Still not dead

[diarytypething]

My LJ is threatening to become a place where I archive stuff that I've had put up on other sites, but I thought some of you might be interested in reading something I wrote about feminism and cake for a cooking blog run by political activists. It features the famous cake-in-a-mug recipe, which hopefully makes up for the fact that the actual

Comments

[stubbleupdate]

I've been making a Human Rights Top Trumps for my S2s and one of the factors was Sexual Equality (I've put down Gender Equality on the first draft... I'll need to change that).

Do you know of some handy resources for comparing/defining women's rights and equality among different countries?

[diarytypething]

I would probably refer to it as gender equality, but maybe you have specific guidance on what terms to use.

I'm not aware of any particular resources for comparing women's rights in various countries, but some good criteria to use might be the year that women got equal voting rights, the percentage of women in parliament, women's literacy levels, or a comparison of men and women's average earnings. All easily quantifiable, and nothing that might offend your school.

[cleodora]

I love this! I'm about to go and see if I have all those ingredients so I can give the cake-in-a-mug recipe a go. I tried it once before but I used olive oil (the recipe I used was the same as yours except it didn't tell me not to use olive oil!) and so it turned out terribly and I was very disappointed. I am excited to try again now!

I hope you don't mind but I posted a little quote from your article (with a link back to the original article, of course) on my body-positve tumblr. People seem to be liking it there! :)

I also plan to link to it in my next Things I Love Thursday post! (Which I probably won't be doing today, despite it being Thursday, because my list of things isn't quite long enough yet XD)

[diarytypething]

I'm glad you liked it, and flattered that you put it on your tumblr. One of the guys who runs the website mentioned that they had a huge surge of traffic when the post went up yesterday, so you helped contribute to that.

[davidn]

Though I first wondered how feminism and cake could possibly relate, I did enjoy reading this explanation :) It's a surprise to me to hear that baking is the less popular kitchen venture among men, because it's the only thing that I can do there (apart from the washing-up). And that's precisely because of the reliance on measures and procedure, and... just following directions, with an easy liquid/solid ratio being the limit of what can go wrong and what needs to be corrected. I can't attempt to defy gender roles any further, though, simply because we've just accepted that normal cooking is something that I just can't do. Cooking anything for a main meal could result in me burning the house down.

With lemons.

[diarytypething]

The fact that you bake without considering the gender role implications is a sign of progress in itself. It's also reassuring to know that it was comprehensible to someone who isn't that involved with feminism activities (I don't mean to suggest that you're against feminism in any way - it's just an observation that you're probably not used to the specific language and concepts used when academically-minded feminists discuss this kind of thing amongst themselves).

[davidn]

I had no idea there was an entire technical language behind it ;) My dad always did the baking, as well, and so it never felt strange in any way to me. Though I've never felt particularly manly - and if things like American football, for example, is involved in masculinity in any way I'm sure I'm not missing much.

By the way, how do you get it to stay in the mug?