Posts by B Jones
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I'm pretty sure they make you take off the heels if you're about to hit the big inflatable plane crash slide. They wouldn't want you to put a hole in it. I suspect running over flaming aisle carpets isn't much fun barefoot, but neither is having nylon stockings melt onto your skin and they don't ban those. They might even make flight attendants wear them.
I'm very careful about my inflight foot and legwear. Sneakers and heavy cotton wherever possible.
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Yet, every minute a teenager spends fussing over what they wear and where that will put them in the complicated and vicious social hierarchy of high school is a minute that they could be spending doing something more enjoyable and productive. Uniforms are cheaper for parents and take out one of the levers of toxic power games. Plus, having a uniform is possibly the only reason many teenagers learn how to handwash and iron.
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Ok, it's exercised my curiosity now. I've done a quick survey of girls' schools in my area and my old alma mater. Most seem to have knee length skirts, Wellington East has optional long skirts for Muslim students, and only Queen Margarets seems to have it as standard. They also have regulation hair tie colours.
I suspect it's designed to be frumpy and awful, in the sense that nobody should be looking at these teenagers' legs so we won't let them. It feels like a very 90s sort of approach to preventing sexual harassment (I remember the senior master at school insisting on no touching between students from their neck to their knees). I'm in favour of uniforms in general, but they should be uniforms, not shackles.
Oh, and um, googling school uniform skirt length gets you very quickly into NSFW territory.
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girls can wear long or short skirts or shorts or trousers if they wish
Heh, my old school had a version of that rule. You had to buy or make skirts at knee length for the start of the year, but then half the girls rolled them up at the waistband or had a growth spurt that took the hemlines well north of the knees. A few clever ones got their mums' sewing machines and also took the A-line in to a snug pencil style, gaping pockets, pleats and zips bedamned.
Given that experience, I'm surprised by the number of really long skirt uniforms that have popped up since I left school. I guess there's a demand for them amongst Muslim students and those from other conservative cultures, because I can't imagine them being popular with anyone else. They're baggy and unflattering and restrict movement.
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However acknowledging good behaviour is a great thing. "You did a great job there George." "You dried all the dishes." "You brought the washing in without being asked." No reward though.
Those are rewards, they're just social ones rather than financial ones. There's a vast informal economy in social currency, and it's applied in praising good behaviour in children and ignoring bad behaviour, and it's the glue that sticks social relationships together. It can devalue, if it's overspent - nobody believes that salespeople really want them to have a nice day - but if you get lots, you spend more.
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I'm boggled by someone who argues that the state applying the full costs of road use to the users is bossy and interfering, at the same time as saying the state is responsible for preventing family violence by withholding support for families.
The whole DPB enables domestic violence argument turns on the premise that the DPB makes people have kids irresponsibly. Turning off that tap will supposedly result in a corresponding reduction in the number of irresponsibly conceived children, and enable their would-have-been mothers to live a life of freely atomised social interaction where their willingness to work for money is the only thing between them and success.
The problem is that people don't have 14 years of foresight to use in determining whether their decision (or accident) of having children will result in them being left without financial support. You can't create that foresight by punishing those who don't have it. Many families will stay intact throughout child-raising time. Many will not, through no fault of either party. Some should not, because one member is so detrimental to the wellbeing of the others that they outweigh their financial contribution. You can prevent such families forming, and you can help them disassemble, by providing alternative means of financial support.
Having the state as a backup in case of family failure is an immeasurable source of freedom for women, and I believe, the primary reason social conservatives (who often masquerade as economic liberals) oppose it. Same with state protection of children's rights. They all conspire to interfere with the ability of the breadwinner to be a domestic tyrant, a far worse creature than a political one.
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One of the nice things about being paid to have kids is that the state doesn't do domestic violence, whereas there's a proportion of private citizen breadwinners who do. Mothers of young children need to have support from someone, and I'd far rather they had the choice of a somewhat distant and neglectful state over an all too present violent partner.
In any case, the vast majority of people on the DPB are paid to support kids that they already have, not to have new ones.
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Oh, I love a good poetry reference with my outrage.
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A girl I went to school with was killed by her boyfriend, not long after they left school. On my sixteenth birthday, I discovered how a friend had been abused by a family member. I'd found out about another by the time I was 18. These were not the mean streets - I went to a decile 10 school, and they were superficially nice families.
Young people have it rough in that they deal with some of the worst things life has to throw at people, at a time where they don't always have the resources and skills to deal with it most appropriately. And the way that roughness is distributed is really really gendered.
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I think I was just so incensed/surprised at my space being invaded that I spoke with enough authority to fend him off.
That's the kind of story they tell in self-defence classes. Having the guts to stand up for yourself is halfway to winning a confrontation. It's also halfway to escalating an unwinnable one, but picking which is which is a special skill you need to develop. Dogs are quite good at it, and boys tend to have more experience in negotiating those kind of encounters than girls. When you're of a gender (or ethnic group) that people assume will back down all the time, it's likely that someone who's trying to intimidate you isn't expecting a fair fight.
One of the dumbest things I did as a teenager was talking on the phone to a friend who was worried that there was someone in his house who wasn't meant to be there. He was debating on whether to make a noise in order to scare them off, and I said that depended on whether the purported intruder was a scared teenager or a drunk guy with a gun. Way to contribute to someone's peace of mind.