Debbie’s friend Patti pointed us to Marc Quinn’s sculpture of Alison Lapper, disability and women’s safety activist, and photographer. This giant nude sculpture of Lapper was done when she was pregnant. It stands in London’s Trafalgar Square, home of Nelson’s Column, where it is generating a lot of attention and controversy. The photographs of the [...]

Before Thanksgiving, Jill at Feministe revisited the issue of raunch and kids, once again making sense on this troublesome issue. She quotes from this Washington Post article by Patricia Dalton, and responds perfectly: Dalton: I often recommend that fathers be the parent to take the lead in setting limits on their daughters’ dress, because opposite [...]

In the U.S., it’s Thanksgiving. We look around and there’s so much to worry about, get angry about, and dislike, that we wanted to spend a moment looking at what’s worth being thankful for. Here’s our random, off-the-top-of-our-heads list (with thanks to Richard Dutcher). Please help us add to it. The New York Times is [...]

Raising children in this body-insane world is really hard. The most important thing I did was tell my daughters the truth. I hope my life reflected the truths I told. I don’t believe in protecting my children from ideas or realities (including economic ones), and I gave them reasonable physical freedom in the world, including [...]

We see a lot of criticism of children’s leading “sedentary lifestyles,” because that “makes children fat.” Our criticism is a very different one: while active and healthy children can be any size from skinny to fat, sedentary children of any size have less opportunity to learn to enjoy their bodies, the pleasures of movement, the [...]

Following up on our “Passing the Torch” post last week, we’ve been thinking about the social pressures on children, specifically with regard to body image and physical self-esteem. What goes into the truism that this situation is getting worse and worse? We’ve identified several factors: The ages at which children are encouraged to think of [...]

Big Fat Blog reviews the newly published Taking Up Space, by Dr. Pattie Thomas. Pattie is an ally of ours and a terrific writer. Check out both the review and the book.

The right-wing pundits are more aggressively insane than usual this week, perhaps because the election went badly for them in so many parts of the country. Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson told the city of Dover, Pennsylvania that its defeat of a pro-intelligent-design school board means that the city has “just rejected God.” He continued by [...]

It’s cool enough to find a blog called “Fascinating History.” It’s even cooler when that blog collects links on the history of an everyday (well, everymonth) item whose history I (Debbie) had never thought about. (Thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty for the link.) And while arguments about the philosophical underpinnings of sexual (in)equality are as [...]

Debbie says: In the comments to our post “The Things We Can Control,” Pearl points to an interesting blog entry by Rachel Apanewicz-Delgado on her own body image as it relates to working with her daughter’s Girl Scout troup. I’d love to have Laurie here to blog this with me, because it’s about parenting, which [...]