It's murder on the dancefloor

I don't spend much time on crowded dance floors these days. What with being really old and having a toddler to look after.

Most of my friends have children too, so the chances of finding someone willing and able to stay out late on a day when I have a babysitter are pretty slim. If I really want to spend time in a writhing sweat-box then it's most likely to be soft play.

Photo by Derek Raugh via Flickr Creative Commons

One evening lately the planets aligned and my friend and I went out to find out if it was true what we had heard - that people do indeed go forth in the hours after the CBeebies shutdown and have fun.

And nothing much has changed. There we were strutting our stuff in a tight corner of the dance-pit, when a young man steps past me, and decides that it will assist his passage if he brings his hand into contact with the side of my body.

The passing grope

I remember this well. and another old favourite - brushing up against you at the bar. Or worse.

Wandering male hands is a hazard of crowded bars and nightclubs. These small, unremarkable but uninvited touches that men do to women when they think they can get away with it. And mostly they do. Sometimes when you turn around you can't be certain which one it was. You keep quiet or risk accusing the wrong man. If I do reprimand some bloke for touching me on his way past, he'll probably either laugh at me, or ignore me. or reproach me for being touchy about being touched. Either way, I always feel like I'll come off worst, so I never say anything,

It was a tight fit in the dance floor, but it wasn't that tight. He didn't need to move me out of the way. Neither did he look so unsteady on his feet that he needed to grab a passing girl to prevent himself from stumbling.

It's not subtle

This is the peril of going out and having fun. Probably this man/boy wouldn't dream of laying hands on me in the supermarket or at the bus stop, no matter how busy it got. But as soon as I'm on a dance floor, I'm fair game (It's a big sweatbox of inebriation and iniquity, and she probably won't notice anyway).

Well here's the thing, we do notice. It's actually quite hard not to notice some idiot momentarily resting his hand on your hip - I mean, it's your hip. You'd have to be pretty drunk to not notice and I wasn't. You don't have to be drunk (or single) to be on a dance floor. You just have to be someone who likes dancing.

And OK so maybe there's a little bit of me that's quite pleased that at 37-years-old, on a dance floor of 19 and 25-year-olds (I know because the DJ did their birthdays), some random still feels the need to grope me on his way past. But mainly I'm immensely pissed off that me and all those other girls, and eventually my daughter, are considered fair game for grabbing and groping, just because we wanted to go for a dance.

Telling pregnant women what to do

Why do people enjoy telling pregnant women what to do? Does conception immediately render us incompetent to make decisions about our own bodies?

I am around eight months pregnant now, regularly experiencing the joy of yet another unpleasant pregnancy symptom. And it's both interesting and annoying how much other people (men and women) tell pregnant women what we should and shouldn't do with our bodies.

I read this story in the Huffington Post, about a woman who continued strenuous exercise until shortly before the birth of her child, and was widely condemned for it on Facebook.

I have no idea whether it was or wasn't a good idea for her to carry on with her activities - I don't know what her body feels like, nor am I her doctor or midwife, who might understand of how her pregnancy affected her. How is it anyone else's business?

Deciding what you can and can't do in pregnancy

People have very fixed ideas about what constitutes acceptable behaviour during pregnancy. My views on alcohol in pregnancy mean I'm no exception to this. I think I'm learning to live and let live a little.

Pregnant women receive a bewildering range of contradictory advice. But we're not ill and we're not stupid. We need to make up our own minds about what's right for us.

One minute we can't drink alcohol at all, then it's OK to have the odd glass. A couple of years ago stilton was on the banned substances list, but now, apparently, it's fine. What's a girl to do? My friend Rachel Extance wrote a great article on this - 'We need facts not fears'.

My favourite pregnancy dilemma is the sun cream issue. When you're pregnant, your skin is more sensitive and so can burn more easily, therefore you are advised to use lots of sun cream. However, some research which came out this summer suggested that the chemicals in common household products, such as sun cream, are potentially harmful to the unborn child. So maybe pregnant women should just stay out of the sun? Except there's been a rise in rickets in the UK, which is caused by a deficiency in vitamin D, and where do we get our vitamin D from? Yep, sunlight!

Making my own decisions

I have no problem with medical professionals giving advice - that's what they're qualified to do, and hopefully they will take the time to understand the individual situation of the person they are dealing with. But if you're not in my body and you don't know what I'm physically capable of, then it's really none of your business what I do or do not do.

Exercise is an important part of my life, and I'm pretty fit. I stopped running and jumping some time ago, but I'm still lifting light weights in the gym. It wasn't until I was 32 weeks pregnant that I finally gave up my beloved boxercise class.

Before making my decision to continue with boxercise into pregnancy, I consulted my instructor, who has known me for several years, and seen other pregnant women do his class, and I talked to other women in my class, who have been through pregnancy.

We all agreed that I was fine to carry on, as long as I only do the things I'm comfortable with. As my pregnancy progressed I scaled down my activities - I stopped running when it no longer felt comfortable for me. That doesn't mean that someone else who was more pregnant than me should have stopped.

My body tells me pretty clearly what it does and doesn't want me to do at the moment. It was actually pretty happy with the basic punching movements I was doing. (I may be pregnant, but I've still got a mean right hook if you're thinking of messing with me), it was more my endurance that was suffering. It felt like the right time to stop, for lots of reasons. But my friend carried on boxing until just a few days before her baby rocked up, and that was fine too.

Pregnancy is hard work, and it takes its toll on women's bodies. A few months ago I was running, jumping and chucking myself around the gym, while now putting my socks on is a major workout. But it's not for other people to judge what we can do. Let us decide for ourselves.

Get drunk and get raped - thanks Joanna Lumley

Yet again this week we got the message that women who drink too much and dress too little are inviting rape. This time it came from a surprising source - the actor-turned-campaigner Joanna Lumley, someone who should know better.

Lumley is known for being extremely posh and extremely elegant - not the kind of woman to be caught flashing her crotch coming out of a nightclub. But the role Lumley is best known for is Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous. Patsy is exactly the kind of woman to do this kind of thing.

In an interview in the Women's Life section of the Telegraph, Lumley says: "Don’t be sick in the gutter at midnight in a silly dress with no money to get a taxi home, because somebody will take advantage of you, either they’ll rape you, or they’ll knock you on the head or they’ll rob you."

I'm not advocating that women/girls do these things. She's right - it's not a good look. And I can see that she's trying to encourage young women to protect themselves.

But in doing this she suggests that getting raped is women's fault, something that women need to guard themselves against, and that women don't have the same freedoms that men have, to behave as they wish. Lumley doesn't exhort men and boys to avoid these kinds of behaviour. And isn't it equally unpleasant having shouty vomity lads staggering around the streets as shouty vomity ladettes?

Maybe Lumley is just trying to advise and protect, but she should know better. She could have encouraged both sexes to not get drunk and disgrace themselves. By putting it on women she places the responsibility for rape at the victim's door, not the rapist's. This is not on.

As one of my wise Facebook friends said this week: "Alcohol and short dresses don't mean people get raped, rapists' decisions mean people get raped."

Should Patsy be raped?
Lumley's character, Patsy, is a drunken, lecherous old sot, who expects to live the high life but give nothing in return. She deserves a lot of things, but she doesn't deserve to be raped. Patsy is sick in the gutter, on herself and on other people, she wouldn't be seen dead in anything that wasn't a "silly dress" and she never has ready money for anything, not least getting a taxi home.

According to Lumley's description, Patsy would indeed be raped, knocked on the head or robbed, probably all three if you take into account the regularity with which she does these things.

Excusing rape
In telling people that rape is a consequence of skimpy clothing, we give rapists and potential rapists an excuse. We encourage them to go ahead, because she's asking for it, in that dress.

Rape is not a passive activity. You cannot accidentally rape someone. Rape is a deliberate, violent and intentional act of abuse inflicted on one person by another. There really is no other way about it. Society needs to accept that the responsibility for rape lies firmly at the door of the rapist.

Role models like Joanna Lumley may think they're trying to protect young women, but by not thinking their advice through before doling it out so publicly, they are giving rapists an excuse and putting the responsibility for this horrible, abusive act onto the very people they are trying to protect.

Why you 'probably’ shouldn’t drink during pregnancy

Sometimes you have to be a rude and nasty girl, to make people sit up and listen to you. When people I know are pregnant, and the subject of alcohol comes up, I feel the need to do this. It feels too important to be polite and pleasant and let them get on with it. So I was delighted to wake up to this headline on Thursday this week: 'Moderate drinking in pregnancy harms IQ'.

The BBC article reports a new piece of research from Oxford and Bristol universities, which looked at the IQ scores of 4,000 children and the alcohol intake of their mothers. It found that a ‘moderate’ alcohol intake of one to six units a week during pregnancy had a very small affect on the children’s IQ. It was pretty tiny - just one or two points of their IQ.

But who wants their child to one or two cards short of the full deck?

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, 1954

You know you shouldn’t...

Everyone knows you shouldn't drink during pregnancy. It’s bloody obvious that it’s not going to be good for your developing child.

This famous photograph, shows a small boy carrying two bottles of wine. The sinister aspect is that his face shows the signs of foetal alcohol disorder (FAS).

I feel strongly about this, because I’ve met adoptive parents who deal with the effects of the extreme end of this – bringing up the children of alcoholic mothers who didn’t moderate their drinking during pregnancy and as a result gave birth to children whose problems can include: heart defects, sight/hearing impairment, hyperactivity, attention problems, cognitive problems, impaired coordination, learning difficulties, impaired memory. For more about this, read Matthew’s Story. 

Protect your child with magic beans

All the pregnant women I have known will do pretty much anything to protect their unborn child. If you tell a pregnant woman that rubbing baked beans onto her belly will promote foetal brain development and help her child become the next Einstein/Shakespeare, she will probably do it. 

The trouble is, despite knowing for decades that alcohol and pregnancy shouldn’t really mix, we’ve not yet managed to come up with a coherent or coordinated message. 

Alcohol and the foetus

During the different stages of pregnancy, different parts of the foetus are being formed at different times. Drinking alcohol during pregnancy, can affect the development of whichever parts are developing at that time. For example, the heart is developing during weeks four and five, so drinking during this time could lead the baby to have heart problems. Drinking when the eyes are developing could lead to the child having sight problems. 

This is a well-known and extremely scary photo. On the right it shows a normal brain. On the left it shows a brain damaged by alcohol. 

No one is suggesting that if you have one drink a week, or even just a couple of drinks over your whole pregnancy, that this will happen to your child. It definitely won’t. This is the result of serious and sustained alcoholism. With just the odd drink or two, probably your child will be absolutely fine. But it’s this ‘probably’ that bothers me. 

Current guidelines on drinking during pregnancy

Women are clearly told not to drink much during pregnancy, but what’s not clear is whether it’s really OK to have the odd glass, or whether they should abstain completely. Drinking in the first and second trimesters, when the baby’s brain is developing, is the most dangerous time, so women are sometimes told to avoid drinking at this time, and wait until the final three months of pregnancy. 

Part of the problem is that if drinking small amounts of alcohol does have an affect on unborn babies, then it is very small, and therefore difficult to detect amid the many other factors that influence children’s development. Previous studies have produced inconsistent and confusing evidence about this. 

Relatively little harm

Dr Arun Ghosh, who is interviewed in the BBC report, ends by saying that women shouldn’t drink at all during pregnancy, but if you have the odd drink “You’ll do relatively little harm, if any at all, to your baby.”

But do you really want to do "relatively little" harm to your baby. Wouldn’t you prefer to not have a glass of wine, and therefore do no harm at all? Is having a drink really worth any risk, however tiny?