Posts by B Jones
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My guess is that the "worst" tidbits of information quoted in those stories comes from the questions from the kids - this was always a feature of sex ed classes I had around 1990. Whether the questions were anonymous or hands-up, there was always at least one kid trying to make the teacher blush, giggle or cry, usually by pretending to knowledge well beyond their years. PE teachers straight out of t-coll were the easiest prey.
I remember asking a sensible anonymous question about contraception, but at that stage it was apparently still illegal for teachers to tell under-16s about it.
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I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Lyn of Tawa. She was a work of fiction, but was one of the first to publicly use the real pakeha kiwi accent. It made my mother cringe.
There was a telly programme a couple of years ago about where the NZ accent came from - it had Judy Bailey reading the news as one would have done it a hundred years ago (it sounded more Scots) and how linguists think it will be done in the future. Lyn of Tawa sprang immediately to mind. Apparently the way young women talk is the vanguard of accent change.
A kid I know asked the other day why "blood" isn't pronounced "blued". It's a hell of a question, because there was a huge accent shift in English after spelling started to be standardised - relics show up in words like blood and sword, making kids' spelling lessons harder than they need to be for four hundred years.
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I met an actor once who was doing some voice work for a Te Papa exhibit about something that happened in the middle of the 20 century, probably the War. She had to listen to a lot of tapes from the time to get the accent right, and described it as talking like your grandfather. I'd never really thought about the speed at which our accents had changed until that conversation.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Russell Brown,
North & South people are reeling from the venom expressed in the Facebook discussion of their story.
Without having seen the FB page, it's hardly unexpected. Arguments on the internet come in all sorts of varieties, but those between women (with the odd unwary man jumping in) over how to bear, feed and parent their children are up there amongst the longest standing and highest temperature. It's a subject where a lot of people feel entitled to tell others what to do, for the good of the children of course. See also: vaccination.
Interestingly, my experience in RL among other newish parents is that we're all so sensitised to the furore, that we're all very very circumspect about not criticising when other people do things differently.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to DCBCauchi,
But, yeah, I'm not going to argue it.
Good, because speaking as one of the lucky 95%, if you were, I'd suggest you take two small squares of 180 sandpaper, two clothespegs, some string and a couple of weights and come back to us in an hour or so to talk about your valid experience.
Danyl:
My point was that telling a guy he's 'mansplaining' is analogous to telling a women she's 'being hysterical.'
Only if you ignore a hundred or so years of actual medical belief that hysteria was a physical issue, with accompanying bogus medical treatments inflicted on women including forced sterilisation within living memory. Context is important.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
In some ways, the present is less creepy and futuristic than the past.
Modern is a funny concept. The whole early 20th century hygiene movement technologised and dehumanised things in a big way, but it also brought infant and maternal mortality down a lot. Women in Queen Victoria's day, including the Queen herself, fought for the right for anaesthesia, which was opposed by many on the grounds that childbirth pain was Eve's punishment for eating the apple. Yet twilight sleep and ether, the only things available at the time, were risky and had bizarre side effects (twilight sleep kept you up and about but made you forget it all).
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
there's a vast difference between agreeing to give a midwife a learning opportunity, and having the exams conducted without request or consent
Mmm, it's a continuum. There's a certain amount of social pressure involved, when you're trying to do the right and generous thing. On the other side, natural birth advocates often take exception to women being offered epidurals during labour, calling this pressuring women - one book I read instructs readers to say "no thank you" to all sorts of standard treatments/checks. It's hard to know where to draw the line, but as Islander points out, no profession has a monopoly on kindness or bullying. That aspect of midwifery, I think, is oversold.
Informed consent is a vital principle that's been part of our medical landscape thanks to things happening alongside the midwifery/OB reforms. There were other radical changes to our heath systems happening around the early 1990s. In an ideal world, monitoring the impact of all of these changes would have been a priority.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Danielle,
Yeah, me too. Big Girl is mostly self-feeding now, but when she was little she'd take an hour and fall asleep half the time. Goodness knows how I'll keep up with her and her oncoming sister, but I suspect it will involve teaching Big Girl how to fetch the remote for me.
An hour at minimum wage is still way more than the cost of a formula feed.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Deborah,
Cows have nothing to do all day except eat, shit, and produce milk.
They also have four stomachs, one udder and lord knows how many teats on it (I'm a city girl). Pretty big physiological differences if you ask me. Also, if you're no good as a dairy cow at producing milk, there aren't a lot of other useful career options down on the farm.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Samuel Scott,
If so, why do so many people not? And isn't breast milk heaps cheaper?
Breastfeeding is only free if women's time counts for nothing. When women have to go back to work after the 14 weeks' leave runs out, it gets so much harder. Exclusive breastfeeding means that baby and mum need to be together always - I used to think of the tubs of expressed milk in my freezer as preserved freedom - each one represented a night I could go out, or have more than one glass of wine. Acquiring them required half an hour of carefully timed work. Being able to transfer care to someone else is valuable, and not everyone can or wants to lose that option.