Today, on International Women’s Day 2010, I want to do something different: I’m going to share links to some of my favourite gender-related articles.

These links don’t seem to have much to do with needlecrafts. But as I’ve said before, we live in a political soup. Our actions and decisions are informed and constrained by the social paradigms in which we operate. In other words, it’s all connected, man. (Or rather, woman.)

A few things I’d like to make clear before launching into the links section:

1. I am a white, western, terminally middle-class, temporarily-able-bodied, cisgender woman in a mixed-sex, monogamous marriage (I’m queer, as it happens, but you wouldn’t know it to look at me). I try to be aware of the privileges this affords me. I assume I fail in this attempt more often than I notice. I aim to be an ally to people who lack the privileges I benefit from, and if you ever felt moved to call me out for abuse of privilege, I would welcome the opportunity to learn.
2. This selection of links isn’t systematic in any way. I just rummaged through my bookmarks and threw together some stuff I’ve found interesting, inspiring, distressing, amusing, and so on, over the past few years. These links reflect my biases. I’m slightly uncomfortable with that, but I’m sharing them anyway.
3. I’d love – love, love! – if you joined in and shared some of your favourite gender-politics links in the comments.

Right, then. On we go!

Basics

If you’ve done any reading around the feminist space, you won’t find much new in these links – but I still find them galvanising.

• Defining kyriarchy: Accepting Kyriarchy, Not Apologies, by Lisa of My Ecdysis.
• Male Privilege 101: The Male Privilege Checklist from Alas, a Blog. (I can think of several people who really need to see this list. But I doubt if they read my blog. Ah well.)
• Male Privilege from the female perspective: Think Women have Achieved Equality? Think Again (By Andrea Rubenstein, linked from the Male Privilege Checklist.)

Silencing

A key kyriarchal tool.

• Men silencing women: Men Who Explain Things (This one is pretty funny.)
• A more complex case: The F Word: On Feminism, Being an Ally & Social Justice (Plus, a great photo of Bill Bailey at the top!)
• Silencing of the vulnerable by those in power: De Profundis (This one is really, really not funny – it’s little light’s account of trans/queer bashing by police after an anti-war protest. I first read it years ago, and I come back to it again and again.)

Breasts

Are they the most hotly contested area of the human anatomy? I suspect so.

• How the patriarchy (apparently) feels about breasts: For the Discerning Gentleman: You, Too, Can Decorate Your Life With Disembodied Boobs (By Melissa McEwan. Be sure to read the rant at the end. For the avoidance of doubt, this link is staggeringly unsafe for work!)
• Breastfeeding, the ultimate in personal/political fusion: Breastfeeding: radical, feminist and good for you (Kate Joester’s breastfeeding story.)
• Why breastfeeding shouldn’t be used as yet another stick to beat mothers with: Mothers, and how they hurt each other (Ailbhe on why it’s inappropriate to judge people over how they choose to feed their infants.)

Rape

I find it hard to think about gender politics without thinking about rape. Could just be me (yes, in case you’re wondering, I have been raped – though not, so far, in this millennium). These pieces range from the hilarious to the horrifying. I urge you to read every one, if you haven’t before.

• Romance novels and the rape plot: Pleasure Town Is Invite Only (This is the hilarious one. Really. Belly-laughs.)
• Defining rape culture: Rape Culture 101 (Melissa McEwan again, with dozens of illustrative links. I recommend getting yourself a cup of hot and sitting down with this one for an hour or two.)
• Rapists: Meet the Predators (Recent research on men who rape and get away with it.)
• How not to be mistaken for a rapist: Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced (Title says it all, really.)
• Catch-22: Another Post about Rape (Women, men, social rules, and why it’s always the woman’s fault.)

And on that cheery note…

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY!

Please do let me know if you particularly liked – or hated – any of these links. And tell me your favourites. I’m always eager to read more about this stuff.

Observe! Here is the Feaster in his beautiful T-shirt from my Zazzle shop. It’s unfortunately already pretty tight – I should have got it much bigger. But isn’t it great? I give you this picture by way of loin-girding, because I’m going to talk about gender normativity and kids’ clothes again, and we need a little something to get us through.

I was in Mothercare a couple of weeks ago, and as usual, I was on the lookout for egregious slogans. (In case you’re mystified, this post from last November explains why I do this.)

There weren’t as many clothes with slogans that day as there often are. (I wonder if that was coincidence, or if there’s some kind of shift happening?) But I did see two contrasting pairs of T-shirts, in the toddler sections, that pushed all the buttons you could wish for.

I suffer from low blood pressure, you see. It’s a kind of therapy.

Let’s dive right in, shall we?

Girl Slogans

Boy Slogans

So?

Where do I even start?

I mean, OK, in one way, you might be thinking, “What’s the fuss?” Why am I on the warpath over four such completely banal and typical phrases? Aren’t there more important things I could be getting my delicates in a twist about?

(Ha. Actually. Delicates. Hold that thought, because I intend to post about them, too, some time soon.)

And yes, in one way, you’d be right. In the ignoble panoply of kyriarchal oppressions, there are indeed many more urgent issues than the symbols that privileged Western children are expected to display on their clothing.

But that’s not to say that this is trivial. Far from it.

I’m grateful to the fierce and fabulous Kate (of Rebel Raising and I Blame the Mother), who provided a beautifully concise summation, in the comments to my earlier post, of why this matters:

… because it’s a way of putting children in their place *before* they seek to access their legal rights. We condition them not to ask to get out of their gender box, so that we don’t have to forbid them to.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Let’s start with the really obvious one, shall we? Daddy’s little heartbreaker.

Ick. Ew. Ugh.

How screamingly inappropriate can you get? It’s like gender-oppression bingo!

• The girl is sexualised, up to a decade before she even reaches puberty.
• Her sexuality belongs to her father. (Did you just shudder violently? I did.)
• Her sexuality manifests itself in chastity (she breaks hearts – she’s unavailable).
• She is described only as she relates to the boys (or men, but let’s not even go there) whose hearts she breaks.

Bingo!

Moving on, let’s look at the slightly subtler Mummy’s little flower.

Obviously, girls are associated with flowers all the time. It’s so common as to be barely remarkable. And the floral characteristic we’re supposed to think of is, of course, prettiness. Flowers are pretty. Girls are pretty. Isn’t that nice?

Yeah … no. Not when prettiness is an expectation placed on a person who is only beginning to learn about the world. Not when ownership of a girl’s prettiness is explicitly assigned to her mother. (But it’s not really ownership, is it? We know it isn’t. It’s responsibility.)

And really not when you consider some of the other characteristics of flowers. Such as, oh, not being people. Or being rooted to the spot and unable to speak. Not exactly brimful of agency, your average flower.

Also, aren’t flowers basically a plant’s sex organs? Isn’t their evolutionary purpose to attract pollinators, after which goal has been attained, their petals fade and fall, and they swell into a seed-pod? (You know, like Mummy did.)

Flowers aren’t fussy about who drinks their nectar and tramples on their stamina, either. Any bee will do (even a paintbrush, if they’re being bred by humans). Their entire purpose, after all, is to get fertilised. They are, to use a technical term, asking for it.

Which makes Mummy the Madam, unless I’m much mistaken.

Put that next to the chaste “heartbreaker” above, and we’re looking – somewhat aghast – at Virgin/Whore, junior division. See Daddy jealously guarding his daughter’s purity, while Mummy dolls her up and puts her on the market.

I honestly don’t know how one could, in cold blood, pull these garments over one’s daughter’s head and send her off to play.

(I’m harbouring a little fantasy, now, of sneaking into the shop in the dead of night and replacing them with T-shirts that say Daddy’s little pricktease / Mummy’s little sexpot. I think that would be the mature thing to do.)

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the shop, the Future Lords of Creation are also reading these messages. Girls! They’ll break your heart. But they’re also available for pollination (particularly if you’re the strongest in the world).

There was no “Daddy’s little…” on the boy side. (And yes, these did seem to be paired T-shirts, so I’m going to assume that it wasn’t simply that all the “Daddy’s little…” had sold out.)

What’s that about? Daddy’s secondary role in childcare? Daddy and little Oedipus locked in archetypal struggle – this T-shirt ain’t big enough for the two of us?

My impression is that the slogans on boys’ clothes are often focused on the mother/son psychodrama, so although I haven’t done what you might call research, I’m going to suggest that downplaying the father/son relationship serves the kyriarchy in some way.

And yeah. Strongest in the world. That boys must aspire to strength is obvious – but specifically, strength in a context of competition. Strength in a context of domination. Strength in a context of wild exaggeration. (Strongest in the world? Age three? Really? You mean, stronger than Daddy? Yeah.)

There’s some kind of fake-it-till-you-make-it message here, something that translates, later on, perhaps, into the ability to ace one’s salary review.

Next to all that, Mummy’s little man is pretty neutral. This is hardly surprising, as “man” is about as neutral a term as you can get in the patriarchal order. Men get to do the describing and the attaching of baggage and nuance to other people, not the other way around.

The one thing I’d note about this slogan is that it reminds Mummy (and everybody else) that she has a MAN on her hands – not a mere boy. It’s kind of the opposite of the infantilisation to which women are subjected far into adulthood.

WTF?

Why do we keep laying these scripts on our children?

Back to what Kate said in the comment I quoted above: we do it so that our children will learn the gender roles that benefit the kyriarchal order, and so that they’ll find it harder to question their assigned places in the system.

It’s about power and control – as these things so often are. It’s about reinforcing the power dynamics between males and females, between adults and children. It’s about controlling female sexuality in order to maintain the status quo (yeah, that old thing).

To be maximally effective, it has to start early, before our children have any concept of what gender means (they generally start to grasp it around age three).

And as far as I’m concerned, it can stop right now. Coup, anyone?

I have been swatching.

This winter just past, I have been afflicted with that whole “cobbler’s children” thing (adapted to refer to knitters). Except that my children seem to have plenty of hats and gloves – I’m the one who doesn’t.

So I’m going to make myself a hat.

Of course, I’m doing my usual thing of starting to knit the garment I need right at the end of the season in which I need it, but hey, given my normal rate of completion, the hat I’m planning might just be finished in time for next autumn!

I went hunting, found Angela Sixian Wu’s rather gorgeous Three Tams on Knitty, and got all excited. Because, corrugated ribbing! Stranded colour work! Clever use of the chosen yarns’ features! Three patterns to choose from!

Displaying a somewhat predictable weakness of will, I indulged in some new yarn from This Is Knit, as pictured above (Lamb’s Pride and Noro Kureyon).

I decided on Tam C, because I like the definition of the central star. And commenced with the swatching.

This being a hat, knit in the round, I swatched in the round too. (You may remember my being burned last year by the Dragon of Oh No Gauge Is Different in the Round – lesson learned.) Here’s the back of the swatch, where I passed both strands back to the start of each row to knit it from the front again.

And here’s where I cut the strands at the back to spread the swatch out for measuring.

Gorgonswatch! Quick, find a mirror! (Get me and my classical references.)

Stranded colourwork was where I really cut my teeth with knitting, back when I was fifteen and much braver. (Get me to show you my Giant Improvised Cardigan some time. It’ll be a laugh.) I haven’t done any in a while, so making this swatch really took me back. I loved doing it.

Which is a good thing, considering, Because it is all wrong.

The pattern calls for a gauge of 20 stitches to 4 inches (let’s not worry about the row gauge for the moment – I rarely do, to be honest). That’s for a finished brim circumference of 18 inches, unstretched and unblocked.

Two issues here.

First, I have a big head (ahahaha, yes, dear, everyone’s a comedian). Its circumference is 23 inches. And although obviously, hats should have negative ease, and blocking will increase the brim’s circumference, I’m skeptical about accommodating a difference this big. Particularly since the stranding makes a dense fabric with relatively little stretch.

Second, even if my head were smaller, I don’t get gauge with 4mm needles. My swatch has more like 23 stitches to the 4 inches. This means that my finished hat, at this gauge, would be smaller still.

Not so good.

I could reswatch with bigger needles. But where would be the fun in that? No, no: out with the calculator, say I.

Now. Please correct me if I’m wrong here – I’ve had hilariously little sleep this past week or so, owing to the Feaster having come down with a vomiting bug. (Niall caught it too, but he delicately refrained from repeatedly throwing up on me in the middle of the night. Unlike the Feaster. Fun times.)

If 23 stitches gives me 4 inches, then 1 stitch gives me 0.1739 inches, and 20 stitches gives me 3.478 inches.

3.478 is 86.95% of 4.

So my gauge will give me a hat that’s 86.95% smaller than the pattern calls for.

The main pattern is repeated six times around the hat.

What if I repeated it seven times instead? (I’d get a seven-pointed star, but that would be OK.)

If six pattern repeats gives a brim circumference of 18 inches, then seven pattern repeats will give a brim circumference of 21 inches.

But my gauge will give only 86.95% of that, or 18.26 inches.

Hmmm. still a bit small. What about eight pattern repeats? That would give 24 inches at the prescribed gauge, and 20.87 inches at my gauge.

20.87 inches sounds reasonable for a 23-inch head.

So that’s what I’ll do. Instead of casting on 96 stitches to start, I’ll cast on 128. I’ll have to fudge the shorter pattern repeat, because 128 isn’t evenly divisible by 6. But I can live with that. [EDIT: No I wont! Having now read the pattern (always a useful move), I'll just increase an extra 2 stitches on the increase round, then decrease them again when I move to the 20-stitch repeat.]

Wish me luck!

[ANOTHER EDIT: I've been fretting about my calculations since I posted. I've never made a tam before, and I'm wondering about the soundness of my original assumption - that asking 18 inches of stranded colourwork to expand to 23 inches on blocking (an increase of almost 28%) is too much. Anyone with experience care to weigh in? I don't want to end up with an unwearable Monster Hat! Wibble.]

Ha. When I posted about my late-night sock triumph last week, I said I’d write more about them “tomorrow, or possibly the next day”. Well. I should know better than to make rash promises, is all.

Pattern: Spring Forward socks, by Linda Welch, from Knitty (summer 2008).

Yarn: Sock yarn from the Natural Dye Studio, which may or may not be Dazzle (it was bought a few years ago, so they may have changed their product since then).

Needles: 2.5mm dpns.

Ravelled: Here.

Celebrations

• Beauty! Comfort! Joy! Handknitted socks for the win.
• I really love this pattern. It’s so simple, and yet it has so many great points. One favourite detail is the way the transition between instep and sole comes out all wavy (as you see above).
• Grafting! This is only my second pair of socks, and the first pair was knitted toe-up (using this pattern). So I was dead excited (we knitters get our kicks where we can, OK?) to learn the heel-flap-and-gusset method of turning, and practice my Kitchener stitch at the toe. I’ve had mixed experiences with grafting, but this time I followed Knitty’s instructions, and found them excellent.

Lessons

• I haz big feet. I had to frog the first sock I knit, because it simply would not go over my heel. Next time, I’ll remember that the foot needs to stretch to at least 12 inches, and plan accordingly.
• But! But! But! This is not all! Because actually, it wasn’t just the needles. If you scrutinise the photo above, you’ll see a slight difference. The sock on the left is infinitesimally slouchier than the one on the right. It’s hard to see, even if you’re looking, but on my feet it’s noticeable. Now, both were knitted on the same needles, immediately after one another – and after close on thirty years at this game, I trust my tension. So I must conclude that the second skein of wool was very slightly thicker than the first. Useful to know this can happen (my first pair of socks were knit from a single ball).

All in all, though, I feel confident in declaring this project a resounding success. Yay socks!

Here are Niall and I, with the baby Oyster, turning up at the Register Office five years ago, on a fine, cold Tuesday afternoon, to let the State know how things stood between us. As I said in my wedding speech at the party the following Saturday, by any sensible definition of the term we’d been “married” for years by then.

Six years earlier, my good friend, with whom I’d just moved into a flatshare arrangement, took my hand on a sleety Monday morning and told me he was falling in love with me. And I said, “Me too.”

Somewhere in this morass of a house, I probably still have the Filofax diary sheet from that day, on which I wrote, “9:10am: Fundamental and irrevocable alteration to the fabric of the universe.”

Because I am pompous that way. And I knew this was different.

We got married on our anniversary, because this was the day we wanted to go on celebrating. (I’m just obsessive enough to have worked out that this is the first time in eleven years that the date has fallen on a Monday again. Not sure that means anything, but it made me smile when I realised.)

Eleven years! Two children, many job changes, one house move, a procession of lovely housemates, one big extension project, much laughter, some crying, hard times and good times and pain and joy and all the bits in between – and always that deep, abiding connection, that sense of comfort and home that we give each other.

It’s good. Happy anniversary, Niall of my heart.

Spring is here!

In Ireland, spring officially starts today, the 1st of February, which is the Pagan festival of Imbolc, transmuted in the Christian era into Candlemas, St Bridget’s Day, Lá Fhéile Bríde.

And look! My birch is budding!

But that’s not why I’m slapping this streak of incoherence across your internets. No, friends, for there is a miracle far greater than the budding forth of bare branches.

(Actually, really not. But work with me here.)

MY SOCKS!!!

Yes, I finished my Spring Forward socks, just in time! The plan, of course, was to finish in daylight, when I could have taken some half-way decent photographs. But dusk drew in as I reached the toe decreases, and I conceded that it just wasn’t going to happen.

Which is why God Bríd gave us motion-sensitive floodlights, right?

I grafted the toe around 21:30. The moment I’d woven in the ends, I pulled the socks on and headed out into the garden, where I alternated trying to compose usable shots with flailing wildly at the light to turn it back on.

Never let it be said that I am not dedicated.

So there you go. Spring Forward socks from Knitty, finished in time for spring. Result! Tomorrow, or possibly the next day, I’ll post some better pictures and give a full debriefing on the project.

Oh, there are posts queueing up in my head waiting to be written, but this evening I must content myself with showing you some progress on my latest Oyster-inspired project. I’ve been nudging it gently along over the past few days, and it’s now at the point where I can start adding the surface stitching.

You can just faintly see the mast and the broadly grinning boatman, which will be stitched using colours chosen in consultation with the artist.

The boat and sail are reverse-appliquéd. This means that the pattern pieces sit behind the main fabric, which is cut to reveal them and sewn down.¹ The sea section uses normal appliqué (or obverse appliqué, you could say, if you wanted to be infuriatingly pedantic … which, let’s face it, I generally do).

I decided to do it this way for a few reasons. Chief among them was the fact that I’d never tried reverse appliqué before, and I was curious wildly excited to give it a go.

But also, the acute angles on the boat and sail are much easier to handle with the reverse method, because you’re not trying to fold two edges under the same tiny point of fabric. Considering that the pattern pieces are themselves made up of several tiny scraps, the less finicky tucking and pinching I have to do, the better. (By “better” I mean “not so sweary, and with less of that ear-prickling frustration that is unique to fiddly sewing”.)

By contrast, the obtuse angles on the sea section work fine with ordinary appliqué – which is good, because the reverse method would leave only a few threads of background fabric between the sea and the boat, as well as causing problems with colliding turnunders (is that even a word?). I wanted to preserve that narrow strip, because it’s in the original drawing. The way I’ve done it, the three pieces of fabric (sea, background, boat) are tiered comfortably and do exactly what they’re told.

So now I’ve hooped it up, quite loosely so as not to put too much pressure on my stitching, and I’ll be embroidering it – all going to plan – over the next few days. The coarse weave of the background fabric means that those acute angles, despite their unfiddliness, are a little ragged, so I think I’ll be disguising that with some embroidery too.

I’m really pleased with how this is turning out. Children’s art for the win!

¹ If you’re interested in the technique, I recommend Diane Gilleland’s tutorial How to Reverse-Applique a Tote Bag.

I’m sewing another picture by the Oyster (the first one being the dragon). This one uses fabric as well as surface embroidery.

In the photo you can see me starting the reverse appliqué on one of the main sections. I’ve tacked the pattern piece behind the background, then cut out the centre to within about 6mm of the marked outline, and clipped the curves. Now I’m tucking each clipped section under and slipstitching the folded edge to the pattern piece.

I’m loving it. I find hand sewing intensely relaxing, and I’ve enjoyed working on this piece out of the hoop. I imagine you can do appliqué in a hoop, but I’m not sure how you handle the difference in stretch between the background fabric and the pieces you’re applying.

The pattern of the fabric I’m using means that each appliqué section has been pieced. That part was a lot of fun (and actually took way less time than I anticipated). Have I mentioned that I love sewing? Squee!

I’ve finished the appliqué sections, and am now considering whether to hoop the piece up again to do the surface embroidery. I prefer to embroider in a hoop, but I don’t want to pull my slipstitching too hard. Perhaps I’ll experiment with a very loose hoop.

Then I’ll figure out how to finish the thing off. It’ll need some kind of border, and I’ve been lying awake at night (yes, honestly) dreaming up ingenious and elegant methods of achieving what I want.

Much more of my sewing happens in my head than ever gets out into the world, come to think of it. Working on that…

I joined the Irish Patchwork Society (Eastern Branch) last September, in a bid to do something about my dark yearnings.

Yesterday was the January meeting, and [trumpet fanfare, angel choir] I won a prize in the monthly raffle! This never happens. Really, never. In fact, I think this may be the first time. I was so dazed by the experience that I didn’t hear the chair call my name to pick the next prizewinning number. Hee!

That’s my prize, above: four fat quarters from Patchwork Plus (this month’s visiting shop) in … well … colours I’d be unlikely to have chosen myself, to be honest. I’m not gone on the goldy-browny end of the spectrum (though the blue and purple are nice).

But this is a good thing, I’ve decided. I’m in a colour rut, and it’s refreshing to be nudged out of it. The challenge will be to find contexts for these fabrics that sing to me. I already have a few ideas.

Because … is this really odd? … there’s part of me that doesn’t feel comfortable not liking particular colours. Yeah, it’s pretty odd. Don’t let on, but I’m kind of on a mission to find ways to love them all.

All, I tell you! [flashing eyes, floating hair, etc.]

Ahem.

Anyway. Stash is stash, right? Fabric is fabric. Say it with me, now: I’m sure it’ll come in handy some day.

I finished a sock! And it only took me a sock and three-quarters to do it.

As you may recall, I had to change needle size when I’d knitted nearly all of my first Spring Forward sock, because it wouldn’t go over my ankle. Keeping the cursing and wailing to a functional minimum (there are children present, after all), I flung myself at sock no. 2, and here’s the result.

As you can see, it goes on! (You’ll have to take my word for it that it comes off again.)

Happily, I much prefer the fabric produced by the 2.5mm needles. It’s noticeably softer and stretchier – so in case you were wondering, even a 10% change to the needle size makes a difference.

I think it looks good, no? (Fish, fish, fish…) OK, it will look good when I’ve blocked it and you can no longer see the rivers where I changed needle. As I’ve mentioned before, I love that lace. It’s beautifully simple and memorable, and it looks gorgeous. Thank you, Linda Welch!

The colours are rather more saturated than the pictures here suggest – though it’s still definitely pastel. Thanks to Mary for identifying the yarn for me: it comes from the Natural Dye Studio (which is one of those OMG I’ll have one of everything! sites, so click at your peril). Mary warns that it’s inclined to felt, which I’d believe given how it handles, and that it isn’t super-strong. It’s still gorgeous, though, and with a bit of care I should get good wear out of my Spring Forwards.

I frogged* sock no. 1 the other night, rewinding the ball from the outer end, using my grandmother’s method. It came out small and tight, like a little pellet of anxiety. I could scarcely pull my thumb out from the middle. Worth noting in this connection that the Season 1 finale of The Wire provided the entertainment as I wound.

* Just in case you’re not up on knitter-talk, to frog is to rip out one’s knitting with abandon (rip-it, rip-it, rip-it, you see), whereas to tink is to unknit carefully, stitch by stitch. Very useful distinction, I find!

So now I’m embarking on sock no. 3 of the pair. Wish me luck!