Footbinding for the 21st century?

This month I read a novel about the life of Chinese women in the era when footbinding was the norm for women above all but the lowest social levels.* The more effectively mothers mutilated their daughters' feet, and the more perfectly they were deformed, the higher their value would be on the marriage market. One in ten girls died as a result of this practice.

I'd just finished shuddering over this, and wondering how on earth it had ever become so entrenched, when I came across an article about its 21st century equivalent in the Sunday Star-Times:

"Women forking out for a killer pair of high heels are also paying for the ultimate accessory - Botox to make their legs look better in stilettos. An Auckland cosmetic physician has found a demand for his calf-thinning services, in which he uses large amounts of Botox to sculpt women's legs and make calf muscles appear less bulky."

This "physician", who charges between $2000 and $7000 (depending on how thin your legs are to start with) says the procedure is "far safer than surgery to achieve the same result, a practice common in Asian countries. Surgery involves removal of the muscle through an incision in the crease behind the knee or, alternatively, destroying the nerve."

"What happens is that they chop the peroneal nerve [running from the knee to the foot] and this can cause permanent foot drop." As it happens, my husband has foot drop, the result of a degenerative muscle condition. It makes walking extremely difficult.

So let me get this straight. First you get the "killer" high heels - which can occasionally kill their wearers, but usually just cripple them over time. Then you deliberately use either surgery or drugs to make your legs look better in these ludicrous shoes, by reducing your leg muscles - and stopping them building up to make you stronger (so it's "strictly for the non-sporty"). Oh, and you need regular injections every nine months to "maintain the new shape".

A 25-year-old who got the Botox did it because she used to do a lot of running and had big muscles in her legs. She believes it has "given her more confidence" and "can't wait" to wear high heels.

The whole article reads like a promo for this "procedure". The accompanying photo could have come straight out of an advertising brochure.Susan Pepperell, the reporter, apparently did not ask for any other medical opinions on it.

I guess it's only a matter of time before teenage girls start asking for it for Christmas. At least it won't be their mothers forcing them to stop running and start Botoxing? Will it?

*Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, by Lisa See.

Sticking it to sole parents

I've just had my say on Paula Bennett's latest set of sticks to beat sole parents with - have a look at my latest Letter from Elsewhere on Scoop.  But to get a real feel for what's happening, have a look at the manual for MSD staff who have to administer the new rules. See if you can make sense of them. Then see if you think you could make them work fairly.

There seems to be very little emphasis on (a) helping sole parents actually find suitable jobs or (b) finding out what's actually going on in their lives that might lead to them failing their work test - and losing half their benefit. Knowing what precarious circumstances many sole parents live in, I can all too easily imagine you being judged guilty because you've had to find somewhere new to live, or your child has had an accident, or your car has broken down completely and there's no public transport...

Paula Bennett makes great play with the fact that she's been a sole parent. Yet she seems to have absolutely no idea of the real-life situations people at the bottom of the heap have to grapple with every day.

As for John Key - oh no, wait. His mother was a widow. So even if he was a child again now, she would come into the one category of sole parent who doesn't have to face the new Work Test.

Losing your partner by death is a tragedy. But having seen the many ways in which women (and a few men) can suddenly find themselves a sole parent, I simply do not understand why this distinction is still being made.

What is there about being deserted by your partner, or being beaten up and having to run away from your partner (and your home), that automatically makes you completely unable to act sensibly and responsibly (as I have no doubt John Key's mother did) and decide for yourself when you and your child/ren are ready and able to add paid work to your existing workload of parenting alone? (If you can find any, that is.)

Losing it with Peter Singer

Some days, everything goes wrong. I was getting ready to go to some Writers and Readers sessions when I discovered my wallet wasn't in my bag. Frantic searching failed to unearth it. So I had to borrow the EFTPOS card for Harvey's account to get some bus money from the machine up the road. When I tried to get the cash, it said "Your card has expired, we have retained it." Rushed back home and found Harvey did have a replacement card, he just hadn't got around to cutting up the old one. The new one worked, so I got money.

Then I realised I would need to call Harvey during the day, but my mobile phone had almost no cash left on it, and I couldn't use my own credit card to top it up because I'd just cancelled it, hadn't I. Yet another borrowing, this time of Harvey's Visa, followed by a long session on the phone as I (a) mucked up the business of putting the card number in for the automatic top-up, (b) did it all again and got the number right, only to have the autovoice tell me, at the very end, that the automated top-up system had failed and I was being put through to an operator instead, and (c) spent another ten minutes attempting to complete the process with someone in, I think, the Philippines, who kept getting the card number wrong (but never once asked me for the card-holder's name, which was lucky, as it saved me explaining that this man with the completely different surname was my husband). I lost it only at the very end when, while waiting for the top-up to finally go through, he started telling me how I could do it online instead (thereby, presumably, doing him out of a job, but I didn't like to mention that).

Making it down to Writers and Readers at last, I got through two sessions (Margo Lanagan with Eirlys Hunter, fantastic, and Bill Manhire with Steve Braunias, both impressive and heartwarming) before I tried to phone Harvey to tell him the wallet wasn't at the Embassy. But my phone told me there was a text, so I thought I'd better try to read it. Don't laugh, but I've never received a text before, let alone sent one. "I'm so sorry you've had such a bad morning, Anne", it said. "I have"

and then it stopped. I stared at the phone for a while before I figured out that maybe I could read the rest if I used the downward scroll button. It worked, and the next page said "found your wallet in the car." It was from my lovely niece Jenny, who is staying with us, and when she couldn't raise me on the phone (of course I had dutifully turned it off for the sessions) she decided it was high time I learnt to read texts. She was right, and she made my day.

So then I went to hear Peter Singer, who thinks it's wrong to kill and eat chickens regardless of how well they are treated (actually the said chickens would not, of course, exist at all if they weren't destined to be food, though he didn't discuss that), but probably not wrong to end the lives of severely intellectually disabled people, whose life (unlike the life of chickens) he apparently cannot imagine himself into, any more than he can imagine himself into the life of a cabbage (which he is therefore happy to eat). Does that mean it would be okay to eat severely intellectually disabled people? Probably not, eh.

What I Did On My Holiday

I've just managed to have my summer holiday, by dint of being able to get Harvey's caregiver in to stay, and tacking one night with friends and two nights at Mt Maunganui on to a trip to Tauranga and a night with my sister Ruth for my birth mother's 90th birthday.

Mary looked wonderful - my sister Ann bought her a terrific new outfit, a very nice soft long-sleeved top in a beige and blue patterned crinkly material, and a longish skirt, also crinkly, in a lovely soft teal blue. It was all very easy to wear, but also smart and up-to-date. She wanted sparkly earrings and silver shoes, and Ann got her those too. She had two parties, a family one at the old homestead on Sunday, and a rest home/friends/Anglican Women one at the rest home on Monday (her church, Holy Trinity, sent a huge bouquet of flowers), and she enjoyed it all very much. I was able to be there for both parties, and she knew me and was pleased to see me, so that was all good.

And then I swanned off to the Mount. No car, I didn't need one - that was the whole point. I'd booked a small apartment - Absolute Beachfront - on the ground floor, but they upgraded me to a big one on the third floor! Fantastic. The best thing was the beautifully shady balcony - I sat out there for breakfast, lunch and dinner (the takeaway Turkish round the corner, eaten out there with a sensible mini-bottle of red, was infinitely better and cheaper than the mediocre offerings at the cafe next door). But the first night I went out to dinner with Beth. We started and ended with bubbly on the balcony, and we had an Italian waiter who looked exactly like a faun.

Because it was a grey morning on Tuesday, I even walked round the Mount, very slowly - not because I couldn't walk faster, but because I wanted to make it last. It's one of the loveliest little coastal walks in the land. I thought about my husband, and the son I still have, and the son I haven't had since he was 18. I sat on the seats commemorating Ashley, who died at 19, and Chris, who died at 18, and thought about their parents too. Then on Wednesday I came home and picked up where I had left off. But it was good, and I might well do it again.

On making the rich richer by making the poor poorer

Apparently all the rich have to do to have their taxes reduced is to assiduously devise ways to avoid paying. The Labour government introduced a modest increase in the top tax rate. Now the National government proposes to remove it - because so many wealthy people are managing to avoid it. This is like removing speed cameras because more people have radar detectors, or repealing the equal pay laws because so many employers are managing to flout them.

Any quaint notion that those who earn more should pay more tax is fast vanishing. Meanwhile the offsetting introduction of higher GST represents not only a further shift away from income tax to consumption tax; it also means that those who have no choice but to spend all or almost all of their low income will have their tax burden increased.

Here's what John Kenneth Galbraith said about cutting taxes on the rich (in The Culture of Contentment):

"The only effective design for diminishing the income inequality inherent in capitalism is the progressive income tax. Nothing in the age of contentment has contributed so strongly to income inequality as the reduction of taxes on the rich; nothing…so contributes to social tranquillity as some screams of anguish from the very affluent. That taxes should now be used to reduce the inequality is, however, clearly outside the realm of comfortable thought." (p.179)

CROSSOVER: My recent post at The Hand Mirror on last Sunday's SST Sunday Mag article based around the grievances of those without kids against those with has stirred up 23 comments, and counting.

The final farewell to a great New Zealander

Today brought the final farewell to Sonja Davies. On a perfectly calm sea, in brilliant sunshine, her ashes were laid to rest at the deepest point of Wellington Harbour, and bread and roses were spread over the water.

Our lives shall not be sweated
From birth until life closes
Hearts starve as well as bodies
Give us bread but give us roses

Haere atu ki te po Sonja
Haere, haere, haere

Sorry, wrong movie

I've just had a weird experience. I read that Maori TV was screening a movie called "Avalon", by Barry Levinson, and that it was about an immigrant family adjusting to life in New York. Here's how the New York Times review by Janet Maslin starts:

"In the fond overflowing family album that is Barry Levinson's ''Avalon,'' the prevailing symbol of both unity and discord is a Thanksgiving turkey. Or a ''toikey,'' as the participants put it, since the Krichinskys are an immigrant Jewish family in Baltimore and their every bantering, nit-picking conversation carries hints of the Old World."

Great, I thought, I'll watch that. I don't watch many movies on TV because I can't stand the ads, but this one looked good and wasn't something I'd easily stumble across for rent.

But when I switched on, it turned out to be something completely different - a weird science fiction epic. So I looked it up on line, and found that as well as the 1990 Levinson film, another "Avalon" was made in 2001:

"Avalon marks longtime anime director Mamoru Oshii's (Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor) first venture into the world of live action films, bringing a other-worldly vision to what might have been pedestrian fare in the hands of most other directors. For all of its high-concept theories about what is real and what is simulation, Avalon actually scores more points as a unique visual experience much more so than as a richly detailed story."

Oh dear. Did Maori TV think it was getting Levinson, and Oshii was supplied by mistake? Never mind - it's sent me back to the keyboard instead, which is a Good Thing.

The business of milk

Last year I was lucky enough to see Sally Burton's magnificent exhibition, "White Gold: The Business of Milk" at Nelson's Suter Gallery, where she pays homage to the M.P.U.’s (Milk Production Units) commonly known as cows - or as she calls them, the "working women of our most important industry". You can read about it and see images from it here and here.

I thought about Sally's cows yesterday when I heard that the government has called in current resource consent applications concerning proposals to keep 18,000 cows inside, in cubicles, for eight months of the year, and 12 hours a day for the other four months, in the Mackenzie Basin. There has been a huge surge of opposition to these proposals (see, for example, my last Letter from Elsewhere and other items on Scoop). As well as the massive environmental impact, this method involves treating cows as nothing but MPUs - merely milk-producing machines. It doesn't matter how we deal with them, as long as they stay healthy enough to keep on producing.

But cows kept inside in cubicles is not, of course, the image that our dairy industry has wanted the world to see. So if such proposals - and there are bound to be more - are allowed to proceed, they are likely to have a huge impact on the New Zealand "brand".

As this whole affair has proceeded, it's become clear that each aspect of such proposals is dealt with quite separately - and some aren't dealt with at all. This enables the big companies behind these schemes to amass all the consents they need, piece by piece, without the total impact and the wider implications ever being examined.

This time, though, the outcry has been too great to ignore, and Nick Smith has done the right thing. Now let's hope the commissioners get it right too, and stop these proposals going any further.