It's Not A Zero Sum Game

Decisions, decisions: sex in a time of patriarchy

2012-01-14T10:58:00.000Z

This post is a reply to my friend Natalie Dzerins's post on the F-Word which was in turn responding to an article by Hugo Schwyzer, in which she criticizes what she sees as an unseemly propensity of feminists to police women's sexuality by shaming certain sex acts. I was originally planning to comment on the website, but once I hit the 500 word count I thought it would be better to move it here. I encourage you to read both of the articles I'm responding to, they're both thought provoking and interesting.

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I've been made verythoughtful by this post, and I wanted to give a good detailed response, whichparadoxically means I'm going to start by changing the subject:

A while ago some friends & I weretalking about the concepts of choice in the capitalist system. Essentially, theargument is that choice is one of the mechanism by which capitalism perpetuatesitself, because by offering endless choices between different models of thesame thing (cars, or corporate jobs, or coffee shops - any mode of engagementwith capital) it distracts from the fact that there are no OPTIONS. Through thereification of choice, capitalism is able to disguise the hegemonic nature ofits own constraints and trick even its critics into thinking that choosing toconsume items that are "green" or "ethical" (to give justone example) somehow makes the act of consumption to be contra- or outside thesystem, when in fact it's still just an act of consumption and reinforcescapital.

Patriarchy isintimately linked to capitalism in the modern era, and the smorgasbord of"acts" that human sexuality has been reduced to is very muchpatriarchy's way of partaking of the benefits of offering illusory choice whileconstraining meaningful options. The question I would want to ask instead is, why do wehave a spectrum of sexuality at one end of which people of any gender findfulfilment and joy (important to note that I don't for a moment doubt thattheir fulfilment is authentic, or begrudge it) in degradation? Why, becausepatriarchy is a hegemony of domination founded on degrees and shades ofdegradation to maintain the status quo, of course!

There is a view one can take(and many serious, thoughtful second wave thinkers took it) that allheterosexual sex under a patriarchy partakes in spite of itself in the spectrumof shades of degradation. The radicalconclusion from that view - don't have heterosexual sex ever - leaves one insomething of an unfulfilled quandary though, and is a continuing flaw at theheart of feminist thinking about sex.

In the past 30 years, women trying tolive feminist lives have largely rejected the burden of guilt that came withthat approach (good) but at the cost of not meaningfully resolving the deepproblems that patriarchal hierarchies pose for truly liberated sex (bad). Weseem to have plumped for the buffet approach, and spend much energy on policing"good" choices vs "bad" choices, or, as here, defending thearguable-but-not-compelling view that any choice is a good choice because theact of choosing is liberating. Given that we saw that the act of choosing isactually an act of participation in the patriarchy, this is a problematicsolution to the "heterosexual sex in a patriarchy" dilemma.

We have also, and you won't hear me say things like this very often, neglected men. Patriarchaldiscourse on male sexuality is particularly narrow, limiting and destructive -in some ways more so in our current cultural moment than that of femalesexuality. It drives men to seek league table-like "victories" inquantitative fields such as number of partners, number of sex acts and -increasingly, as patriarchy has to up its game to compete with the assent ofliberated female sexuality - the number of progressively more extreme acts thata man can impose in his partner in some kind of escalating arms race ofdegradation.

It is no coincidencethat the hard core sex acts we ten to have these arguments around - ejaculationon the face (I dislike the sneakily euphemistic term "facial"),intense anal penetration, deep throating - are not "pleasurable" in acommon sense understanding of the word. They all overcome some basic physicalaversion: the gag reflex, the blinking reflex of protecting the face fromprojectile, or pain. Despite the authentic and real pleasure that overcomingthese instincts may give to some - even many - people, the normalisation ofboundary breach should be a problematic phenomenon for feminists.

Which is whereSchwyzer comes in. While I find his analysis on this issue flawed, and hisconclusion unconvincing, I was interested by the fact that he was grappling fora directionally different approach to interrogating heterosexual encounters: byreintegrating the psychological needs of men. Attempting to analyse sex from men's emotional point of view is a good animportant way of reaching towards options of hetero (though I'd wager it has implications for LGBT) sexuality rather than simplychoices from a menu of penetrative games. I think perhaps the main flaw inSchwyzer's argument is that he doesn't fully grasp the depth of what he's onthe cusp of, and so misguidedly positions this re-examination in the frameworkof sex-act-choice. In other words, he should have started thinking aboutdegradation in sex and made conclusions about ejaculation on the face, not theother way around.

I have no furtherconclusions to offer: all I can say is that it would be better for us tocontinue trying and stumbling in our search for a discourse of liberatedsexuality for all genders, however disastrous the mistakes we make along theway, than stopping ourselves short at the gates of "choice".

It would be evenbetter for us to not fall into the trap of equating a critical examination ofsexual mores, and expression of strongly held conclusions about the feministvalue of different options, to making law in Parliament, but that's a wholeother essay.

Actual real human women of 2011

2011-12-28T16:05:00.000Z

In case you haven't caught the brouhaha: the BBC published one of those supposedly humorous (if they were funny) lists of "faces of the year", in which the female face of the December was an animal, and most of the other faces were either brides or rape victims -because hey, one way or another getting fucked is all women are about.

There was a bit of a dust up on Twitter, shall we say. Not, as you might think, because women are humourless harpies who can't take a good natured item about a cute panda; but because many women simultaneously realised that even in a year as serious as 2011, when women worldwide have made enormous strides and gained amazing achievements, the natural instinct is to minimise and belittle those achievements. Or, as is the case here, simply ignore them as if they didn't happen. It's a prime example of the gendercide endemic in our cultural narratives: women are held back by the absence of precedents and role models, and existing precedents and role models are either erased or distorted.

Anyway, it got me thinking, who would be my women of 2011? I was delighted to discover that I can't actually fit them all into a list of just 12, so like on Desert Island Disks, I cheated a bit:

Angela Merkel

I get well pissed off with the characterisations of Merkel as either the dominatrix or the mummy, trying to keep wayward and naughty Europe from imploding on itself. But it does seem to be largely true. For well over a year now, Merkel has been all but eulogised by the press: the tightrope she has to walk between holding the Eurozone together and not pissing off her truculent electorate is tortuous. And yet, she's doing it - and if our luck holds out, she'll make a success of it in the end. Basically the only major European leader (Papandreou doesn't count) to put real political skin in the game, she deserves plaudits at the very least for being a dedicated and serious politician.

Christine Lagarde

The first in a long list of firsts, Lagarde is the first woman to step into the IMF's chief role, during a tumultuous period when both the financial and the moral credibility of the insitution were under attack. She hit the ground running and has exhuded nothing but good sense and quiet confidence ever since. I'm not a huge fan of the IMF and its policies, but if we've got to have it then at least it's good to have it managed by someone who's not going to turn into a rutting chimpanzee.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee & Tawakkol Karman

Joint Nobel Peace Prize winners for 2011. 'Nuff said.

Cristina Kirchner, Julia Gillard, Dilma Roussef & Helle Thorning-Schmidt

In order: first ever female president elected in Latin America; first ever female Prime Minister of Australia; first ever female President of Brazil; first ever female Prime Minister of Denmark. There are others - in Kosovo, at the head of the Scottish Labour Party, in Thailand. I haven't checked any official charts, but I get the distinct feeling that this has been a bumper year for female political firsts. Not one of them made it on the BBC list - but the woman who designed Kate Middleton's wedding dress did.

Mona Eltahawy

This award winning Egyptian-American journalist has become the face and voice of the Tahrir revolution in the West. Eloquent, fearless and incisive, Eltahawy served as a much needed bridge between the Arab Spring and the West that struggled to comprehend it. Arrested and severely beaten in December by Egyptian security forces, Eltahawy remains undaunted.

Rebekah Brooks

This is not a popularity contest. If anyone can come up with a better figurehead for the News of the World scandal, go right ahead.

Nafissatou Diallo

I think this is the only point of contact between the BBC's list and mine. Diallo is a hero to women everywhere who are frightened, bullied or gaslighted into pretending that their rape was not a rape and that the outrage done them does not, in the great scheme of things, deserve restitution. I am filled with grovelling admiration for this woman who, as a poor immigrant in a foreign country where she doesn't speak the language and doesn't hold any social or material capital, nevertheless believed that her body was not a dumping ground for the violent perversions of powerful men. Truly a survivor rather than a victim.

Michelle Bachmann (And her UK mini-me, Nadine Dorries)

So, the world economy is collapsing, long-standing political accommodations are exploding all over the Middle East, the war in Iraq is officially lost and fat cats continue to award themselves billions of our money in bonuses. I mean, what would your priorities be in a year likes that? I know! Vaginas, right?

It is usually the case that converts and collaborators are the worst zealots; this is just as true in reproductive rights as anywhere. Bachmann, Palin, Dorries and their ilk are convenient standard bearers for the mainly male-lead campaign to deny women basic human rights, and boy, have they had a busy year.

Jennifer Egan

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and finalist for the Faukner Prize. But that's not made her a "face" in 2011 - nope, what she got coverage for was nabbing those plaudits right from under Jonathan Franzen's genius nose. I mean, I'm sure Franzen is a very nice man and a great author, but the spectacle of male journalists across the English speaking world clutching their pearls in dismay at his unforseen defeat put Egan's name in virtually every literary supplement there is this year. Heh. (PS: great book, btw)

JK Rowling & Stephenie Meyer

Further to the subject of writing, these two ladies hold the double distinction of being among the best selling authors of all time and being behind the two highest grossing Hollywood franchises of the year. Together with a third film based on a book penned by a woman (and one that passes the Bechdel test for a change), The Help, these women have earned the studios $819 million in 2011, in the US alone.

Amy Winehouse

Goodbye, dear Amy. You were chiefly in the news this year for reasons we would all rather have not heard about. You were one of the great talents of your generation.

The Japanese Soccer Team

Because come on. Winning the World Cup? Right after the earthquake and Tsunami? Not only did they put women's football on the map overnight, they made even me care about it for like, a whole day.

Ideas? Additions? Trenchant disagreement? There's a comment section below the line!

Why is it victim blaming to talk about rape and drinking?

2011-12-19T16:23:00.001Z

I posted this a few days ago on a LiveJournal community, in response to a post that generated hundreds of irate comments but seems to have been deleted. In any case, a couple of people asked if they could have a non-locked link to the text, so here it is.

The context, very briefly for non-LJ users, was a post in which someone was defending the position that women should accept responsibility for sexual encounters when they are falling down drunk, rather than "use the blanket excuse" of rape / inability to consent. The discussion that followed fell very much along the lines described below - between those who said drinking has nothing to do with it, and those who took the superficially common sense approach that it does.

"That" thread has gone a bit newkular, and I just wanted totease out one aspect of the conversation and highlight it separately so thatmaybe (if anyone is still left standing at this point) we could have a moretargeted discussion about the issues around alcohol and victim blaming.

Quite a few people in the thread made the point that bydrinking, women "put themselves at risk", because alcohol impairsyour judgement and make you more vulnerable to abuse/exploitation. And quite afew other people have pointed out that it is only the case when a potentialabuser or exploiter is around to try and abuse or exploit you. Booze is neithera necessary nor sufficient condition for rape. Like, I've been shit-faced abunch of times in my life, and every time I checked my pants during those(happy) occasions, there was a mysterious absence of an unwanted penis in myvagina. Fancy that.

But but but, rejoin the alcohol-is-a-risk-factor commonsense advocates! You can't deny that there is a statistical link between alcoholand rape! Why are feminists being so pig headed about saying that womenshouldn't drink because it increases their risk of being raped? You feministsare just illogical.

Well, yes. It is true that there is something of acorrelation between alcohol consumption and rape incidence, especially thenon-stranger rape that we (unsatisfactorily in my view) call "daterape". It's perhaps not as huge as people think (not a necessary orsufficient condition, remember), but it's there. There are two main reasons forthis:

- We consume a lot of alcohol as a society. Almost no socialoccasion is routinely marked without some kind of tippling going on. So thereis an extremely high likelihood that the sort of co-ed social occasion thatbrings women in physical proximity with rapists would also include someproducts of fermentation or distillation. That's just how we have fun - therewas probably music there too, but we don't go around saying music gets youraped.

- Rapists know who to target. And no, I am not talking abouttargeting women who are too weak to defend themselves due to beingincapacitated by alcohol. I'm talking about women the rapists know will not bebelieved if they report rape. The list of things that makes you a woman whowill not believed is so long an exhaustive as to pretty much get any man offthe hook for doing anything to any woman in the right circumstances - read this article about a man who drug-raped at least 21 women but the jury would notconvict him of a single count despite overwhelming evidence - but there are acouple of things that top the list, and drinking (even moderately) is one ofthem.

Second to raping, what rapists care about most of all isgetting away with it. Very few of your common or garden variety rapists havehorns, or breathe fire, or jump out at unsuspecting virgins from sinisterbushes. The overwhelming majority of rapists pass for regular guys, and theyare very invested in continuing to pass so that they can continue to rape. Andalso, you know, stay out of jail. So they target women who they are aware willhave credibility problems: drunk women, promiscuous women, women who have comeout on a date with them willingly, women who are sex workers.

Aha! I hear the Protect Thyself brigade reviving. So you'resaying there are things that clearly make you a target for rapists! So you should avoid doing them, duh.

Well, not quite. Because the thing about this laundry listof get out of jail cards is that it's completely arbitrary. In our AngloWestern country and maybe a few other places in the West, booze and shortskirts have the bad rap, but in other cultures the rules are different andequally nonsensical. In some cultures, if a woman is not completely veiled andcovered head to toe, people say that she is risking rape. In Azerbaijan whereI was born, it was a well known fact that getting in the front seat of ataxi will get you immediately raped, and serve you right for being stupid. A friend of mine whoruns the amazing anti-FGM charity Daughters of Eve says that girls in hercommunity are told that if they are not cut, and are raped, it would be theirown fault.

There is a list as long as your arm of reasons why a womanhas brought rape upon herself. Some are more subtle, some less. All of themhave something to do with behaviours that are generally disapproved of forwomen in that culture, and rape is used as the stick to frighten them intocompliance; at the same time the "obvious risks" are used to justifyrape. Frankly the only way a woman could completely 100% avoid being blamed forher own rape is to not exist.

Well, I hear you say, but if these rules are completelyarbitrary and not somehow built in to the innate male sexual instinct, then howdo rapists know what they are, huh?

Because we tell them. We tell them all the time, byquestioning women, criticising women and advising women. When we tell women -be it in an LJ post or a police campaign - to not wear short skirts in casetheir get raped, what rapists hear is "if I rape a woman in a short skirtI'm less likely to be blamed". Same goes for the anti-drinking tips, orall that "helpful" advice about holding your keys in your hands asyou approach your car in a dark car park. A woman was raped in a hotel car parkwhile putting her child in the car seat - and the hotel blamed her for"not taking adequate precautions". Why? Because we've told women totake adequate precautions so many times, every schmuck can now recognise thatsliver of an opportunity where they can claim it's the precautions that werenot precautionary enough. And probably get away with it.

And that's why it's de facto victim blaming to talk aboutalcohol and rape in this way. Because what you are saying - unless you'remaking the fantastical claim that alcohol consumption leads to the growing ofspontaneous penises in hitherto unsuspecting vaginas - is that a woman who tookpart in a normal everyday social interaction is fair game. You're not saying itto yourself, or to the world at large - you're saying it directly to the onlypeople who have ultimate and exclusive control over the number of rapesperpetrated in the world. You're telling rapists how they can target victims so as to avoid admitting responsibility for their actions, to themselves as well as to the world.

And this dangerous distraction has got to stop, because the longer we're on the "is it or isn't it victim blaming" merry-go-round, the longer we won't be doing any rapist blaming, which is where our energies should really lie.

Feminists occupying all over the place!

2011-11-02T11:52:00.000Z

Well, it seems that we've inadvertently struck a nerve. Feminism and the occupation has been an issue on many lips in the past week or so; there's a fantastic new blog, Occupy Patriarchy, that's doing some great thinking and centralising of information about the many challenges faced by women who either want to occupy or are sympathetic tot he movement but put off by lack of safety. Check out their most recent post, running down many of the incidents that have occurred at various camps and presenting a pretty compelling argument for why safe space is both missing and needed!

A Facebook community called Feminists Occupy London is also doing great work drawing attention to issues being faced by women who want to take part in the Occupy movement, and the Glasgow Women's Activist Forum is collecting signatures for a letter to Occupy Glasgow (where a horrific rape took place just as we in Bristol were getting ready to come together for our Portable Safe Space event last week).

Safe space is needed, safe space is wanted, safe space is absolutely in demand right now, and I for one am doubly confirmed in my belief that we as women need to create, take, claim, grab and demand our safe space, not wait in the vain hope that some benevolent males somewhere will grant it to us.

So. What, to this end, did we learn last Thursday?

We learned that feminists are every bit as socially awkward as other people (if not more). The initial milling around trying to figure out who the other feminists are was kind of toe curling. One piece of advice from an attendee is: bring a buddy, or at least come with someone you know. Another tip is to have some kind of sign/light to identify the Safe Space contingent so that people don't feel like they have to stride up to strangers and ask them if they happen to be feminists!

We also learned that camp business comes first. This is, at the end of the day, about feminists supporting and participating in the Occupy Together movement. At Occupy Bristol last Thursday, the General Assembly was entirely given over to an urgent discussion of a letter received from the City Council inviting the Occupiers to a very short term and vaguely defined meeting with the Leader of the Council. No other topic was discussed that night, and so we had no opportunity to bring up and discuss issues of inclusion and diversity within the camp.

On the one hand this was a shame - but on the other, it provided a great opportunity to test out the Portable Safe Space principle. Would women speak up? Would they be heard? Did we feel more confident with our numbers up?

Here I speak only for myself, but my answer to all of those is an emphatic "Yes". Just knowing that I was not the only woman there, or not in a tiny minority, talking and getting support from other women before and during the meeting, hearing other women's voices raised in prominent engagement with the meeting - these emboldened and encouraged me.

I felt as awkward at the start as anyone would do in an unfamiliar setting, speaking in front of 40 or 50 strangers; but towards the end of the meeting (which went on well into the night) I was fully able to participate and feel like my contribution was being listened to. I'm completely convinced that this was enabled and encouraged by the small but supportive group of amazing women that surrounded me earlier on in the evening!

So the conclusion I draw from this is: we should totally do this again, and soon. I'm greatly encouraged by the fact that Occupy Bristol have suggested creating a Health & Site Safety working group that will work to refine and implement their already pre-existant Safe Space policy; they have kindly invited me to join this group which I will endeavour to do as much as I can given time constraints. I would strongly encourage anyone reading this to do the same! It is also a step in the right direction (though the decision can not have come lightly and I personally am sad that it had to come to that) to declare the site a Dry site going forward. Both these things will hopefully work to make women feel safer in the camp.

I'm planning to attend the working group meeting on Friday Nov 4th at 7pm to continue the conversation on these issues. It is also my intention to participate in the General Assembly at 1pm on Saturday Nov 5th, where I hope to be able to expand the conversation into more than just "allowing" or "enabling" women to participate, but how to actually blend their voices into the aims and demands of the movement.

They may not yet realise it, but the Occupy movement needs feminists. We have experience and understanding of battling hegemonic structures that they could really use. Please come and join me - help me feel safe, help other women feel safe, and help us all raise our voices together for the good of the movement and the good of the world.

Portable safe spaces and occupying the occupation

2011-10-25T11:50:00.000+01:00

Occupy the World is fantastic. It is wonderful and inspiring and in 2,000 cities around the world. It is the first truly global popular protest movement, it's made up of dedicated and self-sacrificing people with the noblest and best intentions. It is not vague, it is not spoiled, it is not destructive. It's ace, OK?

But Occupy the World is, well, part of the world. And that means that it contains, in microcosm, a lot of what is bad about the world as it is. To whit: patriarchy[1].

Some people think that it's OK to use the occupations as a pick-up opportunity; or so at least they claim - personally I take Amanda Marcotte's view that they are threatened by politically active women and are trying to belittle them through objectification. Other people think - and have thought from Day One on Tahrir Square - that the bodies of women are theirs for the taking, that sexual violence is exempt from the demands for a better future. These people are often bolstered in their belief by organisers and sympathisers who pressure women to forgo the small aims of justice and safety for the greater aims of the movement[2].

More prosaically, I know of women who have been heckled, called gendered names, dismissed, silenced and intimidated at several of the camps. I'm sure this is endemic in most if not all camps, not because the people occupying are bad people, but because it is widespread and endemic in the world. Not entirely surprisingly, all of this[3] has added up to a somewhat subdued female participation rate in the Occupy movement.

This is not quite OK, as far as I'm concerned. What the heck point is it in changing the world for half the people, by half the people? If you're going to be like that, then it should be "we are the 48%", not "we are the 99%".

So, last Sunday, my friend Jess organised a Feminist Picnic at Occupy Bristol. We came, we ate, we sat in a friendly circle, we interacted with the occupiers and the public (it was an "open family day"), and coincidentally we had an impromptu discussion about pole dancing. The sun shone and all was well with the world.

For a while. Here is what is absolutely fascinating to me about how the day went: whenever the number of women around our particular little enclave of blankets and chairs dipped below about 6, shit started going down. I'm not saying it was some kind of continuous campaign of harassment, far far from it; a couple of people who were maybe not quite with it and had had a bit much to drink or in general might have issues that we should not judge them for behaved inappropriately and in an intimidating manner. But as soon as ranks closed, women joined, a circle was formed - nothing. Nada. Zilch.

In fact the very same person who was talking over 4 of us, telling us how "things are done here" and being aggressive and belligerent, when surrounded by 10 of us, was raising his hand patiently to seek consensus right to speak and making cogent and helpful suggestions.

The circle grew and shrank once or twice, and the dynamic repeated itself each time: more women, nice atmosphere; fewer women, aggro. Really basic, obvious dynamics that nobody can dismiss as paranoid feminists making stuff us and "choosing to be offended"[4].

We had a fascinating discussion about how to continue interacting with the movement - because we all support the movement wholeheartedly, and frankly most of us could probably teach some of the organisers a thing or two about hegemony, delegitmisation of protest and privilege - while not exposing individual women or small groups to situations in which they feel intimidated or dismissed. It's easy to say "toughen up", but given that not every one can do that, what's the solution? Forgo the support of all the non-Boudiccas, or create a safe space within the movement where all women can come and contribute their creativity and passion?

Exactly. So, we decided to conduct an experiment in "Carrying Our Safe Space With Us". Given that a critical mass of female presence seems to be, in and of itself, a deterrent to misogynist bullshit, we propose to ensure this critical mass by arranging group presence at the Occupy Bristol camp. The plan, in outline, is:

Convene at the camp on College Green between 6.30pm and 7pm on Thursday the 27th of October
Participate as observers and guests (with a right to speak of course, but no agenda) in the camp's General Meeting
Stay, as a group, until 9pm exactly, displaying a sign that says "Ask Us About Women in the Movement"
Leave as a group, with only those who feel comfortable at the camp remaining behind, if any

Then we'll see. It is by way of testing the waters: are we right that being in camp in the dark but as a group can feel safe? Can we actually all commit to a solid 2 hour attendance? Will our presence be seen as a provocation or as disrespectful engagement with the movement? Can we find a way of getting stuck in and helping out without "breaking the circle" of safe space we have imported with us? And most importantly of course, shall we continue doing this as a way of enabling women's participation in the Occupy the World movement?

I hope it works, I really do - because if it does, it offers such a simple and effective way of helping women penetrate all kinds of spaces that they have traditionally been excluded from. And not just women - any group that feels marginalised or intimidated out of a given milieu can try this "portable safe space" approach to increasing visibility without making undue demands on brave and self-sacrificing individuals to be the token representative, the first penguin in the water so to speak.

I read recently, can't remember where, that the selective sex abortion epidemic in places like China and India is a huge problem, because historically, whenever the percentage of women in the population falls significantly below that of men, they suffer increased oppression and violence. At first this seemed counter intuitive to me, but I realised that this is because it flies in the face of a major patriarchal lie and underpinning of a lot of our sexual politics: that women are a resource for which men compete, not agents in their own right participating in society.

Under the patriarchal view (much loved by MRAs and evo psych proponents), the fewer women there are in a population, the more "precious" they are, and the better they will be treated by supplicants eager for their favour. And this is really deeply embedded in our psyches, or we'd all realise straight away that all this male attention is, even in the best and most PC of circumstances, little more than sexual harassment: to take an example I'm familiar with, one gets catcalled, groped and propositioned way more in places like SciFi/geek/atheist/comics conventions and fan clubs than at events with a more even gender distribution like pop concerts or weddings.

There does seem to be a basic principle of strength in numbers here, and while I'll need to think about it a bit more before I can write a pithy concluding paragraph for this post, I'm going to try and see if I can make it work for me in the meanwhile!

Remember: 27/10, 6.30, College Green Bristol. Be there or be a rectangular thing!

[1] And some other things, too. In the UK at least, it seems to be very white, and disabled representation is low more or less everywhere as far as I can see. These are important and serious issues, but I am not qualified to comment on them, hence the focus on stuff I do know something about.

[2] To those people I say: please, find a new tune. Women have been making the sandwiches for men's revolutions since forever - if you really want to change the world, why you be making it stay the same, man?

[3] And a bunch of other stuff, too: concerns for personal safety from the public (one woman at Occupy Bristol has had drunk revellers climb into her tent at night), responsibility for children (running water and sanitary facilities are a problem at many occupations), a sheer inability to not work, and so on - including good old fashioned social conditioning. All of the usual stuff that hinders women's political participation, in fact.

[4] They can, and they will - but that's because they're assholes, not because they have a leg to stand on.

SlutWalk Bristol Speech

2011-10-06T16:14:00.000+01:00

SlutWalk Bristol was held last Saturday, and it was a fantastic day! We had a great turnout and a very successful march through the sunny city centre, with the majority of people responding very positively to us and some even joining in!

Afterwards there was a rally on College Green (in the disapproving, no doubt, shade of Bristol Cathedral) and yours truly was tremendously excited and proud to give a speech at it! Below, what I said in full.

*******

Rape is wrong. Rape is aterrible, devastating thing to happen to anyone, and an evil, cruel thing to doto anyone.

Everybody agrees about this -even the Daily Mail.

And yet, in the UK today and inmuch of the Western world, rape is basically legal.

Based on a 6-year average ofthe most reliable data, there are 94 thousand rapes in the UK every year. 94thousand. Taking repeat victimisation into account - that is, women who sufferrape more than once in a given year - each year 55 thousand women are raped inthe UK. That's one every six minutes.

In 2008, the last year forwhich I could get statistics, 922 people were convicted of rape. Think aboutthat for a minute: 55 thousand raped. 922 convicted.

If someone rapes a woman,getting away with it is not a problem they even need to worry about.

They know she won't tell. Abouthalf of all rapes remain a secret forever because the women are too afraid orashamed to tell anyone at all.

They know if she does tell, shevery likely won't be believed, or will be dismissed or blamed.

So you have to be reallyunlucky to be punished for raping a woman in this country. Getting away with itis the default.

Frankly rapists should be moreworried about getting cancer or being hit by a bus, because that is more likelythan being put away for something that’s technically illegal, and supposedly acrime.

And we know it. We know rape isbasically legal. We'd like to think it's not true, but deep down we all know.

We've all heard about theDominique Strauss Khan case; a powerful, well connected white manaccused of sexually assaulting a poor black working class immigrant. How manyof us were surprised when the case against him was abandoned? We all knew inour heart of hearts that Nafissatou Diallo was not going to get justice.

We know that Diallo is beingdenied justice because her attacker is powerful. But is that what we are told?No. We're told by the very people whose job it is to uphold the law, and by thepress and media, that it's her own fault for being allegedly a liar, or acriminal. More damningly, she has been ‘accused’ of having multiplesexual partners, and of being a sex worker. A slut.

Nafissatou Diallo, andthousands of other women, are being systematically denied justice because theyare sluts. They get accused of being to blame for what happened to them. Ofbringing it on themselves, or lying about it, or wearing the wrong clothes, orwalking on the wrong street, or drinking the wrong type of drink.

A third of people in the UK thinkthat a woman is partially or entirely to blame for being raped if she has beendrinking, did you know that? That's a third. One out of every three people youlive and work with would accuse you of being a slut if you were raped, andthink it was your fault.

And why wouldn't they? Fromwhere they're sitting, it's obviously not the rapist's fault, right? It’sreasonable to expect crime to be punished, but with only 922 people ofconvicted of rape in one year, and still so many women raped? Well it has to besomeone's fault, doesn't it? And so, they blame the victim.

What that means for the livesof women - for our lives - is that we are all sluts in waiting. As soon assomething bad happens to us, there will be those people - amongst ourselvesfirst of all, then among our nearest confidantes, then among the police, thecrown prosecution service, and finally, if we ever get to court, the jury - whowill see being raped as evidence for the fact that we are sluts.

Rape can happen to anyone -whatever we wear, wherever we walk, however we act. We no longer believe thefiction that rape only happens to bad girls as punishment for promiscuity.

We know that most women areraped by someone they know - someone they trust. Are we really expected tobelieve that someone we trust would rape us just because we wore the wronglength skirt?

No. Rapists rape because theywant to rape. They rape because they enjoy the power of humiliating a woman andbending her to their will. They rape because they think they are entitled towomen’s bodies and no one has a right to say no to them. They rape because theydon’t respect women’s autonomy, and they rape because they believe – correctly– that they are invulnerable, and that there is little to no risk to them.

Because of course it’s thewomen they rape who get blamed for it. It's a pretty cosy set up, if you're arapist. From a rapist's point of view, the world is a sweet shop full of womenwho will magically turn into sluts the minute he rapes them. Handy!

A culture in which people turna blind eye to rape being legal is a Rape Culture. A culture in which peopleblame the victim of a crime rather than the perpetrator is a rape culture.

A culture that condemns women’snatural sexuality by calling them sluts,

that seeks to limit theircontraceptive freedom to punish them for having sex,

that seeks to withhold the lifesaving HPV vaccine from young girls because it might lead to them having safeenjoyable sex

that wants sex education to besuppressed or at best limited to discussion the negative consequences of free,consensual, pleasurable sex

that culture is a rape culture.

It is a culture in which a manforcing a woman to have sex against her will is less of a crime than a womanchoosing to have sex freely and for pleasure – because doing so would turn herinto a slut, and mean she will lose the right to protection if she is everraped.

The bad news is that if womennever have sex with anyone, if they’re raped they’ll still get blamed for it.The good news is that you might as well go out and have as much safe andpleasurable sex as you like, since it makes no difference in the end anyway.

The other good news is thatrape culture is a culture we're not prepared to live in anymore!

That’s why Slutwalk has beensuch an infectious and successful idea: that is why we are here today. We arehere to say, to ourselves if to nobody else: bullshit! The whole concept ofslut is bullshit.

The idea that only sluts getraped is bullshit. The idea that men can't control themselves around womendressed in a certain way is bullshit.

Calling women names because ofwhat they wear or who they sleep with is double and triple bullshit!

We're watching you, rapeculture. We're on to you, and we're calling out your bullshit. And if you wantto call us sluts for doing that? Well, that's bullshit too.

Thank you.

Rich white man in evading justice shocker

2011-08-23T10:13:00.000+01:00

Let's get one thing straight right away: the rape case against Dominique Strauss Kahn was dropped because the woman accusing him was not considered good enough to deserve state justice. That's it.

It doesn't actually matter if you think she wasn't considered good enough because of her race, her immigration status, her past, her behaviour right after the attack, what she told the prosecutors and how she told it. At the end of the day, the state has decided that a person against whom a crime was allegedly committed is missing something essential that would make them eligible for the state's protection.

A criminal offence is an offence against the state; when you are sent to prison for looting, you are not being punished for hurting the person whose shop window you stove in, but for violating the law of the land. The shop's owner may or may not be involved in your trial, and if they are it will be as a witness only.

When you read about rape cases as much as I do though, you realise that we live in this completely topsy turvy world in which women[1] who allege rape are not treated like witnesses in a criminal trial, but litigants in a libel case: they are invested with a responsibility of proving that a crime has been committed.

Women, under this system, are not considered to be as automatically deserving of the state's full legal might backing them up like, say, elderly barbers are. Only if they prove, outside of a court of law and under unwritten rules rife with Catch-22s, that a crime has been committed against them, will the state mobilise for the defence of its own laws.

What this means in effect is that there is a shadow court trailing women in high profile rape cases: while it is their alleged attacker who is facing prosecution, he is at least protected by the legal principle of presumed innocence. The accuser meanwhile has no such protection, because technically she is only a bystander in a showdown between the state and the accused, and witnesses have few rights in the criminal system (anonymity being one of the few available ones, and that has been recently challenged in the UK).

Women get caught between the social impulse to blame them for sexual transgression and exonerate the men involved (this is much more pronounced for famous, powerful men to whom many have given their allegiance), and the lack of any systemic barriers to doing so. They are placed in the impossible position of having to justify the criminality of the attack on them - somehow, passively and without any access to the apparatus of the legal system, to make a case that they are as important and as capable of being attacked as a barber shop.

+++

[1] I use the word women advisedly. Men do suffer rape, at rates that though low are still completely unacceptable; but, while there are social barriers to them reporting these attacks, once they do they do not face anything like the systemic obstacles and prejudices that women do. So while rape is a problem of all sexes and genders, cases like Diallo's are a problem specifically for women.

Riots and tabloids and looters, oh my! A feminist reading of #UKRiots reportage

2011-08-17T17:02:00.000+01:00

According to the Guardian data blog, 92.2% of defendants in magistrate cases related to the recent civil unrest in England are male.

That is a pretty significant gender differential; even if we take into account that women commit less crime than men in general, the rioting and looting seems to have been truly overwhelmingly a boys' day out.

And yet, if you were to get your new from the front pages of tabloids (which quite a significant proportion of people do), you'd think that there was some sort of apocalyptic outbreak of female lawlessness in the UK this August. On Friday August 12th in particular (as details of arrests and charges began to get out in a steady stream), 6 major national papers devoted their front pages to female looters: the Mail, the Sun, the Times, the Express, the Mirror and the Star. (Note that most of these stories overlap)

That's 46% of the national newspapers represented on Front Pages website, 50% if you count the Independent and i as one publication. More tellingly, all but one of the newspapers who lead with female lawlessness were tabloids, and 100% of the tabloids (not counting the Evening Standard as a tabloid) had a young woman being named and shamed on their front pages that day.

All the tabloid front pages told the story of women looting and rioting - despite the fact that women make up only 7.8% of the actual looters and rioters. Well, the ones who got caught. And then you have the mum who didn't loot or riot but was sentenced to 5 months for receiving stolen goods. Statistics are messy. That's just life.

In any case: we are not talking about some major spasm of feminine revolution, OK? (In fact: if only.)

No, if anything there is a story about toxic masculinity to be told here: a story of gang affiliation as an avenue to excitement and protection, of young men and boys who see violence and consumption as their only legitimate avenues for self expression. Of the feminisation - and subsequent devaluing - of social goods like education and empathy.

It's not the story of declining morals and crumbling families that the right wants to be told - that the right always tries to tell, in fact - but a more complex story of, actually, things being just as they were in the good old days. Except for when the good old days weren't so good.

And still we see item after item in the press about the girls and women convicted for looting or inciting riots. The naming and shaming is pretty much out of all proportion to the actual rate of participation of women and girls in the disturbances. What's going on?

Well, in part this is about editorial policy and selling papers. As Roy Greenslade writes in the Guardian, atypical, non-representative stories are attention grabbers: yet more black hooded tops can't compete with a party dress for audience draw. Nevertheless, it's instructive to consider what atypical profiles particularly draw papers: the very young, and women. Not, just to throw out some examples at random, old age pensioners, disabled people, Polish immigrants, nurses from the Philippines or members of the Berkshire Hunt (I have no idea if any members of the Berkshire Hunt rioted, but wouldn't it be fun if they did?).

It's also relevant that the majority of this focus on female transgression is coming from the most socially conservative part of the press - the tabloids. Why should that be true? Wouldn't they get more mileage out of pushing racist theories about hip hop culture and "Rivers of Blood"? Well, they do, of course - the Daily Mail lowered even its own debased journalistic standards to allow a defence of David Starkey's barmy and distasteful outburst on Newsnight. So the tabloids are keeping more than one string to their bow, but still pushing the moral panic about female transgression.

I think the context in which to understand this is twofold: one, the tabloid business model, and two, less trivially, the fundamental significance of female purity in a patriarchy.

Tabloids - and other conservative media - sell what I think of as "safe fear". A bit like a roller-coaster ride, what they provide their readers is a steady stream of outrage and disgust at the perceived (often made up) transgressions of others, the idiocy and immorality of the world around them. Vicarious and titillating, the steady stream of human frailty reassures readers of their own moral superiority (essential if they are to reconcile the cognitive dissonances inherent in being staunchly right wing) while confirming their opinions about the failure of liberal policies.

There is absolutely nothing like reading the Daily Mail or watching Fox News to convince the least informed, least intelligent and most prejudiced of readers that, by dint of intellectual superiority, they are fully justified in holding the most illiberal of opinions on issues of social and economic policy. This is the Chomskian manufacturing of consent at its very crudest: by fabricating "evidence" for the rank failure of any redistributive, humanitarian or just initiative, they help ensure these initiatives are forever relegated to the margins of democratic discourse. (PS Dan Brown novels work the same way. I'm just saying!)

And, to segue smoothly into my send point, misogyny is pivotal to maintaining this phantasmagoria. It is not in the least coincidental that The Sun has its Page Three girls and the Mail tops any other online publication in number of pictures of women in bikinis. The exploitation of the female image and ideas of femininity to manufacture social order exist on a spectrum, a continuum of opprobrium in which it is possible to find a balancing point from which to sexualise the female form while demonising female sexuality, and by extension female agency.

The extreme end of this spectrum is is honour killings: when a society invests its entire identity in the sexual purity of its women, nothing short of eliminating nonconforming individuals entirely can prevent transgressions turning into social upheaval. Nothing but a monstrous sacrifice (by male relatives who, I'm sure, love their sisters, daughters and cousins, and don't "choose" to kill them in the shallow consumerist way we think of the word) can reaffirm the commitment of the family or tribe to the prevailing mores. In fact, female genital mutilation operates on a similar plain, but in a preventative, pre-emptive fashion.

OK. British tabloids don't pour acid on people. I get that the examples I used can seem just a little bit extreme and maybe even far-fetched. But. Our society is not free fro misogyny; far from it. One in ten young women (and twice as many young men) believe that women can be blamed for violence committed against them. We're not quite as far from the lawless villages of northern Pakistan as we'd like to think, you know? And who, above all, peddles and encourages these antiquated, violent, retrograde attitudes? Who spreads moral panic about "ladettes", or young women binge drinking and peeing on the street, or the transgressive and nihilistic behaviour of self-destructive, troubled pop stars? You got it - the right wing, conservative media.

So for the tabloids, sticking women on the front page in the teeth the fact that 92% of looters convicted so far are male is the natural and only choice. It's is a double dip of win: they get to stoke fear of massive social upheaval by coding feminine transgression as being somehow emblematic of these riots, thereby making them "worse" - scarier, more deeply disruptive, viscerally immoral. Out of control women are qualitatively worse than just loss of control.

And they get to sell copy, by pandering to the very misogyny they thrive on spreading, stoking then stroking the fears and prejudices of their readers. Reassuring the flog 'em and hang 'em brigade that in fact, if we only flogged and hanged more people, then everything will be OK, and the scary pinko liberal feminazi looters won't be able to come for our gas guzzlers and our porn stash with their single benefit scrounging organic solar recycled climate conspiracy.

As I say, the story of "why so many men?" is more interesting and more important - and ultimately, more feminist - than the ridiculous attention grabbing focus on a few women. But the book on that will be written over decades, and it will be written by experts and academics. The tabloids though are so transparent in their motivations I live in wonder at their continual survival.

Reclaiming the medical narrative around abortion

2011-07-28T12:53:00.000+01:00

Since the election of a Conservative led government in June 2010, we’ve seen a series of attacks on women’s rights, from the economic to the legal to the medical. The one that scares me, personally the most is the campaign against abortion and contraception, because it has the potential to increase human suffering not only for the current generation of women, but for the next generation of unwanted or severely disabled children they are forced to bring into the world.

The trend is a legitimate worry: in the US there were 80 different laws passed this year restricting access to abortion. Several states, chief among them Kansas but others as well, have become de-facto zones where abortion is illegal, in that it is impossible to obtain. And this enormous spike in legislation didn’t just come out of the blue – it is the culmination of decades of insidious and well organised work to prepare the ground through steady erosion of public support for women’s health through a campaign of polemic, misinformation and obfuscation.

We are not immune to this stream in public thought in the UK, and in fact I would argue that US-based propaganda has substantially prepared the ground for a similar move to legally restrict abortion over here; already the public, chiefly through the collusion of the right wing press, holds a mostly unrealistic conception of abortion as a traumatising, sordid experience undergone by feckless, chaotic teenagers who are too stupid or lazy to worry about contraception and who get to near end of their pregnancy before they remember to seek help “evading their responsibility”.

This is of course a wildly distorted and histrionic picure, and yet the Department of Health is actually considering changes to the way abortion support is provided today that may make it easier for anti-abortion groups to corner and abuse vulnerable women, on the strength of “common sense” objections from two MPs who have no sense at all, common or otherwise, and who seem to me to be arguably acting in bad faith on the behest of overseas Christian organisations intent on recriminalizing abortion.

One of the paths to success and public support these two MPs are taking is the path of framing the debate n language they can control the meaning of. This is a well known tactic, and we see it in operation in all kinds of areas of public discourse. After the misleading and disingenuous term “pro life”, of course, my favourite is the fascinating history of the phrase “politically correct”, so beloved of right wing columnists like Richard Littlejohn.

This tactic is more common in the right than on the left; I say this not to disparage the ideological right, but as a simple statement of the fact that we on the left are often hampered by our own aspirations to intellectual rigour, and can therefore find ourselves unable to mount an effective response to things like outright denial of science being self-servingly labelled “scepticism”, or a refusal to accept science teaching in the science classroom presented as a “controversy”. We are getting a bit better at heading off these rhetorical traps and dealing with them when they appear; the terms “climate change denialist” has gained some currency for example.

Similarly, I would like to propose a change in how we talk about abortion. Rather than the awkward and easily distorted construction “women seeking abortion”, “women considering termination”, “women with unwanted pregnancies” etc., I suggest we consolidate all cases of medical intervention in pregnancy under the umbrella term “crisis pregnancy patients”.

To me this captures the essence of what a woman in all situations potentially resulting in a termination: that there is a human being with a problem here, and a medical procedure as part of the solution. After all, we don’t call cancer patients “people seeking chemotherapy”, do we? In all other cases of people seeking legal medical treatment, we concentrate on the problem/condition the treatment is supposed to address; it’s only when we talk about what we consider trivial concerns of silly women that we centre on the procedure, as in the case of cosmetic surgery and, well, abortion.

There are two main objections that I can anticipate to this approach:

1. That switching to “crisis pregnancy patient” is no better than right wing propaganda in obfuscating and masking the real issue with consensus-seeking language.

This is an important objection and I want to deal with it very seriously. I don’t think what I’m doing here is putting a “spin” on abortion to make it less controversial. That is certainly not my intent. I think, rather, that we have swung too far into the rhetorical ground favoured by the opposition, of masking the realities around abortion in order to create a faux-controversy under cover of which it is easy to sell restrictive and cruel new proposals (like girls saying no to their abusers) to the public.

When we agree to talk about “women seeking abortions”, we implicitly agree that an abortion is what women in this situation want. This is obviously irrational – why would anyone want an invasive medical procedure? – and supports the wider portrayal of women who have abortions as feckless, irresponsible, stupid and in need of protection from their own moral failings. The reality is that women undergoing abortions don’t want abortions: they’d rather not be having an abortion at all thank you very much, because they either a) don’t want to be pregnant or b) want to be a mother very badly but something has sadly happened to make that an impossible option.

Abortion is not the “goal” of women accessing the service of BPAS or Marie Stopes; the goal is to not be pregnant. The condition from which a woman wants medical deliverance is not the condition of “not having an abortion” – it is the condition of “having an unwanted or unviable pregnancy”. Abortion, like all medical procedures, is the way of getting from A (crisis pregnancy) to B (no pregnancy).

Tracey Emin I think said it best: “When you’re pregnant, you don’t make up your mind that you want an abortion – you make up your mind that you can’t have a child. Which is a very different thing”.

I hope I’ve convinced you that I am not proposing a rhetorical sleight of hand, but a serious realignment of the discourse that puts women and their medical needs at the centre. Which brings me to my next possible objection

2. That the term “crisis pregnancy patient” dehumanises women by taking them out of the narrative of abortion.

Rather what I intend is to undo the damage caused over decades by the over-concentration of anti-choice propaganda on “the baby”, and bring the woman back into the centre of the debate.

If you hang out on abortion related online discussion threads as much as I do (for general mental wellbeing, I don’t recommend it), you come across surprisingly many people whose main objection to the availability of abortion is openly and nakedly the discourse of choice and rights for women. Protected by the anonymity of the internet, they freely admit that what chiefly offends them about reproductive rights is the notion that a woman’s “right to choose” is something to take into consideration in the first place. They quickly drop, if they ever upheld, the pretence that this is about the rights of the unborn or any genuine debate about viability, when life begins and so forth.

These people are beyond the reach of mere persuasion; you have to plumb I don’t know what depths of dehumanisation before you can baldly claim that a whole class of people don’t deserve their bodily autonomy, or should be punished with a lifetime of unwanted parenthood for engaging in basic human functions like sex. The people who I am trying to reach with this proposal are those bamboozled by these fulminations into forgetting that abortion, contraception, antenatal care and so on are all in the same class of things enabled by modern medicine as root canals and chemotherapy, and that all human beings have an equal right to access these benefits.

This is not as uncontroversial an idea as you may think; many people, who in my view lack empathy, wish us to restrict medical access for those who are seen as being the architects of their own health problems, such as those suffering from obesity, or smokers. And of course we already lock up drug addicts in jail rather than treat their disease. The government policy wind is blowing very much in the direction of taking more and more entitlements to basic human dignity away from people, be it reducing mobility allowances for the disabled or cutting care and respite services at local level. I don’t want women as a class to slip under this descending portcullis of malice, and if I can help towards that just a little by reminding people that women are NHS patients too, then I think it’s worthwhile to try.

So to reiterate: I propose that henceforth, when we talk, write, tweet, blog, comment or argue about abortion provision and access, we refer to the people impacted by any change in the existing legislation as crisis pregnancy patients.

Thoughts? Comments? Will you do it, and if not, why not?

The DoH Responds to Our Letter

2011-07-18T17:56:00.001+01:00

Today I received a response from the Department of Health to the letter we sent to Anne Milton MP, the junior minister in charge of public health, regarding the proposed changes to privision of counselling to abortion patients.

Here is the reply in full:

Thank you for your correspondence of 4 and 5 July to Anne Milton about abortion counselling. I have been asked to reply.

The Department of Health is aware of Frank Field's and Nadine Dorries' concerns and Anne Milton recently met with them to discuss this issue.

The Department is drawing up proposals to enable all women who are seeking an abortion to be offered access to independent counselling. The Department would want the counselling to be provided by appropriately qualified individuals. Independent counselling will focus on enabling a woman to make a decision that would benefit her overall health and wellbeing.

Independent counselling will be for those women who choose to have it and will not be mandatory. Full proposals are still being worked up within the Department of Health and it is therefore unable to provide detailed answers while this process takes place.

I hope this reply is helpful.

Yours sincerely,

[Name Redacted]

Emphasis mine. While it's reassuring to have it confirmed that there's no question of making counselling mandatory (for now), it doesn't really address the problem of explicitly anti-abortion organisations being allowed access to vulnerable women.

In terms of substantive content though, I was very concerned by two things:

1. That the Under-secretary herself has not responded to us and no comment has come from her office so far (I haven't seen any in the media).

2. That the highlighted sentence conflates advice and counselling in a dangerous and potentially damaging manner; part of the value currently being provided by the likes of MSI & BPAS is precisely that they do not mix advice about medical options with counselling for those in distress.

This is not the first time I've seen this muddle-headed approach to counselling from the DoH - they seem to be ignorant of what these services that they plan to "reform" actually do.

I wrote a response to this effect, but unfortunately the email came from a "do not reply" address, so in order to get this concern addressed properly it looks like I'd need to go though the whole rigmarole of writing to them from scratch, and probably getting a reply from someone completely different with no prior knowledge of the case.

It's like working with a third rate utilities call centre, but if I get anywhere I will immediately post updates!

Abortion rights and the tabloids (and a bit of Richard Dawkins, too)

2011-07-10T14:37:00.001+01:00

Pro choice demo yesterday was super awesome! you can find some photos here and some videos here. The name Nadine Dorries came up a few times, in the chanting and the placards, because she has installed herself as the mouthpiece and media spokesperson of the anti-woman movement in the latter's campaign to inveigle itself into British society as it has into that of the US - with lies, with withholding medical facts from women, with exaggerating and inventing and constantly, constantly attacking non-existent straw men[1].

Nadine Dorries relies on a sympathetic media to spread her lies. And we know who the "sympathetic media" are, don't we? Tabloids. Red tops, who claim to be responding to public opinion but, because of the amount of sheer, well, lies and invention in them, can be doing nothing but leading/informing it. Pulling public opinion further and further to the right, against trade unions, against women, against progress, against fairness and justice and equality.

Well, tomorrow they will do so a little less than today - because one of them, one of the more pernicious and disgusting, is no more. And that, friends, is good news for a feminist like me, as well as for pretty much every other right thinking individual. Sure, Rupert Murdoch hates women maybe a little less than Paul Dacre has, but make no mistake - misogyny is one of the cornerstones of his empire, as it is one of the cornerstone of all patriarchy in its capitalist incarnation[2].

Henry Porter writes lucidly in the Observer about what this scandal means to the political system in the UK, the extent of the corruption revealed, the level of damage to public discourse and public trust. Read it, it's really good. He does say just one thing I'm not sure I can agree with though:

News of the World journalists ordered the hacking of as many as 4,000 people including grieving relatives of soldiers and of terror and murder victims because they thought their paper was untouchable. (emphasis mine)

D'you know, I don't think that's true? I can't believe that it is possible to be at the head of this kind of commercial empire and be complacent. On the contrary - you have to be paranoid, as Andy Grove of Intel would say. I think they did it because they were desperate, hungry for copy, sensationalism, scoops - at any cost. Because they were at the top and they were driven as if by the devil himself to stay at the top, or face the full consequences of the long fall.

But it's not impossible to become complacent when you're at the top, and for that complacency to lead to an occlusion of ethics. It's a well known dynamic, which is why Porter went for it of course. And it often happens to people who have been fêted, admired and encouraged in an area of public life that doesn't directly impact on what they really consider their professional life. Like, you know, politics, if you happen to be a linguist. Or atheism when you're, I dunno, a biologist or something.

We have a nice saying in Hebrew: "the urine has risen to his head". I have no idea what the etymology is this is, but it's kind of evocative: where there used to be common sense, arrogance and self importance have imbued with, well, piss. And without question, Richard Dawkins is taking the piss. So the urological metaphor does seem apt after all.

It's easy, when you've had a lifetime of people asking for your opinion, to be misled into thinking that you opinions matter just because they come from you. Noam Chomsky has that little problem. Martin Amis does, too. These are men (funny that) who think we should listen to them because they're them, and they've been listened to for a long time. And, you know, they're wrong.

As is Richard Dawkins. Oh, he's had a good run, with both evolutionary biology and atheism. But he knows sweet fuck all about feminism, and the toe-curlingly embarrassing spectacle of him sniping in the comment section of a blog like some aggrieved teenager must go no further. Enough, Professor Dawkins. You have nothing to say on this subject that will enrich the general discourse. You are speaking without any prior knowledge[3] on the issues.

And we know what we think in the sceptic community of people who expound their strident views without any prior knowledge of the subject, don't we? It's kind of similar to what we think of tabloids and right wing demagogue politicians, really.

[1] As in the "teach girls to say no" example. We do this already of course, where parents don't (paradoxically) opt their children out of SRE education, because the curriculum includes discussion of when to not have sex. But hey, if you can make yourself sound righteous, and make women's lives a little worse, at the expense of the pinko commie state education system, why not, right?

[2]Misogyny is the biggest theme in advertising; 70% of all purchasing decisions are made by women, and advertisers have met the challenge of convincing women to choose their products by playing on and enhancing the feelings of inadequacy and self-hatred. From the cosmetics industry to toilet bleach to scented candles, the message is the same: women are dirty and unacceptable unless they spend money on our products. And advertisers own the media. Its only currently viable model for distributing mass media at a profit, which is exactly why a) The New of the World could not continue once advertisers began to pull out, and b) Murdoch is desperate for control of BSkyB and its lucrative pay per view revenue stream (to break free of advertisers).

[3] Before anyone jumps up to accuse me of not knowing anything about Richard Dawkins' feminist educational credentials: nobody who's read more than a couple of blog posts about feminism in their life would employ either the "you haven't got it as bad as some other women, so shut up" or the "there are much more important topics to discuss than your piddling little problems, so shut up" gambits. Because feminists don't tell women to shut up, duh. He did both in one paragraph, so: stupid.

Update on letter to Anne Milton MP

2011-07-04T12:03:00.001+01:00

Owing to unforeseen technical difficulties*, the letter, which I planned to mail on Saturday, has been posted this morning instead. Forty seven of you excellent and socially responsible people added your names to the bottom of the letter, for which I am very grateful**.

I will post immediately when / if I receive a response from Anne Milton. I rather expect that she will respond, because that is very much the organisational culture in Parliament these days; but, just to be clear with everyone and avoid disappointment, I don't expect her response to be along the lines of "OMG you're so right, we will go and lock Nadine Dorries in the broom cupboard straight away".

This government is openly engaging in an attack on women's rights and well-being; we know this, we can see it, and so far we have been largely powerless to stop it. But it doesn't mean we should let them think they're getting away with it. My aim in writing this letter was to let the DoH know that we're watching them, and that we have a very good inkling as to where the wind is blowing with these "reforms" and "improvements".

If they're going to start attacking women's basic human rights as well as our economic standing and employability, then they're going to have to own that - because the voters are not buying any of this thinly veiled propaganda, with the Tip-Ex still dry on the "Made in the USA" logo. Now that we've sent our letter, and many other excellent people have emailed it too, or sent emails/letters of their own, the government official in charge of public health knows this to be unambiguously the case.

This much we achieved just by writing to her; if we achieve nothing else, I would still not consider this a failure or a waste of effort.

Thanks again to everyone for all the support! Mxx

* I couldn't get the £$%&@ printer to work
** I did change the wording from "I" to "We", given that the letter was now representing so many voices

Tell the DoH not to change abortion rules without a vote

2011-06-29T12:04:00.000+01:00

As some of you may have heard, back in March Nadine Dorries MP and Frank Field MP proposed an amendment to the Helath Bill that will ban sexual health charities that also provide abortion, like BPAS and Marie Stopes International, from offering counselling to their patients, presumably on the grounds that they have a "conflict of interest" of some sort (this despite the fact that they are both not for profit organisations).

Whether because the Bill itself seems to have been kicked into the long grass, or because they think getting the amendment past the Lords is unlikely, Dorries and Field have been trying to get the DoH to make the desired changes to the law without actually changing the law - i.e. without a vote in Parliament. Yesterday, the DoH have announced that they are considering doing just that.

I've written a letter to Anne Milton, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Public Health, to ask her to urgently clarify and - more importantly - justify such a presumption about the abortion providers and the decision to circumvent Parliament in changing the rules governing their services.

I'd really encourage you to write to her too, to disprove Nadine Dories's disingenuous claims on her blog that this amendment has "huge public support". Whehter you are passionately pro-choice or not, we all have a vested interest in making sure that the DoH can't meddle in our medical choices without so much as a democratic by-your-leave. Feel free to reuse or edit my letter, or simply let me know and I will add your name as a signatory to the bottom of it.

Here is the letter itself:

Anne Milton MP

House of Commons

London

SW1A 0AA

Dear Ms Milton,

I read with concern about plans by the Department of Health to make changes to the rules for provision of counselling to abortion patients, without seeking the approval of Parliament on this sensitive issue.

As you are doubtless aware, counselling is already available from the NHS, as well as charities such as BPAS and Marie Stopes. Such counselling is confidential, unbiased, medically informed and focused on the wellbeing of the woman. It is, moreover, independent – of government interference, religious and political lobbying, or the fickle mood swings of the media.

It is therefore unclear what the DoH spokesperson means when they say, as was reported by the Associated Press yesterday, that “The Department of Health wants women who are thinking about having an abortion to be able to have independent counselling”.

I urge you to clarify at the very nearest opportunity what is meant by the term “independent” in this context.

1. If it is the case that the DoH considers there to be a conflict of interest between the provision of a medical service and counselling related to the medical condition that leads to is, it is incumbent upon it to provide evidence for such a belief.

a. It is also strongly in the public interest that other such conflicts of interest are examined; e.g. cancer counselling within the NHS, Health Visitor’s advice on children’s health to parents etc.

2. If a presumption is growing within the DoH that the NHS – or any body providing a medical service, including for-profit firms/hospitals commissioned by the NHS currently or in future – cannot be seen as an honest broker in provision of mental support and counselling to its patients, this is a grave concern of the utmost urgency for public confidence in both the NHS and the DoH.

3. If, however, these proposed change, whatever they may be, are restricted only to the provision of abortion, impacting on the health and wellbeing of women, then special pleading is necessary to explain to the public

a. why not-for-profit organisations offering abortion are deemed less disinterested than other healthcare providers

b. why women considering abortion are seen as more vulnerable than medical patients considering other procedures.

4. Furthermore, it is incumbent upon the DoH to publish, with all possible alacrity, the guidelines for licensing pre-abortion counselling services to any organisations other than the likes of BPAS and Marie Stopes. The public, once alerted to concerns in this area, will be anxious to know

a. how such counselling services will be commissioned and licensed in future;

b. what medical knowledge and expertise in the field of sexual health and effective contraception commissioned bodies will be required to demonstrate;

c. how such providers will be regulated and quality controlled;

d. what safeguards will be put in place against admitting, under the umbrella of counselling, organisations whose aims are only to prevent women from accessing abortion, rather than making the most psychologically and physically appropriate choices for their own and their families’ wellbeing.

I look forward to a clarifying statement released in the nearest possible future, copied to the press offices of BPAS, Marie Stopes, The Fawcett Society and the Terrence Higgins Trust, and openly circulated in the mainstream media.

+++

No seriously, where are the women?

2011-06-13T16:54:00.003+01:00

In this week’s Guardian books podcast, Sarah Crown asked Orange Prize winner Téa Obreht whether it felt “limiting not to be competing with men”. Because, you know, the competition wouldn’t have been as fierce among “just” women. Cause they’re like, worse writers, innit. Just ask VS Naipaul. No, to really prove one’s chops, one should strive to compete against men, without all this “positive discrimination” stuff.

Well, you know, it turns out that the majority of books reviewed in newspapers and magazines are written by men. And the vast majority of the reviewers are – you guessed it – men. But this men-writing-about-how-jolly-good-men-are business is not as “positive discrimination”. Nope, that little private club is all just handy dandy and above board. It’s only when women seek to circumnavigate the cosy unofficial “cultural femicide”, as Bidisha calls it, that we saunter into an ethical problem, or even just one of professional credibility.

It reminded me of Richard Dawkins writing in The Ancestor’s Tale (boring book, pretty pictures) about how spurious and wicked racism is. Really, brays Dawkins, any simpleton can see that discriminating on the grounds of race is evil; but surely we do not need to compound the harm by taking any steps to rectify it that are as radical as the original discrimination! By all means, condemn racism, object to it, look down you white-dude scientific nose at it, but whatever you do, don’t actually do anything about it, or God, sorry, Dawkins, knows where we’d end up!

To which I say: meh. Meh to the idea that I’m so stupid that I’ll accept Hilary Lawson’s feeble excuses for running a cultural festival with 26% female representation. Meh to Start the Week with Andrew Marr, who still only ever have one woman on their panel each week. Meh to the notion that women being excluded from competing against men in sports events is "proof" that they would fail if they tried. Meh to those who think I can’t do the maths and arrive at a number bigger than what it currently is – in the arts, on the radio, in academia, in government – when I know that more women graduate from university, more women write and publish books, more women work in the various arts & culture institutions; there seem to be more women everywhere these days, in fact, except at the top.

And, well, y’know what? That’s just bee oh are ay en gee boring at this stage. Enough with pretending that old white men like Dawkins and Roth have anything left to say about the world that a thousand old white men haven’t said already. I am just not that into them anymore. This isn’t even really political, but a genuine lack of interest in the same old points of view, endlessly rehashed. Unlike Dawkins though, I do want something done about it, and fast (before I expire of ennui, frankly). So I’m going to the “Where Are The Women?” follow up event and planning meeting tonight, to talk to smart women about what we can do to improve the scenery in our cultural landscape. Be afraid, old white dudes; be very afraid. :)

Oh and hey, Sarah Crown? That was a really, really stupid question. Really.

What should you wear to a SlutWalk?

2011-05-24T21:35:00.000+01:00

I have a very complicated relationship with the amount of coverage or display that my skin gets. I think most women of my background or similar - secular feminists who grew up in a traditional, religious society - would recognise the dilemmas that I had with seemingly frivolous things like skirt length while growing up.

In Jerusalem, where I grew up, what a woman wears immediately speaks volumes about her religion, her values, even her politics. Whether your skirt brushes the ground (settler), is modestly below the knee (conservative), is a voluminous part of a Mother Hubbard-like dress (orthodox) or is revealingly short (secular) gives clues to other parts of your life: what you eat (kosher/treif), who you vote for (left/right), where and when you socialise (at home or in a club on a Friday night), your sexual politics (patriarchal/permissive). The signs are not infallible, but they are ubiquitous and strong in a way that simply doesn't exist in the secular west, except for the most pious Jewish or Muslim women. And people in Israel routinely use these signs to facilitate everyday interactions, like knowing whether to shake hands with a woman, ask her for her number, ask her for directions, all kinds of normal stuff. It's not stereotyping (much), it's common sense.

So every sartorial choice is significant. Wearing light clothing (which can be seen as only sensible in the baking Israeli summers) is not just controversial but potentially dangerous. Heck, just wearing trousers can get you shouted at or even attacked with ink bombs or stones (on one memorable occasion, potatoes. It was as weird as it sounds). Wearing concealing clothing can have less violent but no less othering effects in certain parts of civic and cultural life.

So far so normal: even here in the UK, we can more or less understand the notion that covered skin = traditional attitudes. But in the febrile political and social climate of Jerusalem, certain acts of covering up can become just as transgressive, in a more nuanced way, as acts of revealing. And I don't mean transgressive like wearing the Niqab: transgressive as in, it messes with people's heads because they don't know where to slot you on their mental map.

As a teenager, I came to resent the implicit prohibitions on certain articles of clothing. Why can't I wear long skirts? Why shouldn't I wear turtle-neck sweaters? It's cold in winter! It wasn't about rebelling against a culture of objectification or anything feminist like that - I just rebelled against being told, even by "my own side", what to wear. So I wore long skirts while out drinking on Shabbat, and men were completely bamboozled by an inability to know whether they could approach me or not (and whether there was likely to be anything in it for them, frankly). I wore low-cut tops with skirt suits & opaque tights, earning myself some of the most vicious looks I've ever gotten from religious matrons who scanned me approvingly from the feet up until they came nose-to-boob with my cleavage. I played around with backless, slashed maxi dresses and see-through muu muus. I had fun, and pissed people off, which was kind of the point a lot of the time.

So, what am I really saying with this? I guess what I'm saying is that there is no "right" way for a woman to dress. Whatever we wear, it will be transgressive in some circumstances, and occasionally for counter-intuitive reason. That's why, even though I'm not mad for the supersexyfunfeminist aesthetic that's developed around SlutWalk as it proliferated around the world, I think that women choosing to wear revealing and conventionally "sexy" outfits to these events is not as straightforward a concession to the patriarchal beauty ideal as might first appear.

It's true that we live in a society that pushes women to display a narrow, manufactured image of conventional femininity to an implicitly ever present male gaze (if all males were teenage porn fans, anyway). But that by no means makes a choice to reveal one's body uncomplicated as regards patriarchy. First of all, the type of body that is shared is key: to put on display a body that deviates from the strict demands of the ideal is an extremely threatening act, because it re-appropriates the ownership of what is sexy from the mainstream to the individual.

I'm not talking about bodies with piercings or tattoos; those have been more or less absorbed by the industrial beauty complex. I mean non-thin bodies, non-young bodies, non-white bodies, non-beauty compliant bodies (not to mention disabled bodies - the horror!). Put a boob tube on one of those, and suddenly you are very far from pandering to the patriarchy; you're on a collision course with it. (Here are some examples in no particular order, so as not to label any of these brave women and men with labels they may not recognise as being authentic to them)

Even more central to the SlutWalk concept (whatever that might be - more on this in a moment) is the type of outfit that is allowed to be considered "sexy". Who gets to define sexy? Most of the time, not the women wearing the outfits. There will always be some arbiter to say what is too much, what is too little, what is inappropriate, or different, or just weird (you decide which is which). As I learned when I was a teen, the mere act of deciding what to wear for yourself and deciding for yourself what to call it - sexy, modest, chic, daring, stylish, conservative - without reference to the prevailing definitions, is an act of immense rebellion, something outrageous to fling in the face of the patriarchy just because you can. These days I've sworn off wearing skirts completely by the way, and funnily enough, that is a choice just as controversial as any skirt of any length has ever been.

Am I ambivalent about SlutWalk? Yes. Do I wish it didn't use that word? Yeah, kinda (though the process of its rehabilitation in my eyes has been greatly helped along by this excellent piece by the excellent Germaine Greer - now here's a woman who know that just living life for yourself is a provocation!). Do I agree with Sadie Doyle that a simple idea can become merely simplistic as it gains scope and popularity? Ayup. Do I want to metaphorically but nevertheless emphatically smack young women who are grooving out on their petty rebellion, using SlutWalks as an occasion to bash boring old feminists? Oh boy, do I ever. Well, look at them very sternly, anyway.

But to my fellow feminist who are concerned that the word slut + provocative outfits equal capitulation to retrograde notions of femininity and a display of female compliance with patriarchal norms, I'd just like to say that, well, perhaps you'll find that it's a bit more complicated than that. I'm not saying that I've come to stop worrying and love SlutWalk, but hey, you know what? I can't meet the challenge posed by this SlutWalker. Which tells me that looking for an answer may just as well start here as elsewhere, and I intend to at least have a good look.

Equality is nothing but red tape?

2011-04-16T15:57:00.000+01:00

As part of its '"red tape busting challenge", the government is proposing to get rid of equality legislation. It's not clear whether they think scrapping the one Equality Act 2010 and reverting to the multiple bits of pieces of law we had before is good for reducing red tape or whether they just think equality is a bore and wish they could "liberate" the "market" from it, but they're asking for people's opinions. Below is mine.

***

The Government's proposal to "scrap" the above act as "red tape" is revealing in the extreme. To explain by way of example:

- Section 66 of the Act stipulates that employees should not have a clause in their employment contract that is less favourable than another employee's employment contract, on the grounds of difference of sex. It basically says that all employees should be entitled to have equitable and similar terms of employment; this seems such a basic requirement of a functioning economy that I am surprised to see it legislated for: I'd have expected it to simply have been the case everywhere, all the time.

Evidently I, and other members of the public are naive in not understanding that the simple requirement to not write prejudicial contracts for employees is a sizeable enough burden of "red tape" on companies that the Government sees fit to have it "scrapped".

What evidence does the Government have of this? Have employment contracts in the public sector been scrutinised to show that so many of them are inequitable as would require a major investment of resources by employers to correct? If so, why id the Government not sharing this important and worrying information with its public prior to proposing "scrapping" the legislation that would correct this state of affairs?

- Section 74 of the Act refers to the provision that should be made for a woman not to lose entitlements to pay increases and bonuses that she would have been entitled to had she not gone on maternity leave, because she went on maternity leave. the perceived need for this clause implies that at the moment, employers are depriving women of pay rises and bonuses they had earned while in full time work, because the pay out time falls within their term of absence - which is self evidently inequitable, bordering on fraudulent.

By proposing to "scrap" the legislation, the Government is signalling to employers that depriving employees of pay they had legally earned is an allowable action in some circumstances (when the employee is a woman, and when she is not physically in the office due to statutory maternity leave).

This is a dangerous precedent to set, and to my mind speaks to the fact that the government is proposing the "scrapping" out of a feeling that employees who "really matter" to "alarm clock Britain" (read: men) would simply never be in a position where their pay can be simply not given to them, for some seemingly plausible excuse - a dangerous and as I say, revealing assumption to make.

I am dismayed and alarmed that the Government of Britain considers protecting the people of Britain from such obvious unfairness and rapacity as illustrated in the two brief examples above unnecessary "red tape", rife for "scrapping". It shows a commitment primarily to a narrow and shrinking constituency: that of people whose lives are never touched by discrimination.

The reality of this country is that many people can and do discriminate on a variety of grounds against their fellow human beings, for reasons of principle as well as simple profit. That the Government does not consider it part of its mandate to bring these people to book is a sad reflection on the state of social cohesion in this country, a step so far removed from the rhetoric of fairness and "Big Society" as to be farcical.

My recommendation to the Government is to implement the Equality Act 2010 in its entirety without delay, especially with regard to the new provisions such as pay equality audits. Only in an environment of transparency can fairness be seen as well as talked of, and only then can we begin to build a truly big - in the sense of broad, inclusive, and all-encompassing - society.

You can find the consultation papers and respond here. Hat tip to Anna for sending round the link and prompting me to comment!

Limiting access to abortion is about hatred of women, nothing else

2011-04-05T15:47:00.002+01:00

Here's what I don't understand about this most recent attempt at attacking women's liberties from Nadine Dorries: under British law, and abortion can only be granted if the pregnancy risks causing "grave permanent injury" to the physical or mental health of the woman. Two physicians must countersign any decision to grant an abortion after having interviewed the woman, meaning that both need to be in agreement that likely mental health harm may indeed occur as a consequence of enforced pregnancy, labour and motherhood. Unless you live in Northern Ireland of course, in which case fuck you and your mental health, who gives a shit.

Likewise in order to gain access to the so called "morning after pill", a drug that inhibits conception (not terminates a pregnancy, as is often misleadingly claimed), one needs a prescription, which means having at the least a telephone conversation with a GP and explaining the circumstances to him, justifying one's fears and decision to request the drug and so on. Sharing quite a bit more detail about one's sexual activity than a GP would normally be entitled to pry into, frankly.

Even in the case of the contraceptive pill - which is rightly and admirably provided free of charge in the UK - the GP is a gateway through which women must access the treatment they need and deserve. Needless to say, more invasive forms of contraception (IUDs, tube ligation etc.) require even more negotiating, and easily fall prey to the caprices and clinical prejudices of individual doctors.

I know that some people, mostly those who will never need an abortion (read: men and Anne Widdecombe) have this notion - half nightmare, half sexual fantasy - that since the 1967 Abortion Act was passed, women haven't needed to bother with "taking responsibility" for contraception, because all you need to do is walk into Boots, five months pregnant, spread your legs for 20 minutes, and have the inconvenient consequence of your filthy immoral lifestyle taken out, immediately and for free.

Well sorry lads, but it ain't like that at all. Women are actually curtailed already, not only from freely and directly exercising their right to bodily autonomy in case of an unwanted impregnation (a right that, unlike in the US, they don't actually possess under UK law), but we're not free to access most forms of contraception how we want, where and when we want, either.

We already, in effect, have to get "mandatory counselling" before making any reproductive choice, which means that while I completely agree with Laurie Penny's point that with this proposal, Dorries & Field are treating women as if they were all alcohol soused sows who take all comers against the wall for the simple pleasure of ripping ickle babby toesie wosies out of their own uteruses with unwashed hands, in matter of fact she shouldn't be all that worried, because hey ho, British law already kind of treats them like that anyway.

So no, I don't really buy the "counselling" angle. I don't for one microsecond believe that any fibre of Nadine Dorries's tiniest organ has any faith whatsoever that said "counselling" is either necessary or beneficial. This is about using these so called "crisis pregnancy" centres to spread lies, misinformation, false medical statistics, false mental health statistics and shame, with one purpose and one purpose only: to force or manipulate women into pregnancy and labour against their will, and against their initial instincts and better judgement.

Think for a moment just how cruel this would sound if the ickle babby toesie woesies weren't being used as a smoke screen to distract attention from the reality of it: someone wants to take your body, and force you to have something inside of it for nine months, something that will change your metabolism, affect your sleep, digestion and blood pressure, something that will distort your bones and stretch your skin, rearrange your internal organs and change the way your brain chemistry works, and will eventually burst out of you, Alien-style, with great pain and possible grave and permanent injury.

And we think the Spanish Inquisition were evil for only hammering nails under people's fingernails for a few hours.

Why would Nadine Dorries want to do this, I hear you ask? Well, we could tie ourselves into knots claiming that she just loves ickle babbies (she's against welfare for actual babbies, so not sure on that one), or how the foetus has rights too (it doesn't, not under any accepted conception of human rights law), or how it's all about religion and what God said (nothing, abortion isn't mentioned in the Bible). Or we can just use Occam's Razor and admit that opposition to abortion is probably about hatred of women and a desire to punish them for being so hateful with enforced pregnancy, labour, and motherhood. Because that's what it is.

This isn't the first time that US-style anti abortion tactics have been imported to the UK, nor is this idea of mandatory counselling an original one. There are many states that have all sorts of laws making it more difficult for women to access abortion: waiting period laws, parental notification laws, mandatory counselling, mandatory ultrasounds and so on.

The reason they gained purchase in the US, and the reason I fear they will gain purchase over here - for all that it's tempting to dismiss Dorries as a monomaniac crank - is that they play to the well established, unexamined, but deeply misogynist belief that women are just too stupid to know what they want, and that if we don't rub their noses good and hard in the reality of their physical condition, there's no way that they'd be able to make an intelligent choice.

Up to now, I've mostly not really worried about good old Nadine. Women in the UK are not dependent on the whims of private corporations and individuals for access to health care, and people here do in general have a higher level of science understanding that protects them from being influenced by grisly doctored images of fake "aborted foetuses" wielded outside clinics. But this one I fear may stick, and it's telling that she's already got a man to co-sponsor the bill with her.

British people are just as likely as any other people in the world to be of the implicit belief that women, rather than being fully sentient human beings, are a special, slightly brain-addled case of the homo (hah) sapience species, - homo sapience birdensis, perhaps? - too easily distracted by footwear, cocoa derivatives and the colour pink from making really serious decisions or genuinely understanding what is going on with and inside their own bodies. Liz Jones has made a career out of playing up to that stereotype, and I can just about see the Mail disingenuously supporting this initiative as a "reasonable" attempt at "balance", feeding neatly into the bizarre implied argument that GPs somehow have a "vested financial interest" in increasing the number of abortions that makes them unreliable single sources of advice (which is probably the craziest and least well-tailored bit of this American import: fair enough when your doctor works for a huge corporations, but GPs? Really? They're only like the most trusted professionals in the country).

While Nadine Dorries and Frank Field waste Parliament's time and taxpayers' money peddling this hateful bullshit as a cover for their extreme woman-hating, by the way, funding to a wonderful organisation that really does educate people about reproductive health and abortion is likely to be slashed. Do dig in your pocket for that fiver that'll help them reach their extraordinarily modest goal of £30,000 to continue their awesome work, even if you can't really be bothered getting excited about al this Nadine Dorries business.

Silly Trolls (in ur Westminsterz, running ur countryz)

2011-04-01T15:18:00.000+01:00

It could only have been an April Fool. I mean, seriously, who could utter a sentence like "feminism replaced egalitarianism" and not be pulling our leg?

Someone who believes in equality among people, but doesn't believe women are people, it turns out. Because the government minister in charge of higher education, "Two Brains" Willetts himself ("half-brain" Willetts is an irresistible joke that should not longer be resisted, I think), apparently does genuinely believe that whereas giving equal rights to women was in principle a good thing, it was, in the long run, detrimental to equality.

Chew on that one for a bit.

This is the man charged with deciding the future fate of academia in this country. Who has also recently commented that university fees are progressive, because women earn less than men and so will have to pay off the debt more slowly. Yes, a government minister in Britain in 2011 believes that the wage gap gives women an advantage over men - a Scott Adams level of delusion, frankly.

Now, it's a rapidly coalescing consensus that this government is inflicting sustained and systemic violence on women: cuts to child benefit, unprecedented mass redundancies, decimation of women's shelters and rape crisis funding, withdrawal of funding for legal aid and help in getting child support payments - these are all things that will trap the most vulnerable women and children in potentially dangerous situations through poverty and a simple lack of somewhere to go, likely pushing the number of women murdered by intimate partners from 2 a week to something higher.

So I don't necessarily know that it surprises me that we are governed in part by a man who hates and fears women. Because it's only fear and hate that could make an otherwise intelligent, well educated person miss the three massive elephants in the room with this argument: that wages and working conditions have been stagnating since the 80s, feminism or no; that women have not achieved anything like equality, and even for the upper wage brackets economic inequities and the pay gap persist; and that class inequalities and gender inequalities are not Lego blocks that you can mix and match however suits you to construct a plausible sounding complaint, but disparate and complex economic phenomena, duh.

No, surprise was not the emotion I felt most keenly; it was more bafflement at the fact that misogyny would make someone so heedless of embarrassing themselves in public. What did surprise me was seeing Page 5 of the print edition of the Telegraph today. It was a half-page, with the bottom half given over to advertising, and the top half containing the following headlines:

Feminism 'held back ambition of working men'

Mothers being forced back to full-time work

Female drinkers 'a burden on the NHS'

And...

Nice Baps, shame about the name

Oh and also a piece about rude place names titled "Silly Trolls", which was what made me think the whole page might have been a leg-pull.

Because seriously, how can a publication with any sort of pretensions to newsworthyness concentrate so many misogynist tropes - objectification, vilification of feminism, moral panic about misbehaving women, mommy wars pearl-clutching - into one page, and expect to get away with it?

It's seems to me that the Telegraph - a newspaper I used to respect even when I disagreed with it - is trying to pander to the illusions of its readership; illusions about always being middle class, about staying married and not needing to go to work to survive, about not needing feminism because "we have equality now", about the cuts being necessary to bring those lazy, shiftless, drunk poor people in line and not having any effect on "us". It's decided to act as a mouthpiece to a callous government that is hoping to get away with murder because its core voters are too alienated and too smug to realise that blinking at the proposed suffering of others will have implications for them, direct or otherwise.

A lot of people have variants of these illusions. Most if not all of us at times judged or blamed the unlucky, the unsuccessful, thinking "I would never let that happen to me". But of course these people didn't "let it" happen. Bad things happen for random reasons, or for structural reasons that are sometimes too big to see.

And one of the reasons bad things continue to happen to women - bad things like under-employment, poverty, violence, rape - is that we live in this environment of constant, unremitting blame, where a major daily national paper can afford to dedicate an whole page to saying a variety of untrue and damaging things about women and their struggle for equality, and no one but a bunch of angry feminists would even notice, let alone comment.

Violence, schmiolence

2011-03-28T16:25:00.000+01:00

Being Israeli, I'm pretty good at spotting narratives of delegitimisation. Telling someone "you have no right to an opinion" (direct quote from an Oxford based human rights lawyer, that) is a good way to avoid engaging with their argument, and is usually the first recourse of people with strongly entrenched positions who do not want to admit any challenge to their views.

Delegitimisation is the bread and butter of the rhetoric around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, of course: all this "terrorist organisation!" "illegal state!" nonsense being flung about, as if any of that actually means anything to the resolution of the problems at hand. But both sides, unfortunately, are rich in agents to whom the only acceptable solution to the conflict is more conflict, so this type of discourse persists.

Delegitimisation of course is also the daily experience of feminists, online and elsewhere; as Rebecca Watson of Skepchick recently and poignantly said, the new definition of offensive is a woman with an opinion (actually that's an old definition of offensive, but yeah).

Anyway, my point is, I'm relatively good at spotting when an argument is being made that is not an argument at all, but a way of shutting someone up. And the pearl-clutching around the so-called "violence" in London on Saturday is just such a narrative of delegitimisation. A couple of asides on that:

Aside #1: What fucking violence? Like, seriously, I was there. It was the world's most boring walk from Embankment to Hyde Park. There wasn't even any chanting. A few vuvuzelas, some lip service of booing and hissing at the Ritz (note to future generations of protesters: genuinely rich people stay in Knightsbridge), lots of mass produced flags and placards. Buggies. A certain unmistakable Boden quotient. That's about it. We sat on the grass in Hyde Park for about an hour, watching more and more thousands of people stream into the park off the march, and not one thing occurred to make me raise an eyebrow. Elsewhere, we're talking about some paintballs, a bonfire in a well-ventilated and non-flammable area, and a sit-in, from what I can make out. Broken windows != violence, Einstein. That's damage to property, which is not at all the same as damage to people. I've faced Hassidic five year olds lobbing potatoes who had more violent impulses that the marchers on Saturday did.

Aside #2: So fucking what? Since when is violence not an acceptable form of political expression, eh? When people in other countries (dum dee dum, Tahrir Square, lah dee dah, Green Revolution) clash violently with their governments, we invariably blame the governments, assuming that the state, as the holder of the monopoly on violence, is reacting disproportionately to legitimate protests. But when it happens here, suddenly it's the protesters who are out of order. Why? If this had happened in Lybia there would be (non violent, hah) demonstrators outside the embassy as we speak.

In short, this whole business about so called "violence" is nonsense. The truth of the matter is that there is no way to monetise the spectacle of half a million people walking very slowly. It's damned dull, and while I saw a few journos/photogs snapping picks of us in the early stages, I note also that it's quite hard to locate photographs of "violence" that don't have another photographer or ten in them. The media is reduced to use itself to beef up the numbers of disturbance causers, and frankly between them creating the temptation of playing up and the police provoking reaction by being heavy handed (which they emphatically were not, on the main march route), it's a testament to the famous bloodlessness of the English that nothing really serious had kicked off.

Oh yes, but nothing like that should have happened at all, I hear you say. If it had all gone off peacefully without any side demos, we wouldn't be hearing about violence in the news all the time! We'd be concentrating on the main issues! This is very unfortunate! The violent protesters have hijacked the conversation!

Fiddlesticks.

As narratives of delegitimisation go, what's remarkable about this march is just how many different ones have been deployed against it. The anti-cuts movement in all its forms is continuously and concertedly attacked with so many disingenuous non-arguments that the mind reels - no wonder we can't have a proper conversation about the cuts. No wonder even the Labour party big cheeses stand agape at the onslaught of gold-plated bullshit being flung at them. Short of standing at the dispatch box and repeating "Mr Speaker, my main difficulty here is deciding whether my right honourable friend the Chancellor is lying or speaking in tongues" over and over, I don't see how Ed Balls, let alone a bunch of kids on Oxford Street, can outflank the government's torrent of disinformation. Consider:

"They're all a bunch middle class hypocrites", or the Grumpy Old Man Stance: This was the first in a series of ad hominem attacks on the people behind the movement, back in 2010 when the student demonstrations were at their height. It's an easy frame: university students can be painted as a bunch of spoilt, over privileged brats who have no "skin in the game", because they have rich parents who'll look after them. They have no daytime responsibilities like "real jobs", and are just indulging a preference for trouble making. The reason this is delegitimising is not the obvious facts that A Level students protested too, or even that not all university students come from privileged backgrounds; the reason is that it takes it as read that nobody will look at the argument and go "so what? Aren't middle class people allowed to care about the future of this country too? Aren't these students, however affluent their childhoods, right to worry that the growth-deadening cuts agenda will leave them struggling in future, or that they will bring up their own children in a darker, more unequal, more bitter Britain?".

It's the "identity politics" switcheroo beloved of right wing demagogues: a) if you are part of the group affected, you're unreliable because you're too emotionally involved, have a conflict of interest, are just being selfish; b) if you're not, you don't know what you're talking about, and how dare you to insult those people by pretending to speak on their behalf? In this case it skillfully cuts both ways - if you're a student from a middle class background, it's b), if you're not middle class but still a student, a) takes care of you.

"They're all a bunch of freeloaders", as above, the Tabloid Formulation: Applied to anyone on benefits, who has ever been on benefits, who may in future potentially need benefits, or who works in any organisation associated with benefits in any way, up to and including the entire apparatus of the welfare state. I think the only people exempted from the virulent, almost Tea Partyesque loathing certain groups feel towards anyone they think may be getting something "for nothing" (meaning, in return for nothing more than being a taxpayer and a fellow human being) are actual serving soldiers and well behaved white Christian toddlers. It's a good one, because you can use it against basically anybody with any involvement in the welfare state and who is opposed to the cuts. Mother in receipt of child benefit? No right to an opinion! Disabled? We don't want to hear from you! Unemployed? Get a job before you open your mouth, you lazy bastards. None of the above? Who are you to talk, then?

"They're all a bunch of overpaid public sector workers with gold plated pensions", also as above, Telegraph Variation: This one really does get my goat in a massive way. I loathe and despise that the conversation about the cuts has become a conversation about lost incomes. Not that putting half a million people on the dole is not big news; it is, and those people are mostly women who already draw very meagre salaries (cause they're so greedy, duh) and don't have big safety nets to fall back on, which is exactly why the conversation should be about the cuts to services instead. I hate the way papers like the Mail and the Telegraph, and much of TV & radio news too, talk about public sector workers like all they're there to do is draw a salary. Who teaches your children, fixes those potholes you hate so much, triages you at the hospital, adjudicates your divorce, issues your tax refund? Public sector workers, that's who! How have we allowed the media to dehumanise people to the point that we just see them as walking paychecks, as an unnecessary expense, instead of seeing their contribution to the big society we're supposed to be so keen on?

"There is no alternative", or Misdirection: Er, the whole march was titled "March for the Alternative". If you say there's no alternative and half a million people come to London to tell you different, and you still claim that no one has bothered to come up with an alternative, you begin to look a little bit demented. But even before the march, it's a straight up lie that nobody had come up with an alternative: there were lots of ideas, some of them Keynsian, some of them more moderately neoliberal, but they were there. The government's refusal to acknowledge them was simply a symptom of their refusal to consider them. There is no plan B, and however many envelopes labelled "Plan B" you send to Number 11, Number 11 ain't listenin'. They've even gone as far as to make sure there's as little as possible to listen to, by forbidding the OBR to consider alternatives (against the advice of the IMF - see Recommendations in section 1). So, yeah. Not so much a delegitimisation tactic as straight up denialism of the "zombie argument" variety beloved of creationists and James Delingpole.

"It's all Labour's fault", or Deflection: This is both a) untrue and b) nonsense. It's not Labour's fault that the banks needed bailing out. We're not going to go into whose fault it exactly and in detail is (looooong answer), but it is certainly not the fault of one political party, in one country, during one decade, that the global financial system imploded. And if it were, so what? Who's in power now? You, yes? And you're how old? Older than five, yes? So WTF difference does it make who made the mess? Cleaning it up without making a bigger one in the process is your job, and if you're not qualified to do that then you shouldn't have run for office, you twat.

In Hebrew we have a joke: "If people come and say your sister's a slut, go prove you haven't got a sister". That is the essence of deligitimising arguments: they make you argue to prove that you have a right to an opinion, not that your opinion is correct. And that's exactly the trick being played here: the right wing media colludes with government framing to deflect attention from their actions and decisions, by inventing a shortcoming in someone else and putting them in the impossible position of trying to defend it.

This is not a comprehensive list of all the ways in which the moderate left, the socially democratic arm of the public, is being deprived of the right to a legitimate political voice. It's a classic strategy of right wing regimes; Thatcher did it to the so-called "hard left" and the unions in the 80s, Sharon & Netanyahu did it to the left in Israel (which consequently collapsed), backlash demagogues have been gradually chipping away at women's right to control their own bodies, using similar tactics (in this case tacitly implying that GPs have a pro-abortion bias that needs tempering with mandatory involvement of religious "crisis centres").

My view on all of this is twofold: one, it's going to work. There is a structural weakness to the liberal agenda, which is a commitment to reality based argument. Liberals just don't lie and distort with the same facility and confidence as right wingers do, and if they do, and are caught, are judged much more harshly for it. Get ready to consider Saturday's nurses, teachers, and private sector workers concenrned about the quality and cohesion of the society they live in (e.g. me), to be painted into history with the same caricaturing broad brush that the striking miners have been.

Two, this being the case, what difference would it have made if the demonstrations were completely without any hint of property desctruction, any show of anger, any creative attempt to highlight the hypocricy of the rich? The forces ranged against the socially democratic impulse will have resorted to any or all of the above strategies to undermine the legitimacy of the movement and bury the news of a tax cut for the rich.

The big "consent continuum" lie

2011-03-18T18:03:00.000Z

Hat Tip

Trigger Warning

Not to be outshone by august publications like the New York Times, our very own Daily Mail has decided to have a go at blaming children for being raped.

In this case, the children were 12 years old and one of them was raped by 5 men, the other by one. Let's just quickly get definitional snarking out of the way: children of 12 are not deemed capable of informed consent. Any sexual contact with them is rape.

While the Mail goes into loving detail of what they obviously see as the objectionable and blame-worthy actions of the victims, which I will not dignify with repeating here, it is nevertheless the case that they were both raped, one of them repeatedly. It's remarkable if not surprising that a major newspaper would go to such lengths to ascribe agency and apportion blame to children; this and the NYT case mark some kind of new low in rape reportage.

A close reading & heartfelt rant of the first water on the totality of the Mails' coverage can be found here.

My personal attention, however, was caught by two sentences in this article:

The other girl was more reluctant and was raped by just one player.

And:

She was initially reluctant but eventually gave in to his persistence.

On the face of it, the two statements imply quite different things: the first, that you can be more, or less, reluctant to be raped - that there are indeed degrees of rapitude, in which one's desire to not be forcibly penetrated ebbs and flows according to some unspecified set of external factors. The second refers more obliquely to what many if not all of us have grown up to believe to be a normal part of female sexual development: initial reluctance eventually overcome by male persistence (commonly known as wrestling in the back row).

But what I would say is that actually both of these statements say the same thing, they just approach it from different ends:

A woman wanting or not wanting to have sex is a moving target - it's an elastic band that, if pulled in just the right way, will result in her allowing herself to be had sex with (in this case of course we're talking about children so it's irrelevant, but I think this is quite representative of a very mainstream view of women's agency in matters of consent).

The default position is of not wanting to have sex: the gatekeeping responsibility of women and girls in this regard is a widespread social phenomenon and is at the bottom of much slut shaming, as well as more severe instances of punishing rape victims for what is seen as their own dishonour by stoning, banishment etc. Women who do want to have sex, and admit it openly, are either a priori shunned and persecuted in more "traditional" societies, or in our more "liberal" one are singled out for ridicule and criticism, as in the case of Jordan and other openly sexual women.

So the elastic, in this popular construction beloved of the tabloids, needs something to pull against - the woman's default position of not agreeing to sex. The only safe position from which to legitimately engage in sexual activity is one of initial non-consent.

In simpler terms: "At the moment we teach girls that their job is essentially to say "no" until somebody bullies them into changing their minds. We teach them that sex is rape."

That, friends, is rape culture.

It's also important to recognise that however far the elastic is pulled - however much a man pushes against a woman's non-consent in order to achieve what they can both be expected to believe is the legitimate result - the overpowering of her will and selfhood - the woman is never ever off the hook. The safety offered by initial reluctance and eventual submission, á la Madame de Tourvel, is entirely illusory. Young women can be blamed for being raped because of what they wore; children can be blamed for being raped for lying about their age; and Madame de Tourvel died anyway.

And there you have it. Rape culture. A culture that teaches that every sexual interaction ought to be rape: it should start from a position in which the woman does not want to have sex, but does it anyway. Which is rape.

Feminists are constantly and boringly accused of hating on men, and poor old Andrea Dworkin has been erroneously quoted as calling them all rapists so many times that we may as well just print the t-shirts and be done with it.

But we're not the ones who think all sex is rape. It's people who blame women for not resisting enough, not screaming enough, not suffering enough for having sex forced on them who are the real believers in the idea that all sex should basically be a humiliation to women, a subjugation of their will. It's newspapers like the Daily Mail and New York Times that sneakily perpetuate the idea that consent is some kind of continuum, with "grey areas", "fine lines" and all other manner of twattery, and who, when the elastic snaps, turn around and hate on children for not keeping it wound tight enough, who are the authors of sex as rape.

Feminists believe - nay, KNOW - that actually there are two distinct conditions with regard to women and sex: they either want to, at any given moment with any given man for any given act, do it - or they don't. If they don't, and someone "overcomes their reluctance", it's rape. Simple. Of course in order to buy into that, you have to believe that women actually like sex, and can enjoy it and want it rather than do it to please or manipulate men - but that's way more than I'd expect from the Mail, and in any case the subject for another post.

The other 364, Day 1

2011-03-09T12:59:00.000Z

Millennia of misogyny aren't wiped away in a few decades of progress.

Johann Hari

Yesterday was International Arguing About Why We Need International Women’s Day Day.

On that day, thugs and bullies managed to disperse an IWD rally on Tahrir Square by harassing, catcalling, intimidating, crowding and humiliating the 100 or so women who were there. These are the same women who so eloquently egged on the recent revolution in Egypt – the same women, even, who obligingly reverted to traditional roles and tidied up the square after the occupation was over.

The thugs didn’t care. They just wanted the women to go away. Be invisible, quiet, elsewhere. A necessary but shameful half of the population, unfortunately needed for vital tasks like child bearing and cooking, but otherwise unwelcome in polite society. A kind of plumbing, if you will.

Also yesterday, my friend Sian (I hope you don’t mind being pushed blinking into the friend zone, Sian) posted an eloquent and well researched article on Liberal Conspiracy, about the prevalence of violence, sexual violence, oppression and discrimination against women worldwide. Its thesis was that feminism, a political movement dedicated to elevating women’s status above that of plumbing, is still needed in the world.

Predictably, the comment thread below the article quickly devolved into a series of demands that Sian produce evidence for the statistics in her article and faux-concerned questions about why we’re not discussing violence against men. Now, to my mind, any thinking person is capable of reaching the conclusions that a) if they mistrust the evidence they can check it via Google and b) on International Women’s Day it’s kind of OK to write an article about, you know, women.

So I don’t for a moment believe that these (and there were several, persistent) commenters were interested in making the evidence for women’s oppression more robust, or broadening the conversation to include male victims of the patriarchy. They were banding to collectively create enough noise in the debate that nothing useful or interesting can be said about the topic at hand, which was feminism and women’s rights. They just wanted us to go away.

The current UK government is instituting a series of changes to the way the country is run that will, among other things, make more women unemployed than men, make it harder for them to leave the home to work through the lack of child care services, make it harder for us to be heard in court if we are in a violent or just miserable relationship, make it harder for disabled women (and men) to even leave the house in the first place. Make it harder to get online and express our opinions there if we’re unlucky enough to be poor and accessing the internet in our local library.

The government, too, just wants us to go away.

Last weekend I was at an event organised by the Bristol Feminist Network to discuss the absence of women from our cultural landscape. Not just the women directors and the women writers and the women poets, but also the women sportspeople, the women scientists and the women who happen to not be famous or talented in any special way but to whom newsworthy things happen all the time, things that are not given equal coverage in the news.

You can find some of the statistics and stories from the event on Sian’s blog, but my point was not to rehash that argument so much as to note the fact that the event was sold out ahead of time. There were over one hundred women in that hall that afternoon, and there’d have been more if there’d been more room, and almost every one of them had something to say, an outcry to make, a suggestion to offer on how we tackle this enforced invisibility, this cultural status of plumbing.

Now, I’m not a big believer in linear progress. I say, the Middle Ages called, they want their Roman roads back. Things can and do go backwards all the time. But there is one unprecedented thing about the current technological boom, and that is its global scope. Even if Europe and the West sink into another dark age, where literacy is low and communications restricted, there will still be women in Japan, in Saudi Arabia, in Russia, in Thailand who will witness the atrocities committed against women worldwide, and who will work to give voice to their voiceless sisters.

So no, I don’t think we’re going to go away. It’s frightening to the point of white hot fury to have such an enormous body of people suddenly stand up and call out for recognition in a deafening storm of passionate cries; I get that. Some days it frightens me too. But really – and I’m a congenital, happy and committed pessimist – I don’t think that it’s a tide anyone can reasonably hope to turn back.

We’re here; we’re here to stay; we’re here to stay and to be treated with decency and respect. Just, you know, deal already.

A short message in honour of the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day

2011-03-07T21:58:00.000Z

I realise that there is a degree of pressure, of expectation from every feminist blogger - from every female blogger frankly - that, on this one day of all days, we'll write something poignant, something inspirational, something uplifting, something informative. At least something angry.

I have nothing to say. The fact that we still need an International Women's Day after one hundred years stops my mouth wih rage and dries my fingers to ashes.

There are 364 days in the year in which many of those who don't actively hate women are quietly indifferent to their fate. Including many women. I can't promise to be inspirational or poignant every day of those 364 (though I'm sure as shit gonna be angry). But I'll try. I'll try.

Angry from Manchester

2011-02-21T14:55:00.003Z

Dear "Start the Week with Andrew Marr" Team,

I've just taken a casual glance down the list of STW podcasts that I've been loyally downloading since November, and was struck by the fact that on no occasion was there more than one woman on the program at a time. The standard lineup seems to be four men (Andrew included) and a solitary female voice.

Which rather puts me in mind of comedy panel shows like Mock The Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, also careful never to have too much female talent in any episode. I'm not sure that's the audience niche you guys are working to attract, but given that even Melvyn Bragg has grudgingly come to accept that women constitute more than 20% of the sentient life forms on this planet, one is forced to speculate.

The comedy quizzes' excuse is the venerable and well accepted universal truth that women just aren't funny. They do good work upholding this tradition by making sure not to invite too many funny ones, which stands to reason. I'm less sure what the reasoning behind STW's guest lineup is.

Yours,

A. Sentient, Lifeform

ETA: There is clearly something in the water. Possibly seeded there by Bidisha's audacious new venture at her blog, where she catalogs and rails against the invisibility of women in the arts; although it would be unfair not to give first credit for getting me interested in this issue to Maura McHugh, a writer who often blogs about her experiences with woman-excluding panels, awards shortlists and writing manuals.

Anyway, my point is that this issue of women being ignored, excluded or marginalised in various media & artistic fora is getting airplay in the feminist blogosphere right now, with today's serendipitous addition being by the redoubtable Cath Elliott. You may want to read her post, it contains actual information and thoughts rather than just a snarky email to R4.

Over there is over here

2011-02-16T18:33:00.002Z

A very, very sad thing happened last Friday in Cairo. It' a thing so sad, so painful and terrible, that it threatens to overshadow the cautious optimism I felt for the future of Egypt with a big, angry cloud of recollection that it's a deeply troubled patriarchal society, where sexual assault and harassment are rife, and where women report being routinely groped on the streets.

If I'm honest, even before this tragic news broke, I was already casting a jaundiced eye on the gleeful stories of women tidying up Tahrir square, sweeping up all the rubbish and returning it to normal; I heard lots of men taking credit for giving the Egyptian people their square back in good nick, but reports of actual broom-yielding mentioned only women.

Still, my second wave annoyance at the swift reassertion of gender roles isn't really on the same level as how upset I am about Lara Logan. And you know what else I'm upset about? I'm upset about stupid people trying to make political capital out of the personal tragedy of this young woman, in some kind f tasteless attempt to prove their superiority, or the inferiority of Islam, or the impossibility of democracy in the Middle East, or whatever their stupid agenda happens to be that stupid day.

Well, bad things happen in the west, too, you know.

So. Here's a list of women who've been murdered on a sexual/intimate background. In the UK alone. In the last few months (basically since the summer). Because it's always good to be reminded that we don't live in some enlightened utopia where bad hings have ceased to happen as soon as public toilets and non smoking laws were introduced, yeah?

(This is not a comprehensive list of course - just what I could find from about 30 minutes of Googling.)

Overshadowed at the time by the Raoul Moat story, Vicky Case and her two daughters were murdered by husband and father Andrew in their home int he New Forest.
In August 2010, Corby Craze was found in the burnt out shell of her house. Her rapist set the fire to hide what he'd done.
Also in August, Amanda Harrison was found murdered, apparently by husband Barry, while their children were in the property.
More recently, Pauline Jenkins was discovered raped to death (though police did not put it quite so bluntly) in her apartment in Brighton.
Sharon Hull was beaten to death by her estranged husband, who then committed suicide, in October.
Late in January 2011, Magdalena Januszeska was brutally murdered in Norwich; a 21 year old man has been arrested and it is believed he knew the victim. More information is hard to come by - violence against immigrant women is low on the national news agenda.
Again, only this month: Lorna Smith had her throat cut by her ex when she came to see him in Brixton "for a visit".
You may remember Linda Bakewell - her disappearance made the national TV news and everything. Her body was found in the back of a car in November. Her alleged lover was arrested.
You're even more likely to remember Anni Dewani, as her murder provided the Murdoch press with a excuse to send jammy reporters to South Africa and demonise the Asian community.
Then, only yesterday - Joy Small and her two small children, murdered by reportedly abusive ex who then goes on to kill himself (it's almost like there' a pattern here, isn't it?).

Ten women (and several children) in 8 months - and those are just the cases that made the press, that were shocking enough to raise attention. I didn't even mention other murders, of a less obviously personal nature - that of Siobhan Kelly for example, or Marie Stewart, whose remains were kept in a suitcase for so long it was possible to identify her only from dental records.

I'm not some information service - just a girl with a search engine. These murders of women are so accessible they are practically white noise. Still, every time we're surprised. Every time we're shocked. The neighbours always say, they were such a nice couple, weren't they? And put flowers outside the door.

And every time we hear news of something terrible that's happened far away, we like to think well, it's different there. Different culture and everything. What can you expect. They treat their women like animals. We like to think it. Well, we need a rethink.

Yeah, pretty much out of nowehre, with extra asking for money on the side

2010-12-23T12:30:00.000Z

God, how I hate the meme about "having an abortion is a difficult decision that no woman takes lightly". I know it's supposed to be a defense against the vile misogynist assumption that women are thoughtless, irresponsible children who callously have unprotected sex and then resort to abortion as a means of rectifying their own cock-ups (pun totally fricking intended, so suck it up). But still. Seriously? An outpatient procedure that expunges a tiny clump of cells from your body - something that is less invasive and painful than having a mole removed - is a difficult decision?

And don't nobody come along wringing their hands in mock concern about late term abortions and the little handses and the little feetses. Bullshit. The overwhelming majority of abortions are sought within the first 8 weeks. Mine was on literally the first day that abortion was medically allowable (6 weeks). You know why? Because women - have a look above - are not thoughtless, irresponsible sub-beings, and they want to deal with unwanted pregnancy as quickly as possible once they realise something unplanned has happened.

Anyway, abortion schmabortion. That's a difficult decision? What about becoming a fucking parent? How's that for a difficult fucking decision for ya? Cause hey, two hours in a clinic with your legs up in stirrups is so much bigger a deal than a lifetime of care, responsibility, heartache, expense, love, illness and conflict, right?

Or even forget about that. Forget that the hateful slutty "women" who have abortions and the saintly pure "mothers" who raise children are the same fucking people (literally - most women who have abortions already have at least one child). What about pregnancy? Is the decision to have someone scrape or vacuum your insides for a few minutes really that much "bigger" than the decision to carry something in your abdomen for nine months and then push it out through your pelvis at great risk to yourself, or maybe undergo major abdominal surgery if things go wrong? Seriously, who should we be encouraging to "really think about it" - the person who's popping in to their GP for a quick referral, or the person who has some kind of abdominal mass and just leaves "nature" to take it course?

But what about post-abortion syndrome, Marina? What about all those poor, poor women who were bamboozled, bamboozled I tell you, by evil child murdering feminists into having an abortion, and are now suffering from mental illness because of it? Well, to start with, it's a fucking invention. A mean, cruel, sadistic make believe condition, the only purpose of which is to make women feel like shit about themselves. Because guess what? If you keep telling people that they should be ashamed and traumatised, they're just that much more likely to be - you got it - ashamed and traumatised! Isn't it great the way social conditioning works?

Mountains of propaganda - up to and including terrorist attacks against abortion providers - will not prevent women from seeking terminations to unwanted pregnancies. And anti-woman activists like Nadine fucking Dorries know this perfectly, perfectly well. Their mission in life is not to save teh cute little babbies. It is to make the lives of women as miserable as possible, whether through forced pregnancy or through imposing a myth of guilt and shame on them for the self-care they show through taking control of their fertility. It is to make the lives of women so miserable that they forget about their own dreams, their own aspirations, their own desires, and spend their lives entirely in submitting and conforming to the gleefully torturous demands of those who have nothing better to motivate them in life than hatred for the idea that women are human.

So don't give me all that about abortion being a difficult decision. It's an easy fucking decision, as easy as any other decision about our health and self care. But oh wait, we're not supposed to have the right to health and self care! That's why the Tories are slashing Well Woman clinic budgets[1]. That's why Nadine Dorries is wasting Parliamentary time trying to lower the abortion limit from 24 weeks. That's why her crazy-ass co thinkers are importing US-style tactics into the UK, trying to shame and intimidate women who choose to have an abortion.

And that is why, I guarantee you, there will be more challenges to women's rights to control this body within the life of this parliament. Just you wait and see. And when you do see, remember that this rhetoric about abortion being "a serious and difficult choice" is sand in your eyes, thrown to disguise a mountain of hatred of women and disgust of their bodies.

Anyhoodle. Go give your money to this awesome charity that is trying to make up their funding shortfall (this one the Tories really are cutting) in order to educate people in the UK about abortion, and to help British women to be safe, healthy, and happy. Go on, shoo. I know you've just spent a fortune on X-Box games for your squeeze or kids, so you can afford a fucking tenner here, people.

------

[1] OK I totally made that one up - but they would, wouldn't they? If you fell for that, that's proof that you, too, subconsciously believe that the Tories hate women.

Ceci n'est pas une post about Wikileaks

2010-12-08T10:10:00.000Z

I just want to make something super clear from the start - this is not a blog post about whether or not Julian Assange is guilty of rape, or about whether or not wikileaks is a good thing. In fact if this post is about anything to do with Wikileaks at all, then it's about how those two hypotheses do not exist in opposition to each other. Look at the name of this blog. Now look at me. Now back to the name. Now back to me. Assange's personal behaviour doesn't change anything about the inherent value of Wikileaks, and Wikileaks itself does not imbue Assange with any saintly or devilish characteristics. In a non-zero sum universe, both, either or neither can be good, bad or indifferent. I am ambivalent about wikileaks in exactly the same way as Clay Shirky is, but since he expressed it much better than I could, why don't you read his blog and leave me alone on the subject.

No, what this is about, as Cath Elliott wrote on Lib Con a few days back, is how quickly all pretensions to feminist sympathies give way to a "bros before hos" attitude among men on the left once one of their own is in the dock (though in fairness she expressed it with more class). It's easy enough to march at the back, mumbling feminist slogans out of time because you don't quite know the words, when it's some sleazy capitalist or smarmy Republican in the firing line; statistically, it's more likely to be one of those guys in some jacuzzi showgirl snorting scenario, anyway.

But one of ours? Julian Assange, fearless defier of the Keystone Cops wannabes that are US officials trying to wipe the egg of their faces? Courageous snook cocker at misspeaking power-drunk bank functionaries? Heroic exposer of all that is ignoble and slightly ridiculous about contemporary diplomatic statecraft? Impossible! It's a conspiracy! A politically motivated witch hunt! A miscarriage of justice! A honey trap! Fame seeking! Misuse of Interpol resources!

I think I've read, heard or extrapolated almost every one of the above theories about this whole sorry business but one: that the two complainants are telling the truth and that there is a case to be answered.

And you know why that pisses me off? No, not because people trivialise rape and assume that, when it comes to sex, women are all lying bitches out to bring a good man down. People assume that every day, so yawn, basically. Actually I'm delighted that the Swedish authorities are taking sexual assault charges seriously enough to put the wind up a bunch of windbags who are bricking it at the realisation that sexually criminal behaviour is not something that is easily shrugged of, in some places.

No, what's pissing me off about this is that once again, the feminist section of the liberal blogosphere is stuck explaining rape theory 101 (it's not nice, mmkay?) to a bunch of privilege denying dude wannabes, instead of getting our heads down to do some analysis and maybe add, you know, our own thoughts and ideas to the whole Wikileaks conversation. While everybody else is off cheerfully bloviating about the ins and outs of information libertarianism, we're stuck firmly back in the ghetto of "all that feminist stuff", as someone recently said to me, cleaning up the collateral damage left behind by people who just have to make villains, liars, and sluts out of two women who, at best, have had a very bad experience and are still having a really tought time.

I've always been a bit Twisty Faster about the whole "feminist allies" business: basically, men mostly hate you and will throw you under the bus as soon as it fits their psychological or political needs, whatever lip service they pay to liberal values as they relate to women. But sometimes, being an actual thinking person who is open to information about the world, I've doubted my own cynicism, you know? People say you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar and all that, and it's true that in everyday life it pays to be polite and reasonable with people.

Stuff like this, though, makes me wonder if maybe I'm not cynical enough.

The feminist revolution will not be televised

2010-11-30T12:49:00.000Z

I was at the wonderful feminist book group in Bristol last night, and we were discussing this months' book - the biography of Marie Antoinette. I've always felt kind of sorry for her - she was a rather stupid, reasonably harmless person who just seemed to have become identified with all the depravity and wastefulness of the French aristocracy. But when you start picking in apart by looking at the affair of the necklace or the way she was hounded and plotted against by her own court, and you think, Zounds! how come this rather uninteresting woman, who's not even French, is the first thing we think of when we think of pre-revolution France and its injustices? Someone's done a proper hatchet job on that one and no mistake - and the mud seems to have stuck fast through the centuries.

We got to talking about revolution in general - what with mounted police charging at children in Whitehall today it's very topical - and then I started thinking about feminist revolution, not unnaturally, and that made me think about what it would take to create a similar upheaval in the world of gender relations as the French or Russian revolutions did in land ownership and political institutions.

It seems to me that every major revolution - and by that I mean every revolution that stuck, every revolution that has successfully wiped away the preceding regime and made it impossible to go back, regardless of the moral ins and outs of the old order, the new order, or the route taken from A to B - has had a significant component of misdirected hatred in it.

Of course, there's always a core intellectual elite that is thoughtful and motivated by progressive ideology; but the force of numbers required for a violent overthrow of the state relies on the participation of people who neither know nor care about the details of the theory of capital, but would dearly love to lob a few bricks through the windows of a few shops kept by people they don't like. Or, you know, murder 14 year old boys and bury them in the woods.

But the feminist "revolution", the process of slowly reversing millennia of segregation and discrimination to gradually increase the participation of women in the public sphere, doesn't work like that. No irreversible advance has been made so far; no line has been crossed that it is unthinkable to go back upon. Not the right to vote, not the right to divorce or reproductive freedom, not the right to physical security and freedom from violence.

One of the frustrating things about feminism, as someone at the same book group articulated a few months ago, is that it doesn't seem to "stick" - you make some advances, convince some people of the importance of granting women respect and agency, and then a couple of decades later wham! you're having to do it all over again for a new generation. A new generation, I might add, that is ll young and snide and self important and thinks it knows better than you do why exactly pole dancing is a tip-top feminist activity, or why baking cupcakes is a "choice" that is just as feminist as volunteering at a women's shelter. With, you know, apologies to all the feminist cupcake bakers out there (I don't like cupcakes, so I always pick on cupcake makers, and I'm getting to feel pretty bad about that. Maybe if they all made pie instead I wouldn't be so rude? Alternatively, from now on I might persecute soup-cookers).

Feminists are always being accused of hating men, when of course that is not even remotely true. It has been often pointed out that casting men as mouth breathing knuckle-walkers who are as unable to control their sexual urges and domestic behaviour as a pre-toilet trained infant is actually the slightly, er, less complimentary position. But it doesn't wash - it seems that the changes to the power structures of society proposed by the feminist movement are so frightening that we get tarred with the agent provocateur brush whether the shoe fits or not (metaphor mixing FTW!).

In the end I think this lack of a fulcrum of hatred is what's holding the feminist revolt back. Most of us - heck, let's be bold and say all of us - love our brothers, fathers, sons, partners and friends. We don't want to create feminist Killing Fields where they will be exterminated for their inability to completely identify with our new and glorious regime. We want them to like us, and we want them to see that what we're trying to do is for the good of everyone, and to help. And for that we get called Feminazis, man-hating lesbians, and as someone on a community I used to like did a while back, a "species", like we're animals.

Crazy, no?

Really, Stephen.

2010-11-05T15:18:00.000Z

A celebrity (much loved and admired by many, among whom this blogger is happy to count herself) opened his trap in front of a journalist and said something ineffably stupid on a subject of which he has no personal experience whatsoever. So far, so dog bites man.

Where it gets interesting is where said celbrity dedicated the length of a flight to LA and the best part of 3,000 words to explaining how, despite the fact that it was demonstrably his own mouth, operating under no immediate duress, that said this ineffably stupid thing, none of it is his fault at all in any way.

Somebody not a million miles removed from said celebrity once said (in conversation with Nigel Lawson, if memory serves) that self pity is the most unattractive of all personality traits. I've lived my life a little by that maxim ever since, because it seemed like such a good one.

The keenest disappointment I feel about the past week, therefore, is that rather than taking one's foot out of one's mouth, dusting oneself off and thinking of some good jokes about the whole sorry business, we're being treated to justifications, apologia, contextualisation and Twitter twantrums.

I don't believe that Stephen Fry (my adored, admired Stephen Fry, the only man ever to have been granted a - theoretical - pass to my ovaries) holds the ridiculous, unjustifiable, and common opinion as that women are unable enjoy sex.

I do not need to believe, however, that this episode has contributed to shoring up this hateful stereotype - that is a demonstrable fact. The authority of Uncle Stephen will be forever adding its weight to it, whether in common pub banter or in more sinister rape apology and victim blaming scenarios.

The supposedly instrumental nature of women's sexuality - the lie that we only ever "give over" or "put out" in order to get something, like money or commitment, that we withold it as "punishment", "give it away" to another as revenge, dangle it in front of a man in order to manipulate him, "pussy whip" him with it for control - is a central tenet of the most terrifyingly mysoginist attitudes.

It would be reassuring to think that Stephen Fry cared at least a smidgeon as much about that as he does about his outrage at being “misunderstood”. Yet, not much in the way of discussion of this in the whole 3,000 words.

Maybe a blog post on the flight back, eh?

It's a feature, not a bug

2010-08-31T13:20:00.007+01:00

Laurie Penny writes persuasively in the New Statesman about the interesting dynamics that lead to young women performing better than young men in education and the entry level stages of their careers. The argument is, in essence, a simple one:

Women are taught from childhood to think of themselves as objects, not humans

Employers prefer not to employ humans, as they can get dangerous ideas about deserving things like fair wages and job security. They prefer, on the whole, to employ resources

Therefore employers prefer to employ young ~~women~~ resources, who conveniently prefer to be exploited by employers to being unemployed, because they believe they don't deserve any better and certainly don't have the right to hold out for better treatment

This is, basically, exactly true. Not only are girls socialised to be more docile, more complying, more self-effacing and less demanding, making them model employees for third world sweatshops and first world offices alike, they are also, and importantly, taught to invest the vast majority of their self worth in external indicators. By which I mean to say that there is an exponential list of approval metrics for young women, against which they are supposed to measure their right to exist in the world: weight (which should always be higher or lower than it is), beauty, popularity, numbers of sexual partners (which should always be higher or lower than it is), grades, the explicit approval of teachers and parents, and so on and so forth, for ever.

There is, by definition, no finish line or goalpost at which one can stop and say "I am good enough", for even if one's grades, breast size, boyfriend's income level and smoothness of hair are all exactly compliant with prevailing standards, there's always the possibility of cellulite, visible pores, or the exactly wrong length of skirt to let one down. Striving for perfection is as fruitless as it is mandatory - what Amanda Marcotte called "The Hermione Effect":

When I was in school, I noticed this gender divide. Most of the people I knew who changed majors, took only 9 hours a semester, filled their schedules with blow-off classes that didn’t go towards their degree---and thus took 5 or 6 years to graduate---were male. And most of the people I knew who worked their asses off because their financial support would be yanked if they didn’t were female. The in-between people, who worked their asses off though they probably didn’t have to, were mixed.

Young women are supposed to get serious sooner. This isn’t a mystery to anyone paying attention. Over and over again, we hear about how young women believe they should get straight As, be in perfect shape, be perfect in every way and make it look easy---supergirl syndrome. This also includes graduating college in 4 years. Young women didn’t just collectively decide that this was how it was going to be, you know. They’re picking up on expectations put on them.

Having said that, I think this only covers half of the career Catch-22 that women face. Because, you see, once your self effacing modesty and lack of pushy demands actually gets you the job, you immediately start being punished for being insufficiently pushy and demanding. Unless you're pushy and demanding, in which case you get punished for being too pushy and demanding, but that's another story.

Most companies today operate what they call a "meritocratic" system of employee evaluation and promotion. What this means in principle is that they don't get sued for gender discrimination. What it means in practice is that they define some arbitrary set of positive attributes, then make everyone prove that they measure up. The slight flaw in this set up from a young woman's point of view is that the attributes are usually rigged to be ones that are associated with men (assertiveness, decision making, risk taking, confident presentation etc.), and not having them is exactly the reason why young women get hired over young men in the first place, especially in a recession. So for a given subset of talented young owmen graduating from university today, having a job and being successful in it are mutually exclusive categories. Oh yes.

And that's even before we attempt to tackle the problem of how, exactly, one would demonstrate that one is indeed confident, decisive, risk taking, assertive and ambitious without falling into the following trap:

But then, that would be at least a Catch-44...

Constructing the "women are women's worst enemies" myth

2010-08-04T14:57:00.006+01:00

You want a literary catfight? The Guardian will give you a literary catfight! Wait, you don't want a catfight, of any kind really? Well, tough boogers. You're getting a catfight whether you like it or not, because that's what women do! Even when they're not actually doing it!

DJ Connell writes a pretty straight-up and sensible article about why she dislikes the label "chick-lit" and writes humour under an gender ambiguous moniker. So far so good. There's no big time attack on the content of mainstream chick-lit novels. The word "pink" isn't so much as mentioned. Sophie Kinsella doesn't come in for a bashing.

But still, in a postcript to the piece, the editors in their wisdom offer this bit of forshadowing:

"I write chick-lit and I'm proud of it": tomorrow in part two of the chick-lit debate, author Michele Gorman responds to DJ Connell's criticisms of the genre

Wait, what? Have you actually read the preceding few paragraphs? Cause I did not see any "criticism of the genre", only of the unhelpful and sexist label and the all-too-real marginalisation of female humorists.

But I guess you can't, if you're a national newspaper, go out in public and suggest that women may have nuanced and varied views on subjects close to their hearts; that would be almost as bad as admitting that they're actual human beings with, like, opinions and shit. And we can't have that now, can we? Gotta make sure those caricatures of cat-fighting shrews are upheld!

Lazy post: Childless by Choice

2010-07-27T11:20:00.006+01:00

A few weeks ago, I gave an email interview for an online piece about women who choose to remain childless. It all ended up on the cutting room floor - fame, dear reader, continues to elude me - so I thought I'd share it with y'all anyway. It's easier than writing a whole new post, that's for sure.

Q: Why did you choose not to have children? Was it a conscious choice?

I never wanted children; it's just something that never appealed. I did read "The Handmaid's Tale" aged 14 and was deeply influenced by it, but that could have just made me deeply pro-choice (which I am), I don't think Atwood can be blamed here!

I used to get a vast amount of interrogation and aggression around this subject, though not so much anymore as I get older and more divorced. But in my twenties when I was getting married etc., it was a never-ending barrage of having to justify myself. I played the game, and came up with better and better rationalisations to explain myself: feminist rebellion against biological determinism, the state of the planet, the population time bomb, fear of being a bad parent, inability to take responsibility, relationship issues with husband, financial instability, how selfish and insufferable people (of my class and background) get once they have kids... I even used my Jewishness, saying that I don’t want to go through the dilemmas and struggles of raising bi-ethnic children!

But to be honest that was all just excuses. In reality, the more people asked me “why don’t you want children?” the more I thought “well, do I? Should I?”, and navel-gazed and examined my own desires. And because of this emphasis on wanting, desiring children, the more I didn’t find this burning need within myself, the more I became convinced about not wanting to be a mother. It’s a bit circular, but that’s how it worked.

These days I’m a bit more sceptical about exactly how much of a burning desire having a family is for women, and more in the camp that gender and even class expectations have something to do with it. But the short answer, for me, is that I was warned about my biological clock so much that when I couldn’t hear it ticking, I thought this was a significant fact about myself and that I that should make decisions based on it. Reverse psychology!

Q: Do you think people choosing to be child-free is a good or bad thing for society? Why?

I think it’s fairly neutral. You could speculate that there will be some unforeseen long term consequences from changing the demographic makeup of human societies so drastically, but I think the aging of the population would have more to do with it than the fall in the number of children. If you want to be a bit evo-psych about it, then they used to be just as much of a scarce resource as old people, because infant mortality was at something like 50% for most of human evolution. Anyway, you could equally well speculate (with some basis in observed fact) that fewer children mean that every child will get more care and education and be less vulnerable to abuse and neglect, which could ultimately only be a good thing for society as a whole.

In the short to medium term though, societies like Japan where the birth rate is low but immigration is almost zero will be the most vulnerable to the economic and cultural impact of an older population. The US and Europe, with all of their kvetching and occasional posturing on the topic, will continue to benefit from the influx of skills, enthusiasm and population that you get through migration. And that’s a good thing from start to finish, because it takes demographic pressure off of places like India and Africa that can’t necessarily support growing populations right now and redistributes it to where more economic and social agents are needed.

Will it mean the loss of ethnic purity in some places? Yeah. Will there be some evolution or even disappearance of the current national/regional cultures in the host countries? You bet. So what’s new? It’s not as if the Italian espresso can be dated to the Pleistocene. Or Italian. Or the Italians. I can’t get excited about that aspect of things, which makes me a terrible Jew and a traitor to my entire clan of aunties, but there you have it.

Q: Would you say the class expectations that you mention are middle class expectations?

I'd say where I came from - a working class area in Jerusalem, which is a very traditional city as you might expect - the expectation is that you have a large family because "children are a blessing" and it's what women do, and then you work very hard and make sacrifices to give them what you didn't have in life. Or just work very hard and make sacrifices because it's what you do, even if you don't have class aspirations for your children. It's seen as deeply and bewilderingly strange to not want to have "a family", because family is such a strong social glue in that environment.

In the middle class culture I ended up belonging to as an adult, there's definitely something consumerist about having children. It's dressed up in the language of nurture and sometimes "science", but it's also and economic life stage. It's something to upgrade to - you need to get a bigger house, and change your car to a 4x4, and then there's all the accoutrements like four different buggies and two car seats and a high tech cot and developmentally correct toys and and and. There's endless consumption around the growth of the family, and if you're my age and don't have a large house and a large car there's something wrong with you. I'm struggling to put it into words, but it's almost like if you're my age and living in a small flat and take the bus then you're an economic failure. And if you say "you know, you don't *need* any of this stuff", people immediately say "oh well I do, because I have the kids to drive around and I just couldn't do that if we only had one car". They use their family as a pretext to consume.

There are, of course, also just nice people who love children and have well adjusted normal families because, you know, they love each other and have the urge. And upper middle class people who have the luxury to "opt out" and bake organic home woven birthing yurts. And there are different class dynamics associated with those scenarios. But the above two are the main aspects of my personal experience.

Why economics is not a science

2010-07-26T09:54:00.003+01:00

If you're not familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma, here's a nice Wikipedia article about it for you. For the purposes of this discussion, all you need to know about it is that it's a simple experiment that has shown, time and time again and all over the world, that people almost never make the choices they'd be expected to make if they were purely rational beings.

Rational choice theory (oh, alright - but do your own Googling next time!) is the theory that says that even though that is patnetly the case, we should still govern our lives (and set policy, and make economic predictions) as if they did. Because it's the right, or more correctly "rational" thing to do. I very much suspect that rational theorists' definition of "rational" is "that which will make our mathematical models work".

Imagine if medicine was run that way: "yes, sometimes people don't respond as they should to treatment, but that's just because they're irrational! Everyone will have penicillin shots and peanut butter for breakfast, because that's what's best for them. Even when it isn't."

Modern economics - mostly microeconomics, but macroeconomics takes some of the former's assumptions and runs away with them, too - just can't be made to work without the assumptions of rational choice theory. And rational choice theory is flat out wrong, in the scientific sense of being incogruent with observed reality.

Which is why we should be very, very wary of anyone who dismisses our objections to, e.g., severe public spending cuts on the basis of economic forecasts and economic theory. Not because it's always and necessarily wrong, but because it is an ideology dressed up as science. So we should evaluate the claims of the current government as ideological rather than evidence-based: not "is it necessary, based on economic forecasts, to privatise GP surgeries and cut housing benefit?" but "is it the right thing to do to expose surgeries to potential bankruptcy and people to potential homelessness?".

The new Feudalism (and why women really shouldn't vote for the Tories)

2010-04-15T07:17:00.010+01:00

OK, so first off, we live in a feudal society. If this is news to you, then: wakey wakey!

Let's anatomize.

A feudal society is one on which the majority give their allegiance, labour and control over their destiny to a tiny minority who amass vast clusters of wealth and power exclusively in their own hands. It is therefore characterized by very high levels of inequality, and by low levels of mobility, as structural obstacles are put in place to prevent the wealth creating majority (people doing actual work, in simple terms) from impeding the enrichment and control of the few by climbing up the socioeconomic ladder.

Two other characteristics of a feudal society are that, first, its laws and justice are applied differently to the many and to the few. The Magna Carta, famously, is a document in which the few are demanding to have legal parity with the very, very few: the barons demanding habeas corpus and other legal rights from the king. Secondly, a feudal society, though politically autocratic, is economically distributed and has weak central controls for things like hunger alleviation, public works etc. It's up to the benevolence of the feudal masters to provide such public services as exist.

Now, it's this last one where the most progress was made during the social and economic revolutions of the 20th century. We have wrested a measure of control from our economic masters (who were, fittingly, also called "barons" - robber barons, to be precise - during the preceding age of laisses faire capitalism and rampant disregard for the working masses) and vested it in a central authority in order that it should centrally provide for some of our basic human needs and rights. A quick comparison of the 20th century NHS versus the 15th NHS demonstrates that this was quite a good idea.

In other areas of comparison between modern Britain and feudal England, just in case you doubt my analogy (and also to show off my historical analysis skills), let me just say that levels of inequality in the UK are at a an all time high, and levels of mobility have been stagnant since the big economic explosion of the 80's. New Labour has done some good work in dismantling one structural obstacle to mobility by widening access to higher education, but this was done in isolation and in an economic climate of rampant consumerist growth (and also, via the medium of loans, cause debt is such a good idea!). Labour's education policy arrested what would definitely have been a post-Thatcher plunge in social mobility in the UK, but it didn't really reverse the trend, which is for diminishing social mobility. The the same time the UK also imported a large and growing underclass of desperate, grey-status foreign workers, who are occupying rungs on the economic ladder even further down from where their British working class predecessors dwelled, and are in many cases literally immobile due to extreme poverty and the vagaries of the Home Office. Needless to say women suffer disproportionately more in these conditions, so perhaps another post on immigration policy later.

So yeah, we're very unequal and increasingly immobile, kind of like our medieval forebears before the Peasant's Revolt, or our Victorian grandparents before the labour movement and the equalizing trauma of WWI. We are also increasingly threatened by a two tier health system, where the wealthy suck away resources into a private shadow system of the NHS; likewise the effect is present in education with the growth in private schooling. Actually, anything you hear that is a "two tier system", it's a red flag for feudalism, because the top tier is always way way smaller than the bottom tier. Another famous two tier system is the justice system, in which money can silence dissent, argument or even scientific debate through our frankly Kafkaesque - but more importantly extremely expensive - libel courts.

And then, of course, we have a two tier tax system. You may think this is a commonplace: of course, there is corporation tax for companies, and then there's income tax for people. Except, guess what: corporations don't really pay taxes. Mostly, when you hear about tax revenues this and tax expenditure that, it's money that's been colelcted from the majority of economic actors actually doing actual work, not fromt he corporations growing and expanding as a result of those efforts. If you think I'm exaggerating, then I urge you – and I really do urge you, please - to check out the following resources:

- The Tax Justice Network
- Mark Thomas on why we should invade Jersey (which is hilarious as well as scary)
- Will Hutton on tax avoidance
- And something from the US, to make us feel a bit better (not)

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

So you see, corporations are our new feudal masters. We increasingly work for them rather than ourselves, each other, or the state, tying our economic destiny to them both individually and at a societal level (as in the case of the banking industry, which is a systemic as well as an unemployment risk and therefore had to be bailed out). They try to decrease our mobility, through benefits that only vest with length of service, or through encouraging us to specialise until we're virtually unemployable elsewhere, in the same way that feudal England (or Russia) imposed penalties, fines, and loss of property on serfs and peasants who wanted to move to another lord's domain. This is especially potent in the US, where employment with a alrge corporation is sometimes the only means of access to basic human rights such as healthcare provision, but the pressure is exerted int eh UK as well.

Corporations do not contribute anything to the world that you see around you - not anything hat is free and aimed at your wellbeing, anyway. Their job is to grow and become bigger corporations - no other return on ivenstment is written into the model. They do "make" lots of shit that you want, and maybe even need, but it's shit you have to pay for. The stuff that's free, that should be free, like schools and transport infrastructure and the economic safety net and the courts, is paid for almost exclusively BY YOU.

Because corporations don't pay tax, you end up paying them twice: you pay them in kind with your labour, and you pay your hard earned cash through taxes so that corporations can continue to have a workforce that is literate and healthy, so that they can have courts of law to carry out their litigation and contract resolution in, so that they can operate in an environment free from the risk of disruption through war, so that they don't have to spend money on getting their workers to work (since they travel on government financed roads), so that they can use the communications infrastructure for their emails and telephone conversations and be connected to the electricity grid and water and sewage in their offices.

If you work in a large company, then chances are that your employer is getting all of the above FOR FREE, like a Baron of old. And that you have, indirectly, paid for it to be able to do so. So I'd got to payroll and demand a rebate, if I were you. (yeah I'm too chicken to do that too)

We know that the pay of the few people at the top is obscenely - hundreds of times - larger than that of even the average person in the middle, let alone the real "serfs". And that extreme lumpiness is not just some bug in the system of rampant capitalism and the corporate idea, it is absolutely at the heart of it, because at heart it is a feudal system.

So how do the Tories come into this?

The short, simple answer is that the Tories luuurve the feudal lords at the top of this particular rubbish heap. In many cases, as in that of Cameron himself, that's because they are both related and married to some of them. And, out of simple tribal loyalty as well as ideological commitment, they will make sure the feudalism will only get worse. Under the Tories the disparity between what the rich put into running the country and what the poor do will only grow. The government will demand a larger and larger share of most of our incomes, but will generate less and less tax revenue (because we are not rich!). It will therefore be to afford fewer and fewer of the essential things we expect a first world country to have, and which increasingly only teh rich will be able to access freely via the private sector.

The Tories will send us back to the 19th century, and in the 19th century women did not do so good as they do now. Just compare the maternal mortality rates under the Victorian NHS. Haha. You get the picture I'm sure. Anyway, this is getting sort of indecently long, so I will break it up and do Part II: Why Women Would be Crazy to Support the Tories a bit later.

On our own two feet

2010-03-10T18:38:00.017Z

The 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, with it's theme of Progress, has been marked, among oter things, by a flurry of articles about how "far" feminism has "come", and "how far there is yet to go". The wealth perambulatory imagery fits nicely with one of my many observations on last Saturday's Million Women Rise march in London.

MWR, for those who don't know, is organised to protest and combat violence against women. The emphasis of MWR is on male violence against women, especially domestic battery and rape. This is a subject I feel strongly about and would not wish to trivialise, so let's pause for a moment to consider that the world is, in fact, chock full of the most inhumane, unimaginable violence against women. Women are disproportionately at risk of violence from their partners, their male relatives, random strangers and the effects of poverty, deprivation, climate change and war.

Not only that, but the idea that there is something wrong with all this suffering inflicted on women is incredibly controversial - witness the uproar in the tabloids at the proposed addition to the curiculum of anti-violence education for schoolchildren. We live in a society that simply refuses to acknowledge the human rights of women, chief among those the right to be free from the threat of violence.
While our media are full of narratives of abused and raped women, they tend to be romanticised as "inspirational tales of survival" or "unavoidable tragedies". Cries from the heart about the real, everyday, mundane abuse and violence women experience are met with indifference, contempt or hostility.

Many many excellent feminist writers and activists are writing and talking about this unacknowledged holocaust aginst women, and to be frank I consider myself unworthy to add my voice to theirs. Instead I'll talk about just one, in some ways trivial but in others all-prevasive, form of violence against women: fashion.

The above is a picture of the march as it passed Selfridge's on Oxford Street. I ran ahead to capture this image because to me, it held a lot of dramatic tension between the seriousness of women's plight and the superficiality of a lot of what we are encouraged to care about - outward appearance, passing fashions, the economic and social status inherent in designer labels.

There's also a kind of irony - maybe you had to be there, maybe it's just my sense of humour (feminists are famously humourless, after all) - in a group of dedicated, passionate, brave women making noise outside a place that exists to profit from the desirability of so many things that inflict violence on our bodies: scratchy, stifling underwire bras; skirts so narrow you can't walk in them; makeup full of carcinogenic phtalates; jeans so tight you can't sit down in them; flimsy, revealing blouses most definitely unsuited to the freezing conditions of that particular day; unspeakably itchy bum-floss knickers; handbags so heavy and unyieldy they give you backache; and, most emblematically of all for me, dreadful, deforming, painful, cruel shoes.

Add up all these elements together and you have a person who is so uncomfortable, so cold, so tottering, so encumbered and squeezed, that the last thing they can want to do with their day is go marching through the arctic streets shouting that violence against women must stop. And that, at the end of the day, is also a form of oppression.

So I started looking at what the women marching alongside me were in fact wearing, and apart from the eminently sensible array of wooly hats, warm coats, comfy trousers and cosy scarves what struck me was the wondeful display of what I soon started thinking of as Feminist Footwear. So I took some pictures, and, well, here they are. these are the feet of women decisively rejecting the violence inflicted ontheir feet by fashion. And a diverse, beautiful, funky lot they were, too. Enjoy.

PS My own humble contribution:

PPS I'm really not one of nature's graphic designers, am I? =)

In all the excitement about victim blaming, good old-fashioned rapist blaming is a sadly declining activity

2010-02-18T13:20:00.017Z

There's been a predictably large volume of online response to a recently published report about attitudes towards rape, in which close to 2,000 Londoners were surveyed about same, and which threw up the uncomfortable fact that women are more willing to blame a woman for her rape than men. I'm happy to say that the responses have on the whole been intelligent, measured, realistic and insightful. Cara's riposte in the Guardian is my personal favourite, and a bit of an instant classic on the general topic of victim-blaming.

One problem: it's all bullshit. I've gone and read the actual report, and guess what? Despite being called "Wake Up To Rape" (charming) it's not about rape at all. It's about the victims of rape. Here are the headline questions from the survey:

Are you keeping safe?
What would you do?
What have you experienced?
Who would you believe and whose fault is rape?

It's the last one that contains the provocative statement that "Women are less forgiving than men". Shocking, right?

Um, wrong. Because there is nothing to forgive. We would not even contemplate asking respondents to surveys about other crimes whether or not they are willing to "forgive" the victims of those crimes. Do people who have their cars nicked need your forgiveness? No. How about little old ladies who are conned out of their life savings? Didn't think so. Children run over by careless drivers? Nuh-uh. What about murder victims? Does the question "in what circumstances would you blame a murder victim for their death" even compute?

(As an aside, I thought the survey was extremely badly designed - by asking repondents to think about what precautions women should be taking against the possibility of attack, it primed them to consider potential reprecussions if the hypothetical woman didn't follow these instructions. In addition to that it concentrated entirely on the vague concept of "blame" rather than on actual culpability. If you asked people "what prison sentence should be given to a woman who gets into bed with a man but then refuses to meet his specific sexual demands" you'd get very different statistics.)

The reality is that it's nonsensical to talk about what any victim of crime can do to stop the perpetrator perpetrating. Short of taking violent action to stop them mid-misdemeanor, it's simply not under your control, because other people are not under any of our control. A survey, therefore, that starts with the question "what are you doing to stop other people from being criminals?" and ends with "how much do you blame people against whom criminals have committed crimes?" is not interested in preventing rape (or "raising awareness" of it, a phrase which has recently fallen flat out of favour with me), it's simply revelling in misogyny, celebrating some of the many subtle and sophisticated ways that women can be humiliated, hurt, degraded and then punished for it. Big whoop.

Well, enough about the survey, and enough about the victims already. Rape is something rapists do because they like to rape, and if they didn't go about doing that, there would be no rape victims for us to either blame or forgive. Simple.

Encouragingly, this seminal post from the excellent blog Yes Means Yes cites two studies strongly suggesting that it is only a small proportion of men (between 4% & 8%) who perpetrate the majority of rapes, which means we don't have to start advocating the preemptive incarceration of all post-pubescent males. (Yet. =))

More research is surely needed in this area, but even at this early stage some fascinating conclusions emerge. For example, each self-reported rapist (both studies asked men to self report about sexual assault without using the R-Word, making the data pretty reliable) raped more than once. On average they raped 6 times. This means that these guys are predators, they enjoy having sex with reluctant or resisting women, and they are pretty good at doing it: six sexual partners for any man is a decent enough number, but six rapes (and the definition of rape in the studies was pretty narrow - there could be more assaults there that didn't get counted) is a lot. Rapists obviously know what they get off on; this is not some drunken one-time misunderstanding of the "why would you want to ruin a nice boy's future" variety, but something almost approaching a sexual preference or a lifestyle choice.

Whicn leads to the second fascinating thing about these results: hardly any of the repeat rapists use violence to rape, many more of them relying on drugs and alcohol. In other words they deliberately orchestrate the circumstances in which they can rape with the highest degree of impunity. They don't want to get caught, and they're not impulsive - again, these are not crimes of passion, in-the-moment misunderstandings, or any of the other myths we're constantly fed about acquaintance rape (which accounts for the overwhelming majority of all rape).

This has interesting implications on at least two aspects of rape prevention: identifying rapists and identifying rape. If the majority of persistent rapists eschew violence, then we need to completely rethink how we investigate rape allegation. Rape kits (to the best of my knowledge, but I am not a rape expert and so don't quote me on this) look for signs of violence, contusions and tears to the vagina etc. Police officers also have a tendency to look for signs of forced intercourse. In which case it is not even remotely surprising that so many rape cases never get anywhere - if you're set on finding evidence that doesn't exist, your investigation is doomed to fail.

What about identifying rapists, though? True, one of the studies did find that self-reported repeat rapists have a high correlation with other forms of domestic violence, but only for the violent ones. What about the other guys, the ones who aren't into punch-ups, but just like to get their rocks off hurting and humiliating women sexually? Well, to be honest I don't know how you would codify that into a police procedure. But in our private lives, YMY has the following advice to give:

Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it.

[...]

Rape jokes are not jokes. Woman-hating jokes are not jokes. These guys are telling you what they think.

Think about it: do you know any men who don't tell rape jokes? Who don't regale you with hilarious stories about how drunk and passed out the girl they shagged last weekend was? Who don't make a competition out of how many women they've fucked? Who don't think all women are evil scheming bitches? I'm sure you do. I'm sure most of the men you know are not like that. And you have to ask yourself: how come? How come, if it's true that men are these animalistic, uncommunicative, autistic, evolutionarily driven sex automata, are most of them actually not like that at all?

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it doesn't seem outrageous to at least check whether it has a beak. But as far as I know there is no survey out there asking people about their attitudes towards rapists: under which circumstances would you forgive a rapist for raping? How do you protect yourself from becoming a rapist? What would you do if you found out someone was a rapist? What advice would you give them?

As long as we're not asking these questions, there are two injustices being perpetuated: blaming the victims of rape for the crimes of others, and potentially tarring all men with the same brush as only 4%-8% deserve to be painted with. Since it doesn't seem as if anyone but a bunch of feminists is getting too wound up about the former, maybe talking about the latter will help shift some attitudes and delegitimise rape as the calculated act of cruelty it really is.

ETA: Via Pandagon, check out this interesting post about how criminals choose their victims - the research reported neatly explodes all of the myths about the revealingly dressed, extroverted partier being a rape risk.

Festive Perspective

2010-02-02T14:38:00.013Z

I haven't really been following the whole Polanski thing recently, because there are only so many articles I can read about the moral ambiguity of ass-fucking a thirteen-year old, without my actual head actually explding; but it seems he's had a pretty good Christmas, no? Skimming the headlines, he's had Johnny Depp come out in his defense[1], he's won damages for violation of his privacy (becuase let's not forget that he's the real victim here), and, while those silly American lawyers are still getting hot under the collar about all that childlish "justice" stuff, got to spend the holidays in his sumptuous home with his loving family. Plus his most recent film was included in the program of the prestigious Berlin Film Festival.

Not bad going for someone who can throw a little girl on her face - twice - and proceed to force himself into her body - twice - while she cries and begs to go home. Hey, Berlin Festival jury: nice going on the whole progressivism thang! We don't want anyone to get the crazy idea that raping young girls is, like, wrong or anything.

Then you've got Charlie Sheen, who celebrated Christmas Day by holding a knife to his wife's throat and threatening to have her killed. As is the case with Polanski and his pubescent girl fetish, this was by no means an isolated incident for ole' Charlie. Mary Elizabeth Williams writes in Broadsheet:

Mueller's statements are remarkably consistent with Sheen's ex-wife Denise Richards' accounts of the actor's behavior, including an incident where he told her "I hope you fucking die, bitch. You are fucking with the wrong guy," and threatened to have her killed. Sheen also served two years' probation for a 1996 assault on then-girlfriend Brittany Ashland. In 1995, he settled a case out of court with a woman who claimed he'd hit her when she refused to have sex with him. And in 1990, in an incident deemed an accident, he shot his fiance Kelly Preston in the arm.

So this dude has a history of hitting women and threatening to kill them. Phew, nasty. You'd think people would find it a little harder to see the funny side in Sheen's onscreen bad-boy character in Two and a Half Men, right?

Wrong! Two days after the alleged assault, ratings for the show skyrocketed. Well done, American Public! Keep up the good work, sending out the message that beating up on women is a fun and rebellious thing to do, not to mention aspirational - punch your own wife once or twice, and who knows? You too could become the highest paid actor on TV!

But then, there was poor Tiger Woods[2]. Oh, poor poor Tiger. While the child raping, wife beating shenannigans were being allowed to go on undisturbed, Tiger suffered a rapid and dramatic decline in his fortunes for the heinous crime of having uncoerced sex with consenting adults. Because duh, how dare he! How dare he get caught doing something that did not physically hurt or frighten women! How dare he confine his indiscretions to nonviolent encounters with women who might actually have enjoyed it??

Never fear, oh great right-thinking, woman-hating citizens of the West. The wonderful world of computer gaming is here to set all to rights. You can now do your bit for restoring the right woman-bashing balance by personally delivering the physical smackdown to the women that Tiger so shamelessly neglected to assault or threaten:

Take, for example, Tiger's Transgressions, wherein the object is to help Tiger knock out blabbermouth "hos" with "well-timed" drives before they reach a news van. As its creator Dominic A. Tocci explains, it's the "most fun and greatest mistress assaulting golf simulator of 2010." There are two levels of play, depending on how "easy" you like your hos. Oh, look, there's one sauntering outside the Sex Addiction Clinic. Take a swing! Miss the shot? That's a "ho hitting fail." So popular is the chick-blitzing game that it's clocked in over 4,600,000 plays since its debut in mid-December, garnering a 91 percent approval rating on Atom.

Read the rest for the unfortunately obligatory disclaimer about how yes feminists can take a joke (when it's funny), blah blah blah. The point I want to make by pointing out the contrast between media/public response to adultery vs. its response to assault and battery is that I'm not imagining it when I say that violence against women is encouraged and glamourised in this society. Other feminists are not pranoid when they talk about the rape culture, or say that rape is practically legal (especially in the UK, where these days you deserve it for merely having sexual fantasies).

Raping a teenager or threatening your wife with a switch blade knife is better for your career than having affairs is. Just you remember that next time you feel like explaining to me that it's feminists with their "all men are rapists" propaganda that are the real villains here.

[1] Oh, Johnny. Oh, oh, Johnny. Words cannot describe how my fantasy life is going to suffer from this news.

[2] On a slightly more serious note, here's why the Tiger Woods thing realy is a bigger deal than the Charlie Sheen/Roman Polanski thing - at least if you are properly committed to the American dream: what Woods did was a direct strike at the heart of capitalism, because it undermined the image of marriage as the stable bedrock of a well ordered society. As everyone from Marx down has acknowledged, the subjugation of women within marriage is not only ideological but also economic: their unpaid labour in the home is the externality that keeps the capitalist fantasy going. So cheating on your wife and having her chase after you with a golf club when you make your money off of feeding this illusion of a perfect marriage is a very naughty thing to do. As against which merely raping or beating women is frankly peanuts, since our bodies don't really count for anything - other than incubation and domestic drudgery - in the eyes of the sort of real capitalists paying Woods's wages.

Important Announcement to World: Women. Have. Breasts.

2010-01-08T11:02:00.012Z

So this thing has been making the rounds on Facebook, asking women to post the colour of their bra in their status in order to "raise awareness" of breast cancer. Just to be 100% honest with my readers, I did it - I'm a sheep, what can I say. But having done it, I'm becoming more and more convinced that, not only is it a stupid thing to do on a forum that I share with co-workers, but that cutesy little "campaigns" like this are actively damaging to both feminism and women's health.

The feminist angle has been exceptionally well covered by Jules at Feminazeri, so I'm not going to go into that here too much except to quote the following passage:

Call me a humourless Feminazi if you like, but this email is not about raising awareness of breast cancer. It's about using a disease that has a devasting impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people as a spurious justification for discussing saucy undies. It's about women trying to show that they're uninhibited and up for a laugh by inviting their friends to speculate about them in their underwear rather than to think about them as sentient, intelligent human beings. It's about women objectifying themselves.

There's been a lot of excellent coverage of a number of so-called "awareness" campaigns in the US, where the whole breast cancer industry has branched off from the cloyingly pink mainstream (chronicled oh so excellently by Barbara Ehrenreich - seriously, if you haven't read it, it's a gem) to make a pitch for being a wholly owned subsidiary of the porn industry: here's one example from Bitch Magazine, Jezebel, and Feministing each.

So, at this point it's pretty meaningless to say that we don't need any more breast cancer awareness. Because, seriously, not only can there not be any sentient being within reach of a major news outlet still "unaware" of breast cancer, but most of them have by now probably also been made aware of the fact that we're reaching a critical mass of awareness at which all breasts in the world spontaneously explode from sheer attention overload. We get it. Boobs are important. Enough already.

Anyway, what does "awareness" mean, exactly? Are the pink ribbons away of reminding women to be afraid of breast cancer? Not unlikely. Women living in constant fear of violence/disease/poverty is a feature, not a bug, in a patriarchal paradigm of domination. Is it about making sure men don't forget that women are identified with their sexual organs, and not entitled to actual personhood? Hmm, again, that would be consistent with available evidence. Other than those two, I'm really at a loss to see what the hell point there is in any of this.

What is it about breast cancer that makes it so worthy of awareness-raising in the first place, I wonder? It's by far not the number one killer of women - that's heart disease (which they die of disproportionally, because the treatments and diagnostic tools are all based on how men experience the disease). It's not even the number one cancer killer of women - that'll be lung cancer. What it is, of course, is the number one cause for damaging a part of women's anatomy that men (in the sense of "the patriarchy" as opposed to individual men, as always) actually care about. Once this interloper is spotted, it must be tamed, beaten, wished away, driven out, before it manages to besmirch those precious lingerie filling funbags, interfere with our one-dimensional definitions of femininity, mess up our understanding of how women ought to relate to their bodies (our understanding that they ought not to, that is - that those parts of women's bodies that are sexual are publicly owned and those parts that are not range from irrelevant to unspeakable).

But I digress. We are, we can I hope agree by now, too aware. Aren't we?

Or are we?

Look at this picture, for example - it is the news section from the Cancer Research UK website:

Does anything look a bit wrong to you? No, I don't mean the bit about blaming women for being too lazy and stupid to make time for smear tests. Look again. No?

OK, try this: the following is a quote from the Against Breast Cancer website:

The Against Breast Cancer research programme is looking at secondary spread, when cancer cells travel from the breast to other, often vital, parts of the body to form additional cancers. Through our work we want to improve the care, treatment and survival rates of women with, and at risk of, the disease.

Still nothing? I'll give you a hint. A Google search for "breast cancer cure" returns 46.8 million results. A search for "breast cancer prevention" returns 2.2 million. That's less than half a percent.

In other words, we are aware that women get cancer in their lady lumps. We're aware that they will need painful tests to discover it. Aware that they will have to go through dangerous surgery to remove it. Aware that they'll probably need chemotherapy treatment to finish it off, treatment with such terrible side effects that some say it is worse than the disease. Aware that they will lose their hair, possibly lose parts of their bodies - but that's OK because we can, we're aware, make them replace those lost bits with plastic hair and plastic breasts, to make us feel more comfortable around them. We're definitely aware that buying pink stuff and running in races wearing pink t-shirts will raise money to feed the surgery-and-awful-drugs merrygoround, and since it claims to save lives, we're aware of our moral duty to keep it going round and round.

But are we aware of how to help prevent women having to be in this situation in the first place? Nope. We, as a society, want women to be fixable, especially those parts of their bodies that are considered public property (the sexy and reproductive bits). But we don't really seem to give a damn about them not breaking in the first place. Or not suffering more from the fix than from the breakage. That's the sort of awareness I would like to raise: awareness of the fact that breast cancer awareness is bullshit. It's dangerous, cruel bullshit that helps feed an industry that mutilates and torments women in the name of curing a disease it doesn't know if it's causing (there is evidence that HRT - a treatment designed to "fix" women "broken" by the menopause - is implicated in breast cancer, as well as the radiation-filled mammograms themselves).

Breast cancer awareness is the awareness that once women get breast cancer, it is imperative that they be put back together again with all possible speed, and we don't want to hear anymore about it after that. We don't want to be aware of their pain and anger - so we tell them to keep positive. We don't want to be aware of how their bodies change and evolve because of the disease - so we advise them to have reconstructive surgery and prosthetics. We don't want to be aware of what it is about our lifestyles, industries, medical treatments that make them sick, because that might mean we have to do something about it, and it'll be more painful that merely banning cigarettes in pubs, we're dimly aware; so we drown out these things in a cacophony of pink pap, smug do-goodery and willing self-infantilisation, and call that awareness.

Well, to hell with awareness. To hell with papering over the pain and mutilation the disease causes and calling that "survival". To hell with chuggers and co-workers getting money out of me that ends up going to the sweatshop owners making all the pink plastic paraphernalia or to the drug companies that are so obviously part of the problem (and deeply invested in not cutting off the disease at the root - there is no money in healthy women). To hell with it all. You want my awareness? Fine. I hereby undertake to remain aware at all times of the fact that women suffer, women fund raise, women run, women buy, women wear wigs, women stay positive, women cry in secret, women feel ashamed, women can't find clothes that fit post-op, women hope, women wait - not because of breast cancer, but because of the additional burden placed on them by "breast cancer awareness".

'Tis the season to be sexually assaulted, falalalala, lalalaLAH

2009-12-01T16:40:00.004Z

Yo ladies! Listen Up!

Did you know that drinking alcohol makes you grow a penis? S'truth. According to Gwent Police, a penis might just materialise as if by magic where no penis was invited to be if you "let your hair down". Or so at least one is lead to believe by the fact that the poster and text in question resolutely fail to make any mention of an actual, you know, rapist. Nuh-uh. You get pissed, means you get yourself raped, all by yourself.

A very nice representative from the Gwent force is quoted on the BBC website as saying "When alcohol is involved things can become blurred and confused but there are no grey areas in regards to sex without consent - as far as the police are concerned we treat that as rape." Hmm. Yeeees. Except when it gets left in a pile of paperwork and treated like anything at all, I guess.

Listen, if rape was actually illegal in this country, then the police would arrest rapists (as opposed to letting them off with a caution), the Crown Prosecution would prosecute them, and juries would convict them and sent them to jail. None of which is convincigly the case.

So we can all pretty much draw the conclusion that rape is OK and if it happens to you it's your fault anyway. Ain't it nice of Gwent Police to remind us of the pleasant certainties of life just in time for the holidays? Aww.

ETA: In case you thought that it's only women have to get ready for Rape Season, check out this ad from Lynx. Presumably he shoved her body in the dumpster after he was done, since there's only one pair pf footsteps leaving the scene.

Deconstructing Diversity

2009-11-24T20:10:00.004Z

At a departmental update meeting yesterday, our head of operations approvingly commented that we are "ahead of the rest of the region" in meeting the company's diversity targets (which he somewhat haltingly described as "getting more females into jobs" - nuanced!). Considering that bizops is an entry level organisation, and that we have more low grade employees, recent college graduates, and interns than any other function in the region, this is damning with faint praise indeed. Rather than patting ourselves on the back for hiring almost as many women as men (which is only legally required, so no cookie, Large Corporation™) at low pay, we should be looking to see how come it is that they get stuck there. It's not how many female employees you have in the mailroom - it's how many you have in the boardroom.

Anyway, that was kind of funny cause he's a smart guy who I really respect, and he seemed to be genuinely pleased with this in a completely unexamined kind of way. Like the mere fact that women are allowed to do low grade administrative and customer facing roles in an IT giant is major progress. And because I was tickled, it got me thinking about diversity and representation in general.

In a very apropos way, Teh Intrawebs came through with a serious web event on the topic of diversity, inclusion and representation this very past weekend. PZ Meyers, one of (if not The) premier atheist and pro-science bloggers out there, posted an article about the under-representation of voices in the New Atheist movement[1] that do not happen to be attached to the bodies of white males. Now, not only is it certainly true that the most often recognisable faces of "New Atheism" are white and male - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, AC Grayling, PZ Meyers, Sam Harris - it is also true that women and people of colour are dramatically under represented in the community at a lower level, too. On top of which, and this was actually the trigger for the blog post, the atheist movement lovingly platforms people who are overtly misogynist in many of their views, the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Bill Maher.

What I find interesting is that while Meyers was concentrating on the former and the latter aspects of the parlous record of diversity of the atheist community, it's the middle one that really took off in response to his post. I've occasionally posted on Pharyngula before, and I've found that one of two things would happen: if I posted on any topic of biology, religion, atheism etc, - in short, on topic - I got either completely ignored or patronized and belittled. If I posted off topic to say that I found a particular post or discussion to be sexist, I would get run out of town by an intimidating brigade of self righteous dudes who knew for a fact that I, as a woman, couldn’t possibly understand sexism as well as they do, esp. with regard to how they're not and I'm just imagining things. In short, textbook online woman-marginalising and feminist-bashing, no different from so many online gaming fora or geeky blogs.

I'd always put that down to lack of diversity, myself; representation of women on atheist blogs is so low, went my train of thought, that other than myself and a few other lonely voices you couldn’t really expect to find too many feminists on even such a popular blog as Pharyngula, regularly generating threads of a thousand posts or more. Well, it turns out I was pretty much completely wrong - in fact there emerged a large number of articulate, well informed, strongly feminist voices, male and female, in support of PZ's call for recommendations for female and PoC atheist thinkers and speakers. And you have to think to yourself, have these people been hiding? Are they new to the blog? Where are they all when PZ posts pornulated images for laughs, or makes off colour jokes about "the trophy wife", or when the commenters in the many lengthy threads on the website exhibit sexism, misogyny or even just obliviousness and crass disregard for the feelings of minority groups?

I'll get to the answer, but by a slightly roundabout route. Amanda Marcotte, partly I think in response to the kerfuffle (I'll tell you about the kerfuffle in a minute), wrote a piece in which she outlines the natural affinity between atheism and feminism as progressive movements and calls for more cooperation and understanding between the two communities - mostly for an increase in open mindedness among the dudely dudes and libertarian asswipes that seem to make up so much of the numbers on the atheist side. In comments, I disagreed:

"[…]I think your generosity to the atheist/sceptic blogosphere crowd is unwarranted. […] There’s a lot of penis inches invested in the cleverer-than-thou stance of New Atheism; as a sub-culture it’s very heavily weighted towards the Smart Guy(tm) crowd, and is rife with antifeminist landmines.

Atheists are different from feminists in that they have an easily recognisable enemy with a face to it, wheras feminists are shadow boxing against a whole social paradigm. They’re not really as much into dismantling religion as a system of oppression as they are into slamming religious people, and too many of them define their identities by that dichotomy to make me comfortable that they’re not just pro-science bigots. That’s not an argument against atheism (I’m still an atheist, Hitchens or no), but I do think that they’re not the natural fellow travelers to feminism that you think they are.

Yes, the other night when someone on a thread there called rape “a mere inconvenience” and dismissed it as “20 seconds and we only have her word for it”, he caught hell. But that was in the 400’s of an almost thousand comment thread, and a lot of horrible shit got under the wire prior to that by not being quite offensive enough to trigger outrage. It wasn’t a bad showing on the whole for the community, but mostly because of the surprising growth in articulate and passionate feminist voices, not because the rank and file are undergowing some sort of growth process."

Which brings us to the kerfuffle. This guy was obviously trolling, spouting off shit so calculatedly offensive that it simply made me guffaw with disbelief to see people engage with him. But boy, did they! Dozens upon dozens of comments poured in, rebutting his ridiculous pro-rape anti-woman sloganeering, telling him to fuck off, calling him every imaginable name under the sun, and generally getting extremely hot under the collar about the whole thing. Now I'm not saying that it's not a good thing for people to be offended when somebody dismisses or belittles rape; it's a great thing, and if I'm honest when I first read what the guy said even I found it shocking. But it was tame stuff compared to what you hear even on Guardian CiF comments threads sometimes, let alone in the darker and more misogynist corners of the internet. Plus, he was an easy target: it's all vey well to say that raping and beating women is wrong wrong wrong, but when it was pointed out to the same community a few motnhs ago that pictures of a crucified mostly naked woman are maybe not the most woman friendly or amusing of images to post on a progressive, liberal blog, they responded mostly with outraged defensiveness.

On top of which, in the very same thread in question, in which wonderful and intelligent things were said, quoted, endorsed and expounded upon, there was also stuff like this:

"Hmmm, this piece isn't up to PZ's usual standards. It must have been ghost authored by a black woman or something."

"Listing women or dark-skinned people whom I agree with simply because they are women or dark skinned is something that stands against true equality."

"So can we all just fucking get over ourselves and move on to solving some of the "REAL" problems facing the world?!!"

"Here's a clue: people who whine about skeptic groups being anti-female anti-not-white haven't got the discipline to be a good skeptic. Skepticism is about thinking, not whining about how the world hates you and how the universe is out to get you."

"I regard the majority of Western feminists as somewhere between cockroach and the crud behind my fridge."

The thread is 1030 comments long at this stage, so you can imagine the above is just a sampling - and a tame sampling at that, because I didn't have the energy to go trawling for the really horrible stuff. If you have the stamina, I recommend you read the actual thing itself (I got as far as about #700 and lost the will to live). Anyway, the point is, while these comments were not as bad as the pro-rape trolling, they were pretty objectionable from a feminist point of view, and while certain people picked up on some of them, they passed off with relatively little rancour. So it's not like the atmosphere in this thread magically transformed the blog into a pro-woman, feminist, safe space kind of thing. Shit still went down, and a lot of it was pretty gross, but - and this is the interesting thing - it didn't shut the feminists up this time. Why? What made this thread different to the Raquel Welch on a cross thread? To the many many pro-evo psych threads? To my first thread on Pharyngula, in which it was loudly asserted to general acclaim that Patriarchy wouldn’t exist if paranoid feminazis didn't see it everywhere?

Greta Christina has a great and probably seminal post on the maleness, whiteness of the atheist movement, on why this is a problem, and on what e can do about it. Read the whole thing, as the saying goes, but to our purposes, she broadly talk about three things that can be done to make the movement more diverse: actively reaching out to non-white male atheists, conciously working to eliminate biases and debunk stereotypes, and active listening and open engagement with criticisms of sexism/racism.

What I think this episode over the weekend proves is that the first one - outreach - is by far and away the most important one. And here's at long last my answer to why all those wonderful smart feminist people came out of the woodwork and defended women's right to be heard within the movement, and the justice of our feelings of marginalisation: because PZ, by asking them to help him reach out to high profile female and PoC atheists, was reaching out to them. All the douchebags in the world trolling in the comments wouldn’t have the force to completely deter and shut down feminists if the owner of the blog, the person with authority, officially signals that their views are welcome.

Which kind of brings us back to diversity and how to create it. Getting warm bodies of the right sex and colour in your club is not a reflection of true diversity; the real metric of the inclusiveness of any group is how comfortable out-group individuals feel operating and expressing themselves within that group. And while educating and disciplining your group members to be more inclusive and less arrogant is always a good thing, if you're a person in a position of authority, there's just no substitute for stanidng up and saying to minorities and outsiders: "you are welcome, we value your contribution, we are listening: tell us what you think".

So, Mr Big Boss, a little less of the "females" and a little less of the "we're close to our diversity target". If you want women and people of colour to believe that you mean it, it might not be a bad idea to ask us what we think you should be doing in the first place.

[1] Let's table the discussion about whether it really is a "movement" for now, and play like the recognisable figureheads of current atheist discourse are "leaders".

I can has PCC complaint too

2009-10-23T22:38:00.003+01:00

On today's Guardian Science Weekly podcast (around minute 30), the presenters read out loud a number of comments that were left by listeners on the web page after last week's podcast.

As part of the podcast concerned the topic of "penisology", a predictable number of the comments had a bawdy tone. Two of the ones read out were directed at last week's presenter of the podcast, Nell Boase.

The first referred to her "giggle" adding "much needed sex appeal" to the podcast, and invited her to look the poster up if she were ever in Vancouver. The second commenter agreed, and added that Ms Boase would make a wonderful "romance novel narrator".

I feel that these comments are not only sexist, objectifying, and down right rude, but that the first one in particular constitutes a case of public (but safely anonymous) sexual harrassement, to which the Guardian is now a party by re-publishing it (without condemnation, and even with the jokey comment that "Nell could not refuse the offer") on a much wider platform than it would have otherwise had.

That the Science Weekly team don't - and should not - exert control over the behaviour of their forum commenters is a given. But to embarrass Ms Boase and legitimise such bullying behaviour by singling the coments out for praise on this week's podcast is not simply inappropriate; it is offensive, and sends the message that far from being valued colleagues and listeners, women are welcome to the otherwise all-male Scence Weekly team only as light sexual relief rather than journalism. To do so on the already sexualised background of the penisology piece, furthermore, creates a hostile, aggressively sexist environment in which female listeners, too, are made to feel threatened and superfluous.

The Guardian newspaper should not be lending its name to such misogynist tactics.

[Under the section asking what part of the code was breached, I put:]

I believe this constitutes sexual harrassement of Ms Boase, as well as a breach of her privacy by her sexuality being discussed in a public forum without her consent or presence.

======================

Join me in slamming the Grauniad for this piece of juvenile violence. Link to the PCC complaint site helpfuly provided. (on a side note: how much are we loving the fact that they had to put a whole separate page in place just for Jan Moir complaints?)

"Forever young and never forgotten. A man, a friend, a brother, a son, a husband and a hero."

2009-10-21T11:18:00.003+01:00

So said Ronan Keating of his friend Stephen Gately, who sadly passed away last week.

Doesn't sound like anything special, unless you know that Stephen was gay, and that Ronan was talking about him having been somebody's "husband" - Andrew Cowles's, in fact - in a church in Ireland.

It's uncomfortable in a way, trying to draw attention to the wider political point here; ghoulish almost, definitely opportunistic. Surely we should be campaigning for gay rights every day, and not just at the time of a tragic death? Guilty as charged: most days, gay rights are sufficiently below my political horizon to barely rate a thought, and I can't pretend that that's OK.

Nevertheless, here we are, so let's talk about marriage for a minute, rather than use some double-Dutch mea culpa to ignore the issue for yet another day.

First off, definitions: the human right in question is not the right to get married itself. Marriage as we have come to understand it – the dress, the rings, the arguments about name changes, the cranky in-laws and the cheap fizzy wine - can cease to be tomorrow, and the systemic problems will remain exactly the same, because the rights denied to those prevented from entering into marriage are the rights that are conferred on married couples.

These are truly prodigious, and mostly economic. Shared property rights, access to deceased spouse’s funds and tax exemptions in case of widowhood, visitation and financial support rights in case of a marriage involving children breaking up, next of kin decision making rights in case of incapacitation, preferential treatment by the immigration authorities, and many more. Frankly, it’s as if the state is bribing people to get married, on which more anon.

It is a self evident violation of the principle of universal human rights to forbid anyone from entering into the voluntary arrangement that will allow them access to these privileges. Kind of like saying “you can take driving lessons, and pay for the test, and pay road tax, but we won’t give you a driving license, because you have size 7 feet”. But people – and I’m not just talking about Jan Moir here – still do object to gay people being accorded equal rights to heterosexuals, and even when the Human Rights act forces rubs their noses in it, they squirm and pretend that it’s not happening if you call it Civil Unions instead.

The usual explanation for this (advanced by Liberals - the “reasons” that gay rights opponents give are too ridiculous to analise seriously) is basically the Eww Factor. Religious and Conservative people are freaked out by Gayness, the theory goes, because they are sexually repressed and easily frightened by change. They can’t sleep at night thinking about all that delicious sodomy and cunnilingus happily going on behind England’s green and pleasant net curtains, so they contort themselves into paroxysms of illogic and hide behind such things as “tradition” and St. Paul (who was a bugger, no pun intended).

I have always found this theory unconvincing, because it’s based on the definition of marriage that religious and conservative people like: partnership, love, family, commitment, apple pie, blah blah blah. On the face of it, yes, it seems illogical to deny people who love each other these things just because there’s one too many willies (or one too few) in the equation, and the right wing / religious bigots are just stupid and inconsistent.

Well… I don’t buy it.

Let’s have a look for a minute about what marriage actually is, with special reference to “between one man and one woman” bit.

Imagine a world in which there is a systemic and society-wide imbalance of power between two groups, and in which there is a given number of tasks that need to be preformed either at individuals’ expense, or at the expense of the state.

Now neatly subdivide all of your available population into groups of two, each pair to include one member of the more privileged and powerful group, and one member of the oppressed group. These people can be peers in all other ways – class background, education etc. – but this one basic power imbalance has to be present in every case.

Then limit the amount of money you give to the performance of certain vital but unglamorous tasks, and limit the overall number of tasks that are supported by the state. People will be put into a position where they absolutely must absorb some of the workload individually.

Which member of the two-person pairings is more likely to be handed the performance of these extra tasks: the privileged, powerful one, or the oppressed, disempowered one?

Right.

That’s what marriage is all about, and that is why the state is so damned eager to bribe you to do it: because politically, it is easier to harp on about the joys of motherhood and the sanctity of marriage than to raise taxes for the provision of, say, universal free child care (or even universal parental leave – watch employers kick up a fuss when it’s the half of the workforce they actually pay decent wages to that is liable to be absent for six months at a time). Or a subsidized laundry service.

And that’s why gay marriage I such anathema – because absent the power imbalance inherent in a two sex pairing, it’s economically meaningless. And I’m not saying that Sir Elton getting hitched will mean that overnight women are not picking up socks from the bathroom floor anymore; it’s not going to be anything like that straightforward or linear, but the door has been opened.

But that is the fear from the religious and conservative elements opposed to gay marriage. It is not a coincidence that these are the same elements that are the most misogynistic in their outlook, most committed to the subjugation of women to their – hah! – “natural” roles as providers of free domestic labour, and also by the way tend towards the economically “liberal” (for which read: they don’t want to pay taxes and they don’t care who that deprives of basic services).

There will come a point of critical mass where women will look at gay couples and be able to make a credible argument that it doesn’t have to be the way it’s always been for them, because it patently isn’t for same sex couples. Or there will come a time when women who don’t self identify as feminists look at feminist couples and think to themselves that things can obviously be different for them, because they already are for other women.

And to put the final polish on that argument, I present to my rapt audience the new charming companion of Gay Marriage Panic: Feminist Marriage Panic. New York feminist Jessica Valenti recently got married, and such august engines of misogynist oppression as Playboy magazine are getting hot under the collar about it. I can’t link to it I’m afraid – paid subscription only – but here’s a link to the NY Times, with its own brand of snide coverage (I think their thesis is along the lines of she was a feminist only as long as nobody wanted to marry her, but soon changed her mind when and offer was on the table, or something). Gloria Steinem also caught a lot of flack for getting married, with accusations of hypocrisy and insinuations of really just wanting that ring after all.

Anything that violates the basic template of marriage – man on top, woman unpaid domestic support system – is seen as threatening, both economically and socially. And that kind of brings me back to Stephen Gately I guess, and to why even though I think that marriage inequality is a travesty, it's a travesty that is a reflection of, and a part of something bigger. And while I’m totally in favour of any couple being able to celebrate their love publically, what I’m really looking forward to is the day when we just do away with marriage as “two people incarcerated in a private drudgery hell” altogether.

Fragment: some out of context thoughts on the Primark padded bra thing and young girls' sexuality/sexualisation

2009-10-10T02:42:00.007+01:00

I wrote this ages ago as part of a wider rumination on how we panic about the sexualisation of young girls because it might lead them to have sex, and possibly even enjoy it; but we pretend that what we're worried about is pedophiles and sexual predators, because we're so uncomfortable with female sexuality, at any age, that we just assume any expression of it spells disaster. The feminist angle of sexualising and objectifying people, again of any age, never gets a look-in: the underlying assumption is that all female sex is bad and dangerous, so the potential damage to young girld through being sexualised is that they may be introduced into that evil state earlier than is strictly necessary.

Young girls are not binary, digital little femibots. Empowered to listen to their
own feelings and with their agency acknowledged by society, they are able to react differently in different situations, in accordance with their own wishes and depending on the circumstances. Almost like they were, you know, actual people or something.

In other words, if girls are encouraged to explore and acknowledge their real (not performative) sexuality at a young age, rather than being exhorted to suppress it entirely, it does not follow that they will become sexually available to predators, or more vulnerable to abuse. Quite the opposite, in fact.

If girls are taught what pleasure feels like (which we are not, not even as women - there isn't even medical agreement on what an orgasm is, the G Spot veers widely from non existent to all important every few years, and the British Film Council still thinks that female ejaculation is urination), they will be more likely to know what dis-pleasure is when they feel it. If they are allowed to say "yes" when they want to, they will know when the time is to say "no".

At the moment we teach girls that their job is essentially to say "no" until somebody bullies them into changing their minds. We teach them that sex is rape. Not feminists, who never actually made any such claims, but the worthy family focus conservative types who teach them about abstinence and chastity. And when you teach someone that any expression of their sexuality is damaging to their better self, be it with their first love or their creepy middle aged neighbour, how are they to tell the difference between what they experience with one versus the other?

Of course girls can tell the difference, because we're not as stupid as the patriarchy would like; we know perfectly well that kissing the school stud is wonderful while being rubbed up against on a crowded bus is horrible. But we bury both our desires and our misgivings under layers of shame and self-blame. Far from offering any protection, that toxic mixture just means that we sublimate and absorb the abuse that we are left vulnerable to, turning the damage inward.

A quick summary of the past week's papers

2009-10-06T15:44:00.003+01:00

Look, it's actually quite simple.

We don't want young girls getting the HPV vaccine, because they are pure, innocent ingenues who should not be exposed to the possibility of penetration of their delicate pink ladybits by marauding penises. Giving them the idea that letting themselves be fucked[1] is anything short of a heinous offence against society, morality, motherhood, and apple pie, is a crime we will not countenance. If some of them later die of cervical cancer because our dread of women having sex is greater than our concern for their safety, well, that's a sacrifice we're willing to make.

We don't care about Roman Polanski getting the trial and punishment he deserves, on the other hand, because young girls are all brazen, lascivious nymphets. Those of them who have allowed their delicate ladybits to be penetrated by marauding penises are obviously lying, disgusting sluts who like it up the bum, and who like to make up accusations about innocent men, trying to ruin their lives and reputations for no other reason than they belatedly realise and regret their monumental sluttitude.

If young girls weren't such whores in the first place, they wouldn't get cervical cancer. Duh.

[1] What's this you say? Some girls actually enjoy fucking and see it as something they participate in, rather than something shameful and humiliating that is done to them against their better selves? Well, that's obviously an Absurd Liberal Myth. Seriously, who'd believe that? Haha.

Creation is not Causation

2009-09-30T16:09:00.005+01:00

Brian Cox, in case you don't know who he is, is a film critic for the Guardian. He's a very bad film critic; it's not that he doesn't know enough about film, but that one never gets to find out if he does, because he basically never writes anything about the films he's "reviewing". He just uses them as jumping off points for all kinds of incredibly retrograde screeds.

This week's victim is Creation, the new Paul Bettany flick about Charles Darwin. If I'm honest, first impressions had already not disposed me to try and catch it at the premiere, not that it matters in this case, because Cox says remarkably little about the movie, or even about Darwin.

Instead what he takes away from the film is the realisation that because Darwin was devastated by the loss of his young daughter to illness (surely not something it would take either filmmaking or critical insight to intuit he would be), then that means religious people are happier than atheists. He uses the "fact" that religious people are indeed happier than atheist to support his assertion that it stands to reason that religious people would of course be happier than atheists. Because of evolution. Or because evolution is bad. Something.

Like I said, it's a rubbish piece of writing, and I don't propose to engage with the preposterous and circular claim that having an imaginary schoolmarm in the sky makes you less miserable than knowing where the dinosaurs came from. But Cox also takes the opportunity to get in the following dig at his non-believer colleagues. Even atheists, he claims, don't really believe in evolution, because

"[E]ven some of the Guardian's hyper-rationalist readers balk at the idea that evolutionary biology might play a part in the human mating process. Male promiscuity, they insist, mustn't be linked to natural selection. That would let men off the hook. It must continue to be seen entirely as sinful departure from the path of righteousness."

Well, that's an original criticism. Not. And nobody has ever used it as a straw man against evolution. Er, also Not. But let's assume for the moment that Cox is quoting this in earnest, not as an easy point scoring device against imagined humourless and inconsistent atheists, but because he's genuinely concerned with the apparent gap in rationalist thinking.

OK. There are two ways of responding to the argument that men are predisposed by evolution to be unfaithful (promiscuous is a separate thing): ethically and scientifically. The more common, ethical one, is often deployed by feminists in response to claims that men "can't help" staring at women's chests, objectifying them, seeking status by bedding a large number of attractive women etc.: that just because it's "natural" not only doesn't make it right, but it doesn't even make it logical behaviour. It's "natural", feminists point out, to go to the toilet where and when you please - but you don't do that. It's "natural" to engage in unrestrained violence, to eat raw meat, to have bad teeth and to die in your thirties from malnutrition or disease. But you don't do any of that, either.

In fact the whole of human history has been one long struggle to get as far away from the natural as goddamned possible, thankyouverymuch. The invention of ethics, and the constant updating of them as societies changed and human groups grew and diffused, are part and parcel of this trajectory. To cherry pick a behaviour that the dialectic of your society is coming to regard as unethical and defend it on the grounds of being natural is not only idiotic, it's unethical - because it's an attempt to justify your prejudices by amoral (as opposed to immoral) means, giving yourself a free pass from thinking about the ethical implications of your actions.

The fact that many atheists, whom it is oh-so-clever to accuse of immorality (Cox does), can see this flaw in the male infidelity argument and point it out does not make them weak acolytes of the church of Darwinism. It makes them smarter than you, asshole. Also, better feminists. Hooray for rationalism!

However. The whole natural-is-not-ethical cooky crumbles extremely well, and far be it from me to deny that rhetorical tool to the many clever rationalists, humanists, feminists and plain ole decent folk doing battle against the forces of fuckwittery up and down the Internet, BUT. That only holds if the fact being touted as natural really is, and the claim is essentially true (i.e., the problem is with the interpretation).

In the case of male infidelity though, what always gets under my skin is not the poor understanding of ethics, but the nonexistent understanding of biology. Because the true honest to goodness fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that human males, far from being inherently and immutably promiscuous, are, from an ethological point of view, not nearly promiscuous enough.

Human fathers have by far the largest paternal investment in offspring of any primate. Even the fun loving and peaceable Bonobo dads don't really have terribly much to do with their offspring. Gorillas, chimps, and of course the solitary Orangs pretty much ignore their progeny, while many other species of primate are so oblivious to whose young are whose that when a new alpha male takes over a pack, he kills off all the young and starts his genetic empire from scratch - without reference to how many of those he killed might have been the result of a sneaky shag of his own in his pre-alpha days.

Men, however, not only know and recognise their offspring, they mate in long term pairings with the offsprings' mothers, help provide for future joint children and protect them from resource scarcity or violence, protect and support their mates while they are gestating, tend to share food and shelter in times of scarcity etc. etc. Somewhat tautologically, this must be the best evolutionary strategy for them - human children are vulnerable, human gestation is long and labour is dangerous. A widespread tendency towards paternal involvement ensures more young survive to propagate.

It's also a strategy that is hostile to, or at best neutral towards, male promiscuity. If, in order to best assure the survival of his young, a man needs to invest a lot of his resources in caring for them, then we would expect it to be profitable for him to have them well spaced an one at a time, with one partner at a time. Funnily enough, that's pretty much the system that humanity evolved towards. The promiscuous scattering of seed is not completely ruled out by this system - gambling a few chromosomes on the side is not costing a man terribly much by way of resources - but the high sociability quotient of humans has meant that over the eons mechanisms evolved to curtail that to levels that are supportable within a close knit and not very large group, with little privacy and a high degree of social knowledge about peers.

So biologically the whole "I can be an asshole because Darwin" thing doesn't really stand up. But even more interestingly than that, what gets missed time and time again in even progressive discussion about the links between biology and norms of fidelity is what a strong incentive the paternal involvement thing is to female promiscuity.

Think about it: once a man has made a baby, he can go ahead and make lots more babies straight away. It happens to be in his best interest not to risk making too many though, or they might all die. So once he's knocked up his partner, the best thing he can do is keep it in his pants for a while. She, on the other hand, is gifted by nature with the magic ability to not risk her genetic inheritance on another pregnancy for years after the moment of conception, and so can go out and have plenty of sweet, sweet lovin' with pretty much whomever she likes at no cost. Hmm.

Not to mention the fact that once a man has committed to a child as his own and continued to have sex with its mother, she can still go out and have all the sweet, sweet lovin' she wants with whomever she fancies and pass of the kids as his and he will never know. Not ever. It is positively a woman's Darwinian duty to test-drive a man as provider, and once he's hooked to that important function, go out and solicit as wide a range of Grade A genetic contribution for her future pregnancies. Marry the accountant, cheat with the pool boy: it's not a soap cliché, ladies, it's your natural, biologically driven survival instinct, and you just can't help it, because Darwin. Remember that one in divorce court.

Joking aside, there really is a strong imperative towards promiscuity in many species that form long term bonds. It's been observed in all kinds of animals - birds, canines, and of course humans. In fact the false paternity rate in the UK is something like 4% - and that's in a world with contraception and abortion. Imagine what it used to be like.

When you look at it that way, so much begins to make sense: why patriarchal societies always insist on virginity of the woman at the time of marriage; why female freedom of movement and expression is curtailed, as in the case of purdah or sequestration; why female sexuality veers between being seen as rampant and dangerously voracious (Europe in the Middle Ages, ancient Egypt) and non-existent (Victorian England through to today). The whole Madonna/Whore complex is in this light just a reflection of the fact that men understand that women have both the desire and the capacity for luscious, decadent, exuberant sex with lots of men, and really, really don't want them having that sex with anyone but themselves.

In fact, we have been so successfully indoctrinated into that idea that it doesn't even occur to us to say "hang on, from an evolutionary point of view it makes sense for women to shag around too!" - not because we don't want to engage with evolutionary theory, but because it doesn't even occur to us that women shagging around is something that happens, which it does, and that lends itself to pseudo-scientific evo-psych explanations - which it also does.

But female promiscuity is always discussed in terms of social failure, not science: the ignorant Essex Girl, the working class slag, the booze sodden, violent ladette, the benefits mom expecting "Society" to pay for the offspring of her uncontrolled sexual urges. But what has been punished most severely, most cruelly through the ages is not simply promiscuity, but infidelity in women; and that can only be because a strong deterrent was seen to be needed to an equally strong biological pull.

Not to mention that women actually, you know, enjoy sex. Shh. Don't tell.

So, David Cox, ladies and gentlemen: bad at film reviewing, bad at logic, and bad at science. Still, a hat tip to him for giving me a chance to expound on one of my favourite hobby horses!

Preventing sexual assault: Tips guaranteed to work!

2009-09-22T13:49:00.002+01:00

Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.
When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!
If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!
NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.
If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!
Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.
USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.
Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.
Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!
Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.

OK, OK, this is kind of like an email forward. But it's a good email forward!

Posted by request of Feminist Philosophers, who in turn had nicked it from Feminist Law Professors.

Pass it on!

Sexism and poverty, II - or how Nick Cohen thinks women should be sent back where they came from, be it Tonga or the kitchen

2009-09-20T10:56:00.004+01:00

Nick Cohen over at the Observer hits the perfect anti-progressive sweet spot by finding himself an issue that lends itself to stirring up fear and hatred against the Daily Mail's two favourite villains - immigrants and feminists.

Writing about what the Mail on Friday decided merited its front page - never a good source for material for a Guardian columnist, if you ask me - he lambasts Baroness Scotland for employing a woman who had no legal right to work in the UK, through the attractive medium of taking this one incident as the avatar of a vast, invisible army of illegal immigrants being exploited and abused by "the middle classes" in order to shore up the fragile (because, presumably, undeserved) gains of second wave feminism.

I'd like to be able to address the claim that "the success of women is based on exploitation of women", but frankly it's too much of a whopper to be sensibly deconstructed without making my head explode. It should suffice to point out two facts:

Remuneration is not the be all and end all of liberation. Most key components of women's liberation, such as the right to vote, access to health and education etc., are not based on the exploitation of anybody. They are the non-zero-sum result of allowing women to reap some of the benefits of a welfare state. Almost as if they were, like, people, or something. You know what would be liberation? Not talking about domestic service and domestic work as if they are the preserve and responsibility of women alone.
The average wage in the UK is £25,000 per annum. That is the average wage - which means that a vast proportion of people earn less than that, and thanks to the pay gap women would tend to earn less still. The simple truth is that most women wouldn't be able to dream of affording full time domestic help, and so if their libearion is based on exploitation, then it is their own exploitation we're talking about, via the second shift.

Speaking of facts, it would be nice to have some from Mr. Cohen, and would support his claim to fearless exposée of the iniquitous Power Couple much better into the bargain. He waves his arms vaguely to outline a shadowy world of exploited domestic labour and cruel, unfeeling, overpaid feminists, but doesn't back his fear finger pointing with any of the following pertinent facts:

How many full time domestic workers are there in the UK?
What is their average pay?
What are their legal rights - be they specific to their situation or the ones available to all British employees?
How many of them are non-British?
Of those, what is the estimated number of illegals?
How many households employ a full time domestic worker?
What is the average income of these households?
How many of said households are double income, with the woman being in full time high paying employment?

But hey, answering any of those questions would require actual research. Too much like hard work - far easier to bash feminists and wrap it up in a nice bit of immigrant influx paranoia.

Sexism and poverty

2009-08-20T15:08:00.004+01:00

There's a great article in the London Review of Books about the confluence of identity politics and neoliberalism. The basic thesis is one that I find difficult to disagree with: making society more diverse is not the same as making it more equal.

To elaborate: diversity is the word we use to describe the person-profile make up of different groups. So, for example, in Parliament, such and such a percentage of MPs are female, so many are Asian, a certain amount are gay, disabled, etc. The rest are all able bodies white men, who are seen as the default and only complete embodiment of the idea of "human being".

So, diversity is the measure of how close any given group - a company board, a school, a political institution - is in its ethnic, gender and cultural make-up to the whole of the population. Obviously a lack of diversity is near to impossible to defend: unless you turn yourself inside out with sophistry and made up "data" to prove that female, disabled, black or foreign people are somehow naturally stupider than white men, there's no explanation for their lack of representation.

Equality is something a litle different. You get different types of equality: equality of opportunity (beloved of New Labour and other neoliberal movements), equality of outcome (the progressive, socialist ideal), and economic equality, or equality of income or wealth. As it happens, the UK isn't doing too well on any of these scales compared to the rest of Europe, but Michaels concentrates on the interaction between diversity and equality of income.

Specifically, his main argument is that racial/gender equality serves neoliberal profit maximisation interests, and that it has been used as a smoke screen to distract from the wider picture of economic inequality and the social ills occasioned by it. It's a compelling and illuminating argument, and I find it hard to disagree when Michaels says things like:

The focus of [...] outrage [...] is not the fact that some people can afford the chocolates and others can’t, but that the ones who can are mean to the ones who can’t. And this represents something of an innovation in left politics. While everyone has always disapproved of adding insult to injury, it’s traditionally been the right that’s sought to treat the insult as if it were the injury.

I'm not a big fan of classism, or in its more old fashioned name, snobbery; but if I could eliminate either snobbery or poverty, I know which one I'd go for. Where I part ways with Michaels is in his attitude towards sexism and how it interacts with capitalism.

To be fair, though he lumps anti-racism and anti-sexism together for the purposes of making his point, the majority of the article concentrates on race relations and not gender politics; I get an inkling that that is because Michaels realises that his argument vis a vis institutionalised sexism is weak. He concludes:

If the downside of the politics of anti-discrimination is that it now functions to legitimate the increasing disparities not produced by racism or sexism, the upside is the degree to which it makes visible the fact that the increase in those disparities does indeed have nothing to do with racism or sexism.

I'm not a race relations scholar and I leave the question of how economic inequality and racism interact to others. But it is categorically untrue that inequality is not the product of sexism, and the data simply does not support such a breezy dismissal of anti-sexism (put less politely, feminism) as economically toothless identity politics.

According to the Rowntree Foundation's Poverty Website, women are only slightly more likely than men to live in low income households - in other words, to be poor - than men. Among those, single retired women and lone parents are the most likely to do so; luckily however, it is in those two groups that the gap between women and men has been narrowing most quickly. This is good news.

Mysteriously though, a staggering 31% of children are likely to live in low income households; a dramatically higher proportion than either women or men.

Huh? Are kids forming their own little minimum wage communes now, or what?

The answer lies in the fact that these numbers are absolute, not proportional. They are calculated in terms of total income per household, not relative income per household member. Which means that for every 1 single mother with 3 kids living in poverty, there are 3 children living in poverty - and the majority of single parents in the UK are still, despite media scaremongering, mothers.

Breaking the statistic down further, if a man lives in a "household" with an income of less than £10K p.a., or the aforementioned woman with 3 kids lives in a "household" with the same income, he still has 4 times as much real income as any of teh people in her and her children. This example, though, is not very solid - because in reality the woman is highly unlikely to have the same level of income as hte man in the first place.

And that is where sexism comes in. Women still earn approximately 85% of what men do - but for low earning women, those in part time or unstable work who struggle the most to stay above the povery line, the pay gap is an appaling 33%.

So, more women are bringing children up on their own; on average they earn less and have more mouths to feed; and if they can't work full time because some of their children are small, then the two effects are likely to be amplified many times over.

How does this tie back with the economic inequality issue? Well, the one thing that everybody seems to agree on when tlaking about social mobility is that there isn't any. Rich parents are still overwhelmingly more likely to raise rich children. Children who grow up poor are crushingly more likely to spend the rest of their lives in the cycle of poverty. And more children are raised poor because of sexism than anythig else.

Parenting equality, pay equality, status equality between traditional "male" and "female" professions; these are all essential to closing the poverty gap and improving that GINI coefficient. And yes, diversity, too - as we are currently seeing with Harriet Harman and Hillary Clinton, women in power are much more likely to emphasise women's issues than males are. I'm with ya that the left should get its economic priorities right already, and stop pandering to pampered upper middle class paranoiacs; but if you think that means that feminists can hang up their boxing gloves, you're dead on the nose wrong. Because on economic reform and financial equality as on anything else, if men do what they've done, we'll get what we've got. The patriarchy causes poverty, and the patriarchy has to go.

Boo-hoo for the world, Big Bad Hillary is being mean to it

2009-08-17T15:33:00.006+01:00

OMG, y'all, Hillary is so mean! Cause when somebody is asking you what your hubby thinks about your job, you answer, biyatch! What's this getting uppity and sniping back about? She's like, got no empathy, y'all!

See, travelling half way across the world into a war zone to urge the humane treatment of half the population of the world - the half that, in this particular beauty spot, is having their very bodies forcibly penetrated not only by assorted and often ganged up penises, but gun muzzles, razor blades, broken bottles and the AIDS virus - is totally not empatheitc. No, taking time out of your busy State Secretarial schedule to answer rude, fuckwitted questions is empathetic. Bake some cookies already!

Judith Warner at the NYT has a great article up, attacking the trivialisation of Secretary of State Clinton in the US media, and I find echoes of it relevant to the UK; because US issues become British issues so quickly, of course, but also because we've just had our own round of abject trivialisation - of Harriet Harman and her more limited but nevertheless excellent initiative to combat violence against women and girls.

A lot of the commentary I've seen on both topics in the last few weeks tended to focus on the journalistic inanity of this tone of coverage, as well as the potential political implications (e.g. long term undermining of Secretary Clinton could lead to a wider destabilisation both of her mission and of the Obama administration). But that, to me, dismisses the ridicule, obfuscation, misrepresentation and trivialisation of high ranking female political figures as an Aw Shucks side effect of the boys' club that is journalism, and its lazy attitude towards playing into the public's basest prejudices. And to do that is to miss the point.

It's significant that Harriet's fuckability and Hillary's love handles made their respective appearances around the time when both of them were publicizing significant initiatives to improve the lot of women and protect them from violence, cruelty, torture and rape. I was actually surprised when the Mail - a publication that I thought had long lost the power to ever lower itself further in my eyes - didn't ridicule Harman's intiative. It actually got angry about it. It really, really scared and outraged the Mail that government is trying to interfere in the God-given right of upstanding citizens to teach their children on the one hand to beat, and the other to take beatings. Educating children to eschew violence was framed as being fundamentally, invasively evil.

It's the same kind of non-logic that underpins the widespread outrage in the US at the suggestion that people could be given access to better healthcare. Preventing the suffering of others is being read as an unforgivable intrusion into basic democratic liberties. The operative word in this, as in all discussions about welfare reform and the protection of vulnerable groups, is other.

There's a bunch of feminist discourse dealing with "Othering", and a lot of it can be a bit obscure and intimidating to the newcomer. But to put it very plainly, albeit in my own somewhat unqualified words, Othering a person, or a group of people, is the mental process of redrawing your emotional boundaries such that empathy no longer extends to them. If you can place yourself in the shoes of an 8 year old child who has been gang raped and mutilated, or in the shoes of a person dying of cancer because their insurance company won't pay for chemo, and at least somewhat enter into their state of pain, fear, confusion and despair, there's just no way that you won't want to do something to help. At the barest minimum you will not stand in the path of others who wish to help, especially if the help comes at no cost to you.

But doing this is painful; empathy entails at least a tiny psychic wound inflicted by the imagined anguish of the empathees. So to some, the emotionally cogent solution is to imagine that those people - the mass raped, the uninsured, the victims and addicts and punch bags of soceity - don't exist, or can't possibly exist, or possibly do exist but deserve their self-inflicted suffering, or, in the most extreme cases, are simply so alien and un-human as to bear no meaningful relationship to one, possess no hook onto which one can start fastening one's empathy. Women, to go back to the feminist theory bit of this post, are the quintessential "other", which is why when we talk of mass rape in Liberia or family killings in Pakistan we don't talk about human rights - we talk about "women's issues". So insiduous is the othering of women that we quite casually dismiss them from membership of the human race on a daily basis.

There's a trick to this emotional equivalent of placing one's hands over one's ears and shouting "lalala nobody's listening!", and trivilisation by the media is central to it. Concentrating on Secretary Clinton's wardrobe or Mrs Harman's accent starts a feedback loop that, properly nurtured, provides whole swathes of people with the near-mystical ability to believe that the most heinous, the most dehumanising, the most abhorrent and disgusting and appaling outrages against one's fellow human beings aren't really anything to lose much sleep over. Because if Harriet Harman is frivolous, then all of her prattling about spousal abuse and the rape conviction rates is frivolous, too. If Hillary Clinton is frivolous, then little girls in Africa having their insides torn up by bayonettes, being "circumcised" by marauding soldiers before being deemed clean enough to rape, are frivolous too. And shame on these women politicians for wasting our time with them!

That, friends, is real lack of empathy. A couple of tetchy sentences in response to a silly question at a press conference really don't allow Secretary Clinton to aspire to such high achievements.

Victim blaming - the logical conclusion

2009-08-14T17:27:00.008+01:00

(Via Jezebel)

An upmarket hotel in the US is accusing a woman who was raped at gun point in its parking lot of having "failed to exercise due care for her own safety and the safety of her children".

The rapist attacked the woman from behind while she was strapping her two small children into their car seats. He forced her to undress and raped her on the back seat in front of the children. He pointed his gun at the children and threatened to sexually assault one of them.

The rapist was apprehended, tried, and sent to prison for 20 years. Neither judicially nor morally is there any doubt who is 100% responsible for this inhuman violation of another human being's dignity and personhood.

We talk a lot about victim blaming and how prevalent it is in our society, and it's often difficult to explain to people who are blinded by patriarchal assumptions about gender what "victim blaming" actually is, or how, e.g., asking questions like "why did she take him back?" or "why was she walking alone at night?" constitutes victim blaming behaviour in the first place.

But this is an absolutely clear cut case. The Marriott here is totally adamant that the rape was the woman's fault, or at least that she bears a lot of the responsibility for it (presumably they're not deluded enough to claim that she raped herself). They are, explicitly and unashamedly, blaming the victim.

They're not saying "young women are more prone to attack, she should have been more careful", because she was 40 when the rape happened.

They're not saying "she shouldn't have been flirting with him", because this was one of those tiny minority of random stranger rapes.

They're not saying "she shouldn't have been alone in a dangerous neighbourhood", because it happened in their own 4-star garage parking lot.

And yet, when she sued them (for an earth shattering $15,000, no less) for failing to provide adequate security on their premises and for ignoring previous reports about the rapist hovering in the area and harassing women, thereby leaving him free to rape, they turned around and quite clearly stated that it's all her fault for not making "proper use of her senses".

How can this be? How can someone even take precautions against a random crime? How do they propose women parking in their garage "mitigate their damages", as they put it?

Well, presumably, by not brazenly existing in the world while in possession of a vagina.

That is what I'd like people to take away from this: every time you think, or hear someone say "you know, women can do a lot to prevent rape by doing/not doing XYZ", think about this woman, whom a major corporation is lambasting as the author of her own misery.

Because saying "don't drink and flirt with men" and "don't wear short skirts" is bullshit. The rules won't protect you. Long skirts won't protect you. Secured parking lots with guards and cameras won't protect you.

Women don't get themselves raped. Men rape them. Anything that says otherwise is victim blaming.

ETA: Shakesville has a list of emails & URLs where you can contact the hotel chain and its owners to let them know what you think about this shit.

IVF and other property crimes

2009-08-10T16:08:00.000+01:00

On Monday, 20 June, 2005, one Professor Ledger ("a leading UK fertility expert"), via the BBC, warned of a "reproductive time bomb" threatening the UK if women continued to put off having children until their late 30's or early 40's.

Last Sunday, he proclaimed the bomb detonated from the front page of the Observer. A staggering, frightening, threatening, unsustainable number of women were forced to resort to IVF.

What do you mean, exactly how many? This is a newspaper front page article, people. It's not in the business of reporting actual information.

Anyway, you don't really need to know the numbers[1]. You can tell that this is a serious problem by the seriousness of the solutions Prof. Ledger proposes for it. Four years ago, he was entertaining such wishy-washy ideas as career breaks and financial incentives to enable women to have children earlier in life without jeopardizing their financial futures. Now, however, the situation is so much more severe that the advice of the good doctor is to subject women to an MOT.

An MOT is for cars, not people, you say? Well, where did you get the radical notion that women are people from? What are you, some kind of feminist?

[1] Oh, all right. Here they are:

35 thousand women are estimated to receive IVF treatment each year. That is 0.1 percent of the women in the UK. Obviously, a calamity of epic proportions that is going to overwhelm the NHS despite the fact that 80% of these women pay for it privately. Whatevs, numbers, right?

1.43% of babies are born as a result of IVF. Clearly if we don't do something about to reduce our reliance on it, the population decline will wipe Great Britain off the map and Britannia will no longer rule the clammy North Atlantic waves. If that sounds a little faux-jingoistic to you, then I'm sorry but I don't know how else to treat such patently preposterous alarmism about the fertility rates at the same time as banging the drum for immigration control.

The birth rate in Britain women is just over 2.0 children per woman. That's a pretty respectable replacement rate. At a time when we are being warned of unsustainable population growth through "migration", keeping the population more or less stable sounds like a pretty good idea, no?

What's this I hear you say? Women are machines for making nice white middle class babies? Surely not! Next you'll be suggesting that we limit their rights to terminate pregnancies and generally decide when and how to have children for themselves... Oh, wait.

The birth rate has been steadily increasing in the last 20 years. It is currently at its highest rate since the early seventies. So is, however, anxiety about the loss of mass control over the female population, and manufactured panic about the decline of "Britishness". Coincidence? You decide.

32.5% of couples with fertility issues have those because there's something wrong with the man. It's the exact same number - 32.5% - for women. In other words, the medical problems are pretty evenly spread across both sexes. But men are not exhorted to submit themselves to the sort of invasion of privacy that women should put up with. Because human rights are for humans, not females. Duh.

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As an aside and a general comment on the state of print media, most of the above numbers were present in a graphic side-bar accompanying the print version of the article. So the Observer staff were running a front page that expressly contradicted their own research. That this journalistic FAIL involved a) science and b) women is exactly no surprise to me whatsoever in any way shape or form.

That this appalling piece of regurgitated misogynist propaganda make the inside pages of The Sheffield Telegraph is, in some ways, almost comfortingly predictable. But the front page of the (self confessed) most liberal Sunday newspaper in the land? "MOTs for women"? You shittin' me, or are all of your brain-enabled editors currently sunning themselves in Tuscany? Fuckwits.

Hate-mongering tabloid in misogynist shocker

2009-08-06T16:51:00.002+01:00

Look, people. Yeah, the Daily Mail seem to have jumped the shark with this one. Yes, their opposition to the monstrous notion that teaching children to avoid violence is ridiculous, and is bordering on evil.

But seriously. Did anyone expect any different?

People are always like "feminists are hysterical, they're overreacting, most of the goals of feminism have been reached, you're jumping at shadows, why do you always have to see sexism everywhere" blah blah blah.

Answer: because it's like, there, mmkay?

People hate women. Lots and lots of people hate women. They think that women deserve to be hit. They think that women deserve to be raped. They think that women should be punished for being so vile as to deserve to be hit and raped by being made to stay with their abusers and carry tehir rapists' babies to term. These people call themselves "proponents of family values", "pro-life activists" and "men's rights activists". Also, quite often, "nice guys".

So somebody at the Mail was on holiday and the temp forgot to keep the language sifficiently coded, allowing the mask of concerned citizenship to slip and show the naked loathing below. Big deal.

You wanna get really mad, check out this "scientists", or maybe I should say Scientist(tm), who thinks that feminism is illogical, unnecessary, and evil. Cause he gets paid - out of your taxes - to teach this hate speech to young people at the London School of Economics.

What the fuck is UP with Comic Con, huh?

2009-07-27T16:59:00.001+01:00

OK, these people are officially so fucking hateful that they will chop off their own noses and serve them to their own faces with a nice Chianti rather than admit that the human race is twice the size they would like it to be, and comes in more than one regulation model.

First they didn't want women to come to the Con at all. The they were like, hey, we can't stop them. But we can complain about it when they do! Now they're all, OK, women are allowed if they wear a thong and allow men to paw at them in public without their consent. Wait, but dudes might not know that pawing is mandatory. I know - we'll give them prizes for doing it[1]!

Female comic fans (of which I am one) are pretty much used to the fact that comic books are essentially a spank bank. Any considerations of character development or plot outline are secondary to how much tits, ass and leg you can show per frame. So what if Diana Price is an Olympic-grade athlete, accomplished military strategist, and dedicated crime fighter? She can get all that done in a belted onesy, and like it. Be grateful she's not a nineties Garth Ennis invention, or she'd be doing it in a thong. Speaking of, what's with Ennis and the hate fuck recently (totally NSFW)? And yeah -Jean Grey. So she's like a Doctor or something. Big deal. She can wear her skimpy underwear and do her gratuitous lesbian scenes, like a proper comics character!

So yeah, OK, we get it, this shit ain't aimed at us. We are not the target audience, fine, great, whatever. But ComicCon are so fucking up themselves this year that they did the commercial equivalent of taking out a billboard saying "Recession? What recession? We don't need no stinking pink dollars! Teh Ladeez are for ogling, pawing and avoiding: we don't serve their kind here!"

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[1] Contrary to the title of that Jezebel article, the promotion is valid for pictures taken with any Booth Babe - so all women employed by the convention are open to harassment and assault.

Hey, not bad!

2009-07-13T17:00:00.002+01:00

Way to go, Jimmy Carter. I'm not a big fan of arguments from God - whatever camp's opinions they are used to justify - but, religious stuff aside, it's good to see acknowledgement of the fact that Women's rights are human rights (thanks for that phrase, Hillary Clinton), and that the systematic oppression of women is a global human rights crisis, coming from this sort of echelon of politics:

"Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries."

Word.