Missing DH and SlutWalking....

'Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.  I miss you like hell' (Edna St Vincent Millay)

I know I know, unusually sentimental for a slummy mummy, but life without DH is proving to be well, lifeless. There is something most unnatural about two people who, having spent the past 17 years together, suddenly finding themselves living on separate continents, particularly when they actually like each other.

Aside from the daily visceral agony of simply missing him, the idea that we are living our lives separately -- only coming together for brief phone calls and online chats, more like friends or siblings than husband and wife -- leaves me feeling extremely vulnerable, much in the way of a young mother who unexpectedly finds herself out and alone for an afternoon, without the bulwark of a buggy in front of her. In short, I am without my anchor.

And I find myself frequently musing: 'what if something terrible happens, and our last days were spent apart purely out of some misguided notion of pragmatism?'  Can tearing a family apart ever be pragmatic? Two months in to the separation I can honestly say, I have my doubts.

My only saving grace has been in the guise of a box-set of Glee, something which I accepted with reservations but to which I was soon completely addicted – my love of musical theatre and interior design often leaves me wondering if I am in fact a gay man trapped in a woman's body....

However, returning to the UAE seems reckless at this point since DH's employer's are behaving even more appallingly than usual and, despite the many rules and regulations put in place by the Ministry of Labour (an institution which surely decided on it's logo long before it even began to consider it's policies) to ensure that companies pay staff regularly and on time, his employer seems to have neatly side-stepped any penalties or sanctions. It's amazing what you can get away with in the UAE if you wear the right clothing and speak the right language (and owning several banks in Saudi Arabia probably doesn't hurt...).

In a desperate bid to escape from that godforsaken peninsula, DH has applied for jobs in such far flung places as China, New Zealand and Kazakhstan but to no avail -- I'm beginning to wonder if we should employ the brilliant job-hunting technique used by 'Jobless Paddy', the unemployed marketing graduate who spent his savings on a billboard on the Merrion road in Dublin, begging for a job to avoid emigration -- to date he's been overwhelmed by responses and has recently accepted a job.

With a few minor alterations, Batman, it might just work....

And SlutWalking....


I'm slightly confused by these so-called 'SlutWalks', a term coined after a Toronto policeman advised a group of students that in order to avoid unwanted sexual attention, women should not dress like sluts.  

The response to his ill-advised (although arguably sensible) comments has been the staging of dozens of so-called 'SlutWalks' around the western world, in protest, which has seen hundreds of women take to the streets wearing basques, rubber shorts, fish-net stockings and all manor of revealing and tarty clothing, with the clear message being that women should be able to wear what they want without fear of sexual harrassment or rape.

While I appreciate and agree with the sentiment behind these SlutWalks – i.e. that women should not be held responsible for being raped by men -- these walks are only  bolstering the idea that women are defined solely by their sexuality and are in fact reinforcing that which they hoped to dispell. 

The feminist movement has made great strides in creating equality for women over the past few decades but this movement, rather than empowering women, seems to bring us right back to where we started, whether we wear a bikini or a bhurka (as I commented in an earlier post) - Feminist writer Camille Paglia writes 'don't call yourself a slut unless you are prepared to live and defend yourself like one'.

And while I firmly believe that a man intent on rape isn't going to be galvanised into the act by the sight of a bare shoulder or an exposed cleavage (after all, all types of women are raped -- young women, old women, women out walking the dog), these protests aren't going to make one jot of difference to the sort of men who perpetuate these crimes, as Paglia writes --'Honourable men do not rape.  But protests and parades cannot create honour'. 

Of course, if these SlutWalks achieve nothing more than to sway the judicial system away from the idea that a woman is somehow 'asking for it' if she chooses to go out wearing a short skirt and thigh-scraping boots, then I suppose it will have achieved some level of good, but I just can't help wishing that this objective could be achieved by women engaging in intelligent argument and debate rather than having to resort to getting their tits' out.

Rather missing the point....