - are our own and that our sovereignty over them is not to be taken lightly.

UPDATE on 100 Miles For Tanner: training for a half-marathon in the FREEZING sub-arctic Canadian winter is HARD.
 

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