Violence, schmiolence

 
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

 

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

 

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

 
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

 
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

 
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

  
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

  
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

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.

 
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

 
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:

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


2. 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


3. 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


4. QED

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

 
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

 

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

 
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)

 
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

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

 
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.