As this is my final Lifting the Veil column, I thought a bit of summing up might be in order. While the mission statement of this column was to impart information about wedding traditions and their feminist implications, you may have noticed that much of these entries consisted of a somewhat confused woman, caught between ...
Mrs. Dalloway is yet another feminist classic that I had to grow into. Wrapped up in Woolf’s instantly recognizable prose and the claustrophobia of post-WWI middle class life, the themes of repressed sexuality, mental illness and class division didn’t fully resonate with me until a second or third reading, and quite a few dinner parties ...
Last weekend I was entertaining a guest, you know, the sort I was planning to have lots and lots of sex with in between ordering pizza and uncorking wine. I decided to be fancy. Like, maybe wear something under my jeans other than cotton panties with holes and such. I charged into a shop after ...
As a teenager I was so absorbed in the chemical make-up of Jane Eyre, I didn’t have much time for another Brontë. Nevermind a story of obsession on the moors, which at that time sounded to me like the script of a bad soap opera. Certainly not a thing which would ever afflict me. It ...
It’s that time of year, when spring blossoms counteract the car pollution, beer gardens are filled with humans on the run from their sweltering offices and everyone briefly falls in love with someone they’d normally ignore. It’s also time for summer pursuits, like cycling. I’m in the market for a two-wheeler, having recently moved from ...
One of Australia’s leading female politicians has suggested that women facing sexual discrimination at work should just ignore it and it will disappear. Isobel Redmond made the comments at a women’s leadership event in Adelaide. These comments seem more suited to a grey-suited politician from the an earlier era, not a liberal Australian political leader. ...
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved arrived in my hands via a public library, when I was a broke teenager with vague ideas about what it meant to be a feminist at the turn of the century. The central character, Sethe, is an African-American woman living in the United States in the late 19th century. An escaped ...
Happy Victoria Day! It is the day that signals the beginning of summer parties throughout the country and many Canadians forget that it is a celebration of the birth of Queen Victoria. While it may seem like a British tradition, Canada is the only country in the world to observe this day as a holiday. ...
After you get engaged, it’s easy to become bogged down with planning the wedding, if you choose to have one. But while being bombarded with emails about chair covers (seriously, never give your email address to anyone in this industry), occasionally it dawns on one that hey, one is going to be married after all ...
My attention was drawn this week to an article about the reaction at a Canadian university to proposals to start a “men’s centre” on campus, as a place for men (according to the would-be founders) to discuss “men’s issues and mental wellness and all the different things that come along with that.” The article was ...
So, we’re having this baby. It’s due in a few weeks and we’re trying to get organized with all...
I recently heard about what is claimed to be the rising phenomenon of Japanese men remaining virgins for longer...
Ladders. Patriarchal conspiracy. I’ll explain… This week I climbed a ladder. I was trying to reach a loft space,...
Dear Madame X, My boyfriend needs to look at porn while we have sex. It bothers me because I...
Mrs. Dalloway is yet another feminist classic that I had to grow into. Wrapped up in Woolf’s instantly recognizable...
Last week saw a Big Thing come to our soggy little island. Well, it was a Big Thing for...
Last weekend I was entertaining a guest, you know, the sort I was planning to have lots and lots...
All little girls want to be princesses… right?! It’s bad enough that toy aisles are separated out by what...
