Here's some basic "reality" for ya

In a week when a British feminist took on & defeated Facebook, Louise Mensch writes disparagingly of the supposed flaccid ineffectiveness of non-US activists, compared to such feminist luminaries as Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg.

This, per La Mensch, is a "reality based" approach to feminism.

It's boring and stupid arguing with Louise Mensch. She is one of those people in whom an early aptitude for conventional education had instilled the unfortunate belief that they possess a comparable level of native intellect. This is unfortunately not the case. The ability to identify the commonplace achievements that carry the most desirable incentives (school grades, mediocre fiction) is useful, but it doesn't follow that to have it is to possess the skills to analyse complex phenomena or comment on serious issues.

So I'm not going to do a close reading of Mensch's piece, but instead highlight the risibility of her "reality" through the example above and one more telling throwaway line. Men, per Mensch, "have been the primary breadwinners in all cultures at all times in history".

Really.

Well I don't know that Louise Mensch is a student of history, especially, but OK - she can make such sweeping claims if she substantiates them. Unfortunately this is not the case here. Having made this jaw droppingly bold assertion, she moves swiftly on to argue that given that men have always been the primary sustenance providers, in all societies, for all of human existence, then they must like it. Like, you know, people have always suffered from bouts of malaria, which is how come it's such a hoot.

But it bothers me, this small bit of abysmal reasoning, because it ties in to a hobby of Mensch's that is also a central problem in the public understanding of feminism and gender roles, and that is biological (or in this case historic) determinism.

The standard evo-psych story goes something like this: women are weak and vulnerable, especially when pregnant or breasfeeding. They depend on men to provide them with food and protection. This is why women have "evolved" feminine wiles to attract and retain male partners, and men have "evolved" strength and aggression to compete for and then defend the best female partners. Men then gradually used this aggressive instinct to amass possessions and compete with one another, eventually "inventing" agriculture and thus civilisation.

Never mind for a moment that this is a kindergarten-level understanding of evolution; it's just not true.

In observed hunter gatherer societies, gathering (usually but not always done mostly by women) provides the majority of the group's calories and all its staples. Hunting is an intermittent and risky activity and cannot be relied upon to sustain a group or family unit reliable, especially around vulnerable times of infant rearing.

In existing and historical pre-industrail agrarian societies, women do 90% of the labour and produce almost all of the staples the family or village depend upon. When men engage in agriculture it is more often a) separate from women's growing activities and b) concentrated on production of cash crops, the proceeds of which are not reinvested in the community but are used to purchase personal luxuries such as tobacco, alcohol and clothing for the man.

Chances are that if I say the word "farmer" to you, your brain will supply the image of a man to fit that role. But the crushing majority of farmers in human history have been and still are women. In fact, given that farming probably developed from a kind of enhanced-husbandry model of seasonal gathering, it's perfectly reasonable to suppose that it was invented and perfected by women, too. Even in Europe, up until the modern period women participated in all aspects of cultivation, from walking behind the plough to rearing domestic animals. Men, meanwhile, never took part in the refining and useful application of the resulting products through spinning, weaving, cooking, preserving and so on.

The second shift is not, as we are so often told, the fault of feminists "telling" women to go out and work (never of men for not stepping up to plug the gap). Women have always worked twice as hard as men, and mostly the work they did won and baked the bread. Men have never been and are not today universal "breadwinners", or frankly there wouldn't be all this talk of single mums on benefits, now would there.

Yes, Louise Mensch is blinkered by privilege and yes, that makes her say some really stupid things about how black people should and shouldn't react to racism. But quite apart from that, this woman who's taken it upon herself to lecture us about reality is ignorant and disdainful of the facts. She's just a bit... Full of shit, really.

Feminist theory and the blue sweater

  
In the movie "The Devil Wears Prada", which is otherwise a pretty uninspiring non-exposé of the underbelly of the fashion magazine industry, there is one scene of transcendent importance that has stuck with me through the years, and that I am often reminded of when people tell me that some subject of philosophical, political, scientific or sociological inquiry is "academic", "ivory tower", "has no relevance to people's lives" and so on.

I think of it as "the blue sweater speech":

In context of course, the scene give us a glimpse (not enough of a glimpse, and it;s a shame the film didn't explore that subject further) into how what we think of as our personal choices are really determined by executives, advertisers, buyers, magazine editors and so on. The relationship between fashion designers - the creative people who actually conceive the patterns and shapes of the clothes that we by necessity must choose among - is mediated by an enormous chain of other, often extraneous relationships that mean that at the point of purchase (or even closer to home, at the point of dressing), we can't really be said to make an informed choice between neutral options.

This is true everywhere in the consumer society; in food, in literature, in leisure activities and holiday destinations, in the jobs we go for and the degrees we choose etc. it's not really the amorphous concept of "society" that shapes the limits of our choice, it's groups of specific individuals whose job it is to do that, in various forms. On a side note, the vagueness of "society" and "culture" is a deliberate neoliberal ruse, and no wonder that it was set up for Thatcher to attack - of course there is no such independent, sentient agent called society. Making it sound ridiculous made it easier to nudge the choices people - individuals - to disengage from it and stop believing in it.

So much for Miranda Priestly and her unintentional critique of capitalism; but how is the blue sweater relevant to feminism? Well, the blue sweater is "lived experience".

I've been seeing that term about much more lately, almost always juxtaposed with, and opposed to, the idea of "theory". Feminism, the critique goes, is too detached, too academic, too theoretical. what it needs to be relevant to women's lives is an injection of lived experience. And example would be a woman who says "I have a basic belief that my (any) theories aren't as compelling as lived experiences."[1] the implication is that "theories", lower case T

it is now seen as an insult, as an affront to intersectionality, for example, to talk of queer theory. Transgender, the riposte invariably goes, is not a theory. It is real, and by claiming that it's "only a theory" you are insulting and erasing transwomen's experience. The saying goes: "your analysis doesn't trump our existence." This attitude often crops up in other controversies within feminism, such as the fight for sex workers' rights, in which the lived experience of individual sex workers is often advanced as a rebuttal to policy suggestions or research findings: theory is impersonal, obtuse, out of touch, and at its worst a deliberate bad-faith attempt to avoid taking the lived experience of women into account when it doesn't agree with the desired outcome.

Clearly, that is sometimes the case - "don't confuse me with facts" is a mental attitude that a lot of people wedded to their ideologies adopt rather than rethink their actions (see: Osborne, George). but that is not in and of itself a condemnation of theory, and more importantly it is in no wise a reason to suppose that there isn't a long, varied "supply chain" of sorts, mediating between what we think of as our independent agency and the theorizing of some feminist philosopher somewhere.

I remember sitting on a bench on the island of Santorini once, having a discussion with my best friend about the Spice Girls (yes I am that old!). Her position was that Girl Power was a real force that could be harnessed for women's liberation; mine was that it's a shallow flash in the pan. The conversation stuck in my mind because it was the first time that I heard this argument advanced: that what philosopher and feminists do in their ivory towers is so disconnected from the lives of ordinary women as to be entirely separate from and useless to them.

At the time I instinctively felt that this can't be right, and tried to rebut it with a fairly hand-wavy conception of a "trickle up" effect from academia to the privileged realms of Real Life(tm). I don't know that I did a very good job, because I didn't really know how things like Parliamentary Committees, policy think tanks, UN research reports, charity lobbying campaigns, popular science/politics/psychology/self help book commissions and so on interact with the world of academia and mediate between it and the seemingly independent everyday world of jobs, traffic jams and childcare dilemmas. Possibly even more importantly, I didn't know how very porous that connective tissue between "theory" and "lived experience" is - how directly, in some cases, academic conceptions are imported into the conditions that govern seemingly trivial parts of our lives (if you don't believe me, Google "jamology").

What Miranda Priestly is saying, in her inimitably blood-chilling style[2], isn't just that the Anne Hathaway character is being stupid and naive to think "this stuff" doesn't have anything to do with her; she is also hinting at the fact that without "this stuff", she'd simply have nothing to wear. If it were not for the temper tantrums and drug habits (sorry) over highly strung creatives in the Fashion World, we might not have all those "choices" we like to defend from encroachment, in the first place. We might all still be wearing petticoats.

Now, we might also not - we might discover a hidden wealth of creativity and variety within each of us. That is a somewhat Utopian view, but I don't discount it entirely. Certainly, to come back to feminism, the conception of an ideal post-gender society includes the complete freedom from external influences on individuals' socio-sexual identities. I mist say though, history is against us: one of the things we definitely had less of, before the age of universities (and fashion designers), is variety. People more or less all wore the same thing, even though they had full control of the production process, from flax to handkerchief; and they quite often more or less thought the same, too.

However that future might turn out though, that hypothetical world in which everybody can simply be free to have their own individual theory of identity is still to come; in this world, we're all the products of the same sausage factory, and that sausage factory is built on blueprints that have a lot of theory in them. To imagine that any one individual's lived experience is entirely above or beyond engagement with theory is like thinking that you really did "choose" that blue sweater. And, when we identify beneficial changes that have filtered into women's lives through decades of feminist work, to fail to acknowledge the important contribution of theory to that would be short-sighted and ungrateful.


[1] I'm sorry for the lack of proper attribution; I did think about and decided that depersonalizing the discussion is probably the better choice here.

[2] I'm not advocating being that nasty to anyone (ever!), but isn't it kind of marvelous how Meryl Streep manages to portray absolute power without an ounce, a breath of male patterns of aggression? Masterful! And a bit of a template for would-be non-violent dictators. Er. Don't quote me on that.
  

Femen vs. Pussy Riot: Russia and the Ukraine are not in the "West"

I've been interested in the discourse about Femen that's been going on ever since the story of Amina Tyler hit the news. One of the things that strikes me the most about it is how hostile the reaction to them has been compared to Pussy Riot. I've thought about it a lot, and what I think is this:

If as a feminist you have a different reaction to Femen than you did to Pussy Riot, you need to think about that. I know, really helpful.

Pussy Riot are part of a male-headed, heteronormative collective called Voina - "war" - and lead by Oleg Vorotnikov and his wife Natalia Sokol. The collective engages in traditionally male forms of artistic expression such as punk rock, as well as some heavily porn-inflected performance art (in which it is female members who are shown in explicitly sexual contexts).

Femen is a woman-lead, non-hierarchical and quite amorphous group of women appropriating not just the symbolism of female nakedness, but traditional markers of femininity for purely political aims. [In case you don't know: those flower garlands they wear are Ukrainian women's folk headress, which adds an interesting twist to the bare chests.] 

So why the reverence of one and the hostility to the other?

I'm not really interested in how the establishment views Femen or Pussy Riot, but that the left sees them so differently is concerning.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that there is an element of puritanism in the reaction to Femen naked breasts. It's the wrong context. In a society like the Ukraine, one that enforces the most shocking extremes of pornified femininity and supports horrific male violence, nakedness takes on a different meaning than in a society in which female bodies are forcibly hidden. Femen tactics are essentially Ukranian, and it is incorrect to compare them to, for example, PETA - who really do explicitly objectify women's bodies in essentially Anglophone cultural contexts. 

As an aside, it's been a surprise and a disappointment to read almost nothing in the coverage of Femen in feminist circles, most notable Bim Adewunmi's otherwise measure piece, about their origins and cultural background. Because they are white, they just get folded into the imperialist, Islamophobic "West". But the Ukraine is not in the "West". Eastern Europe, and especially ex-Soviet states, have their own cultural trajectory and a different engagement with imperialism & post colonial analysis.

And yes that does mean that the transplantation of those tactics to Muslim countries can be problematic and clumsy; that is a valid concern. So I don't necessarily want to critique the #MuslimaPride hashtag on Twitter or the other reactions to Femen by Muslim feminists. That's a conversation that needs to happen inside Muslim feminism (especially given that it was essentially kicked off by a Muslim woman, not Femen or anyone else), and I don't think I've much of a right to comment on it.

But still, I'm kind of curious why most feminists & lefties are so much more lukewarm, if not hostile, to Femen than to Pussy Riot. Not to come over all Nick Cohen, but is it because Pussy Riot only took on the church, whereas Femen branched out into mullah bashing? Or is it because some feminists have imbibed the anti-objectification message to such a degree that the naked female body has become anathema to us? Or is it because the - literally - naked anger and hatred of Femen simply refuses to play by our rules?

  

Vile Product: Mick Philpott & our cosy acceptance of male violence

The Daily Mail is doing what the Daily Mail does: taking a human tragedy & obscenely distorting it to score a cheap political point, in the process shedding or neglecting every semblance of decency or tact. Small things like the fact that children are born, not "bred" like piglets; or that if you plaster an enormous headline screaming "VILE" above a photo of six dead kids, people will assume that's what you're calling them.

The Daily Mail is, of course, interested in twisting this awful, incomprehensible event to have a dig at people on benefits. All of them, it implies, are morally bankrupt scroungers who would murder their own children to do the taxpayer out of a buck. Who's more morally bankrupt is of course a debatable point, but the debate wouldn't be very long or very interesting (hint: it's the Mail).

But almost as interesting is what the Mail is almost equally interested in eliding, turning away from, hiding. Reaching back into some unspecified past, the Daily Mail news team implicitly posit a scrounging attitude, engendered by reliance on benefits, that developed over an unspecified length of time to a murderous approach to benefit fraud. That's the implication of "product" - first there was the benefits system, then there was this murderous monster, so clearly the two are connected.

But we don't really need to engage in hand-waving and insinuation to offer an opening bracket to the kind of mindset that leads a man to set this own children on fire: we can go back to when Michael Philpott was 21, and broke in to the home of a 17 yer old woman who dared to leave him. He stabbed her 17 times, attacked her mother, and was sentenced to 7 (!) years imprisonment for attempted murder. When he was 21, he thought that the penalty for daring to rebuff his violent, controlling advances was death, whereas the penalty for trying to kill a woman was a few years bread & board at Her Majesty's pleasure. If he really is such a determined scrounger as the Mail makes him out to be, he must have been in heaven.

Is it any wonder, then, that a man who was allowed to go back out into society and inveigh vulnerable young women with a history of abuse or violence to give themselves over to his control would have drawn the conclusion that leaving him was a crime that should -and could - be severely punished? When Lisa Willis decided to leave him, is it really such a stretch that a man who'd been breezily getting away with abusing and nearly enslaving one teenage future wife after another would decide that she should be punished?

This man killed six children trying to get back at a girlfriend who dumped him. That's all there is to it. He didn't do it because he was on benefits (in any case, both of the women he'd been controlling worked, not that the Mail would care for such a detail of fact) or because he was particularly evil or twisted. He did it because that's what men get away with in society all the time.

Two women a week die at the hands of their abusers; the majority, while trying to leave or just after having left. The Philpott children are just another such statistics. You'd almost think that this unusual circumstance would lead us to ask: why? Why do we let men like Mick Philpott get away with decades of violence, abuse and exploitation? You'd almost hope we'd ask those questions instead of the inevitable "why did she stay with him" (look at happens when "she" does!).

But nope. Our leading daily newspaper uses this opportunity not to start a conversation that will possibly safeguard the lives of other children, other women, but to ram home a mendacious, rancid piece of propaganda that will probably endanger their lives even more.

I don't know whether the national conversation about the Philpott case can ever rise above the sexual prurience of it all and really get into the mechanics of how men such as him find, target, groom and control vulnerable women with our collective support and connivance. Certainly the Fred and Rosemary West case never gave rise to anything other than polite but ultimately ineffectual horror. But we can and should try; we can and should tell people when the topic comes up: no, he wasn't especially or uniquely evil. He was a common or garden variety abuser who had gotten away with it for a very long time, and thought he could get away with it yet again. We never gave him a  reason to believe otherwise.

ETA: Apparently Philpott only served just over 3 years for the attempted murder & GBH of his ex-girlfriend and her mother. If I were given to making up hysterical screamy outraged headlines for tabloids, that's what I'd be shouting about.

ETA II: Women's Aid have released an excellent statement highlighting the mechanics of "decades of domestic abuse".
 

Eight simple rules for not being a dick on Twitter, or: what to do when feminists are WRONG

  

1. Assume that people are competent, intelligent and are trying to do the right thing. And I don’t mean “pay lip service to that assumption”, I mean really live that belief.

2. When you see something that still seems offensive to you, do this: smile, then read it out loud. Seriously, try it. Because it may be that you got it wrong, that the tone didn’t come across, that you’re not familiar with this person’s dry sense of humour: a bunch of stuff. If it is capable of being construed ironically or sarcastically or as a joke, that’s probably how it was meant.

3. Additionally, assume that you’ve misunderstood. Always. If you see something you don’t agree with, that seems profoundly wrong and completely illogical, there is about an 80% real-life chance that it’s you who’s not getting it. Your first approach in any communication situation should be to ask a question…

4. …but this question should never – ever – contain any of the following: “um”, “has it occurred to you that”, “don’t you realise how”, “actually”, “excuse me”, or any other passive aggressive patronising self-righteous bullshit. If it doesn’t start with one of the 5 W’s, you’re being an asshole.

5. On twitter, or on a blog you’re not familiar with, click on the person’s name and have a little rootle 

round their other writings before responding. Are the obviously on your side? A good person? Generally with the angels? Then consider leaving them alone. If they used (what you think is) the wrong word or said something you seriously think is un-feminist, there are plenty of people out there less evolved than you, and I promise you they’ve already let that person know their displeasure, oh yes.

6. Don’t join mobs. For fuck’s sweetest honey oozing sake, don’t fucking do it. You see someone telling someone off on Twitter? Great. That means that person has been told off. Your contribution is no longer necessary. The good deed has been done. Pat yourself on the back for having had the correct instinct & go make a cup of tea.

7. Don’t incite mobs. The next person I catch suggestively @ tweeting an offensive article/tweet into someone else’s stream, implicitly or explicitly inviting them to go & get medieval on the offending ass, is going to get a smack, they really are. What are you, twelve? Jesus.

8. Above all, nomero uno, the Rule Supreme of Feminism, this is it, genuine 100% 24 carat wisdom: ask yourself if you could be wrong. No matter how expert, how well versed, how experienced you are, how much more lived experience you think you have than this other person who is pissing you off, force yourself to stop, breathe in, and think for just a second: could they be right and I, wrong? Or maybe they could just have a point, if I follow Rule 1?

Feminism isn't an exact science, which means nobody – not Judith Butler, not Luce Irigaray, not Caytlin Moran, not Laurie Penny, nobody – has got it 100% figured out. Everything is up for debate and negotiation, and if you truly believe it’s not, then you need to join a religion and not a social justice movement, mmkay?

In fact if feminism were an exact science, you’d be in even more of a pickle, because then you’d be compelled by professional standards to evaluate new arguments brought to you, rather than just thinking of the most sarcastic way of knocking them down.

I actually try to apply that “scientific” approach myself – taking each new argument as if it might actually be right & going from there. Here’s a case study: last week, people in my timeline were freaking out that Richard Dawkins said that a baby is like a pig and only foetal pain stands between a woman and the right to abortion.

Now, abortion, as some people will know, is my baby (see what I did there?) – I can quote law details from like 10 different countries, statistics from all over the world, abortion rates, studies, services, educational projects, Nadine Dorries scandals… In fact it just so happened that I accidentally ended up lecturing the very same Richard Dawkins about it the following weekend. But.

I went to his timeline. I read the whole of his argument. I thought seriously about whether the discovery of foetal pain would change my mind about the subject of abortion on demand at any stage in pregnancy (probably not, but it was an interesting thought experiment). I saw how many people were already piling on on him… And I decided not to get excited about it.

Did that make a difference in the world? Nuh-uh. But would being the 100^th person tweeting The Dawk to tell him what a bellend he is have made a difference in the world? Nope.

What’s true of someone like Richard Dawkins is much more true of some random feminist on Twitter who is probably really doing her very best to be in the movement in the most productive way she can. In the movement you don’t own, and your oh-so-enlightened, holier-than-thou friends don’t own, and I don’t own and she doesn’t own and that’s what’s so damn great about it.

Tl;dr version: if you don’t want to have a lot of in-fighting in feminism, don’t start any fucking fights.

So, does any of this mean I'm the Zen grand Master and never get into online spats? Like hell it does. Sometimes I get my feelings hurt & things run away from me. Sometimes I fail at applying the rules. Sometimes I'm having a bad day. But I've had more productive discussions with people on Facebook and Twitter than I've had rows, and I'd like to see that ratio continue to improve. Also, I'm fed the FUCK up with the self righteous yelling & screaming, and I felt like I had to do something constructive about it or I'd explode.

  

Sexual harassment & assault in public places - does it matter?

  
So there was this very interesting series of tweets from Dusty this morning, which I briefly storified:



I think the most important question though, and the one she asked by way of conclusion, is this:

Does it matter than women are choosing not to go out, rather than suffer harassment/assault by men?
— Dusty (@dustsister) March 11, 2013

The automatic response to this question (and I think the one Dusty was going for, by way of sarcasm - though I may be wrong) is "of course it bloody matters! It's terrible! And unfair! It limits women's freedom! It's a violation of our collective human rights!".

And clearly all of that is completely true. But I think it also matters very much for a different reason, and one that is less often discussed than the impact of harassment on individual women (or even women as a class):

It matters because women's fear proves it's working.

I'll explain.

The question that often arises when street harassment and casual sexual assault are discussed is: why do  men do it? What drives individual men to curse women on the street, shout at them, follow them, grab them? And the assumption is that it will be something individual - some kind of choice that individual men make or a set of fears/insecurities they have that express and alleviate themselves via this medium of humiliating women.

Do a degree, that is probably right. Not all men harass, and not all men sexually assault women in bars & clubs. So there's got to be some kind of distinction between the ons who do and the majority who don't, probably at the level of personal histories & psychological profiles. But while that might help us explain away individual instances of harassment, it doesn't explain the phenomenon. Why is it the public sphere made so persistently unsafe for women?

[Note to sceptics: if you don't think it is, please, go here and read this, and then come back & read the rest of this post. Go on, I'll wait. It's fine, I was getting a cup of tea anyway. Off you go.]

Like I say, the common hypothesis seems to go something like "there are a lot of fucked up men in the world". Which there are - there are a lot of fucked up people of all genders in the world, 'cause it's a fucked up world & patriarchy & capitalism mess with all of our heads. I'd like to propose an explanation for why these particular fucked up men feel that they need to express their damage in this particular and very commonly predictable way; why they grab women's crotches in clubs or shout obscenities at them from moving cars, almost as if they want to punish us for being out and about in the first place:

They do. They do want to punish us and put us off being out in public. Because they don't think women have a right to be there. They don't believe that women have an equal right to occupy, much less enjoy, the public spaces they see as belonging to them and their peers. To men - especially white, dominantly coded men - the whole world is a "safe space". And the way they keep it safe for themselves is by making it unsafe for everyone else. That's pretty much a textbook definition of discrimination anyway: making sure not only that you withhold certain rights from some groups, but that they are constantly reminded of their inferior status. Otherwise where'd the status brownie points come from?

It's not strictly speaking about doing harm or damage - more about constant, pulverising reminders that damage is a distinct possibility. The world would not become a safer place for women if all men stopped harassing & touching them in public: rape rates would not go down, domestic abuse would not vanish; the only noticeable difference for women would be that we would occasionally forget to be afraid, and forget that we do not have an equal right to the streets, bars, schools & workplaces that we share with men. 

We might just - horror of horrors - start acting as if we do have a right to leave the house & walk down the street like we're some kind of 'equal citizen human being' or something.

In other places (and in other times), the prohibition on women sharing men's world is expressed much more straightforwardly: they're simply prohibited from leaving the house. Or if they're allowed to leave without being accompanied by a relative/driver/guardian, they have to cover up - so men don't actually have to look at them, & can continue to pretend they're not there. Or they have to ride in the back of the bus. Or pray in a back room. You get the idea: one doesn't have to go far to find examples of women being quite simply told, without inhibitions: you don't belong. You're not allowed. Not just in this university or this profession, but here. In this world. On these streets. With the rest of humanity.

Luckily we're way more enlightened and advanced here in the post industrial, democratic, liberal global North. Men here don't just tell women to fuck off out of it & make themselves scarce or else; they 'only' act on the "or else" part of things.

This doesn't have to be the avowed & consciously acknowledged aim of every wolf whistler or tit-grabber. It's still what the result is. It makes sense to judge widespread social phenomena by their outcomes rather than the atomised intentions of individual actors, and in this case the outcome is that women self-police by staying out of certain places at certain times, to their own detriment and for the glory of patriarchy. 

So that's why it does matter, very much, that women (for entirely sensible reasons of self-preservation & well-being) end up policing their own movements: is proves the effectiveness of harassment, and it reinforces the status of women in the world as subordinate, inferior members of society, allowed to move in the shared spaces that make up society only on sufferance and with the constant threat of their 'living a normal life' privileges being revoked. 

What is taken for granted by men is a special privilege for women, open to attack & liable to be challenged by every bored van driver or tipsy Norwegian tourist. And by taking the no-choice choice of avoiding them, the message that is being sent back is: keep going, lads. It's working. 
  

Mild sexual harassment and failures of empathy

Tom Chivers had this great piece in the Telegraph this week, where he repeated a suggestion from Caitlin Moran to men who think that workplace sexual harassment - or as it's sudden becoming known "inappropriate touching" - is no big deal:

"it’s a good mental exercise to imagine that you, a man, are on a planet far, far away, populated by aliens roughly a foot taller than you, who have pretty much all the money, and who keep touching you on the arse when you’re just trying to look in a cupboard for printer cartridges."

I think it's an interesting exercise to engage in, but not because once they've done the thought experiment men will suddenly have some kind of epiphany about how awful & demoralising harassment is, but because for the more self aware of them it ought to provide an insight into how hard our culture makes it for us to empathise fully with women.

I had this friend once who was always interrogating me about why I'm a feminist. He was one of those smart guys who think that there's something fundamentally wrong with your argument if they hadn't already intuited it, since, being so smart, if it was so important and correct, they'd have though about it themselves by now. He didn't leave me alone one time until I told him that when you improve the status of women in society, the whole society benefits from it; he actually said "oh, well in that case it's OK", because, having slotted women back into an instrumental subordinate role, he could more easily live with the idea that someone was dedicated to helping them.

Anyway, so this guy liked bringing "examples" for me to disprove of how bad men actually have it in society. One of these stories involved a group of older women in his workplace who had a habit of commenting about his attractiveness in a suggestive way. He wanted me to admit that it's sexual harassment, I think so as to make it easier for him to dismiss sexual harassment entirely, since if he can just put up with it then women ought to, as well.

I asked him who the women in question were; he said they were the admins & secretaries in his department. So I explained the power dynamics inherent in harassment & tried to show that, however personally unpleasant & professionally inappropriate their behaviour was, it didn't really exploit the dual power advantages of gender & seniority that harassers tend to have over their victims.

I also asked him what the remarks consisted of, & it was nothing very explicit, and there was no touching, cornering, physical proximity or any kind of contact otherwise. So I explained that, as a guy who is 6'6" (really) and not being cornered or approached, he's not really in a position to compare himself to a diminutive women being groped in the copying room.

In other words I tried to encourage him to do a sort of guided version off the exercise that Caitlin Moran came up with. But the problem was that he just couldn't do it - he couldn't put himself in the shoes of a woman in his situation, let alone extend his imagination to a more realistic harassment scenario.

And when I say realistic, here's part of what I mean:

• A friend of mine came back from a conference with a senior client whom she'd been shepherding around town. He pushed his way into her hotel room (their rooms were on the same floor) and started kissing & groping her
• A senior co-worker in a job I was doing as a temp once grabbed my arm in a "friendly" fashion and pulled me down to sit by him in the kitchen. Once I was at his eye level, he lunged at me & kissed me on the lips
• A respected academic at a conference once sat down next to a friend of mine at breakfast & started stroking the inside of her bare arm (ETA: He was in his 60s, she was 20 years old)
• I had a professor at university who, whenever I came to see him in his office, would lock the door behind me and proceed to try and kiss/touch me

This is what people like Lib Dem Lords chief whip Lord Newby mean when they talk about "mild sexual harassment". It's not persistent, it's not violent, you don't end up losing your job, they don't stalk you or expose themselves to you. It's not quite Anita Hill territory - it's just the everyday kind of one-off stuff that's "pretty common", as he says.

It's not that I think Lord Newby or my former friend actually know what the hell they're talking about; clearly neither of them are even remotely aware what this "mild" sexual harassment consists of. It's that I think even if they did, it wouldn't make any difference, because they simply wouldn't be able to put themselves in womens' place & imagine just how gut wrenchingly terrifying & awful these sorts of "pretty common" incidents are. The problem isn't really that men don't know what sexual harassment really is, it's more that the power relations between men and women in the workplace are so spectacularly skewed, that they probably can't even imagine what it's like, with a map, a flash-light & a ball of string to guide them.

  

Heads I lose, tails he wins

 
I felt this Lindy West piece on "sexism fatigue" so, so hard today. Especially the bit where she talks about how doggone exhausting & demoralising it is to have to "prove" that sexism exists and is real over, and over, and over again:

 I am tired of being told to provide documentation of inequality in the comments sections of a website where a staff of smart women documents inequality as fast as our fingers can move. Like, you might as well write me a note on a banana peel demanding that I prove to you that bananas exist. I am tired of being asked to "cite sources" proving that sexism is real (that RAPE is real, even!), because there is no way to concisely cite decades and decades of rigorous academia. Allow me to point at the fucking library. We can't cite "everything," and our challengers know that. It's an insulting diversionary tactic, it's an attempt to drag us all backwards, and fuck it.

It's frustrating to the point of self-harm to have to sit there and seriously try to convince some man that the sky, no hear me out, seriously, I'm not making it up, it really is, just look at the evidence, blue.

I gave a talk last Friday, to a local group of philosophy enthusiasts in my town. The talk was titled "Are women human?", and the whole drive of it was to basically catalogue the litany of injustices and atrocities against women that mean that, in practice, we treat women as if they are less than full citizens, persons, and human beings. Not exactly earth shattering stuff for most of the audience, and even though it's very middle aged white guy heavy, the questions at the end were mostly thoughtful, my answers were accepted respectfully and we had a good and interesting dialogue.

But this one guy. This one guy started quoting statistics at me from a book he'd actually brought along, about how awful and hideous it is to be a man. And even though I was able to quote some counter-statistics at him (e.g.: yes, more men die in the workplace, but mostly in professions from which women are either barred or discouraged, and the research doesn't take the home as a workplace so women are just not counted), he simply wouldn't let it go until I said yes, men have it rough too, yes, you're right, patriarchy is bad for men as well, yes, OK, you got me, not all men are terrible human beings sitting on the top of the pile.

That was a mistake. I should have brazened it out & shut him down instead of trying to do the respectful thing and engage. Because once he knew he had me on the whole "rebut my evidence" ride, he came back for another go - this time with some evo-psych bullshit that I don't even properly remember. What I remember is this:

Being a fan of prehistorical studies and having some training in archaeology, I was easily able to bring examples that refuted his run-of-the-mill assumptions/misinterpretations from things like primate studies and ancient remains. I just said well, you know, we know that certain things in the past and in tribal societies don't really work how we maybe thought they did in the 50's, and we have some evidence to show that actually blah blah blah. It was a good, solid answer based on actual knowledge of the subject (as opposed to second hand quotes from pop sci blockbusters), and I thought I did well.

And then he went in for the killer blow. He said - get this - "but how do we know these things?".

Hang on a minute. We're talking about epistemology now? You want me to give you an impromptu systematic review of the literature, with reference & publication dates? So that you would believe me that I really did read the words of some real scientists who really know their shit? Chapter and verse?

He. Said. Yes.

So. When you, Mr Man, challenge my facts with counter-facts and assertions, you expect me to take that as a good faith inquiry and address your remarks at face value. But when I offer you some counter-examples, you're simply not obliged to take me at my word that I didn't just pull them out of the air?

You ask for evidence that the sky is blue, and when I point to the window you demand that I give you the exact wave frequency of the colour, and the technical specifications of the tools used to measure it, together with the resumes of the scientists and engineers involved?

Well fuck it.

If ever there was an in-your-face demonstration of the fact that "scepticism" of the claims made by feminists is mostly bad faith derailing tactics, that was it. Because when you meet these people on their ground, they simply shift the ground until they find some ground on which they can win. And given that men have a structural advantage over women on almost all ground, because duh, patriarchy, it's not even that difficult for them to do.

The crazy thing, though? Until I read that passage above from Lindy's post, I blamed myself. I didn't answer the question well. I let him get under my skin. I wasn't properly prepared for the inevitable nitpicking. That's how well this ruse of theirs work; that's how in thrall we still are to the idea that there is some true position of "objectivity" and "truth", and that men have privileged access to that position. So I'm very with Lindy at this point about just being tired. So tired, and discouraged, and basically just wanting to quit.
   
 

Empowered, but empowered to do what?

 
I don't know why I've been thinking about this today - maybe it's the Israeli elections and the fact that I had an opportunity to use my right to vote for the first time in over a decade (Israel doesn't have overseas voting) - but I've been thinking about the way feminists use the language of empowerment.

To empower someone is to give them power. So to empower the public via suffrage, for example, is to literally give them the power to hire & fire their political leaders (let's ignore for the sake of argument the incessant meddling with this power that the elites have always brought to bear in order to protect for their own vested interests). to empower a student to take control of their education is to give them a real right to choose certain subjects & drop others.

In other words, empowerment is dependent on action: once someone has been empowered they then exercise their new power to effect some kind of change in the world that would benefit them.

in the context of feminism though, we talk about empowerment of a very different kind. the most common way of coming across the discourse of empowerment is in discussions of sexualisation. To take control of the presentation of one's sexual display is, on this view, empowering. So make-up, sexualised clothing, sexy poses in photographs, glamour modelling, stripping and so on are defended as feminist acts in the language of empowerment more often than in any other form of discourse.

But the question has to then be asked, empowered to do what? I can understand (and have myself experienced) the rush of power that comes from feeling all male eyes on you & being able to inspire sexual desire at will. But then what? Once you get off that stage, or take off those clothes or whatever, there is no power that you take away with you that you can sue to effect real change in the world.

so we have this strange situation in which it is feminist to feel a temporary rush of power, and it is seen as anti-sex and anti-woman to think that this rush of power is a form of self-objectification that really panders to the male gaze and to patriarchal views of women as sexual playthings.

I think it's very important to protect omen's choices; and if they choose to dress a certain way or work in certain professions then we should make sure that they are safe and have all the same human rights & protections as all other workers & employees. So this is not some call for banning make-up and closing all strip clubs. But I think we do need to acknowledge that performing to the expectations of the male gaze doesn't do anything for the advancement of women as a class or to the advancement of the specific women who practice it.

I also just want to quickly touch on the issue of women who say the wear make-up or heels etc. "for themselves" and not because of social expectations and male approval. To gage whether this is really the case, ask yourself: do you still do it when you are alone at home? And, do you perform femininity in a way that is culturally specific to your culture? So to give a hypothetical, a woman like myself (white, living in the West) doing the housework in a sari is performing (a particular kind of) femininity "for herself". A woman who "puts her face on" to look like the culturally dominant idea of an attractive & professional UK woman before going to work is not really doing it just for herself.

So in the same way that there is a sense of power too be had from playing with sexual presentation, there is also a genuine sense of fun and pleasure to be had from performing the standard rituals of femininity as defined in our cultures. but just as the one is not truly empowering (because it doesn't offer any residual ability to influence the world around us), so the other is not really a choice in the sense of freely engaging in creative self-presentation for artistic & aesthetic reasons divorced from patriarchal expectations and the male gaze.

Personally this leads me to reject make-up and other details of "proper" femininity, and it makes me reject the idea that there is anything empowering in conventional sexiness, pole dancing, corset wearing and so forth. I think this is a fairly reasonable conclusion and I hope Iv'e argued it out logically; it's not about being anti-sex or anti-fun, it's just about really engaging critically with the language we use to find the oppression that's sometimes hiding behind seemingly positive words like choice and empowerment.
 

Some thoughts on sex positivity* & purchasing consent

I've not really written on this topic before, because my views were not very strongly formed for one thing, but also because it's one of those incandescent intra-feminist controversies that I think should be given time to run out of fuel naturally. However the subject has been everywhere in the last couple of weeks (even Woman's Hour!), and that means that I've been thinking about it a lot and possibly coming up with new insights. Sorry of my ideas are actually old & hackneyed; blame it on parallel intellectual evolution.

Given the framing of the debate around the professional choices some women make to engage in sex acts for money, it seems sensible to me to look at it from an economics point of view. In that context it seems to me that pro-sex work thinking is mostly quite neo-liberal or libertarian in its conceptions, emphasising the choices & freedoms of individual persons as having the key moral weight in the debate. It is therefore incompatible with feminism in its guise of a progressive, left movement, with at least some roots in radical, class based analysis.

First of all, I'd like to establish that saying that sex acts should not be exchanged for money is not by definition a puritanical or anti sex idea. There is a well established core of things that we see as exchangeable for money and things that we see as being in the realm of interpersonal relationships. The economist Dan Arieli gives the example of holiday dinner (topical!). If you were to turn around and offer your mother in law £20 at the end of the meal, instead of a big hug and maybe some help with the washing up, she and everyone else at the table would be scandalised. it is understood by all of us as a basic underpinning of a private life that certain things are exchangeable for money and others are not. This is called the difference between market norms and social norms, and in most cases it is quite uncontroversial.

A lot of the new sex work thinking seems to me to blur the distinction specifically when it comes to the ability to consent to sexual contact. What it seeks to do is square the monetary circle: claim that doing something for money is equivalent or even identical to doing it out of a social/emotional impulse. So me bringing you a cup of tea because I'm your friend is no different to me serving you a cup of tea because I'm a waitress, to use one Twitter example. Essentially it seeks to monetise consent.

I find this an alarming and reactionary development. Far from being in any true sense sex positive, it seems to me to be yanking consent out of the realm of social norms into the world of market norms. Market norms operate very differently and we need to be very very careful how we approach them. Yes, sex was always purchasable for money: but consent was not.

The feminist analysis of prostitution has always been that people who perform sex acts fr money are in some way coerced: by poverty, by force, by enslavement and so on. It did not, therefore, involve meaningful consent. The moralising view on the other hand was that prostitutes are somehow inherently immoral - it was seen as a moral failure, as sin and a mark against the person's character rather than a result of economic choices (often rational ones unconstrained by anything other than financial considerations, it should be added). In other words, the patriarchal conception of prostitution was that people who engage in it do so out of pleasure, and therefore their consent is meaningful (i.e. we don't need to worry that they are being essentially raped).

But sex work campaigners often tell it the other way around: sex workers on their view are liberated people making authentic choices, whereas as feminists who object to the sex trade are moralising patriarchalists attempting to coerce women out of their natural inclinations.

By implying that sex work can and does involve true consent however, the sex positive thinkers are potentially undermining the enthusiastic consent model and feeding into the transactional view of sex: the traditional one where sex is something men "get from" women in exchange for the things women are truly interested in - marriage, children, or in this case cash. I struggle to see this as truly progressive, and I don't think it's helpful at all to insist that this is somehow the true feminism and if you don't agree your feminist analysis is useless.

To sum up, the problem here is not that sex workers exist; the problem is  that there is a move to blur the distinction between market norms and social norms by moving consent (not just the performance of the sex act, but the subjective state of consent) into the column of things that can be bought, and therefore sold. I think that's a dangerous direction to go in.

*ETA: I've changed the title of the article to properly reflect the fact that it is not sex work per se that I am querying here, but the attitude that posits that it is in principle unproblematic, which is part of a wider set of "sex positive" approaches.

Just those reported women, being alleged all over the place

  
Some people are kind of gross, you know? It's not nice to say it, but they just are. You look at them and you imagine that they probably have bad breath, or that their BO has that particular sour note that takes it from unpleasant to bile inducing. You want to look away from them and not look back. Jimmy Saville was one of those people for me. I've never seen him on TV when he was at the height of his fame, so when I finally did see clips of him, openly molesting young women on Top of the Pops (I think it was some Channel 4 nostalgia clip show), I was horrified - who is this ugly, greasy person, and why is everybody laughing like it's all just hunky dory?

Julian Assange is somebody else that I've always felt ooky about. I remember when I first ever saw him, it was a TED interview and he took his jacket off, and I swear to Dog my first instinct was to think his pits probably smell under that unwashed-looking white shirt.

So it's not my favourite ever activity to examine Julian Assange and his actions in any level of depth. I sure as hell am not tempted to read nay more lickspittle interviews with him in the Grauniad, anyway.

Still, sometimes, as in the case of cholera research and entomology, it is what disgusts us the most that contains the vital clues we need about the world and how it works. Observe:

Isn't that linguistic genius? Reported. I mean, it's true, it was widely reported that Malala Yousafzai had been shot. In the head. Aged 14. Does it really even matter that she go that treatment because she's campaigning for women's rights? Anyone shooting a 14 year old child IN THE HEAD is news. It's gonna get 'reported'.

So you know, technically, it's not like Julian Assange (who is reported to be in sole possession of the @wikileaks Twitter account these days) is lying or anything. She was reportedly shot. He is an alleged rapist. It's all fair enough, pretty much.

But it's not really fair enough, is it. See how this kind of language works asymmetrically? How it minimises the crime committed against Malala, while providing potential cover for the faeces slinging animals terrified by the idea she and girls like her may see a horizon beyond the rancid cage being prepared for them? So pants-wettingly terrified of a little girl they need to annihilate her in order to shore up their brittle manhoods?

In Assange's case, the legalistic hedge has given him just enough of a sliver of deniability to go hole up in the Ecuador embassy. And his addlepated supporters, enough of an excuse to squeal the internet down with protests that he has not been convicted of any crime and therefore it's defamation in libel sauce to say he should go on trial for rape (which is a crime, of which he might be convicted). 

In Malala's case, it means that she might have just imagined the hole in her head. I mean, it might not have really happened, yeah? It was only reported, after all. You don't believe everything you read in the papers, do you? What are you, sheeple? Stooge.

Meanwhile on the unimaginably hideous crimes that would keep you awake at night if you thought about them too much, we have this:

Women are reporting sexual abuse by Jimmy Saville literally in their hundreds. Women who were never listened to before, because their evidence - the reporting of a crime by the victim of that crime - was not seen as enough of a reason to maybe shuffle over and have a butchers. It was just the women, you know? I mean, we don't just believe people who say their car was stolen, do we? Oh, we do? Well, but these were only reported rapes, gropings, assaults, fingerings and grabbings. By, you know. Just the women.

Both Julian Assange and Jimmy Saville are disgusting human beings. Literally, as in they put me off my dinner. Clearly Assange can only aspire to the level of monstrosity Saville achieved, though there but for the grace of two brave Swedish women go we, and who knows how many others there have been. Wilful sex criminals rarely confine themselves to just the occasional tipple. It tends to be a full time habit. And how do they get away with it? Because nobody believes "reports" from "just the women". Shutting down justice for women is as easy as using the smarmy language of "alleged" and "reported". Was then, is now.

Anyway, listen. If you want cool, level headed analysis about this stuff, go read Sian. I'm too busy swallowing down the acid in my throat at the thought that someone could be so squelchingly slimy as to try to win an online popularity contest over a little girl with a hole in the head, just because he realy really wants to. All I'm saying is: reported. Useful word, eh?
 

Sarah Catt, the expectation that all women want to be mothers, and the complicated reasons why they don't

  

I had a conversation recently with a representative from an organisation that helps women obtain access to contraception and abortion. We were talking because I volunteered to be a contact for the media, in case they were looking for women to tell their stories of abortion and unwanted pregnancy. Having women prepared to go onthe record about their abortion will hopefully help break the conspiracy of silence around the subject and dispel the mistaken idea that abortion is something secret, shameful and wrong.

We went through some stock questions, and it was a pleasant chat, but one question gave me pause. It was, and I'm paraphrasing from memory, along the lines of: "why did you feel that you wanted to have an abortion at that time? Was it for financial reasons, because you were young or in college etc.?". I was kind of dumbfounded to be honest. I had my abortion getting on for 20 years ago in a different country; at the time, I had never seen a poster of a dismembered foetus or heard the term "pro life lobby". Having an abortion when you were faced with an unplanned pregnancy was just what you did.

It would have been the opposite choice - not terminating the pregnancy - that would have caused questions. Are you old enough to be a mother? Can you support the child financially? How will you finish college with a baby? What about the man, what if he doesn't want to have a child right now - will your child grow up not knowing its father? And anyway, is it right to bring a person into the world based on nothing but a preventable and unwelcome accident?

It seems to me now that, somehow, over the years we've lost this common sense attitude to having children. These days, women are presumed to always be, by default, in the state of actively wanting to be mothers. So when they are faced with the possibility of motherhood unexpectedly, we want to know what reason they can give for not acting on this presumed readiness. And we limit what we want to think of as legitimate reasons: I was poor, I was young, I was at university, I had no support. "I didn't wake up that morning wanting to be a mother" is not on the list.

Nobody ever asks a man why he didn't make a particular important life decision at a given time. Men are presumed to have true agency, in the sense that when their personal lives bifurcate, either choice they make is deemed legitimate. I've never heard anyone ask a man "so why didn't you propose to her at that time" or "how come you didn't chose to take care of your children when they were small". Got married? Fine. Didn't? Also fine. Changed nappies? Wonderful. Refused to? Oh well, you were the working parent. Either way, men are generally trusted by popular discourse to have had good reasons for their life choices, whereas women's choices are either constantly questioned (as in the "mommy wars" debate) or actively circumscribed (as in th case of reproductive freedom).

It is part of the condition of an oppressed class that what the dominant group takes for granted the oppressed group has to beg for & make arguments for. So in and of itself this insight that women are seen as always being in the "on" position when it comes to becoming mothers is not surprising as such. But it is extremely disturbing, because it a) treats women as no better than cattle in terms of how much moral agency they can exercise over the decision to reproduce and b) utterly elides the dangers, complexities and implications of pregnancy and motherhood.

Which bring me to Sarah Catt. Last Monday Catt was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment for "attempting to procure an abortion". She admitted to taking drugs she bought online in the 39th week of pregnancy and giving birth to a stillborn baby shortly afterwards. The body has not yet been recovered. Catt already has three children: two with her current partner and one who she'd given up for adoption when young. She has also had one abortion that we know of. This latest pregnancy she kept a secret from her partner throughout (how is another matter). She had also sought to abort this pregnancy but approached the service after the 24 week cut-off point and was refused the procedure.

If anything emerges from this quick reproductive biography is that this is a woman who is ambivalent about pregnancy and birth. Clearly, to undertake such a desperate measure - essentially giving birth to a dead foetus alone and in secret - she must have been in some psychological distress. It was also submitted to the court that in the case of the child she ended up giving for adoption, she had originally wanted an abortion but was "persuaded" to go through to term. Another complicating factor was that the pregnancy she was convicted of terminating unlawfully was the product of an affair that she was keeping hidden from her partner. Such a level of secrecy in a relationship is a red flag for abuse, but this was not in any way mentioned in the judge's sentencing note.

There's been a lot written over the last few days about Sarah Catt and abortion provision, or the pro-choice position in general; but I think the most insightful commenters were those who saw that in fact there is no relationship between the two. Catt sought an abortion and was turned away as per the law. End of. 

What came next though gets right to the heart of this implicit, silent-but-deadly social presumption that motherhood is the default state for all women. Here was a woman who really, really didn’t want to be pregnant - but there was no recourse for her, no service that she knew to approach that would help her to deal with the inevitability of labour. It's just not something we think about; if a woman is so unnatural as to want to abort a pregnancy, well then she can do so (provided she repeats the right cant and gives a legitimate excuse) up until 24 weeks in. After that, unless there's something physically wrong? Tough cookies.

It's worth remembering that Catt was not convicted under any clause of the 1967 Abortion Act, but under a 1861 (!) statute that is still on the law books and which specifically criminalises women attempting to procure an abortion themselves, without the help & approval of a doctor. That law has no time limit, so even though the judge explicitly handed down a harsher sentence because of how close to term Catt was when she committed the offence, in fact it's not really got anything to do with it - she'd have been breaking the law by inducing her own abortion after 3 weeks as much as after 39.

The '67 Act did not decriminalise women seeking abortion; it decriminalised doctors performing them (under certain limiting conditions and of course not including Northern Ireland). There is in fact no law in Britain that explicitly grants a woman autonomy over her own reproductive capacity. It can be startling to be faced with the tenuous nature of the so called "legalisation" of abortion, and to realise just how fragile and limited our freedom as women is to control our own bodies.

Now, British law is a bit notorious for being a spaghetti bowl of precedents, fudges, obsolete legislation and obscure clauses. For example, did you know that there is another law - from 1929 this time - that Catt could have been charged under? But in the case of abortion, we need a brave legislative initiative to consolidate and modernise the existing legislation, strike off irrelevant and ambiguous laws, and provide British women with a clear and firm basis for legally protecting and upholding our rights over our own bodies and reproductive organs. The unfortunate case of Sarah Catt case is a stark and tragic reminder of that fact - not a cheap pretext to demonise abortion.

There is a demonstration outside Parliament on September 29th to demand reform to the abortion law, organised by Abortion Rights, the national pro-choice campaign for the UK

  

It's only Monday, and already it's a banner week for rape denial

Well well. An elected politician in the US provided a helpful distinction between "legitimate" rape, by which presumably he meant "rape in which it is legitimate for the victim to feel aggrieved", and, erm, the other kind. Because it's important to make sure we have the right language to use when women lie about being raped, because even though they have been raped, they haven't been legitimately (or forcibly, or honestly, or rape-raped) and are therefore lying sluts out to victimise innocent men[1].

Not to be outdone by the American misogyny circus, British elected politician (and first rate clown[2]) George Galloway, as well everyone's favourite nerdy Python Terry Jones, helpfully lined up to explain to the misguided masses that having unprotected sex is a crime in Sweden, which is why WikiLeaks is innocent. Or something.

It's like there are all these people (oh, ok, men) out there who are expending a serious amount of effort on making up scenarios in which holding a woman down and putting your penis in her vagina while she is asking you not to is not rape. Nuh-uh. Summing else, not rape, nope. No rape here. I mean, really, you'd almost think they felt it was really important to make that point, no? Almost as if, I dunno, maybe for thousands of years men could force sex on women with impunity, and the idea that maybe sometimes that's actually not OK anymore is really unpleasant to these guys?

Let's get this straighty-up straight, honeycups: when Julian Assange makes a 10 minute speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy without once mentioning the immediate cause of his being holed up there in the first place, he's not just being forgetful: he is executing a deliberate rhetorical manoeuvre designed to allow him to get away with raping two women[3].

And when other men perform seemingly ridiculous mental acrobatics in order to imply that some if not all rape charges are not actually, really, honestly, legitimately rape-rape, what does Occam's Razor dictate that we assume?

That's right. That thy are exercising rhetorical manoevers in order to be able to claim that men who raped women should get away with it.

They are protecting their right to get away with it.

People get all hot under the collar when you spell it out to them like that; or they good naturedly try to come up with less gobsmackingly awful reasons, as in the case of saying that it's really all about abortion (I'm not sure that treating women like cattle for the sake of sexual power in order to justify treating them like cattle for the sake of farming unwanted babies is much of an improvement, but it provides some comfort in the form of an intellectual remove from immediate ugliness).

I don't mean that Ron Paul and Ken Clarke (much less Whoopi Goldberg) have raped women. I just think they are really, really attached to the theoretical possibility of being able to. Partly this is because  people are taught so little about the joys of consensual sex that it's easy to fear, deep down, that there's just the tiny possibility that you might have raped someone at some point, and that thought makes people defensive. Partly it's because rape culture is the dominant paradigm and everyone gets antsy when the dominant paradigm is under threat. Partly because they're woman hating shit sacks of inhuman loathing and callous cruelty.

At the end of the day, who knows. But let's not fool ourselves about what it is that people say when they say "X is not really rape". They are also saying "Y is not really a rapist". As well as "Z is a lying bitch". These three things are logically necessary corollaries of each other, and they have played out with textbook accuracy in the media discourse about both the Assange & the Strauss-Kahn cases. So please, can we all just stop pretending that the whole rigmarole is about anything other than men defending their age old right to stick their schlongs into women at will?

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[1] I mean rapists. No, I mean men... Oh I don't know anymore - whichever one I use on Twitter, I get accused (by, erm, men) of being a terrible mean meanie.

[2] Oh dear, did I say that out loud?

[3] Not "allegedly raping" - because his lawyer has admitted all the charges on his behalf in a British court, so we know the facts. And said British court has ruled decisively that these actions constitute rape under British law. Legal culpability in a Swedish court with Swedish standards of evidence is all that remains in question, making Assange's need to elide the fact that he's a rapist from his refusal to travel to Sweden all the more urgent.

Brazil Week One - Settling In

  
To those not in the know, I'm spending the summer in Salvador, Bahia state, Brazil, volunteering in community projects through an organisation called Cross Cultural Solutions. I've been here since July 7th and have been writing weekly bulletins for my sponsors who donated money to help me make this possible. I reckon they won't mind so much if I post the bulletins here with an appropriate delay, for my other friends to read... This was my very fist effort:


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Mostly this week has been about settling in; to the house, my 2 volunteer placements, the city... Building those early relationships, making all important first impressions and receiving them myself.

The volunteers all live in one big house, mostly in shared rooms with bunk beds. I'm very lucky in that, because the house isn't full, I've got a room all to myself, with my own bathroom to boot. I was really dreading not having my own space, and it's great that my fears were unfounded. I've attached a photo with my improvised laundry line. :)

I have two different placements that I volunteer at: Monday, Wednesday and Friday I teach English to a small group of students ranging in age from 6 to 72, in the tiny back room of church in one of the poorest slums in the city. On Tuesday and Thursday I help out at a Mother Teresa mission in a different (but pretty much just as poor) part of town. 

The areas where I spend my mornings look pretty much like a set from the movie City of God - ramshackle self-built houses, a chaos of wires and pipes, stray dogs, piles of garbage. It couldn't be more different than the neighbourhood where we live, which is relatively affluent and practically indistinguishable from a middle class residential area in any Mediterranean city. But life in the so called "slum" isn't as alien or different as that might imply. 

Yes, there are homeless people and drunks and whatever, and I'm sure it's dangerous, but somehow it's still just a bunch of people going to work, running businesses, enjoying a cup of coffee. I think there's a tendency to exoticise "The Poor", but to me they mostly seem like normal people with crap housing. Then again, what do I know? I've been here a week.