My new favourite stuff

Sometimes you stumble across a website and it sends a shiver down your spine. Like you've turned a favourite corner. You're in the right place, in safe hands...they're talking your language.

A while ago it happened to me with Pink Stinks, Abi and Emma Moore's awesome campaign about the 'pinkification' of girlhood. Today it's happened again, as I've just found Crystal Smith's Achilles Effect, which argues for a similarly de-stereotyped vision of boyhood.

While I'm on this subject, if you haven't already done so, DO read Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender, which sets out to debunk the supposed science behind sex differences. It's brilliant, and if I had my way it would be on the National Curriculum.

None of this is directly about fatherhood, of course - but then again it IS. As fathers (and mothers) we must navigate across oceans of gendered expectation, both of ourselves (informed by the representations of fatherhood we've grown up with) and of our children (through whom new, more inspiring representations will hopefully develop).

Resources like these are precious. They help us recalibrate our moral compasses as we wend our merry way...

A very modern bravery

In an editorial in this week's Spectator, the magazine's editor Question Time regular Fraser Nelson says David Lammy MP is 'brave' to talk about the importance of fathers in his book Out of the Ashes: Britain After The Riots.

Mr Lammy was brought up by his mother, and a line of argument in the book (which I haven't read by the way - and I'll wager Mr Nelson hasn't either) is, apparently, that the absence of fathers from many young boys' lives probably goes some way towards explaining why the riots happened.

According to Mr Nelson, such a claim could 'cast him out as a heretic' from his own party.

Poppycock - politicians of every hue talk about 'absent fathers' all the time. What marks Lammy out is that a) he has, having been born black and brought up in Tottenham, a very personal perspective on the rioters' issues, and b) he puts his money where his mouth is by heading up the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fatherhood, which goes some way towards putting fathers and fatherhood on Britain's political map.

If that's bravery, let's commend it!