Hey, Dollface.

This is a Bratz doll:



And she looks like she's had very bad cosmetic surgery. Dolls for children generally have idealised faces - pert noses, big eyes, the stereotype of perfect beauty. But how can bad cosmetic surgery have become the idea of perfection? Am I just being old and crabby and not seeing the inner beauty of having oversized blown up lips or something?

I've currently got one male child and one baby of unknown gender in my belly. It could be a girl and if it is I really don't want dolls like this to be a part of her life. But then as a parent you're faced with the difficult decision. Do you be the unkind Mum, the one who says no to the toys all the other kids have got, or do you allow your female child to be indoctrinated from a very early age into the fine art of the female form Hollywood stylee?

Hamleys has recently been shown up for dividing it's toys into gender stereotypes - pink and baby dolls for girls, Dr Who for boys. Female children are given really dull toy choices; kitchens and pretend cashiers tills and dolls that wee themselves whereas the boys are presented with toys that make them think and become spacially aware; geomag, lego, meccano. I know boys toys are stereotyped too - macho fighting characters and guns and such but I think that the lack of imagination, the belief that all the girls will need to aspire to is looking beautiful, having babies and working in a shop really should have been long gone from the toy industry. But instead of getting better, it appears to be getting worse.

I really, really don't think little girls should be given dolls which look nothing like any kind of realistic female, let alone ones which wear kinky sexy clothes as a matter of routine. I know that when I was a little girl we had Sindy and Barbie - dolls with very long legs and tiny waists, and tiny noses and huge eyes.



But Sindy dolls still look childlike, especially when you look at them with an adult eye. In fact in finding that picture I am quite surprised at how childish her face is. I remembered her to be more 'adult' more elegant and beautiful. No Bratz doll these days would have the same cute chubbiness.

Barbie, whilst also looking very doll-like has, redeemingly, at least had several careers including:

Astronaut, Doctor, Dentist, Aerobics Instructor, Fire Fighter, Athlete, Police Woman, Scientist, Business Woman, Flight Attendant, Teacher, Tap Dancer, Soldier.

If the Bratz dolls had done these things they might not be so bad, but the Bratz dolls are flower girlz and movie starz and pop divaz and pixiez. They like slumber parties.

So they look like pornographically stylised versions of women and they spend their time doing glitzy fame jobs with no real substance, or being fairies.

They annoy me.

Badly.

On not saying, "Hurry Up" all the time.

When I was a little girl my Mum always used to say, "You've got two speeds, slow and stop." But I remember dashing about everywhere, always in a hurry.

Now I find myself chivvying TLB along, "Come on, hurry up, get a move on."

I know children have a tendency to dawdle and daydream, to stare out the window when they should be getting dressed but I don't think they're that different to adults.

I think the difference is that adults monitor children. They're constantly waiting for them, telling them what to do. Nobody monitors adults.

Nobody is waiting for me to hurry up and get in the car, I make the decision about how long it takes me to do a thing. But children don't get to do anything for themselves. "Go and have a bath and hurry up, make it a business bath, not a play bath." "Eat your dinner quickly", "Get dressed, you'll be late for school".

They never get to do anything at their own speed.

I suppose it could just be me, being impatient, but I hear it everyday in the street, in the playground and it can't be that all children are inherently slow.

It must be us with an eye to our watches thinking they're slow when in fact they probably don't take any longer than we do.

Apart, of course, from when they have to get up in the morning. Or clean their teeth. Or finsh their dinner. Etc, etc, ad finitum.

I don't understand how Easter works. Why do the dates keep changing? I think there is a person in an office somewhere, sticking a pin in a calendar with their eyes shut, going, "I would like Easter to be now".

On why it is not OK to look pregnant when you are pregnant.

I have discovered that the perception of feminine bodily perfection covers many stages of a woman's life and is not just limited to the youthful female form.

Pregnancy, it seems, does not escape judgement. A pregnant woman should apparently put on very litte weight, carry her bump high, appear almost unpregnant from the back and have many people say how compact and neat her pregnancy is.

For me and the throngs of women I see at the maternity hospital, this is bad news. Our general weight gain and roundness and the fact that we actually look like we are pregnant seems apparently to count against us.

But I don't want to look like I'm not pregnant. I am pregnant! I have put on a bit of weight, some of my weight has moved around but I'm building a baby! I don't want to be compared to anyone with regard to the shape of my body, and especially not to naturally thin women who carry their baby in a neat rugby ball stuffed up their jumper (although this, for info, is apparently the definition of pregnancy perfection).

The zeitgeist seems to be small bumps. It's all 'Sporty Mum's! Women who run marathons right up until they're 10cm dilated! Wear your old clothes all the way through your pregnancy!' No celebration of normality, no deference to the complicated business of what's going on inside, it's all about how we look on the outside. I don't understand the seemingly constant desire to minimise the size of women; the definition of perfection is getting smaller and smaller. It really feels like the ideal would be for us all to be tiny little Alices in a world full of tall and manly men.

It's not just the media either. A colleague at work is five months pregnant but has lost a stone in weight because she's been so ill with morning sickness. Another colleague said to me, "Doesn't she look fabulous? You'd hardly know she was five months pregnant. She's carrying the baby really neatly!" Neatly! But she lost a stone in weight from being unable to hold down food, at a time in her life when the food you eat is even more vital than usual. That is not fabulous.

I think that women are judged physically at every point in their lives; as children we are picked (or not picked) to be May Queens, teenagers think size zero is the height of aspiration, the twenty somethings try diet after diet and are encouraged to eat cereal instead of lunch in order to drop a dress size. Shouldn't pregnancy be the one time when this pressure stops? Is not even pregnancy sacred?

Weight gain in pregancy has to do with many things like having some reserves for breastfeeding. It's normal and natural and it makes me really sad to be part of a society where it feels like women may not even bloom during pregancy. The ideal pregancy shouldn't be anything. It shouldn't be tiny, thin women with bumps on their fronts, looking as much like they're not pregnant as is humanly possible, it should just be women, being pregnant in their own way and shape carrying their babies to term in the way that their body chooses.