The graduate without a future: British creativity has not gone quiet, its just struggling to be heard

An artist who I think is really really good 

Here's a new piece I wrote for a Guardian Comment is free series, (ironically?) named "The graduate without a future": British creativity has not gone quiet, it's just struggling to be heard. 

If you fancy a brief meditation on the sheer wretchedness of humanity (or that represented below-the-line on Cif, at least), have a look at the comments. Suffice it to say that my choices of interesting young artists were, according to one delightful commentator, examples of:

"No skill, artless, derivative nonsense. Dishonest"

In any case, I totally rose above it by lying on my bed for much of the day feeling sorry for myself, resolving never to step outside the comfortable territory of gender related sarcasm ever again.

But then the next day I took part in a really fun live Q&A session with great and goods Paul Mason, Shiv Malik, Ed Howker and Oliver Laughland. You can find it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/graduate-without-future-q-and-a

The sex lives of others are our greatest fetish

Allegedly this man's guilty feet have got no rhythm

Rather belatedly, here is my blog at the New Statesman on George Michael, the public interest, and the salacious press creation of "sex scandals":

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/media/2012/05/sex-lives-others-are-our-greatest-fetish

Familes are not factories

I'm guest blogging at The F Word this December! This is the first post, published last week: http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/12/post_6

Good question. Tangentially relevant to this post.

My parents have been married for thirty years. I grew up in a semi-detached house in a suburb, one of three kids. The only surprise in the set-up is that we don’t have a picket fence. It was a Tory government’s wet dream of an upbringing. 

Somewhere along the line, though, something went wrong. The conveyer-belt churning out endless, identical replications of this ideal kinship model hit a snag, shuddered and stopped. It turned out one of the slightly-more-than-2.4 kids was queer and at least one of the others didn’t really give a damn about marriage. Our predicted stable, nuclear futures wobbled as reality, in all its glorious diversity, failed to conform to ideology.  

Thank god, then, for the government, who have announced the return, albeit in diluted form, of Thatcher’s Clause 28. Children in free schools or academies will in future be receiving heterosexist brainwashing instead of Sex and Relationships Education. Perhaps they can halt the cultural decline in straight people buying into holy matrimony by literally legislating for its ideological imposition? 

How obnoxiously weird that a practice designed to institutionalise the exchange of women-as-commodities should, in 2011, be being brought back as if it’s the only excellent kinship model. Over one third of marriages end in divorce, we know that only about 50% of people get married anyway - why do conservatives insist on touting the myth that marriage provides a stability that other forms of relationship don’t? Could they actually believe it, or is this a Dorries-esque way of grooming the next generation’s prejudices against the rights of those who threateningly queer the picture? 

Against all the evidence suggesting that other relationship models are also great, we are hugely invested in the ideal of marriage, in particular, in the importance of marriage to women. Popular, mildly-misogynist TV shows Don’t Tell the Bride and Four Weddings (both guilty pleasures, I admit) speak to this, camping up the ‘greatest-day-of-her-life’ aesthetic until it is too absurd to take seriously. Unless you’re Michael Gove, who presumably resolved to bring back Clause 28 during the Don’t Tell the Bride adverts. 

Given how much pro-marriage marketing we receive, perhaps it is not surprising that our common cultural conception is that it is vaguely ‘best for children’ if they grow up with married hetero-parents. The viciousness of anti-single-mother rhetoric, returning time again to narratives of blame and failure, only compounds this problem. The government spectacularly fails to consider the possible impact of such negative socialisation on children growing up in single-parent households. 

No matter. It is best for children to be brought up by married heterosexual couples , apparently, because two parents provide more stability than one. If an extra parent is so great, why wouldn’t it be better to have more than two? Why not four? Or ten? Why don’t we bring children up in communes, as envisaged by our feminist foremothers? 

I want to know why a marriage certificate makes a difference, if it is not just to get couples bogged down in financial commitments to each other so that they can’t separate. I’d like to know, moreover, how it could be better for children to grow up the company of two parents who would really rather have gone their separate ways, and why it is thought to be right that parents abnegate those - potentially eighteen - years of their lives ‘for the sake of the children’. I’d like to know why gender is presumed to make a difference to that equation, why God is genuinely believed to have given a shit about anybody’s chromosomes. 

Clause 28 is a case of cart-before-horse. There is nothing inherently better about nuclear families except the belief that they are better (coupled with tax breaks). If the children of hetero-marriages turn out to be better adjusted, whatever the hell that means, than those from other families, we need to look at the ways in which the former set of children are systematically culturally privileged and change the system accordingly. To conclude that therefore marriage is best and should be preached to kids is question-beggingly circular. It perpetuates the cycle, excluding those who can’t or won’t fit. 

I have seen at first hand that a heterosexual marriage can provide a stable upbringing in which children can grow. But I would contend that if there is anything about my orientation which would prevent me from bringing up kids in just as good a manner, it is the attitude of Gove and co, who, through Clause 28, will attempt to make sure that the society my children will grow up in will be even more full of hate than the society we have now. Thanks Gove, you utter wanker. 

Here is my opinion, deal with it: on real life silencing and internet abuse

Edited version of this post published at Liberal Conspiracy: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/11/04/how-womens-voices-are-silenced-online-through-trolling/



It's funny because it's, like, true

It's difficult for women to speak in public, particularly political women. Today Helen Hasteley-Lewis blogged at the New Statesman about the torrential online abuse feminist writers get. This follows Cath Elliott's blog earlier this year on the shocking invective she personally regularly receives. At the moment, the internet is a society where being (perceived as) female and writing about feminism invariably leads to responses on the theme of: 'shut up or I will rape you/you're ugly and deserve to be raped/you're too ugly to be raped'. 

This is a form of silencing, an internalised gendered behavior which acts reflexively to suppress challenging opinions - particularly those vocalised by women. Abuse is more explicitly misogynist online, where trolls can hide behind anonymised usernames, but it isn't a phenomenon isolated to the internet. The watered-down version plays out offline all the time.

Show me a mixed gender group of any sort and I will show you a group where men speak more than women, where women are regularly interrupted, where something ignored when said by a woman will be praised when said by a man.* Debates about the merits of women-only spaces sometimes ignore the value, for women, of being in a group where they are not constantly struggling to be heard.

This is not to say that there aren't loud, opinionated, dominating women, or shy, retiring men, or that people biologically conform to a gender binary. It not to say that ALL WOMEN are one way and ALL MEN are another way. It's not to say that silencing doesn't happen along other axes of oppression, race and class being two of the rather pertinent ones. It is, however, to say that a meaningful gender analysis can be enacted on the ways that women's voices are publicly stifled. It is to say that the loud, opinionated, dominating women who want to write have to get past discriminations that loud, opinionated, dominating men don't. Online abuse is just the most blatant example of this.


How does silencing work? Partially, it works by ad feminam response. Suppose that Fictional-but-also-factual-John and I are having a discussion. I say that I think silencing is something that is usually directed against women by men in order to shut them up. John replies with, 'okay, but you don't have to be so angry about it all the time/you're cute when you're political!/did someone get out of bed on the wrong side this morning?/you don't have to make it about gender all the time/you're just saying that because you're a woman/ok...come here and kiss me/yeah but you're fat and ugly and therefore irrelevant', and so on. My opinion is sidestepped; irony abounds. Next time, it is harder to speak.


Silencing works by trivialisation of what women say, through mockery of what women say, through reducing-women-to-sexual-appearance. Subconsciously, we have internalised the idea that whatever it is, it is better if it comes from the mouth of a man than from a woman. It happens all the time. Ever seen a group of men sitting around making jokes as their female friends laugh appreciatively? I have, and I've also seen what often (but not always) happens when women try to join in. Anecdotal it may be, but at some point collections of women's experiences become overwhelming evidence. Women are being told online that they're sexually unattractive femi-nazis who deserve to be attacked, and being ignored/mocked/trivialised offline. After being silenced once, twice, a thousand times, I find it surprising that anybody has the labia to say anything at all. 

If you, of any gender, find yourself instinctively disregarding what a woman is saying, if you find yourself not listening, or wanting to interrupt, or looking at the clock, you are enacting a form of silencing. If find yourself thinking, 'what a cow/bitch/hag' when a woman is saying something in an outspoken fashion, you are taking part in the mentality of silencing. Take a step back, have a look at your own privilege, and then, please, stop doing it.

*For more on this, see Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender. 

The comedians that Mock the Week missed out

The twitter war against @mocktheweek has finally ended. It could most closely be described as akin to a battle in which cannonballs are fired at a person who, protected by an imaginary brick wall, simply denies that the cannonballs, the wall, gravity, or any form of Newtonian law exists.

The social media face of Mock the Week, known only as "@mocktheweek", refused, in the face of all reasonability, to accept that there is anything sexist about a panel show in which women comedians are a: rarely booked and b: hate appearing when they do get booked. I can't be bothered to explain, again, why it is very, very, very, very, very sexist, so I will simply recall here that the all-female episode of Whose Line is it Anyway was one of the funnier ones. Just saying. Four comics who were women did comedy on a stage and it was funny. Anyway, if you are confused about why Mock the Week is very, very, very, very, etc, sexist, go on twitter, search 'mocktheweek', and scroll down the exchanges. I'm not linking.

Anyway, and instead, let us feast our ears on a compendium of comedians who, if they were men, would probably be Mock the Week regulars/would by now have their own road-shows and a pile of free money gifted to them by the BBC:

1. Isy Suttie:



In exhibit A (above, literally just above) we see a comedian making funny jokes to a large audience of people who are laughing. That comedian happens to be a woman, and therefore either a: will not be booked to appear on Mock the Week, or b: will not appear on Mock the Week because it is a particularly nasty atmosphere for women comedians - see Jo Brand.

2. Sarah Kendall [Edit 22/1/12: transphobia warning at around 11.30 mins]



One of my favourite comedians who probably won't ever be on Mock the Week. Unlike Russell Howard, who gets to be a regular in virtue of having a real penis, probably. I hope Sarah Kendall does go on it, but if she is her jokes will probably get edited out in favour of some look-at-me-mummy-i'm-clever-now nonsense.

3. Shazia Mirza



Bit of an obvious choice, but also, why the hell doesn't she already have her own show?

4. Josie Long



Pretty well known and stuff. Pretty funny. Probably hasn't been on Mock the Week, and I hope she doesn't go on it. I have a suspicion her style would get lost in the celebratory cockfest. She's spot on with the bit about turning 'go on then, make me laugh' guests into 'I like drinking water out of sponges' guests.

5. Here, to finish, is a trailer from the Funny Women awards of 2010. What's that about female comedians just 'not existing'?




Other things to look at -

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/09/52-female-comedians_n_833214.html - because they have women comedians in America too.

What's that? Another women comedian talking about how Mock the Week is horrible? http://www.birminghammail.net/what-is-on-in-birmingham/birmingham-comedy/2009/12/11/comedy-shappi-khorsandi-takes-on-the-male-world-of-stand-up-97319-25366685/

Good stuff on the most recent sexism debate: http://minority-thought.com/culture/2011/09/twitter-diversity-audits-and-mock-the-week-why-the-bbc-is-failing-its-audience

Give abortion counselling responsibilities to Justin Bieber

*29/8/11: This entry has been edited to correct a mistake pointed out by 'Anonymous'*

Dear Nadine Dorries MP (and Frank Field MP, and the "up to 80%" of MPs who supposedly back you),

I am writing to commend you on your most recent attempt to obstruct women's access to abortion, specifically, the amendment on the health and social care bill stripping the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, Marie Stopes, and other abortion providers of the right to offer women abortion counselling.

The decision to force abortion providers to offer counselling with alternative, "independent" providers - defined as non-statutory bodies who do not offer abortions - shows a level of regard for women's mental health and bodily autonomy which is genuinely staggering.

I would also like to make some suggestions for some alternative, genuinely independent counselling providers. I know (though your tolerance towards the distinction between truth and pure fantasy may lead you to deny it!) that your intention is to gain enough influence over reproductive rights policy to give counselling permissions to fundamentalist Christian 'charities'. It's a shrewd decision. After all, why assault the right to abortion openly when you can sneak restrictions in around the edges! I certainly do not want to think that women considering abortions should be allowed to speak only with people who believe in reproductive rights - we don't want fickle little girls having their heads turned by abstract notions like 'choice' or 'you have a legal right to an abortion, if you want or need one'!

On the other hand, I wonder if it might not be the case that Life, etc, are not really independent enough to take proper responsibility for the lie-filled shaming service that you think should be offered to women? If those who know about abortions are to be stopped from advising or supporting women, it shouldn't be done by half measures. Instead, why not contract out abortion counselling to Dawn French in this video? (1.00 onwards)



As you can see, Dawn French's advice is just as accurate and helpful as the more conventional fundamentalist Christian options. This is a women's rights issue, after all. As someone who might, conceivably, one day be considering abortion, I want to know that my access to correct information is being chipped away at by the state's caring paternalism. Being offered counselling with Dawn French would do just the trick, don't you think? And she's so lovely about it! She could reel women in, get them to trust her, and then make them too scared to even consider abortions! (Silly, easily frightened women).

Alternatively, I recognise that in this particular video Dawn French argues for abortion (though I'm sure she could be persuaded to argue the exact opposite with very few changes needed - the sledgehammer idea could be used as a good anti-abortion scare tactic?). If you prefer, how about instead offering women abortion counselling with this bloke I met in a club yesterday? Or I hear that Justin Bieber is considering a move into the charity sector? You guys totally have all the same opinions.

Oh my god! Do you know who would be awesome as an anti-abortion counsellor? That baby elephant Dumbo from the Disney animation Dumbo ! I don't remember him speaking much but he's really cute and would definitely switch on the natural maternal instinct that every woman always has at all times. I mean, fictional characters, fictional non-information about abortion, things that actually exist, charities with abortion expertise, it's all quite similar really isn't it?

How about letting me advise women on abortion? I'll lay out the 'facts'. Like this. "Stupid little girl: you sluttily opened your legs in the first place, so now deal with the consequences. I don't care what happened to you or what your situation is. Abortion always causes cancer. Abortion makes you evil and bad. Abortion will send you to hell. Don't kill your unborn child. Look, it's probably crying 'mummy!' in the womb right now. Yeah, it's fully formed right now, after two weeks of pregnancy. Have the baby, then you're on your own. What do you think we are, some kind of nanny state?? What do you and your scavenging kid want now?! Welfare? Daycare? Jobs? Child benefits? That's not really the state's problem, soz!"


Please let me know what you think of my suggestions.

Yours, in eternal hope that you will retire from politics,

Ray Filar



In all seriousness, here is the link to email your MP with a real letter: http://www.abortionrights.org.uk/content/view/422/110/

And some news coverage: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/28/anti-abortion-lobby-reforms?CMP=twt_gu

A rape culture 101, for the unsure.

'Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or against assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.' - Andrea Dworkin

Word


I am pissed off, fucked off, at having to write this. This is about rape culture. It's about the ability of powerful and less powerful men to rape with impunity, whilst worldwide everybody looks on and says, 'ah yes, but it's "he said, she said"/it has to be innocent until proven guilty' or just *stereotypical rape apologism here*'.

I am sick and tired of having rape discussions that start from the premise, 'it is terrible for a man to be falsely accused of rape'. Yes. Of course it is terrible to be falsely accused. Can we stop pretending that we currently have a fair system which simply and rightfully attempts to make sure that innocent men aren't convicted?

More to the point, it is terrible to *be raped* And, putting this out there, MANY MORE PEOPLE ARE RAPED THAN ARE FALSELY ACCUSED OF RAPING. THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS MORE. Stop catering to the Daily Mail's victim-blaming mythologies. Can you, for once, put it into perspective??

Shall we talk about the ways in which rape victims are sometimes treated in court? Shall we talk about the victim-blaming preconceptions of jury members? Can we have a discussion about misogyny and how this might affect cases, for fuck's sake? Or do we have to keep acting as if that none of this other stuff happens, that the only thing at stake is deciding upon a legal principle: innocent until proven guilty?

I have lost count of the amount of conversations I have had about rape which have not been about how thousands of people get raped and don't bring convictions, but that instead centre around the tiny minority of cases where a false allegation is brought. Conversations about rape should not start with me having to reassure your fragile ego that in general, *women don't lie about rape*. Any woman (and I'm focusing on woman because men do not face the same kinds of prejudices) who makes a false rape accusation, and who has half a brain cell, knows what she is getting into. She will be disbelieved, mocked, denigrated, shamed and shamed and shamed. People will simply not believe her. People will sympathise with her rapist, not with her. There is nothing so stigmatising as being a rape survivor; except maybe talking about it.

If in conversation you find yourself defending those who are accused of rape on reflex, ask yourself why. Is it because you are scared that one day you may be falsely accused? If the latter, maybe you need to start thinking about what consent is. Are you having sex with people you aren't sure are consenting? The absence of a 'no' is not enough for consent. You need an enthusiastic yes, and if you aren't sure, ASK. It is highly unlikely that you will simply encounter a vindictive psychopath who puts herself through the hell of a legal rape claim just to get at you. It could happen, but equally, you could get struck by lightening.

Or do you sympathise with the accused because you think that in most cases of rape, it is one person's word against another and the most important thing at stake is innocent until proven guilty? (Aside from the rant about to follow, please see Zoe Williams' point here, that as a false allegation of rape is also a crime, the only reasonable presumption is that you don't know .)

What is rape culture?

Rape culture is one in which the default position in a rape case is not just innocent until proven guilty, but I'm sure that *something happened* but it was probably consensual and she just changed her mind or she was probably drunk and regretted it or she was wearing a short skirt and asked for it or she had some reason to blackmail him or she was walking alone at night and shouldn't have been or she's a bit emotionally unstable anyway or she's a sex worker or she got into his bed or they've had sex before or she isn't credible anyway, look, one time she took drugs, or she's into group sex so how can we tell or she's a member of the BDSM community and that's what happens if you get into that kind of situation or she's a slut anyway or he seems like a nice guy, why would he do something like that, or she has lied before in her life or it wasn't that violent so it can't have been that bad. ETC ETC ETC.

Rape culture is where only 6.5% of reported rape cases lead to conviction. (Thanks, The Guardian, for reconfirming that fact here)

Rape culture is where women and men feel too afraid to go to the police when they have been raped or sexually assaulted. They know there is every likelihood that police treatment will be belittling, denigrating and unsupportive. They know that their word will immediately be put on trial. Rape crisis centres and refuges, at least, often *believe what the survivor is saying* - oh, except most of their funding has been cut.

Rape culture is where being a crime victim leads to your credibility being destroyed in any way possible. You'd better have a 100000% perfect memory of the rape, the events before and the events after - if you mix up the details at any stage of the million recountings you'll have to do, you're clearly lying. In fact, you'd better have lived a saintly life, because if you've ever done anything wrong, you're legally unrapeable.

Rape culture is where the media can spread a lie about the survivor across the world in the pursuit of destroying her credibility. See Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Rape culture is when every major news outlet tells this story: 'charges expected to be dropped', 'prosecutor says charges will be dropped, and accused may rejoin presidential race in spite of other rape allegations', 'prosecution says witness unreliable'... can you see a pattern here? I can, it's one in which powerful white men are allowed to rape powerless women of colour.

Rape culture is where sex, in general, is seen as dirty and bad and only to be done in hetero-monogamous marriage. It's where women are shamed for having sex, or for not having sex. It's where men are taught to aggressively pursue potential sexual partners; to see sex as something to be acquired from the initially resistant (dehumanised) target. It's where sex education doesn't really happen. It's where we don't know, or don't care, that yes means yes and no means no.

Rape culture is where media coverage of rape fixates on, amplifies, hypes, endlessly reports on the small percentage of women who (a law enforcement body has decided) made a false allegation.

Rape culture is where rape coverage relays every grisly detail of an attack.

Rape culture is where falsely retracting a rape allegation can land you in jail. (Supposedly Keir Starmer has now put a stop to this)

Rape culture is when women are invariably represented as devoid of subjectivity, sexually submissive, and acquiescent to forceful sexual overtures.

Rape culture is the fact that a husband could not legally rape his wife until 1991.

Rape culture is where copies of soft porn magazines are seen as appropriate reading material for juries waiting to be called into cases. Possibly rape cases. (I'm not making this up, Snaresbrook Crown Court has copies of FHM in the jury waiting area).

Rape culture is where rape is accepted as an inevitable part of male sexuality. Please see Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Rape culture is where the onus is put on women (men aren't ever seen as victims) to prevent their own rape. Ignoring the fact that preventing yourself from being raped is impossible, however you act. Ignoring the fact that not calling an illegal minicab doesn't reduce the risk of you being raped if your partner, friend or acquaintance decides to rape you.

Rape culture is where you can't withdraw consent after you've given it.

Rape culture is where fucking someone whilst they are asleep, who therefore *cannot* have given consent, is not seen as rape. Rape culture is where preventing someone from using protection is not seen as rape. Please see Julian Assange.

Rape culture is where you can't discuss rape without ending up, or beginning, in a discussion about false allegations.

This list could go on forever. Please feel free to add to it.


What can I do to oppose rape culture?

Make sure you know what rape is and then don't do it, look at these websites, challenge rape apologists. Also give all your money to Rape Crisis:

http://www.scarleteen.com/

http://www.object.org.uk/ (Caveat: I have heard a lot of criticism of OBJECT. They take an explicitly anti-porn and anti-sex work position. You may or may not agree with this, but what they say is nevertheless very much worth your time and thought.)

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/crime/call-end-violence-women-girls/government-stern-review?view=Binary

http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/

http://www.thehavens.co.uk/advice.php

http://www.aswaterspassingby.org/sexualabuse.html


I leave you with another quotation from Andrea Dworkin, who said some good, invariably misrepresented stuff:

We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way. That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

Let's not get derailed in discussing violence against women

Originally published at Liberal Conspiracy: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/06/24/lets-not-get-derailed-in-discussing-violence-against-women

It’s the same every time. A feminist politician or campaign group proposes a patently sensible idea, and the derailing begins.

The End Violence Against Women (EVAW) report is a comprehensive study on the massive prevalence of violence against women and girls, calling on Michael Gove to make a priority of educating against sexism in schools.

Great stuff. Simple common sense, even; unless you are generally in favour of violence against women. But developments like these are a starting horn for discussion derailers.

Here’s one we’ve heard before, ‘but men are victims of violence too!’ Another derailer chips in, ‘and what about female perpetrators of violence?’ We might even hear a bit of, ‘Why focus on women? Shouldn’t we just be educating children about violence generally?’

I recently saw a column by the Somalian women’s minister derailed in this way. It was outrageous, apparently, that a women’s minister should dare to write about the abominable problems specific to women in her country.

When the derailers get going, the debate takes a sudden turn to the right. Instead of discussing the part of the proposal which calls on Gove to develop schools in which girls are not subject to abuse, rape, sexual harassment, bullying or shaming, we are arguing about whether it is right to take gender-specific actions at all.

For the last time, YES, people of all genders perpetrate violence. YES, people of all genders are victims of violence. YES, there is domestic violence between same-sex partners. Now can we go back to EVAW’s proposals?

The derailers are univocally, universally missing the point. Education about violence against women cannot be simply subsumed under education about violence against people generally, and to suggest it should be deliberately ignores the scale of the problem of violence against women.

Consistent evidence demonstrates that it is disproportionately men who enact violence, and disproportionately women who are subject to it. If you want to contest this, go away and do some research.

So don’t get it twisted. The fact that other kinds of violence happen doesn’t negate the need for feminist education to combat the virulent combination of institutional misogyny, equation of masculinity with violence, and culture of sex negativity which makes sex a commodity that boys ‘get’ from girls, not something that all parties enter into consensually.

Violence against women is normalised and perpetuated when sexism goes unchallenged, but if young people are taught better across the board I’d be willing to stake my right arm, left leg and favourite hat that we will see cultural change.

No one denies that men and boys are also victims of violence. But do you know how it feels to be a woman, or a girl, where the sexual harassment, abuse and shaming starts at school and carries on into adulthood? If you don’t, talk to your girlfriend, female friends, mother, sister. They’ll put you on track.


More to look at:

http://www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/

Interview: Branded a liar by UK authorities, the Ugandan lesbian outed in a national newspaper.

Betty Tibakawa is an asylum seeker from Uganda who came to the UK fleeing homophobic persecution. Her asylum claim is currently being denied on the grounds that, whilst she has been tortured in Uganda, she is not credible. My interview with her is in Pink News: http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/06/09/interview-branded-a-liar-by-uk-authorities-the-ugandan-lesbian-outed-in-a-national-newspaper/

A direct link to the petition can be found here: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/stop-the-deportation-of-betty-tibakawa-home-office-ref.html

Just a taster from Red Pepper, the homophobic Ugandan tabloid which outed Betty Tibakawa

Where rape is concerned, talk isn't good enough.

I have a guest blog on The F Word. Hopefully it is not triggering, but it does concern rape and recent discussions of rape. If you'd like to read it, click here: http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/05/rape_in_the_media

What ludicrous distinctions, its obviously the same person. Oh, I didn't need to say that. This brilliant image makes the point all by itself.

A wolf in sheep's clothing (just a little rant)

"Peer pressure is a key contributor to early sexual activity in our country. Society is focused on sex. Teaching a child at the age of seven to apply a condom on a banana is almost saying: 'Now go and try this for yourself'. Girls are taught to have safe sex, but not how to say no to a boyfriend who insists on sexual relations."

- Nadine Dorries MP

Deceptions. Fictions. Dogmatic idiocy. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries is certainly a controversial figure. Tonight, Political Correctness Goes Mad takes an undercover* look into the sexual politics of the woman some call 'a psychotic, sexist lunatic' to find out - what the fuck is she thinking?

Hey, if we don't teach them about sex then maybe they will just never do it until they get married to nice vanilla heterosexual male-bodied people?

Last week Nadine Dorries MP managed to slime through a 'Ten Minute Rule Bill' on abstinence sex education. For girls only. I'm aware that there is not a hope in hell that this bill will become law, but still, the fact that it passed (67 to 61) is staggering.

Nadine Dorries MP's method is a little bit backhanded. She doesn't go directly for what she believes, having come to the rational conclusion that anybody with a brain cell will oppose the infliction of her prejudices onto wider society.

In this vein, the above quotation is strange. If not for the absurd and evidentially incorrect idea that teaching children how to put condoms on bananas will lead to an uncontrollable spate of young banana-rubbering hobbyists, one might even agree with it. Peer pressure does contribute to 'early', whatever this may mean, sexual activity. Girls are not taught how to say no to a boyfriend that insists.

Sure, we are taught that saying no is an option, but we aren't taught how to do it. We aren't taught how to say no when you're attracted to the other person and you want to fuck them but you don't have any means of getting protection. We aren't taught how to say no when you sort of want to, but you sort of don't want to, and you sort of think maybe another time might be better but you don't want to reject the other person completely and you don't want them to get angry. Dorries is also right insofar as we aren't taught to say no when the other person wants to and you totally don't. That's still a problem, and a serious one.

But we also aren't taught how to say yes, and this should be equally important. There are no lessons on saying yes when you want to have sex so badly and blood is pumping around your body and your cunt is a more pH neutral version of the Thames but you don't know how to convey to your (willing) partner that you also want to. Its difficult to know how to say yes when you're scared of being rejected, or called a slut, or that they might tell their friends at school.

Perhaps its different now, but in my day sex education focused solely on the conveniently erect penis going in the mysteriously self-lubricating vagina. ('When the penis goes in the vagina, the vagina becomes aroused and moistens') Really, sex education in 2001? What if your vagina prefers vagina, or what if you don't like penetration that much, or what if you need a bit more than that to get you off? Where in god's name is the discussion of the clitoris? What if you like to be tied down and spanked with a portrait of George Elliot whilst free jazz plays in the background? (this has nothing to do with my sex life, by the way)

Ok, so Nadine Dorries MP's conclusion from all these difficulties with navigating sexual exploration, is not that children need to be more comprehensively educated, but that we should attempt to stifle their burgeoning sexualities by TEACHING ABSTINENCE.

Sorry Nadine Dorries MP, but being taught to say no when you mean no, and yes when you mean yes, and how to do it differently when you need it to be done differently, has nothing to do with abstinence. Being taught abstinence suggests that sex is dirty, or wrong, or evil. This kind of 'education' has a counterproductive effect, heightening occurrences of rape, unwanted pregnancy, STD transmission, and generally unsatisfying sex because you haven't been taught how to do it at all, let alone how to do it well. This kind of ideology can't even really be described as education. It is the opposite to everything education should stand for: regressive, dogmatic, and ultimately, very very sexist.

That Dorries tries to wrap up her odious beliefs in slightly palatable seeming policy is all the more reason to oppose her. It is staggering that there are 67 people in Parliament who thought her ideas were reasonable rather than self-evidently GROTESQUE. We need to be constantly aware that these people still exist.


*Please note, by 'undercover' I mean that I'm writing this in bed. Now, back to practicing condom application on this bunch of phallic fruits.

Princess Kate’s reality TV wedding

Article originally published at The F Word: http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2011/04/princess_kate_royal_wedding

Leave me out of your utterly banal "happy national celebrations", kthx bye.

“It would be extremely unwise of anyone to try and spoil a happy day of national celebration.” - Boris Johnson, feminist icon

Once upon a time, in the far away land of Berkshire, a beautiful little girl called Catherine was born to the nouveau riche Middleton family. As she grew older, she would sit by a wishing well, singing daintily to the mysteriously sentient birds that clustered there. It is said that proletarian residents of the Middletons’ village would hear strains of ‘Someday my prince will come’ floating over the wall of the house where little Kate was confined. Very shortly after Kate began singing about wanting a prince to rescue her from her debilitating solitude, he appeared. Aside from a few minor dwarf-oriented subplots, they were soon conjoined in holiest matrimony and lived happily ever after.

Wait, now I come to think about it, that might be the basic plot of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. Nowadays, Disney heroines are very slightly less a misogynist’s wet dream, but you could be forgiven, after reading much of the media coverage of the forthcoming royal wedding, for thinking 1937 has come again (hopefully much like Snow White’s prince. And Snow White, obviously. I do hope that they both managed to come regularly during their happily married lives.)

Fictional characters’ orgasm frequencies aside, the media build up to the royal wedding has slowly but surely lubricated the royalists’ clunky marketing machine, as a result of which Kate Middleton, a rich and privileged but otherwise normal person, is re-branded as the central figure in an odd sort of fairy parable. Allusions to this archetypal story in which a peasant woman marries a prince and becomes a princess buttress the lurid media coverage. The objectionable assumption is that the archetype still has the power or relevance to transfix the nation’s imagination.

The sheer relentlessness with which attainment of princesshood is being presented as both desirable and admirable is frankly a little bit sickening. I’m under no illusions about the number of people who keep the radical feminist analysis of prince/princess mythologies that is Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating under their pillows (if you are one of these people please call me). But one doesn’t have to be a die-hard Dworkinite to recognise every story reporting on some irrelevant minutiae of the wedding’s organisation, and every scare about ‘anarchists’ targeting the national celebrations, as more grist to the mill of the whole gender-role-pushing, vulgar, money-spinning bandwagon.

Imagine strong, handsome, ruddy-cheeked Prince William giving up his job as a helicopter pilot to marry a prince (or a princess of the kind that is actually heir to a modicum of state power, even as figurehead)

On many accounts, Kate has given up her previous career, at least for the build up to the wedding, in preparation for the onset of princessness. It would be unfair to simply blame her for this. I can only imagine what kinds of pressures she may be under to conform to what is expected. But at the same time, I have not really seen any journalist challenge the seemingly foregone logic that marrying a prince primarily entails a full-time role as official princess.

The implication is that subsequent to the marriage, Kate’s career will be distinctly secondary, that really, her subsequent career will be ‘princess’. It is as if the title confers a difference in kind on its grateful acquirer, once merely mortal, now passively reified, admitted to the sacramental circles of the blue blooded.

As far as I can make out, the role of someone who is only a princess by virtue of marrying a prince is this: a prince’s wife, a mother to heirs, an attender of state functions, perhaps with some occasional token charity work. William will not give up his job as a helicopter pilot, nor is it suggested that he should.

Extrapolating from the favourable media reports that William asked Kate’s dad’s permission for her hand, we might be able to just about deduce that this is no modern, feminist marriage. As if Kate’s dad owns her hand, or any other part of her. A recent ‘big story’, that William will not wear a wedding ring, though Kate will, is further icing on the cake of their royally betrothed power dynamic. Unlike William, Kate will be defined merely in virtue of her marriage - something utterly antithetical to the great strides feminism is supposed to be making into the upper echelons of institutionalised sexist tradition.

Equal celebration and denigration of woman-only-as-wife are still rife in much, if not most of the national media. One needs only to contrast the considerable coverage allotted to, for example, male politicians and footballer’s female partners, with the relative obscurity of female politicians and footballers, to see this. Some writers seem to consider the right to free speech as a go-ahead for an insidious misogyny which threatens to force traditional gender roles down our throats until we stop muttering nonsense about women being human too, or whatever. The media’s wholehearted advocation of Kate Middleton as being successful, more successful than those other women who only do things like conflict resolution or working on a cure for cancer or sitting on the board of a company, is not just sexist and retrograde, but also slightly surreal.

At stake here, however, is not just the idea of woman as wife, but a specific instantiation of a riches-to-aristocracy princess mythology. Princess Kate is good, kind, beautiful, well-mannered and passive, like all fairytale princesses. What Catherine Middleton is actually like as a person is irrelevant to the story we are being sold.

The trick here is to imagine the gender roles the other way round. Imagine strong, handsome, ruddy-cheeked Prince William giving up his job as a helicopter pilot to marry a prince (or a princess of the kind that is actually heir to a modicum of state power, even as figurehead). Imagine that it is assumed he will spend much of his time henceforth raising heirs, being beautiful, going to parties and dressing well. Can you imagine this happening? I can’t. The maintenance of polarised binary gender is well and truly alive within the royal wedding’s national narrative. Kate might as well stock up on pink, glittery princess outfits from the Disney store right now, preferably from a range that does matching mother and daughter dresses (though perhaps she will hope for sons until such time as the UK sees fit to overturn male-preference primogeniture laws).

The promotion of stereotypical gender roles is blatant, but other, less conspicuous assumptions support the credulous, glowing media reports. One such assumption is that even though our society is ostensibly just about OK with homosexuality, unmarried cohabitation, non-monogamous couplings and so on - what we really should all still be aspiring to is Wills and Kate’s ideal, heterosexual marriage between young, attractive, rich white people in a church. This is marriage’s ultimate Platonic form, the reporters seem to be implying, this is what you should all aspire to. We understand that not everyone can marry their Prince Charming, but by god we should be trying to. If we can’t bring ourselves to completely renounce our wicked, sinful, fornication-outside-of-holy-matrimony ways, then we should at least pretend to be buying into the culture that supports the opposite.

Indeed, buying is the operative term. Feeding into the royal wedding’s unsubtly enforced premise of national celebration, is, of course, an unabashed assumption that we will consume as we are told. Look at how happy the nation is on this wonderful day! Buy this poorly designed tea towel! Here, have a mug as well! Not lucky enough to be invited to the special event? Oh well, cheer yourself up by pre-ordering an official commemorative coin! Even the kingdom’s peasants can take away some Wills & Kate merchandise.

Aside from being entirely revolting in itself, the furore around the royal wedding provides a current on which those with a vested interest in making money out of selling sexism can ride. One example are the odious Princess Prep classes, advertised with the tag-line ‘All little girls dream of becoming a princess’. This summer school is provided to girls (and only to girls) too young to have much developed their capacity for analytical engagement with the implications of the activities on which they are enrolled. I can’t help thinking that if the girls attending princess classes are not at the same time provided with the critical tools to make up their own minds about whether the stifling docility of the princess role is for them, it is a form of, at least… severely questionable teaching.

Even for those, both young and old, who escape such official indoctrination, the internalisation of such retrograde ideas about gender is tough to avoid in a cultural climate which is currently doing its very best to promote moral admiration of the heterosexist ‘Wills & Kate’ ideal.

This is a reality TV show wedding. It’s a little surprising that Modern-Day Princess™: Kate’s Big Day Approaches, “a fly-on-the-wall show following Kate Middleton as she prepares for the greatest day of her life”, hasn’t yet been made. The unremitting marketing, merchandising and the promotion of a sexist status quo that underpins it all is everything that might be associated with the crass value system of reality TV. The Guardian’s April Fools’ joke, that they would be running a 24-hour live blog of all the preparations from 1 to 29 April, was spot on. But I, for one, am not buying it.

The topless Miss Salley and 825 double standards

Page 3 of yesterday's Evening Standard was a pioneering exercise in journalistic integrity. It seems that topless pictures of an art teacher named Miss Salley had been spread among students at Harrow, a public boy's school. The coverage dwelled simultaneously on Miss Salley's distress at the sharing of the pictures among pupils, and her status as a former model and 'Miss Ireland'. In other words, first, Miss Salley is a woman for whom having topless pictures is just about understandable (as models do that kind of thing). Second, because she is sexy it is understandable that the boy that found the pictures passed them around to his friends, who passed them around to their friends, and so on (because young humans with penises naturally do that kind of thing). Third, because she was upset, she was slightly redeemed. Slightly.

Harrow School boys, possibly not the bullies in question









The articles in the Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, and (unsurprisingly) the Daily Hate could have been broken down in this manner:

1. LOOK AT THIS PICTURE OF A HOT SMOKING WOMAN!
2. Guess what happened, another teacher took some pictures of her with her tits out and all the boys saw! How shameful!
3. But it's ok, she isn't a slut, she's actually a model and they were artistic photos.
4. Also, boys at the school confirm that she is sexy. For example, one eloquently described her as a 'total babe'!
5. And don't worry, she repented. She was really upset and had to go home. Natural balance restored!
p.s. She used to go out with a rugby player!

The reasons why this story is abhorrent are almost too numerous to count. It is not just that we are supposed to look upon the schoolboy's behaviour as naughty yet permissible, it is that at the same time we are encouraged to find it all a bit titillating - reinforcing the idea (as if it needed reinforcing) that a woman's sexual shame is erotic, and that more, female sexuality is in itself shameful when not officially mediated by male permissions. In this story, the story of many women and girls, Miss Salley is the one shamed for sluttishly allowing a semi-naked representation to be taken of her, to be stolen by others. She redeems herself only by being attractive, and by being rightfully upset when others find out what she has done. Heaven help Miss Salley if she is ugly, or if she dares to not recognise her shame. This story has been told a million times and it is rarely, if ever, questioned, particularly not in the schools where it so often takes place.

I will always remember the multiple ways in which girls at my school were sexually bullied. On just one of the many occasions I could pick from, I remember hearing a conversation about the existence of a video of a girl fellating a boy in a toilet. Apparently whilst this was going on the boy's friends had taken the video over the wall of the toilet door. Just rumours about this video were enough to make me feel shocked at the temerity of the girl in question, and thoroughly embarrassed for her. What was she thinking, to give a boy head in a toilet?! How bad she must feel! What a slut! I would never do anything so base! The idea that if she should feel ashamed, the boy receiving head should also feel ashamed was never even mentioned. Nor, for that matter, was it seen to be at all embarassing or shameful to be hanging over a toilet stall door video-ing a couple having sex.

Lets take it as read that there is a massively gendered heterosexual double standard at play here, presenting the idea that it is in some way shameful to give head, but not shameful to receive it. Aside from this, it is highly strange that at no point in teenagers' lives does anybody usually sit them down and explain that this is wrong.

(Imagine you are sitting in a class full of thirteen year olds. Your teacher, a Miss Jean Brodie soundalike, stands up and says this): 'Contrary to everything else you will have probably have learned from films, television, books, parents, friends, and other aspects of our society, it is normal and ok for people to have sex. Women are not sluts for having sex, nor are they prudish for not having sex. Men are not studs for having sex, nor are they losers for not having sex. It is ok to have sex, or to not have sex. Anybody who uses the word 'slut' will henceforth be called to the Head's Office (ha) for a full explanation of their actions.'

In my feminist utopia, this lesson is read instead of morning prayers. Except, this doesn't happen, and instead sexual bullying happens time and time and time again. Obviously girls will take naked images of themselves to send to boyfriends, or friends, when the most prevalent, obvious outlet for burgeoning sexual desire is misogynist heterosexual porn, and when there is no education to suggest otherwise. Whilst young people are growing and developing their sexualities, there is little to nothing taught about gender equality, about sex being compatible with humanity, or about sex being positive and normal. Waving a condom around during one biology class is not sex education.

At what point do we begin to question where the blame really lies? Is it on the woman who experiences her sexuality in such a way as to create a naked image, or is it on a cultural attitude to the female body and to female sexuality which sexualises, commodifies and controls, whilst also blaming, shaming and denigrating? It is scandalous that the British education system is still too embarrassed, too naive, or too outright sexist to talk about sex and relationships to those who need to hear about it most. How long will it be seen as better for sexual bullying, rape, domestic violence and male-centric sex to prevail than for teachers to spend a bit of time teaching children what they don't learn elsewhere?

Here, to my mind, is how the story should have been reported:

1. Picture of public school boys.
2. Boys at Harrow public school were suspended today for attempting to bully a teacher, sexual shaming and property theft.
3. This kind of thing really shouldn't happen any more. How unfortunate. Why weren't those students educated better?
4. X, the photography teacher whose photos were stolen, is pressing charges.
5. We hope that prestigious Harrow school will recover from the shock of such behaviour, and implement better education to make sure it won't happen again.

Please keep our children safe from men's football commentators

The Daily Mail Mantra for Successful Article Writing

What an amazing day for news stories to boil the blood! The first occurrence was the deafening arrival of Melanie 'probably a lesbian' Phillips into my field of reference. In that bastion of enlightenment known as the Daily Mail, she wrote an opinion piece containing some unbelievable lunacy about 'The Gay Agenda' and its supposedly relentless drive to indoctrinate children. Here are some real, live, actual sentences from the article:

'...mad as this may seem, schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.'

and

'Alas, this gay curriculum is no laughing matter. Absurd as it sounds, this is but the latest attempt to brainwash children with propaganda under the camouflage of education. It is an abuse of childhood.'

and

'It seems that just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda.'

You read that correctly. Melanie Phillips actually, in nationally published print, described the possibility that children might one day be taught that same-sex oriented penguins exist, as 'an abuse of childhood'. Not just 'something I disagree with', but 'an abuse of childhood '. I think out of any subset of people that includes Melanie Phillips, somebody needs to acquire some perspective.

Anyway, if she's right about this unjustifiable incursion of tolerance and understanding into our national education, I for one would like to find the gay agenda and her sinful sexual partner (the 'belief in equal rights for all agenda'?) wherever they're currently living, and give them a good talking to. There'll be no dirty homos in my B&Bs or in my schools, that's for sure. Disgusting. We all know that homosexuality doesn't exist in Iran, so maybe we should take a leaf out of their book? On the other hand it was difficult to get too worked up about this (I thought, some time after I'd calmed down) given that it is just so, so, blatantly hateful that nobody can feasibly be taking it seriously.

But then a Tory MP from the esteemed Fathers 4 Justice school of gender analysis decided that teh menz are terribly oppressed, and called for 'men's equality'. His comments were made in light of recent news concerning the disproportionate and unfair number of successful women in politics, business, sport, all other companies, and the world. He also said something about how women now rule the world, officially, because now, all of a sudden, it is primarily men who suffer from domestic and sexual violence at the hands of women, and also women own like a thousand times more land and property than men, and women's affairs dominate the world political agenda, and 70% of the people who live in poverty in the world are men, and men are continually denigrated in all world cultures, and in many countries men aren't allowed out by themselves and have to cover up their faces in case they inflame the violent passions of libidinous women, and most words that represent negative qualities are masculine ones, and we tend to refer to all people as 'she', conveniently ignoring the relevance or importance of male existence. Then he went on to describe the way in which the main burden of childcare and domestic household responsibility still falls on men, and about how men still don't have much medical or legal control over their bodies or reproductive capacities. And apparently there are now massive problems with the manipulation of the male image in the media, leading to disproportionate numbers of young men developing anxieties about their bodies, leading to eating disorders and so on. And also this is only exacerbated by a multi-billion pound porn industry which is mostly comprised of male-submissive fetish material rewrapped as normal heteronormative sexuality. Oh wait, hold on...

Anyway, the Tory MP has been all over the papers saying something about men being oppressed and feminists being the worst kind of bigots, which sounds extremely reasonable and is definitely backed up by true facts.

Why do people in positions of relative privilege feel so threatened by the smallest advances in civil rights movements? It is surely hardly anything to Melanie Phillips if kids get taught about the existence of homosexual and transgender people in schools, and it is hard to see how it can be particularly threatening to well-moneyed Tories that the women's movement has made some legislative progress over the last thousand years.

It also wouldn't take much for anti-feminists of the masculinist ilk to actually read a bit of feminist theory and find out that all the issues they point to, fairly, as gender constraints on men, are all the same issues that feminists have previously pointed out as gender constraints on men. Nobody wants additional paternity leave and stretching of understandings of the male gender role more than feminists do, and given that this information is well-known and easily available, I can't help but think that the focus on straw-feminism masks nothing more than internalised contempt for feminist challenges to female gender roles.

This brings me, finally, to what was originally intended as the focus of this increasingly lengthy diatribe. The final story of the day concerned two men's football commentators, Andy Grey and Richard Keys, making abhorrently sexist comments about lineswoman Sian Massey. The video below doesn't quite detail the extent of the comments but it gives a representative indication of the flavour of the conversation.



The thing is that all of this isn't particularly unbelievable. Where I'm surprised that homophobes like Melanie Phillips still get a voice today, even in the Daily Mail, its not at all surprising that those involved so deeply in men's football are sexist. Well, duh? Professional men's sports in the UK, particularly football, are among the most overtly sexist fields that there are. Sexism is accepted as part of the culture of men's football. Whilst there are loads of men in women's football, with some very honourable exceptions aside, there are next to no women working successfully in men's football. Nobody currently bats an eyelid that the women's game hardly ever gets on TV and invariably isn't in the papers, even when the women's side are world champions.

This was really brought home to me the other day when speaking to a woman from Sweden, who told me that moving to England had been a massive shock for her, because she'd turned on the TV to catch up on the football, and found that women's games weren't covered. Think about it. There are approximately twenty million Sky TV channels exclusively dedicated to sports, but I'd estimate (with no particular backing evidence, are there any studies on this?) that time given to women's sports is less than 15%, with much of that given over to women's tennis and athletics. In almost every newspaper in England there is a section at the back misleadingly entitled 'Sport', which openly and unapologetically reports on only half the sports that take place. I see this as grossly obvious sexism, yet it seems to go unnoticed, or at least, unmentioned, by most people for most of the time.

This is important because men's football is one of the big, stereotypical drivers of male homosociality, a.k.a the way in which some men cluster around worship of masculinity in a bonding way that excludes female participation except at a secondary level. I fundamentally object to the idea that I should go to a pub and peruse a male sporting event; that I should use masculinity-appreciation as a tactic for bonding with my friends when I know damn well that the same thing would never happen for a women's game. More, in the appreciation of traits we associate with maleness, strength, skill, stamina, and so on, there is an implicit celebration of man as not-woman. It is this kind of attitude that keeps women's sports relegated to the sidelines (what?! women who can do these things too?!) and that preserves involvement in and appreciation of high-end men's football as a men's-mostly pursuit.

Some commenters from the political-correctness-gone-mad brigade (also known as the 'don't challenge our prejudices' club) apparently thought Andy Grey and Richard Keys' comments were, and I hesitate to use to word, 'banter'. I personally think that they should both be summarily executed, that men's football should be banned from television or newspapers, and that it should be illegal to show men's sports in public places. As ever, though, this is just my all-powerful gay feminazi bigot's agenda, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, so let's just sack the both of them, have more coverage of the women's game, and have done with it.

If 'doms, why not dams?

It's about twenty to four on a Sunday afternoon. Having spent an hour in Boots frantically but unsuccessfully searching for what I need, I am now in my local pharmacy. This pharmacy stocks literally every product under the sun and is open seven days a week till ten p.m. Do you have a minor skin ailment on the underside of your left knee-cap at certain times during the month? This pharmacy has a multitude of creams and lotions for it. Do you find that your child resolutely only speaks German whenever your second cousin comes round? The person behind the counter will prescribe you something, trust me. I'm taking my time, sidling around the shop, looking extremely casually through every shelf. Then I find what I'm looking for. The contraception section has, very cunningly, or so I think, been shelved next to the oral hygiene section. 'Aha!' I say to myself (silently)'. Someone here has a warped sense of humour, and has slid the dental dams in next to the condoms, but on the oral shelf. Brilliant.

But no such luck. Condoms and lube give way to dental floss and toothbrushes. Not a sneakily placed packet of dental dams in sight. After looking intently at hairbrushes for at least five minutes to placate the multitude of people in the shop judging me during my contraception contemplation, I finally pluck up the courage to talk to the lady behind the counter.

'Excuse me', I shout awkwardly, 'do you stock dental dams?' Unfortunately the operative 'dental dams' bit of the sentence comes out in a strangled whisper so I have to repeat it several times, like, 'what?', 'dental dams', 'what?', 'dental dams?', what??' DENTAL DAMS??!'. It's a bit like that scene in every sketch show where the protagonist of the sketch deliberately doesn't hear what someone is quite obviously saying in order to embarrass and frustrate them. The woman stares at me like I'm a bleeding idiot and gets another chemist out from behind the medicines section to deal with me.

So I have to ask again: 'do you stock any dental dams?'
'Dental floss?' he asks, pointing to the dental floss in case I am unclear on what it is.
'No, dental dams,' I reiterate.
'What is it for?' he asks me, and at this point the feminist conviction that I should be completely comfortable talking to anyone and everyone about sex and sexuality is starting to lose out in my mind against the instinct to run away and forget this ever happened.
Like an immature thirteen year old, I mutter, 'for contraception'. (Even though strictly speaking they are not contraceptive but prophylactic, I know. Maybe this is where I went wrong.)

'Contraceptive pill?' he asks.
'No, dental dam.'

Hey baby, I've got us a little something for later

Firstly, I'm not exaggerating this conversation. It genuinely took place without recourse to verbs or adjectives. Also, my simple request has now caused enough consternation that the chemist gets another chemist out from the medicines section, and together they start debating the merits of dental floss as contraception in a low whisper that somehow manages to highlight to me the flashing 'DOC MARTINS WEARING DYKE REQUESTS PERVERSE ORAL SEX PROTECTION MECHANISM' sign above my head. As if I hadn't noticed it the minute I started talking about dental dams in public. The chemists go back behind the counter and beckon me to follow them to a computer upon which they are presumably looking up what a dental dam is. They're looking at the computer and I'm on the other side. The kinds of websites that might be coming up are running through my mind and I'm trying desperately to keep a straight face as if this is completely routine and normal.

After about five minutes the first chemist looks up and says, 'dental...can you spell it?'

'D, E, N, T, A, L, you know, like dental, that well known thing that you stock many products for, D, A, M. Like a dam. D for dog, A for apple, M for Mother. For contraception.' An eternity seems to go by as the chemists stare at the screen. I can't tell whether I'm making it up but the one on the left seems to be trying not to laugh. I imagine them looking at pornographic pictures of straight-man's-lesbians using dental dams in various ways upon each other. I'm trying not to laugh/cry in sheer horror at a situation in which asking for what should be a pretty routine prophylactic turns into the equivalent of me walking into a shop full of people and shouting 'I AM A LESBIAN! SHOULD I GET INTO A SEXUAL SITUATION I WOULD LIKE TO PROTECT MYSELF AND OTHERS FROM ORALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES! PLEASE ENABLE ME TO DO THIS! OH BY THE WAY I AM A LESBIAN!'

Anyway in the end the first chemist looks up, and says in a faux-conspiratorial tone, 'I think I can get the thing you want. Call us tomorrow.' As if we're in a B-movie drugs heist. So I leave the shop with as much dignity and grace as I can muster. I'm not going back.

But the point of this piece is, apart from to detail both the acute embarrassment I felt in asking for dental dams and the unbelievable level of ignorance that my request was met with, actually surely it isn't just lesbians who need to use them? Presumably anybody who is buying condoms needs also to buy dams, or customize their condoms and then put them back in the little packets for future reference, in order to up the old safety levels? Why aren't people using them, and given that my internet research tells me that increasingly people are, why aren't they stocked in chemists? I'm pretty sure that this shouldn't be as fringe a thing as it seems to be, and despite the fact that covering your partner's genitalia with a latex rectangle is probably quite unsexy for most non-fetishists, the equally vile condoms seem to have caught on. So why not dams? Answers on a bit of plastic, please.

Fancy some anonymous outdoor sex? No, I'm a woman.

Its hardly the most earth-shatteringly important story running at the moment, but it was surprising to read about Stephen Fry's idiotic comments on the lacking nature of the female sex drive in a recent interview. This is apparently what he said:

In uncharacteristically extreme comments, the openly gay Twitter champion said he believed most straight men felt that "they disgust women" as they "find it difficult to believe that women are as interested in sex as they are".

"For good reason," he declares in a candid interview in the November issue of Attitude magazine. "If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas. Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: 'God, I've got to get my fucking rocks off', or they'd go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn't happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it."

Fry, 53, continues: "I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want," he said. "Of course, a lot of women will deny this and say, 'Oh no, but I love sex, I love it!' But do they go around having it the way that gay men do?"

"If you expect me to believe you really like sex you'd better do it my way"

Jarring ideas from someone so purportedly intelligent. Maybe some straight men do feel that way. And, as has been noted elsewhere, some women and men do probably use sex as a bartering tool. And some men and women don't. And some gay men don't go around 'having it' the way Fry seems to assume. But on top of this, what's surprising is the lack of analysis in the two superficial comment pieces I've seen countering Fry, here, and here.

One really important thing that both the above pieces are fundamentally missing is reference to patriarchal/kyriarchal* control of public space. Its simply this: the fact that there are no particularly well-known male-female or female-female cruising grounds has little to do with sexuality that isn't about the construction of female sexuality through control of space. This isn't an inherent thing whereby all men biologically control space and all women biologically don't, this is just another sign that we still live in a patriarchy, or overwhelmingly 'masculine' dominated culture.

Most public areas are run, still, as they always have been, along the lines of a traditional culture of masculine interest, and are kept this way not just through resistance to change, hostility to feminism, divisiveness between women, and so forth, but by an implicit threatened violence that physically and mentally keeps women (and men!) in their places.

To take an example of a public space central to our culture, how often are pubs colonised by men (and token women) doing stereotypically male things like watching men's teams play sport? Isn't it expected, at least during the 'World Cup' (not any world that interests me), that every pub will be taken over by the competition, and if you don't like it you can stay home by yourself, you spoilsport? Women do run events for women in pubs, but the overwhelming culture of the traditional public house is masculine, and more than that, macho.

I for one have never casually dropped into a pub screening something stereotypically 'female', whether a women's sports game or an episode of Sex and the City. I have also never been to a pub where groups of mostly women dominate the public space and marginalised tables of men sit as far away from the noise as possible. It just doesn't happen.

We might conclude from this that women don't like hanging out in pubs as much as men do, (as Fry would say, 'women will protest that they do like drinking in groups with their friends but if they do, why haven't they traditionally controlled society for all of time in order to create public houses specifically tailored so that they can do that in peace?'). Rather, if it can be said to be the case that women like pubs less than men, maybe its because men overwhelmingly control and run public houses in line with traditional male pursuits/traditional ideas about about what people should like to spend their time doing.

Of course the analogy with anonymous sex isn't direct, but the point stands. Just as some women go to pubs and enjoy men's sports with their male friends and just as sometimes one sees a group of women drunkenly shouting and laughing at a pub or bar, so it is that some women have and enjoy casual outdoor sex. At least, browsing the Craigslist personals section suggests that there are some straight women interested in anonymous sex with men.

But coming back to notions of male and female sexuality, think about what would happen if a group of lesbians tried to set up an outdoor cruising space? Well there are two subsidiary issues that fall underneath the pretty, I think, undeniable fact that space is patriarchal. The first, sexual violence, the second, fear of sexual violence.

On the first point, as soon as some unfortunate subsets of the male population got wind of any lesbian cruising area its quite probable that it wouldn't be left alone for long. I can only speak from my own experience here, but one of the only times I've had anonymous sex in a public area I looked up to see at least ten men standing around watching. Which soured the mood somewhat.

I'd like to think that the majority of men would be completely uninterested in any lesbian cruising area, but even if that is the case, sexual violence happens, and weighing up the attraction of anonymous casual sex with the possibility of being raped is a risk seemingly much greater for any woman than for a gay man.

Even if we believe now that the majority of rapes in the UK are carried out by perpetrators already known to the victim (see footnote four of the Stern Review), i.e. a boyfriend/girlfriend or friend, or acquaintance, it is still the case that violent stranger-rape is a cultural motif. We are taught that as soon as it gets dark, behind every bush lurks a rapist, and whilst obviously this kind of rape happens, fear of this kind of rape is one issue (though of course not the only issue) that - I'd speculate - prevents many women from ever experimenting with the kind of sex that Fry reckons all gay men have.

When spaces, both indoor and outdoor, are so often controlled by men, and where women are taught not to recognise or develop their own physical strength and bodily autonomy, and where the fear of rape is something so internalised - is it any wonder that women aren't all out having anonymous sex on Hampstead Heath? Its not for no reason that female reclamation of space, such as Reclaim the Night, generates so much controversy and feels so radical and groundbreaking. It is radical and groundbreaking.


*From this point on I'll say 'patriarchal' or 'male' rather than kyriarchal, because I'm particularly focusing on gender insofar as it makes any sense to talk about gender as something separate from the other axes of oppression. Likewise, to talk of male oppression is not, in my view, to talk of all men oppressing all women, but rather to talk of a particular kind of masculinity and a machismo-glorifying culture that also discriminates against some men.