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.

Festive Perspective

 

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.

 
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

 
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

 
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

 
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."

 
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

 

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

 
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

David 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 and 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!

 

1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.
   
   
2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!
   
   
3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!
   
   
4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.
   
   
5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!
   
   
6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.
   
   
7. 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.
   
   
8. 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.
   
   
9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!
   
   
10. 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

 
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.