"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/

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. 

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. 

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.

SlutWalking is rooted in riot grrrl attitude

I was extremely (sexually) excited this week to have a piece published on The Guardian's Comment is free. Find it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/09/slutwalk-feminist-activism

An image from a SlutWalk, or possibly an image from some sort of microwavable women's autonomy march. Not sure.

Also, here is a link to the official SlutWalk London website, now taking place on 11th June: http://slutwalklondon.tumblr.com/