Snippets from the "Diary of a Caregiver" - Wellington August 9th

This event sounds totally amaze, many thanks to Rebecca for telling me about it.

Snippets from the “Diary of a Caregiver”

EEO Commissioner, Judy McGregor, will talk on her experiences as a caregiver and compiling the report Caring Counts

This event is hosted by the NZCTU Women’s Council and is a fundraiser for the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma Women’s Committee

August 9^th, 5.30- 7.00pm, 13^th Floor Education House, 178 Willis Street. Wellington

Serving soup, rolls and snacks at 6pm – a cash bar will be open

Cost $20 & $10.00 for low waged

Rsvp (required) to Karin Currie Karinc@nzctu.org.nz by  August the 7^th. 

Facebook event.

---

I'm keen to assist with organising something similar in Auckland if others are interested...

When I grow up I want to be an old woman

I don't know much about Age Concern, though I respect their work identifying elder abuse in New Zealand, where we have four referrals each day, and like most other kinds of intimate violence, women are over-represented at 65-70% of those referrals.

I do know I hate the poster I walk past in their national office every morning, which, irritatingly enough I can't seem to find online. All I can find is this, part of one of their Annual Reports:


This is some of the poster adorning their national office, but not all. The rest of it features more white men. In fact, it ends up with men outnumbering women (despite there being 122 women to every 100 men after age 65) and with no one recognisably Pacifica or Maori. I don't think the woman second from the left on the bottom features either, I think the sole representative of people of colour is the man on the right at the bottom.

Obviously there's dangers in judging ethnicity or cultural identity by just looking at people, but I think it should be possible for Age Concern to have recognisably Maori and Pacifica symbols and people on their main poster, just like the rest of the Annual Report cover.

Then there's what people are doing. In this version, and in the national office poster, the women are smiling. The men are pointing or playing sport and I think there might be another white man doing something important, but we don't want women to be worrying our pretty heads with such things, do we?

I'm going to one cantankerous old woman, let me tell you, if all I get to do is smile after I turn 65. Best I start wearing purple now.

Diana Crossan in Papakura to talk about retirement savings

What: Why Should I Save for the Day I Retire? Talk by Diana Crossan, Retirement Commissioner
When: 7.30pm, Thursday 8th April
Where: Salvation Army Centre, 87 Clevedon Rd, Papakura

Message from the organisers:
Diana will inform you on what can and is making a difference as she speaks to New Zealanders in schools, tertiary institutions and the workplace also to those already retired. She is also being invited to take her message internationally. So don’t miss the chance to ask the questions you’d like answered while she visits our locality. Young or mature you can always improve your options, Come and find out.

Gold coin donation (to NCW for expenses). Light refreshments available after the presentation.

Organised by the Papakura/Franklin branch of the National Council of Women

not so complicated

one of the films i've seen recently is "it's complicated", and i loved it. not just because it's genuinely funny in a way that isn't demeaning, but because the characters are so real. there's meryl streep with all her wrinkles & alec baldwin in all his fat hairiness. a decent storyline about people in their 50s (with hot sex lives too), rather than one featuring the young and the physically perfect.

i sat there really enjoying all of this, and hoping this signals a change in hollywood. maybe a broadening of what's being offered to us, and a movement away from the traditional stereotypes of what makes a commercially successful film. we can only hope!

Quick hit: Older women like sex. Film at 11.

From Reuters, via Stuff:

Women become less sexually active and less interested in sex as they get older, on average, but there are still plenty of women who continue to have sex and maintain their sexual desire into their 60s and beyond, new research shows.

And a woman's mental and physical health has more of an influence on her sex life than her age, according to the researchers.

Conventional wisdom holds that women's sexual activity and interest dwindles as time goes by, but research has shown that some women maintain satisfying sex lives well into old age, Dr Alison J. Huang of the University of California at San Francisco and her colleagues note in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

...Forty-three per cent of the women overall said that their interest in or desire to have sex was "moderate to very high" over the past three months, while 60 per cent reported some sexual activity in the previous three months.

Click through for the whole article.

But before you make with the clicky try and have a guess which celebrity's picture they've used to illustrate the story. Go on, you know you want to...

ANTM debrief #2: A 'big' girl made it

And so ends another gripping season of ANTM. During the final, three things in particular struck me:

- Tyra's face actually appeared superimposed on an image of the Mona Lisa. Does it get more egotistical than that?
- Paula's input into the show consisted entirely of being mean to the models for no real reason.
- A so-called plus-sized model made it.

In past 'cycles' of ANTM, the judges have been quite open about the fact there's not a big market for 'big girls' in the modeling industry. I always got the sense these models were included as a form of tokenism. I wonder what's changed?

The cynic in me suggests that ANTM is trying to 'push the boundaries' in some feeble way - a trend to be continued in the next cycle, which features a transgender model. If I were even more cynical, I might suggest that Tyra has been led to endorse larger, curvier women because she's become one herself. (ANTM's commitment to diversity doesn't run too deep, I suspect. There's still no place in it for older women, for example, and I don't imagine we'll ever see a model in a wheelchair or one who looks like she's has children.)

The thing that disturbed me most about the cycle of ANTM is that Whitney actually began to look large to me, particularly when she was counterposed against the tiny Fatima. When the vast majority of women you see on TV are very thin, it warps your perception. If that's happening to self-aware, cynical old feminist me, what's it doing to my seven-year-old daughter?

another day older

today i'm 42 years old. that's right it's my birthday, and i would have said that i'm another year older, except it's not really true. i'm only another day older really. another day wiser? i hope so, but who can tell.

in the culture of my homeland, this is a day of celebration. a day to receive gifts, phonecalls and good wishes. it's a day when i get to be treated as special for a while. i'm a bit too old now for the associated rituals of birthday cakes and candles.

in the culture of the country in which i was born, birthdays used to not be marked in anyway at all. in fact, 20 or 30 years ago, many people didn't know the actual day they were born. they might remember the year, if it was associated with a particularly memorable event. but generally, the day of your birth was not something to be commemorated in any way at all. however, with increasing globalisation and westernisation, that has changed and now birthdays are celebrated with the all the associated rituals.

in terms of my faith community, there are those who think birthdays should definitely not be celebrated. mostly as a form of resistance against said globalisation pressures, a way to remain fiercely independent by refusing to take on customs and practices that are alien or foreign. besides, these sheikhs will say, what is there to celebrate? that you're older, another day closer to your death? hardly anything to be joyful about.

typically, i try to find where i fit between all these different views (the story of my life, really!) one thing i do know is that i wear my age with pride. i hate how women of a certain age - and i'm pretty sure i'm at that age - are supposed to hide how old they are. as if aging is bad thing.

well it is really, in our current culture. young and energetic is in. and hot. women can get away with being older, as long as they're hot. as long as they hide the sags and the wrinkles, and have bouncy, perky breasts. but remember to be coy about your age!

i hate how older women presenters get taken off the news (bring back judy bailey!! and kim hill!!!). i hate, as meryl streep does, how few good parts there are for older women in film. and in television for that matter. i hate how the older you get, the less value you seem to have a person.

OMG, i'm only 42 and already raving about this stuff. just wait til i'm 82, i'll burn holes in your computer with my outrage. but in the meantime, i'm happy to have been on the planet for 42 years. i think i'll just celebrate that.