Perspectives on egalitarian relationships: Jenny Baker

Today's guest post - on the theme of shared parenting - comes from Jenny Baker. Jenny is the director of the Sophia Network and has been married to Jonny for nearly 25 years. They have two sons.

Sharing work and parenting

I grew up in the Brethren church which had very clear divisions of labour along gender lines – men made the decisions and women made the tea. My mum and dad had a very traditional, and very happy, marriage with mum giving up her job as a teacher when she had children and dad working long hours as the breadwinner. As a teenager considering what was modelled at my church, I found myself on a pendulum swing – one day thinking ‘if that’s what God wants for men and women I don’t want anything to do with God’, and the next thinking ‘if that’s what God wants then I’ll put up with it because I want to follow Jesus.’

At university when I was in a relationship with Jonny, who is now my husband, someone gave us a book called ‘Marriage as God intended’ which had incredibly prescriptive roles for men and women. That was the clincher for me; it just made me determined never to get married because I knew that constraining myself into those roles would make me slowly die inside.

Fortunately, the church we were part of put on a series of evenings exploring what the bible said about men and women, which made me rethink all I’d previously taken in through osmosis as a child. It was really liberating to discover the full equality and partnership that’s described in the bible and to think through what the redemption that Jesus won on the cross meant for relationships between men and women. It also transformed my thinking about marriage much to Jonny’s relief and we’ve now been married for nearly 25 years.

We talked a lot about what a marriage of equals would look like in practice, and from the start shared all the domestic work that comes with being an adult, as well as both finding work. After all Jonny had cooked, cleaned, washed clothes as a student and it seemed bizarre that I should suddenly do that for him once we were married as if he were a child and I was his mum. We decided that if and when we had children, we wanted to share work and parenting too. I think it was really important to make those decisions early in our relationship and to be intentional about sticking to them. I can remember feeling incredibly guilty when Jonny ironed his shirts because something in my gut said that I ‘ought’ to be doing that for him, even though rationally it made sense that we should each do our own ironing as both of us hated doing it. That feeling soon went away, but it would have been easy to give in! As one of the slogans of second wave feminism says, the personal is political – what we do inside our homes and the way we organise our relationships does affect the time and energy and attitude we have to engaging with the world outside it. So many women do the ‘double shift’ of being employed and running the household and then wonder why they are exhausted.

We had children quite early in our marriage when we were both youth workers with YFC. Although I loved my baby, I struggled with being at home on my own with him on maternity leave. So when Joel was about three months old, Jonny and I started to job-share. We ended up working three days a week each, and found a child minder for one day a week so that we could have a team day for the meetings we both needed to be at. Harry was born a couple of years later and slotted into the pattern. We had quite set routines which suited us; whoever had been at home would cook the evening meal so that we could all eat together early evening then the parent who had been at work would bath the boys and put them to bed. We were fortunate to have a management committee who gave us a six-month trial to see if it would work, and having made the decision to rent rather than buy a house, we were able to live off one salary between us. Both of us benefited from being fully engaged parents and having the stimulus of work, although I know Jonny was lonely at times as there weren’t many other dads doing the same.

We moved to London when the boys were three and five, and as they went to school we changed jobs and increased our hours until eventually we were both working full-time but in flexible situations which meant that one of us could always do the school run while they needed that. Working in the Christian charity sector has given us more freedom than other sectors so we’ve been fortunate in that sense. We had to be very organised about our diaries and discuss trips away before committing to them, to ensure that one of us was able to take care of the boys and at times we did do the ‘tag-team’ parenting thing where one of us would get home just in time for the other to go out. For us, mealtimes were really important as a foundation of our family life and we’ve really valued the discipline of sitting down together around the table every day, taking time to talk to each other. And we had to recognise that there would be seasons when one of us was incredibly busy at work and the other would need to pick up the slack at home; but then a few months later it would work the other way round.

And the boys have turned out fine. Now 19 and 22, they haven’t grown up confused about what it is to be men as some people predicted. They are both quite different in terms of temperament and interests, and I am hugely proud of them. And very grateful that we made those decisions early and stuck to them.

Why the Samantha Brick backlash missed the point

Samantha Brick is suddenly famous. If you use Twitter, or read the Daily Mail (in which case why are you here? Seriously?), you'll know why. To cut a long story short, on Tuesday the Mail published a piece by Brick entitled 'There are downsides to looking this pretty': Why women hate me for being beautiful. This ridiculous article promptly went viral, with the author's name appearing to be trending on Twitter every time I logged on.

This is not a post about my views on the piece. Of course it was awful, although no worse than Brick's previous efforts for the Mail. With standard and incredibly tedious woman-hating, Femail-fodder headlines like 'I use my sex appeal to get ahead at work... and so does ANY woman with any sense', 'Would YOU let your husband dress you? Samantha does and says she's never looked better', and 'My husband says he'll divorce me if I get fat', I think it's pretty safe to say that I'm not missing out by refusing to give them a thorough reading. I couldn't care less about Samantha Brick's musings - they're typical of the Mail's 'women's interest' offerings. State that women are backstabbing bitches. Talk about how much better life is when men are in charge. Criticise women some more. Pit them against each other and encourage 'cattiness'. You know the score.

This is also not a smug post berating all of you for heading over to Mail Online in order to read it, retweeting it and talking about it because it's just giving the Mail what they want, people! More hits and more publicity! Again, I couldn't care less. And yes, I am succumbing to the hype and giving in and blogging about it. Hate if you want.

This is a post about the way people react to stories like this. If you search 'Samantha Brick' on Twitter and look at what people have been saying about her for the past couple of days, if you look at any comment thread about her on forums or on Facebook or even the 5000-strong comment thread on the article itself, you'll see a theme emerging. People are desperate to give their personal opinions on whether Brick really is attractive or not. The issue at hand: she think she's stunning, people want to take her down a peg or two and point out that she's 'average' and 'nothing special', going right down to 'ugly' and 'looks like a man'. You can't escape people's judgement on Brick's appearance.

For me, the issue that needs to be discussed is not the way Brick looks. It's the way that the Mail exploits women writers to further its misogynist agenda, holding on to its crown as the newspaper most widely read by women. Who knows if the article has much to do at all with Brick's true opinions of herself? It's been well-documented that the Mail can't resist putting words into women's mouths and publishing misleading stories about them, even if this means that their lives are pretty much ruined as a result. Two examples can be found in Anna Blundy's account of being stitched up over a feature, and Juliet Shaw's tale of how the paper completely fabricated facts and quotes for a story about her, leading to her taking legal action.

The Mail has no qualms whatsoever about publishing features like those found when you search for 'Samantha Brick' on its website; indeed it's almost gleeful in the way it offers them up for people to hurl abuse, and for commenters to write vicious responses. Hadley Freeman is spot on when she says that the paper 'simply threw Samantha Brick to the wolves'. The way it uses writers like Brick is so predictable - the stories about deferring to men, bitchy women, weight and women in the workplace form a steady stream of hate.

But people, in general, don't want to talk about this. They want to pass judgement on the woman's appearance, thinking that this is what really matters because they're conditioned to believe that this is what's really important: having the last word on a woman's looks - because that's what women are here for. To be hot - or not. A woman's worth lies in what people think of the way she looks, what men claim they would like to do to her, how many women are secretly envious of her. And everyone has to weigh in with their views on the matter. If it's not her looks, it's her opinions of herself. She needs to be set straight. Who does she think she is?

Last year I wrote about the drama provoked by the way Scott Schuman (aka The Sartorialist) described a woman he'd photographed as 'sturdy'. What annoyed me just as much as the stupid post and Schuman's stupid reaction to it, was the way the discussion became framed around what people really thought of this woman's body type. Was she thin? Was she fat? Was she curvy? Was 'curvy' an offensive way to describe her? You know how it goes. It's a familiar scenario in comment sections. Has she really got good boobs? Is she 'worryingly thin' or 'fuller figured'? Does she actually look good in that outfit? Wherever there is deeper discussion to be had, you can guarantee that people will reduce it to their personal opinion on her appearance. And is there any wonder, when the media continually encourages us to critique, compare and contrast women based on 'who looked the best', 'who wore it best' or 'who has the best beach body'?

Unlike the rest of Twitter, my feed wasn't full of people calling Samantha Brick 'ugly'. Today, of course, it was full of people bemoaning the fact that those people had given the Mail exactly what it wanted because Brick wrote a follow-up piece, gloating over the number of hits Tuesday's article had received and claiming that the backlash she received just proves that she was right when she said that women hate her because she's attractive. And so it began again.

People: stop playing the game. Stop falling into the trap of judging a woman's worth by your opinion of her looks. Stop reducing every discussion about a woman in the public eye to whether you think she's hot. Stop equating looks with power and success and sneering at those who don't, in your eyes, measure up. Stop treating confidence as something to be torn down and trampled upon. Stop perpetuating the lie that women are by nature 'catty' and 'bitchy'. Stop defending the roadblocks on the highway to equality and giving people like Samantha Brick fuel for the fire as she churns out more articles bemoaning how nasty other women are.

Perspectives on egalitarian relationships: Ruth and Nick Wells

This week's guest post on egalitarian relationships comes from Ruth and Nick Wells, who are both youthworkers living in Bournemouth. Ruth and Nick have been married for nearly 10 years and have two children.

"But who wears the trousers?"

It seems to be a trend to write about marriage as a couple, and so as those who would not want to shirk away from what is trendy (!) we have decided to follow suit. We write as a couple, approaching 10 years of marriage, who met as young people and are both Christians. We also write as people who both hold an egalitarian view of gender and marriage. We are both youthworkers and have two beautiful children. This post is anecdotal rather than an over-arching theological exposition of egalitarian theology – it is our story.

It is not uncommon for the issue of how we ‘do’ our marriage to come up with various people. From the ‘oh so Nick looks after the children too’ to ‘what, Ruth was once your boss Nick?’ we are often met with looks of incredulity! To us this is how things work best, and how we believe we are both able to outlive what it means to follow Jesus.

When people have been able to move on from the fact that we both work, and believe that Jesus, not one of us, is the ‘head’ of our marriage, the inevitable discussion is around ‘but who makes the final decision?’ This question goes something like ‘but the buck has to stop with someone doesn’t it?’ Well we are happy to report that there have been no occasions at which one of us has had to ‘pull rank’ so to speak, and at which we could not reach a decision through negotiation and that mysterious art-form ‘talking to one another’. It isn’t that we always agree - we don’t - but we have never got to the point where we couldn’t resolve something through being together and chatting it through. We have been best friends for over 15 years and as such we find that we have some understanding of how we work.

We believe that marriage isn’t a relationship bound together through the subjugation of one party to another, but is one of mutual submission, respect and love. We also find it hard to imagine that if someone has to always ‘pull rank’ on decisions or forcible stop the buck, that there isn’t something fundamentally at odds in the relationship. It seems plausible to us that no-one needs be assigned the ‘in-charge’ monitor of the marriage. Just as Israel in the Old Testament sought to replace God with an earthly King, we believe that people sometimes mistakenly feel the need to replace Jesus, as the over-seer of the marriage, with man.

So what does our marriage ‘look like’? Well, following having our children we decided to both continue working part-time jobs to not only ‘provide’ financially, but to pursue our callings as people, and also parents. Our children get to see each of us as parents with roles within the home and as providers with our work roles – demonstrating that it is important to have dreams and aspirations and to seek to step into what God has gifted each of us in. We believe that our children do not have pre-scripted roles as they grow up, but are free to explore their own God-given gifting regardless of their anatomical make-up. It is not always easy to maintain this balance of life, work and children, but it is something we strive for and something that others find difficult to grasp.

A case in point would be following an interesting conversation about gender roles one New Year, when we found out that some other local Christians had reported that they knew who ‘wears the trousers in that relationship’! It wasn’t meant as praise for us both feeling able to be articulate opinions as part of dialogue. It was derogatory and hurtful. It suggested that because we both had a say about things, because we were both comfortable and confident to look after our children and because we did not fulfil stereotypes of ‘firm husband’ and ‘demure wife’ there was something wrong. It is saddening to us that the utter joy, love and freedom we find in our marriage is not found by others. It is tragic that so many women feel they have to put their own callings on hold for the sake of their husbands. It is sad that so many men miss out of being ‘Dad’ because they dare not shy away from the crippling shackles of over-working in order to be seen to ‘provide’.

So we want to give Jesus the trousers, if that’s not some kind of blasphemy?! He is the one who heads up our marriage and it is to him that we are accountable. We will continue to try and hold each other in love, respect and mutuality whilst trying to find fun, adventure and joy in the journey.

Perspectives on egalitarian relationships: Bekah Legg

Some weeks ago, and after lengthy discussions online about it, I asked my fellow bloggers to write guest posts for me on the subject of egalitarian relationships. The reason? Many of us felt that it's hard to find books or other resources about it. Resources that don't even present an egalitarian relationship as an option, or resources that focus heavily on gender stereotypes and set 'roles'. I asked people to write about their own experiences, to explain what relationships look like for them, as a way of unpacking some of the confusion and attempting to answer the questions that always arise.

"But when push comes to shove, who makes the final decision? What if someone needs to have the final say?"
"But what are you teaching your children about gender roles?"
"So are you trying to say that men and women are the same?"

So each week I'm going to be featuring one of these posts. If you'd like to write one, or have already committed to writing one but haven't yet got round to it, feel free to send it to me, because I hope this will be an ongoing project.

This week's post comes from Bekah Legg. Bekah is editor of Liberti magazine and programme director of Liberti Life, a local schools work project that seeks to empower and equip young people through workshops and mentoring. She is kept on her toes at home by six fabulous children and a husband who occasionally dices with death by singing "The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow" when she's feeling overwhelmed.

"Me and my egalitarian marriage." 

It sounds quite grand when you say it like that, but the truth is I fell into it by accident. I have friends who practically had a manifesto set up before they went on the hunt for the man of their life which detailed exactly what was and wasn’t acceptable, detailed how they would or would not change their name, what their wedding vows would look like and they had an outline schedule prepared for sharing childcare when the time came.

I really didn’t think that much. I probably should have – I’d already been married once, to someone who turned out to be not just determined to be my head but to push submission on me in ways I had never imagined. I had had my spirit broken and my heart torn apart by a, once upon a time charming, man who, when I challenged him that he treated me like the home help, pointed out that I was less than that as at least he didn’t have to pay me.

In the aftermath of that, I didn’t formulate the kind of equality I would desire in the future. I just knew that if I were ever to give myself to anyone again – it would be because they made me feel safe. Not in the big man who can fight someone for me way, I’d learned that wasn’t such a great thing. But that I would feel safe to be me with them, that I knew they would never abuse me or manipulate me or control me, that they would listen to and value my opinion not belittle me and tell me what to do.

It’s only since I’ve been married to someone who does all those things that I have gradually appreciated the sheer gift it is to be valued as an equal on every level. I am still delighted to discover that my husband is proud of my brains – that he isn’t intimidated by them, that he’s happy to put me forward for things when he knows I’m better at them than him or that it would be good for me to have a go. I love that he’ll stay home and look after the kids, cook the tea and clean the bathrooms when I’m given an opportunity to go and speak.

When we disagree over how to do something he doesn’t get angry or insist on his way but we sit and chat it through and sometimes he shifts and agrees with me and sometimes I move and agree with him – not because I have to, not because it’s my place to submit, but because he convinced me with his reasoning.

I am slowly coming to appreciate the sheer freedom there is in a relationship like this where I feel able to utterly respect my husband because I know he totally respects me. I think it’s Ephesians 5:21 in action – mutual submission. This passage goes on to unpack verse 21 and people conveniently forget that the whole section on relationships is rooted in submitting to one another. Paul goes on to explain mutual submission in terms women and then men will understand but he starts by saying submit to each other.

The thing that I think is most notable here is that in his next breath, he talks to kids and parents and slaves and masters and here, kids and slaves are told obey. Wives aren’t – they are told to submit just as their husband has been told to mutually submit. Obeying is about being the weaker part in an uneven power relationship; submission is a voluntary surrendering of your will to another. I frequently do that – I get out of bed when I don’t want to and make coffee for my husband, I make him breakfast and iron his shirts, I cook him dinner when I’m tired sometimes and I help him on the computer when he’s having a technophobe moment. But every other day he pulls himself out of bed bleary eyes to make me tea and porridge, he does the laundry and cooks supper.

We’re a team. We take it in turns: we love, we honour, we respect. We fall out sometimes and enjoy making up. It’s marriage, it’s hard work but it’s equal. In every sense of the word.

Womanhood: what does it mean?

What does being a woman mean? What makes a woman a woman? C. Jane asked me this a few weeks back after she'd watched Miss Representation and was mulling over a lot of thoughts about how what she'd seen. The makers of this documentary want it to be a call to action to women and girls, encouraging them to challenge the limiting way they're portrayed by the media and in public life, so they can realise their full potential and women who have a great deal to offer society, rather than women whose worth is dependent on their looks and sexuality, or fulfilling certain stereotypes.

I think most of us can identify with this. We talk about it - the expectations society has of us, the way it pits us against each other and the way it denigrates women who don't measure up. Someone replied to Courtney to say that for them, becoming a mother was the ultimate expression of womanhood. Not everyone agreed - where does that leave women who can't have children, or don't want to, or would like to but don't have any yet? This is the problem with trying to define it with particular life experiences and characteristics - inevitably, someone will feel left out or hurt.

I'm someone who struggles to articulate what "being a woman" and "femininity" mean to me. I'm not even sure if I know. And I wondered if other women feel the same - so I asked them. Here follow the thoughts of some of the women who follow me on Twitter.

One thing that was immediately obvious was the negative feeling associated with the idea of "femininity".

"Womanhood is a state of being a woman. Femininity is a 1950s advertising stereotype that some try to impose on women. I've been accused of being unfeminine by another woman because I liked beer and football and I was outspoken. I don't want her version of femininity, it's bobbins." 

"I feel like womanhood embraces all it means to be a woman, whatever that looks like. Almost a rallying call rather than a label. For me femininity has a lot more baggage. It's a standard used to judge women by. Too feminine, not feminine enough..."

"I feel like 'femininity' is so often a by-line for stifling stereotypes."

"Womanhood is the cultural destiny ascribed to biology. Femininity is when I play along with it. Feminism is when I spit in its eye."

"Femininity is a state that I feel other women achieve and I've never quite managed. It's only a concept to me, not reality. I've always been quite 'unfeminine' (short hair, tomboy etc) and didn't want to be stereotyped by it, but felt like I was failing by not being able to do those feminine things even though I didn't want them. Very confusing."

"Womanhood means the biology bits. Femininity, the way I signal it through clothing, appearance and manners. Being a woman feels unavoidable. Being feminine is something I work at."

"I've always felt excluded by the terms feminine/femininity because it is something I have never felt/wanted to be."

I very much identify with these statements. As a teenager and a woman on the cusp of adulthood, femininity was something I didn't have much of. I wasn't bothered about grooming and adornment. I didn't have "curves". Boys made fun of the way I looked and girls sneered at my clothes (teen bullying, eh?). The accepted line of thinking was that I looked "like a man". I remember sitting in my room in my first year at university, overhearing someone who lived on my corridor discussing this fact just outside the door. People giggled in response. Femininity was something I didn't have, and that made me a failure.

Eventually that phase of my life was over, but I had something new to worry about: "Biblical femininity" (whatever the hell that was supposed to be). I gathered from various sources that I wasn't joyful and outgoing enough. I was too outspoken and opinionated. I had no interest in other people's children and certainly didn't have the "gift of hospitality" - I liked to be left alone. That made me a failure. That phase of my life is over as well, but it just goes to show how much that word, and that concept are used to put us into little boxes, and beat us about the head when we don't fit into them.

In the same was that "femininity" is seen as something limiting, "womanhood" seems, for some, to be something unattainable and far-off, something for "grown-ups" that's dependent on having the job, the car, the house and the partner. How much of that is down to women's magazines and the like, or what society - and our families - expect we should be doing by the time we've reached a certain age?

"Womanhood is something I associate with grand dames, matrons and majestic older ladies. Manhood seems just a sexual euphemism to me. Womanhood is a combination of experience, power and knowledge."

"There seems to be a transition period for all faab people between 'girl' & 'woman' - an interim period, where there's a too-grown-up for girl, not 'grown-up' enough for woman (maybe not ALL female people, but many). Seems like there is an unattainable aspect i.e. a woman can raise a child, have a job, love a partner and DIY a doily..."

"It feels sometimes that I have spent my life trying to be a woman that I think I am meant to be, rather than the person I really am who just happens to be a woman."

There was also a definite third category of responses - and these are the statements I most identify with at this point in my life. To me, being a woman doesn't make me feel special. It doesn't make me feel more spiritual or more blessed. It just happened. I don't feel I have to act a certain way to be a woman. I want to embrace who I am and celebrate womanhood, but I don't think womanhood has to look like anything in particular, and I think that when we attempt to make it so, things start to go wrong.

"I am passionate about teaching and enabling young women, but other than that, being female is almost incidental."

"Womanhood is something I am, femininity is something I wear. Femininity is not inherent to me, not an essential identity."

"I find defining myself problematic as humans are contradictions & far too complicated to label. However in terms of my passion to see women realise and released to fullfill their potential, I am passionate about women. I celebrate my being a woman in that I have managed to do grow and achieve and find value and security, but ironically that security has led me not really be bothered about my womanhood."

That third statement sums it up perfectly for me. Finding value and security in my identity meant I stopped bothering about womanhood and "femininity" as a concept and realised that it doesn't mean a set of achievements, rules and behaviours, clothes or hair or what men think of me. For me this seems like the right conclusion to arrive at. When womanhood does signify those sort of things, it will always leave someone feeling inadequate.

When I look at the women of the Bible, they fulfilled many different roles and displayed many different characteristics. That's why it leaves me baffled when my religion tells me that being a woman is about ticking certain boxes. It's why I feel baffled when people get so very distressed at the idea of men and women being "equal" because they think that means "the same" - because that would never do. It shocks and appalls. Because when you take away the "differences" that aren't really "differences", the "differences" that are more assumptions and stereotypes, what are you left with? The way I see it, the answer is "not as much as most people think". Although we are told in scripture that there is a distinction, it reveals little about any personality traits we must supposedly have as a result. I'll always remember reading an extract from a book, which claimed that Genesis 1 gives us a portrait of  "a woman's inherent softness". Just in case I'd been missing anything, I double checked. The creation narrative seemed to be oddly lacking in any mention of, or allusion to, "softness". This is what happens when ascribing stereotypes goes a touch too far.

So how can we focus on a positive concept of womanhood? How do we make sure that all women feel included in this - that there are no accusations flying around of either trying to box us in, or hating on "traditional" femininity - which is of course embraced by many? And what implications does it have for the way we raise future generations?

I plan that this will be the first of a number of posts exploring this subject.

Defending the tweeting sisterhood

Do women support one another on Twitter?

So asks Laura Davis in the Independent today. She refers to the "Twitter 100", a list of supposedly influential people on Twitter published by the same newspaper a couple of weeks ago, to conclude that no, we don't. And that this is the reason why we're not getting more entries on these lists.

"It’s a question of why women aren’t more influential on the site," she says.

One fifth of the "Twitter 100" were women. I don't think that says as much about the influence of women on the site as much as the odd way in which the list was compiled. It may have been calculated by looking at numbers of followers and how active people are, but what the Independent ended up with, certainly as far as the Top 20 was concerned, was a list of celebrities, which in my opinion (and I know that plenty of other people feel the same way) misses the point of Twitter entirely. So when Davis claims that what women are saying on Twitter "isn't resonating", I think she's got it wrong. She says that when it comes to helping out other women:

"One place to start would be on Twitter, where we can encourage other’s work, quietly inferring that another opinion is worth hearing."

All day I've spotted women I follow talking about this article and wondering how Davis has managed to get it so wrong. It's an odd pronouncement considering that we've basically had completely the opposite experience on the site. Fair enough, most of us identify as feminists so we'd probably like to think we're incorporating at least a bit of sisterhood into our social networking. But since I joined Twitter in 2009, I've found it to be an incredibly useful tool for women in encouraging each other, promoting each other and networking. Offering as it does the chance to talk to other people with similar interests and passions, I know it's invaluable to many people seeking community with others. When I started tweeting, I was reasonably new to activism, new to blogging, and had no local network of individuals with shared interests to talk to about certain topics. Almost instantly, I was able to find community there.

Three years later, I can say that the women I follow on Twitter have promoted my blog. They've invited me to write guest posts for their own blogs, and for various websites. They've given me career advice and messaged me links to jobs they've spotted and thought I might be interested in, invited me to conferences and events, linked me up with other people they've thought I might get on with, met up with me in person and not lived to regret it, talked to me about matters of faith and shared in my pregnancy experiences. If that's not supportive, I'm not sure what it is. This Saturday, I'm off to London to meet up with a group of women I chat to regularly. We're going to be discussing how we can work together on a particular issue and support each other in what we do. I know all of these women because of Twitter.

The majority of women I interact with on Twitter are eager to look out for each other - giving advice, sharing knowledge, linking up with others. The groups, blogs, forums and real-life friendships I've seen spring up as a result show that this "infuriating" atmosphere of "competition" doesn't always have to exist, and isn't the default mode for many women. Thanks to Twitter, when we see yet another men-only "top bloggers" list or poll, we don't just think "where are the women?". We know where they are and we get their names out there and promote their work. Here's Cath's response to such a poll - a post that still gets this blog hits. When the same sort of thing happened with a list of "top Christian bloggers" last year, I wrote about it, as did several other people. The result? Women connecting with each other for the first time, and yes, being supportive. Much of this took place on Twitter.

Susan Shapiro Barash, author of a book called “Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry”, is quoted by Davis as saying: “It’s a dirty little secret among women that we don’t support one another”.

It might be a stereotype beloved of magazines, tabloids and well, people who love to stereotype, but what I've found on Twitter is a lot of women who hate all that nonsense and genuinely want to be an encouragement to each other. We let out a collective sigh when some newspaper runs yet another feature on "bitchy female bosses". We get irritable when some blog article tries to create a new dimension to the "mummy wars". We want to see mainstream media change the record, and that's why it's disappointing when articles like Davis's piece appear.

Before someone points out that this one time, they saw some women having an argument on Twitter, I'll say that of course that's bound to happen. It would be bizarre if it didn't, because sisterhood isn't about never disagreeing. It's not about acting like you're everyone's biggest fan just because you share a gender. And naturally, some people just aren't that nice - so let's not expect unicorns and rainbows 24/7. My point is that it's ridiculous to stereotype a social network and women in general off the back of one list, which, let's face it, doesn't really say much about Twitter in the first place.

Cosmo's new feminist focus

What happens when the ultimate men-and-diets magazine does equality?

One of my pet subjects to analyse, keep track of and, yes, rant about is the way women's magazines approach the subject of feminism. It used to be that they wouldn't touch it with a bargepole; feminism was something cringeworthy and outdated that seemed so out of place until the middle of the Noughties. Then gender issues got cool again. Okay, this happened at least five years ago but it's only in the last couple of years that mainstream women's magazines have wised up to the fact women actually care about gender equality and have started covering it again.

They've got a host of new books and new protests to reference. And a host of women - always referred to as "the new feminists" - to profile. But what really gets me, to the extent that I wrote about it at length last year, is the limited and clichéd way in which they approach the multifaceted awesomeness that is feminism. We're talking repeated references to Sex and the City, Katie Price and high heels. Reducing gender equality to a set of rules: "Can you wear makeup and be a feminist?" - "Can you have a boyfriend and be a feminist?". They'll interview activists doing amazing work and shoehorn in stuff about lipstick and fashion.

It's really irritating and really patronising. Irritating because it attempts to cause division about what makes an acceptable feminist. Don't worry, girls, you can believe in equality and still get a Brazilian! Patronising, because it seems to ignore the fact that women are capable of thinking about serious issues without having to see references to vajazzling painfully woven in. We know women are entitled to be into clothes and celebrities. But they do have other concerns.

To be fair, some magazines have been doing some good work of their own by promoting awareness of issues like domestic violence and workplace discrimination. And with International Women's Day coming up, I've been wondering what coverage gender issues would be receiving this month. Enter Cosmopolitan magazine, celebrating its 40th birthday and running a new campaign all about using "the F word".

The premise is, of course, that lots of women today don't like using the word, or might not even know what it's all about. So Cosmo's hoping to change that - running a campaign to close the gender pay gap, getting celebrities to talk about why they use "the F word", and taking part in the Women of the World festival in London next week. The thing I'm left wondering though, is how does this all fit with the magazine's steady stream of "Get a man! Keep that man! Get a better body! Lose weight!"? Its focus on men, dating and sex "tips" is legendary and much-parodied.

So when Cosmo editor Louise Court went head to head with feminist blogger Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour on Monday, how did she deal with the accusation that, well, women want more than dating tips and body image hypocrisy? Rhiannon, who writes for brilliant new feminist blog The Vagenda, wondered if the magazine could do with changing the record if it wanted to be more supportive of women's issues. Louise didn't agree. Her argument centred on the fact that women must want to read about that kind of thing, because Cosmo shifts plenty of copies - 1.6 million of them, to be precise. She wondered why women who complain about magazines like Cosmo don't just set up an alternative. Rhiannon asked if she thought it was good that teenage girls might be getting negative messages from the relentless focus on appearance and pleasing a man - Louise replied that actually, plenty of older women are into Cosmo, because they're newly single and want to know - I quote - "about the new rules of dating". Erm, yay?

I'm not buying it. I know for a fact that women do get sick of standard women's magazine fodder, which is outdated and repetitive. I think that when journalists refuse to acknowledge this, they're underestimating their readership. I do think it's good when mainstream magazines cover feminism. But I think they have to be careful that they don't reduce it down to something with no substance and no passion in their quest to make it appealing to a new audience.

The new edition of Cosmo is now out. Included, one of its "10 rules for living the Cosmo life": "Outshine your male colleagues in that early meeting - all while wearing stilettos and a bodycon pencil skirt. Feminist and fabulous? Hell, yeah!". When the magazine takes part in the Women of the World festival, well-known women will take the "for" and "against" sides in a debate called "Can you vajazzle and be a feminist?" It's not filling me with hope for the future of Cosmo's relationship with gender equality, let's put it that way. Let's move away from the clichés, and towards an approach to empowering women that actually seems genuine.

This post originally appeared on BitchBuzz.