UK: the power of the women’s vote

Y. Cooper you are so great please be my Prime Minister

I have a top story up on openDemocracy today. It's about how the "women" half of the electorate holds the cards in the 2015 General Election. But will any of the so-called political parties be brave enough to do something about it? Click here: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ray-filar/uk-power-of-women’s-vote

"Intersectionality", let me Google that for you

So great? 

It's all kicked off on twitter over the last two days since The V Spot's problematic blog "In defence of Caitlin Moran and populist feminism".

In response, I've written a piece over at New Statesman.

It's called "'Intersectionality', let me Google that for you." It's on the issue of who feminism is for: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/10/intersectionality-let-me-google-you


Here are some great pieces by others on the same debate:

Dear Vagenda editors: http://blackfeminists.org/2012/10/23/dear-vagenda-editors/

You don't need an MA in Gender Studies to know that race matters to feminism: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/23/race-matters-to-feminism

How to be better: on intersectionality, privilege and silencing: http://stavvers.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/how-to-be-better-on-intersectionality-privilege-and-silencing/

Feminist slam poetry for National Poetry Day

To celebrate National Poetry Day, here are some of my favourite feminist slam poems. They are clever, moving, amazing, and about as far from the GCSE poetry anthology as you can get, thankfully. Some are long but they are totally worth the investment. Enjoy bubbelehs, enjoy.

*trigger warning*

Staceyann Chin - My first period. Also features a haiku about George Bush.

"Even Jesus had to pass through a punani
Angels and messengers aside
Mary had to lend passage to god
Or them Christians might still be Jews 
Waiting for a christ that was stuck up the ass of some man
Who thought he could do what little girls do
Every day against our wishes" 

Andrea Gibson - Letter to a playground bully from Andrea (age 8)

"I am not 'always crying', 

I am just thawing outside the lines."

Sonya Renee - What women deserve

"Women do deserve better, 
Women deserve choice"

I think I have linked to this on the blog before, but it is just so great.




Alix Olson - Subtle sister 

"So I take back the whispers, the cute, mute act and the high pitched giggles, 
Yeah I take them back 
I won't avoid your stare evade your step 
Nothing of that kind, 
I won't help you help me victimise the only space that's mine." 



(Unfortunately this video is cut with other footage - but its the only reasonable version I can find on Youtube).


And finally:

Mindi Nettifee - For young women who don't consider themselves feminists (the last nerve)





Who have I missed out? Please share your favourite feminist poems below!



More:

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/03/27/future-of-feminism-telling-our-stories-out-loud/

Contraception is no stroll in the park and men should share the stress

On a side note, all the stock pictures of women and implants are of white women

I have a new piece up on Comment is free. Its about a recent scandal in which contraceptive implants have become lost in women's bodies, and problems with the contraceptive market more generally. And the global pharmaceutical industry. And gender: Contraception is no stroll in the park and men should share the stress

Feminism is not just about choice

Um, this is awesome, and a T-shirt.

All of a sudden we're talking about 'a woman's right to choose' again. Threatening tactics more associated with the American anti-choice movement are steadily creeping across the pond, whilst in the States, the debate has spiralled even further downwards. On April 1st the '40 Days for Life' anti-choice campaign ends - 40 days during which abortion clinics worldwide were picketed, with abortion providers and women seeking abortions harassed, filmed, and intimidated. Recent exposes by the British Humanist Association and Feminist Action Cambridge show that anti-choice group the "Society for the Protection of Unborn Children" (SPUC) tell an incredible pack of lies during talks in schools - including the facepalm-inducing claim that abortion causes breast cancer. It's an increasingly terrifying time to be a fertile woman. 

'Choice' is invaluable when framing the fight for continued reproductive rights. However much Nadine Dorries' anti-choice minions might disingenously proclaim themselves to be 'pro-woman', the fact remains that the only real pro-woman approach is one that admits of a woman's right to choose what to do with her body. The US anti-choice slogan 'women deserve better' can be seen for what it is - a blinding bit of double-think - if you can see that the implicit end of the sentence is '...than to have the right to decide whether or not to carry a preganancy to term' (of course that full slogan would be neither catchy nor persuasive). As Sonya Renee concludes in this amazing video, "women do deserve better, women deserve choice". 

But feminism has more to say than, 'Great, you've chosen! Awesome! We can go home now!'  Feminism as a whole is about more than enabling women to choose, even if the right to choose is a good start. The idea that feminism's end aim is just to enable women to make the choices that are right for them is almost meaningless if it isn't combined with opposition to systematic oppressions. Paid work or unpaid household labour, leaving or staying with an abusive partner, choosing underwear, opting for either Team Edward or Jacob; all of these choices are relevant for feminists (and are situated against areas of feminist thought and criticism), but not all of the options are equal. 

Recently I've been hearing more and more about 'agency' - another important area for feminists which can sometimes become little more than a misused buzzword. Women's agency and women's choices aren't the same thing, but distinctions are rarely made. Choices reflect agency - but agency can be and is always constrained by more than just the choices that are available. 

We need to admit both that women's agency differentiates depending on position and privilege, and that women's agency is disproportionately constrained compared to men's. The existence of some women who are more privileged than some men in no way undermines patriarchy, anymore than the existence of the wonderful Borgen undermines the awfulness that is TV (not strictly a logical analogy). 

There are problems when 'agency' or 'choice' is used to block strands of feminist criticism. This debate is most often representational: the constant compulsions to be feminine, or beautiful, to wear make-up and heels, to 'perform' sexuality rather than experience it, are justified as agency-based choices which are therefore untouchable. We've got so caught up in saying 'of course you can be a feminist and wear make up and be pretty!' that we've stopped analysing the gendered institutions that create these pressures on women. Recognising that these things are gendered pressures doesn't mean you have to immediately throw your lipstick away to be a feminist, but its equally dishonest to refuse to analyze something that you happen to like. 

There are some fair criticisms of feminist positions that a: suggest that women who make 'anti-feminist choices' are either devoid of agency or anti-feminist themselves, or b: speak from some sort of unquestionable position of privileged 'total agency'.  It's very easy for me to point the angry-n-militant finger at the decision for breast enlargement, for example, as someone who basically lives in a library surrounded by weighty tomes and other people who mostly haven't had breast enlargement surgery. My life wouldn't improve if I modified my body in line with dominant cultural expectations. That's a massive privilege. I'm sure that cosmetic surgery might be a reasonable choice within a set of available options; this doesn't necessarily represent lack of agency, or greater false consciousness, or any of those other feminist bugbears. 

When porn director Anna Arrowsmith describes pornography as a 'dream job' that 'we consent' to, though,  she's really missing the point. The key to it is not to load choices with values: my choice is feminist and yours is not ("erotica is what I like, pornography is what you like"). Nor is it about decrying women who make certain choices as anti-feminist - I reckon feminists are defined by self-definition, within reason. It is past time, way past time, though, that we stopped being persuaded by attempts to paint oppressive institutions as 'feminist' through the rhetoric of 'choice' or 'you are denying my agency'. 

Just because some women choose to do it, it doesn't make it ok. It doesn't make it ok for feminists to attack other (less privileged) feminists, but critique shouldn't be stifled. The undeniable agency of the woman involved is not the last feminist word on the subject. Choice is important, but it means little without criticism, and even less without change. 

Regeneration: "The Feminist Evolution: Queer Feminism for the Next Generation"

My first print publication is out! It takes the form of a chapter in a book entitled Regeneration, mainly edited by Guy Shrubsole and Clare Coatman, but edited a bit more by Ben Little and Shiv Malik. It's primarily a book about intergenerational justice - proposing solutions (to pervert a favourite Tory phrase) to 'this mess we've inherited'. The first print run has already sold out, which suggests to me that it's bloody good. 

My chapter is called "The Feminist Evolution: Queer Feminism for the Next Generation". It has little to do with intergenerational justice, but much to do with how feminists might - and are - reconfiguring the movement in opposition to both new and old problems.

You can download the book (literally for free) here: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/Regeneration.pdf 

Here's an extract: 

To adopt a queer approach to gender is to recognise that transgression, subversion and play are kinds of anti-normative political activism that can also disrupt existing gender hierarchies. One person born with a body called ‘female’ assuming the trappings of masculinity is unlikely to change any government policy about women as a class, but neither was the vote won by one women chaining herself to the railings of Westminster. In time-honoured suffragette style, the more people who, by manipulating gender, expose cultural dogma about men and women for what it is – arbitrary and abusive – the more the binary line dividing ‘M’ from ‘F’ trembles.

My chapter is on p.70 - but the whole book is very much worth a read. Feedback on my ideas also very much appreciated. 

Other info here: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/ebooks/Regeneration.html

Also if you're dying to get this book in the hard, papery flesh, there should be another printing at some point. Stay tuned! 

"Justice" for Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Don't make me laugh.

Oh hey! Do you like knowing you're right? Me too! What about justice? Hooray for justice! How about demonstrations of blindingly ignorant privilege coated in the faux-language of 'objectivity' or 'reason'? Wait, what..?

Privilege Denying Dude: he's always right

I didn't study gender at school. My school syllabus was based on the theories white English guys made up about the world for the past thousand years. At school, some things were up for nuanced interpretation, like English literature (a girls' subject). Sometimes, at most, we were asked to consider 'the role of women in...' But hard, manly subjects like science and maths, defined as fact, could not be disputed.

Apparently there's a major branch of theoretical thought called 'feminist epistemology', or something. Most people don't know about it, because we only learn white-guy-theories at school. One of the great things it does is to challenge the idea that what a culture thinks of as "knowledge" is objective, or neutral. Here's a quote that summarises the central point nicely:

"One cannot survey the human race from a great and learned distance, proclaiming loudly that one has found the truth for the good of all the nameless faceless abstractions that one has never bothered to take seriously." (Elshtain, 1981)

And here's another:

"Reflection on how social phenomena get defined as problems in need of explanation in the first place quickly reveals that there is no such thing as a problem without a person (or groups of them) who have this problem: a problem is always a problem for someone or other." (Harding, 1987)

In other words, feminist epistemology focuses on the roles of real people in abstract theorizing. When we're talking about knowledge, it matters who is doing the knowledge acquisition, and who the knowledge is being acquired about. The people involved - their positions as members of oppressed or privileged groups - affect what facts get churned out, and who gets to decide what counts as fact.

What falls out of feminist epistemology is the extent to which "knowledge" generally reflects the perspectives, not to mention the will to power, of the people in charge. How do societies come to believe that we are most threatened by those who are worst off: the Jews, the immigrants, the blacks, the gays, the benefits scroungers? As a direct result of the taken-for-granted "knowledges" made up by those with more power, that's how. And we believe it. We read the newspapers, we absorb the prejudices handed to us.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, despite facing (or rather, evading) repeated allegations of rape and sexual assault, gets to speak at the Cambridge Union debating society because of these power imbalances in the process of knowing. Facts about "the law", "justice", "innocent until proven guilty" are taught to us year in and year out. These are the representative tenets of our great liberal democratic society. They are the mighty principles of the fair society, we must uphold them, free of nuance, free of interpretation, lest we become a Stalinist Soviet Union! Innocent until proven guilty! That's an objective fact! You don't get to decide the law, the law does, and the law is defined as not-wrong!

But there are other facts here that don't get heard, or taught, or learned. These are the facts about the crimes of those with more power against those with less power, and the proportion of the time that the law fails to uphold justice when the victim is a woman, or a person of colour, or someone defined as 'vulnerable'. Could a black chamber maid ever prove a rape case against the white male leader of a political body? I doubt it, whatever the evidence was.

Do I need to quote, again, the attrition rate for rape cases in the UK? It's less than 6% Do I need to mention that 1 in 7 women experience sexual or physical violence whilst students, that about 1 in 4 women are sexually assaulted as adults? Is it worth pointing out, again, how many cases there are, how few of them reach the police? What about the figure for the number of cases reported that are simply dropped due to what dominant knowledges say about false allegations?

I'm so bored of talking about these facts, but no one from the "innocent until proven guilty" camp considers this to be valid knowledge, worth using to interrogate Dominique Strauss-Kahn's free pass to propound his views. Instead, we hear "innocent until proven guilty" repeated over, and over, and over, like a cult mantra. That's the only knowledge that counts, the justice that protects the rights of the guys in charge.

What about the "innocent until proven guilty" that should have been upheld for Nafissatou Diallo and Tristane Banon? Instead we had the "guilty, just guilty" treatment meted out to Diallo, and the "you have a case, but the law is designed to stop us from pursuing it" reaction to Banon. Given that the law did nothing for them, I reckon Cambridge should give them the benefit of the doubt. I'd suggest that we should believe that they aren't just vindictive, pathological liars - but of course that's not the kind of justice that we're used to.

For what it's worth, I agree with "innocent until proven guilty". It just doesn't apply here. We don't have a fair process for finding people guilty. Dominique Strauss-Kahn isn't going to court on these charges - he got let off. 

The case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is damning: Diallo and Banon are just the women who have come forward. Their heinous treatment at the hands of the law, in the name of "justice", suggests to me that Dominique Strauss-Kahn will go on to rape and to assault with impunity. And all the while student debating societies will invite him to chat about economics. After all, it's a much more important subject, rooted in facts and objectivity. That's the stuff that really counts.

To sign the Disinvite Dominique Strauss-Kahn petition, click here: http://www.womens.cusu.cam.ac.uk/campaigns/strausskahn/

Why the gender pay gap matters

The real castration complex? 

I have a new post at openDemocracy. It's about the gender pay gap, but is also sexy and exciting: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ray-filar/why-gender-pay-gap-matters

A well regulated press would also be a freer press, if it could do anything to end media sexism

Not another picture of Pippa Middleton's ass

The Leveson inquiry drags on, akin to the 1000 pages in the middle of The Lord of The Rings where the hobbits do nothing but walk across a cliff. We're still only on the first half - the bit of the inquiry in which press culture, ethics and practices are vigorously talked about. In fellowship terms, we're barely out of the shire.

Lord Justice Leveson is now indicating that he is unlikely to consider any government regulation. That may not be so disappointing, given the government's seeming view on regulation, otherwise expressed as 'we hate regulation'. But this does leave us to speculate on exactly what actions Leveson may be intending. In a manner quite dissimilar to that of Tolkien's oeuvre, the inquiry does not seem to be leading to any massive inexorable conclusions. 

At the end of last year coalition of mainstream feminist groups (the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW), Eaves, OBJECT and Equality Now) submitted to the Leveson inquiry that it should address press sexism as part of a full investigation into the relationship between media and society.* How unbelievably heinous; it takes a country-wide media culture overhaul to enable official challenge to media myths of the alien species, 'women', who do nothing but lie about rape, wear clothes, or not wear clothes.

In this video, a Sky News commentator speculates - ever so insightfully - that the inquiry's outcome may be a 'tougher, beefed up, testosterone fuelled regulator.' Sexist language aside (and the identification 'good=masculine' could be one of the first things to go, if you ask me) a proper independent press complaints commission would seem to be one highly logical outcome of the inquiry. We already have one, after all, giving it teeth would be relatively easy. 

The problem is that enabling it to take action against sexism would take greater ovaries than Leveson could ever countenance. The culture is too longstanding, and it runs too deep in the national psyche. The suggestion of any anti-sexist regulation stronger than 'um, guys, can you please play nicely?' is invariably met with the outraged cry: 'FEMINIST CENSORSHIP!!!!' or 'A FREE PRESS IS THE SOLE HALLMARK OF A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY!!!' or, as with Clare Short's campaign to end Page 3, you are clearly just 'fat and ugly' and 'jealous of beautiful young women'. 

Here is what will (probably) happen instead. Between now and the announcement of a new PCC, the bit of the inquiry that was about countering media misogyny will get lost. Or looked over. Or watered down so much that it will become irrelevant. Some concession may be made to not displaying 'inappropriate' materials pre-watershed, 'where children can see'. But the banal onslaught of everything that is idiotic in our culture, the four hundred pictures of Pippa Middleton's bum, the appraisal of women politicians on the basis of their clothing choice - all this will continue.

Those who get on the high horse about the inalienable right to free expression forget that in practice this has meant the unabated reproduction of unsubstantiated ideologies about less powerful groups who, non-coincidentally, have less press control. The people who read rape reports focusing mainly on 'false' accusations, skirts, and alcohol consumption, are the same people who comprise juries who sit in on rape cases from which rapists repeatedly walk free. That's the very definition of a vicious circle.

To mandate that women should be represented as people who partake in the public sphere in roles which are not primarily aesthetic is simply to mandate representations closer to the truth. An end to the barrage of boobs and bimbos would make life a lot freer for the women who would like to be assessed on the basis of their actions rather than for the shape of their behinds. I hope Lord Leveson is brave enough to say so.


*Disclaimer: I don't agree with everything that was put forward by all of these organisations, but implementation of anything vaguely anti-misogynist would be better than what we have now. 

All I want for Xmas is a stocking full of really arousing feminist porn

Originally published at The F Word: http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/12/all_i_want_for_

This isn't quite doing it for me

Wrongheadedly, I visited Anne Summers the other day. Hidden at the back of the store next to the 'Dominatrix' range (exclusively advertised with pictures of submissive women - I don't think they get it) was the section marked 'Porn for Women'.

A less interesting porn section could scarcely be conceived of. Whoever is designing this porn seems to think that women will descend in droves to purchase any porn which replaces the 'for men' signifiers 'slutty/anal/hungry/cock/bitch/fest' with the more delicate, pleasant, feminine word 'couples'. As if 'couples' is any draw in a film that conforms in every other respect to the male subject/female object binary.

I'm sorry for women if that's what porn 'for women' amounts to. Perhaps I shouldn't expect revolutionary female-driven narratives about sexualities and the female gaze in the Anne Summers porn section, but I would at least like to be slightly titillated. The barest hint of a sensation in the knicker department would be enough.

Still, it's only the most commercially successful sex shop 'for women', after all. In a more fringe way, women, or rather, feminists, have been conceiving of, directing and distributing feminist porn - or porn which tries to subvert the misogynist narrative - for ages. The downside is that the lack of mainstream market support results in small, independent distributors who seem to spring up and then go under (and not in the fun way, either). Last month, notably, saw the sad departure of Filament Magazine, billed wonderfully as the 'thinking woman's crumpet'.

It's a small relief that the Feminist Porn Awards are out there, attempting to give voice to the desires of those mind-numbingly bored by the restrictive fare conventionally on offer to women (let's not even get started on the soft/hardcore misogyny that passes for general/men's porn). The Feminist Porn Awards reckon that porn is feminist if it is hot and:

"1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction, etc. of the work.
2) It depicts genuine female pleasure
3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn."

Or, as Caitlin Moran succinctly put it, "I JUST WANT A MULTI-BILLION-DOLLAR INTERNATIONAL PORN INDUSTRY WHERE I CAN SEE A WOMAN COME."

That all sounds great, so why is it rare to find hardcore porn which fits these quite minimal criteria? There are, of course, commercial successes. There are the Anna Spans of the straight world (though her failure to look critically at mainstream porn is rather damning), and there are the Courtney Troubles and Shine Louise Houstons on the other end of the spectrum. But it isn't enough, it isn't available enough, and what there is doesn't do enough to undermine the free tube sites of the industry.

Isn't it strange that an activity which - much of the time - is something men and women do together, should be so invariably so distorted when put on camera? I don't think there is anything about the presence of a camera, or indeed a mass market, that necessarily turns sex into misogyny, but it is depressing when this is so often the case.

Lisa Saunders' interesting and well-argued anti-porn/pro-sex article on this website yesterday suggests that 'it's about as easy to get hold of 'ethical' pornography as it is to score 'ethical' cocaine.' My suspicion is that feminists will lose out if we completely write pornography off, forever, the end. The continued presence of feminist voices in other unethical industries hasn't created any feminist industries, but it has changed some things for the better.

The sustained critique of the industry and its wider cultural normalisation that anti-pornography feminisms provide are extremely persuasive, but I am reluctant to condemn all porn that exists or could exist on the basis of the industry as it stands. Women watch, and get off, on porn which doesn't cater to them, which is misogynist, racist, and unethical in every other respect. If this is the case with such rubbish porn, how much better could it be if feminist porn were to flourish?

Can feminist porn can break away from mainstream misogynist narratives? Are the criteria given by the Feminist Porn Awards enough to make porn feminist? Is there feminist porn which genuinely represents women's sexualities? Have you seen any that really stood out? What are your recommendations for feminist porn?

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. 

Mad Women on the March

Alicia would probably be a better Prime Minister

Write up of Fawcett Society's 'Don't Turn Back Time March' - published at openDemocracy: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ray-filar/mad-women-on-march

A thousand feminists, a million acts of violence

A piece about the UK Feminista 2011 conference and Violence Against Women and Girls. Published at openDemocracy: http://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ray-filar/thousand-feminists-million-acts-of-violence

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 problem with sexy children

This look: correct in women, totally perverse in children

Sexualisation: a buzzword for feminists, Christians and conservative party leaders. Most people agree it's a Bad Thing, particularly when it happens to our delicate little children, who must be protected. If sexualisation is impacting upon children, says everybody, then, and only then, must we take rigorous measures to oppose it. In particular, we must complain about Rihanna dancing on X-Factor in her too-risque undies, and make sure that schoolgirls wear trousers so that they don't invite sexual assault. In case you were face-palming there, let's just say that the latter policy clearly springs from the same mind that wrote the hilarious joke: 'what's the leading cause of peodophilia?'... 'sexy children'.

A desultory review of the internet literature on sexualisation reveals that it's affecting children everywhere. It pervades our culture through magazines, 'pornstar' slogans on children's clothing, under-wired bras for little girls, music videos (though the fixation is on female pop stars, not the male hip hop artists who use naked-gyrating-women as legal tender), television generally, and so on. These impressionable young minds see it, take it in, and start acting like sexy adults far too young. The solution, therefore, apparently, is to stop our children seeing sex-related things. 

Of course it would be totally fine if she was a bit older..

The most recent governmentally commissioned research on this, the Bailey Review of the Commercialisation and Sexualisation of Childhood, deliberately fails to define sexualisation. That's because it was written by a man whose agenda is not anti-sexualisation, but anti-sex. For Bailey, 'sexualisation' is just convenient modern jargon to slip a right-wing agenda under the policy radar.

Let's stop pretending that children and young adolescents don't have sexualities. Don't you remember your furtive childhood wanks? It's simply ridiculous to believe that sexuality rightfully gets switched on when we reach the age of consent, as if the benchmark 'sixteen' represents anything other than an arbitrary regulatory decision of the state.

The problem is not sex but its cultural implementation, and an aspect of that is the difference between sex and sexualisation. Part of me doesn't want my figurative children to find out just how limiting, sexist, racist, homophobic, etc, adult women's cultural sexual representation is, but I'm not going to sit around acting as if stopping them from seeing the images does anything to stop the images-as-messages from being there.

Girls are not sexualised because they develop and experience their own sexualities, nor are children-who-must-be-protected generally sexualised because they have sex. Girls are sexualised, rather, because women's and girl's sexualities are still culturally defined in a way that detaches genuine sexual pleasure from the body, replacing it with a narrow, limiting appearance of (submissive) arousal. Ariel Levy was saying something similar to this six years ago, by the way. Why is it considered sexy for women but not men to wear make-up, heels and lingerie? (I personally think men in make-up, heels and lingerie are incredibly sexy, but I seem to be the perverse minority)

The Bailey Review correctly identifies sexualised products, but doesn't really pick up on the other problems that comprise sexualisation: the normalisation of a particular kind of sexy-woman standard that all women are held up as wanting against. Sexualisation is a horrifically gendered thing whereby men sexually consume agency devoid women-commodities. The extensive possibilities for and variations in peoples' sexualities are denied except where they match the man-fucks-sexy-woman standard. I recognise that some women get off perfectly well under the popular narrative, which is great for them, but even as much as sexuality reflects society, many still cannot fit the box.

There is a fundamental problem with the idea that sexualisation is terrible up until the age of sixteen, at which point it's all fine and normal (The Bailey Review uses the term 'premature sexualisation'!) It's sad that girls will have to resist everything the sexualised society tells them about themselves, their desires and their bodies, in order to have fulfilling sex lives. Yet I would almost prefer that they learn about it early so that they can start developing the critical tools to call it out for what it is - a fabricated belief system of the misogynist imagination. Perhaps children should know their enemy. 

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

You can't smash patriarchy with transphobia

You should totally check out Bornstein's book Gender Outlaw. It's awesome. 

I spent a lot of time thinking about radical feminist transphobia whilst writing my undergrad dissertation (on whether trans theoretical and radical feminist ideologies are fundamentally at odds). When writing it, I treated the conflict as feminist history that had really been put to bed by writers like Sandy Stone, Patrick Califia and Kate Bornstein (above). It's strange and upsetting, but then perhaps not so surprising, to see that feminist transphobia is alive and well outside of the ivory tower.

You will be pleased to find that this article is marginally less wanky than my dissertation: http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2011/09/radical_feminism_transphobia. 

Speaking out about abortion: four women share their stories.

I go to sleep fantasizing about shouting this at Nadine Dorries

So Downing Street looks set to advise MPs to vote against the “Dorries amendment”. About bloody time, too. The anti-choice, anti-women attitudes that stigmatise abortion, however, remain. When needed, abortion should be a matter of sheer common sense. The fact that in 2011 a vocal minority can come so close to restricting further the little control women have over our own bodies is terrifying. When a fundamentalist minority has this much influence over policies for the majority, we have a serious problem.

According to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS), one in three women will have an abortion in their lives. Yet publicly talking about it is still taboo. Here, four women speak out about their unwanted pregnancies, abortion counselling, and the social pressures they have faced:

How did you feel when you first found out you were pregnant? 

Robyn*: Sheer disbelief at first, then a lot of fear and guilt. I felt guilty because I knew I would have to have an abortion and I knew it would really upset/worry my mum.
Anna*: Scared, terrified, nervous, very alone...
Lucy: I already had three kids, and was very clear in my own mind that I didn't want to carry this one to term. The first child was the result of a one-night-stand (when I was twenty three) and I was a single mother from the start. The second was very much wished for by my husband and the third kid was planned too. My youngest was about sixteen months old at the time and I was still breastfeeding quite a lot. A fourth kid didn't fit into my plans at all, no space in the flat, no room in a normal car for four kids and I didn't want another. My husband was happy with my decision, neither of us have problems with the idea of abortion, especially if it is done early on in the pregnancy.
Sam*: It was pretty unreal, first I felt blank fear and then a brief moment of emotional helplessness.


How old were you at the time? 

Lucy: About forty, happily married, financially secure. 

Sam: Nineteen
Anna: Fourteen years old
Robyn: I was seventeen. 

What caused the pregnancy? 

Sam: Many excuses, but the main one being the sustained belief that I wouldn't be able to get pregnant by having unprotected sex the week following my period because really...there’s no egg there then
Anna: Unprotected sex with my first love... 

Robyn: Me and my boyfriend had unprotected sex.
Lucy: Carelessness with contraception because I was breastfeeding and my periods hadn't returned. Yes, I should've known better.

When did you first begin to consider abortion? What did you do? 

Lucy: Straight away. As I was travelling to the UK to visit my parents a few days later, I decided to try to get a chemical abortion while I was there. Unfortunately, by the time the clinic in the UK could fit me in, it wouldn't have worked out with the second appointment which needed to be in the same clinic and in person. I knew the score in Germany, diagnosis at your GP or gynecologist, appointment with counselling service, some "thinking time" and then the abortion itself. 

Robyn: I considered abortion as soon as I found out. I was seventeen and couldn't raise a child, I was in the middle of my A levels and wanted to do more with my life. I researched abortion services with my mum after I had told her I was pregnant and arranged a consultation. 

Anna: I talked with a teenage friend of mine, at the time. She suggested it, said she knew a doctor. She went with me to the appointment. I remember she was well-off, so I think she paid for it too... 

Sam: Pretty much straight away, it's weird because I went to a Catholic school but at the time it didn't seem like a baby, that's only something I've felt recently. I just wanted my period, it wasn't traumatic, although I was scared, it just seemed like if i thought about it in terms of making my period come on then it felt natural. I did what most would, went online, found a gum clinic and found out what time the drop in session was. 

Who was the abortion provider you eventually got in contact with, and how did they treat you? 

Anna: Dr. Tiller, I think was his name, in Wichita, Kansas. You can actually google what happened to him, later, much later, in life. He was gunned down and murdered, I think in front of his clinic? Or it may have been at his church? I can't remember...
Robyn: I got in contact with Marie Stopes. They treated me very well, provided me with helpful information leaflets on the different types of abortion and arranged a consultation with me a few days after I had found out I was pregnant. They told me about the other options, and made me feel very comfortable and not as if I was guilty for having an abortion.
Lucy: It was a day clinic and they chucked us all out at 6 p.m. My abortion went pretty well but there was a Chinese student all on her own in the recovery bed next to mine who was still feeling pretty bad at 6 p.m. I ended up getting my friend to drive her home.
Sam: The Gum Clinic were already really nice, they booked me an appointment with BPAS straight away, which I was so relieved about. All the nurses I met were lovely and it was their kindness that was reassuring, they were professional and that made me feel secure.


Do you remember your counselling sessions? Could you describe them? 

Lucy: As it was late August and a lot of people were on holiday, I had to wait two weeks or so for my counselling appointment. Luckily the woman was OK. I told her I'd got three kids and knew what I wanted, she was a bit cowed by my clarity and just gave me the minimum spiel. I only had one session with her. She signed my slip of paper and then at long last I was able to book an abortion (I think there was an obligatory wait/reconsider time) and had my abortion a couple of weeks later. 

Sam: On my first appointment at BPAS I met with three different nurses, one of which was just to speak to. She asked me if I was in a relationship, if I had considered the other option. Once I revealed how I came to be pregnant she also talked me through some other forms of contraception besides the pill. She was really nice, and when i showed interest said that she would recommend the same use of contraception to her daughters and was happy to hear that I was in a stable relationship and was receiving support from my boyfriend. I think at the time I was trying to reassure her that I was ok but as she was accepting of all my answers I felt secure in my decision.
Anna: Counselling was offered. It was just one session, rather long, maybe two hours, right before the procedure. Dr. Tiller was the one who counselled me. Asked about the father, activities of the father, I replied that he smoked a LOT of pot, and this worried me about any baby. I explained I wasn't ready to have a baby, I was too young, wanted to finish school and have a life. I was afraid on a lot of levels, and alone. I think the reason Dr. Tiller spoke with me to such great lengths, was because he knew it was "illegal" in Kansas to perform abortion on a girl of my age. He wanted to make sure I could understand the results of what I wanted to have done. My concerns were certainly listened and responded to, the conversation and atmosphere was pleasant, reassuring.
Robyn: I was offered counselling sessions, but I didn't take them, and although I have received counselling I have never told my counsellors about my abortion. This is not for any particular reason, it was just not an imminent concern.

Do you think that your abortion counsellor had a vested interest in making you have an abortion? Would it have been easy for you to finally decide not to have one? 

Anna: Dr. Tiller did not have a vested interest in making me have an abortion. He was just very concerned that I understood the implications of having an abortion, before he did anything. It would have been very easy for me to just walk out. I knew that. He was very easy to talk to. 

Sam: I would say that all the women I spoke to there were impartial. They were extremely sensitive and did not discuss my choice with me in depth, their focus was more medical.
Lucy: No, I think the counsellors here have to be pro-life or at least are obliged to tell you how great it is to be a mother and how much help you can get from the state.


What kind of attitudes do you think society takes towards women considering or having abortions? 

Robyn: I think overall the attitudes are better than they were, but I did have to rearrange the actual termination date because one of the consultation nurses warned me that on that particular day there are often protesters outside the hospital - which I think is disgusting. I didn't want to see any disturbing images or be made to feel as if I should feel guilt for what I did.
Anna: Well I had my abortion in 1975, so views then were very different than they are now. It was very hush hush. It was ok to talk to the doctor doing it but that was about it. It was not acceptable in society. People knew it was going on, but it was not discussed. 

Lucy: Negative
Sam: I used to believe that it was 'murder' because of a video that was shown to me in R.E. but honestly, I feel like our generation are pro-choice.

How do you feel about your abortion now? Why? 

Sam: I feel like it was some serious shit in my life that means that as you get older life becomes more complicated and harder. I will never forget because the feelings get more intense as time passes. As soon as I had it, it was straight out of my mind, but reflection and cute babies in public are a bitch. 

Lucy: Glad I did it. No regrets.
Anna: Well right after I had it done, I was very depressed. I think that's when my clinical depression started really, although I was not diagnosed with it until 1991. I started drinking a lot, became a very hard-core alcoholic, drank for years after... I didn't recognize the depression or link it to the abortion until many years later on. Now, as I am fifty one years old, I am ok with it. I know the baby is in heaven, I feel as if God has forgiven me. He is a loving and forgiving God. I am very pro-choice now, because the alternative would kill girls all over, and because women ultimately should have the say-so over what happens to their own bodies.
Robyn: I feel guilty because I could have prevented getting pregnant in the first place, and probably always will. However, I have learnt from the experience and am now extra careful.


Finally, is there anything else you want to share with me? 

Anna: Well I think I told you I was fourteen when I had the abortion and and I am fifty one years old now. So it has been a very long time. But the memories are as if it was yesterday. It was very painful for me emotionally, I think mostly because I was so in love with the daddy. I stayed in love with him for years and years afterwards. He stopped talking to me after he found out what I had done.
Lucy: I felt very frustrated that although I was very clear about wanting an abortion, I wasn't able to have the abortion for over a month. All that time I was feeling more and more pregnant and I knew the little thing was growing in me. I don't believe in the idea of a soul descending on an embryo at conception, so, for me, it's a sliding scale between a period and a baby. I was completely happy about getting rid of a small clump of cells, I was less happy the further it developed. I've always wondered why counselling before you have an abortion and yet no counselling before you take the much bigger, infinitely more life-changing step of having a baby (like I did at twenty three)
Sam: Sperm can actually stay alive in your vagina for a week.


*These names have been changed.