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

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?

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 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.

How Celebrity Endorsement and a Catchy Title Still Doesn’t Make It Appealing To Stick Diamantes On Your Waxed Pubic Area.

Definitely get this done immediately?

‘After a breakup a friend of mine Swarovski Crystaled my...ummm...precious lady. And umm...and it shined like a disco ball, and so I have a whole chapter in there about how women should vajazzle their, vajayjays....It looks like a little disco ball down there, its great....it does...and...and it’s hot pink today, for you. So that’s good.’
- Jennifer Love Hewitt, discussing her new book on ‘Lopez Tonight’.

A year or so ago a good friend sent me a Youtube clip called ‘Clitter! Its Glitter for Your Vagina!’ Featuring the unforgettable lines ‘thanks Clitter, for turning my labia into a yaybia!’ and ‘Clitter turned my yeast infection...into a jewel collection,’ the clip was an obvious yet diverting send up of those ubiquitous beauty adverts which purport to endow lifelong happiness if only women would buy into the relevant product. The clip showed deliberately crude upskirt shots of female celebrities’ crotches covered over with MS Paint-like attempts at glitter. In short, Clitter was ridiculous, and because it was ridiculous, it was quite funny.

Ironic then, that where my friends send me videos mocking the ludicrous idea of decorative glitter for the cunt, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s friends suggest she lie down and get the hot wax out. That’s right, some women in the world, in the real, substantial world, have decided that pubic diamante applications are not self-evidently nauseating but rather, sexy and fun. Clitter has actually become reality, but cunn(t)ingly retitled as ‘vajazzling’. You’ve got to hand it to Hewitt, vajazzling is a pretty clever name. Because it is a pun. It has two meanings at once, get it? Meaning number one: vajayjay, (I’m presuming that this is a word for the vagina) delineating the general area to be glitzed up. Meaning number two: jazz, like jazzy, like jazzy diamantes. Or jazzy Swarovski crystals, if you have loads of money to waste an expensive crystal collection on the area where your pubes should be.

Except, this fad has nothing to do with the vagina. Indeed, in the vajazzling clip from inane TV show ‘The Only Way is Essex’, which I hold to blame for bringing the vajazzle to British shores, the vajazzling beautician (vajazzler) explicitly warns the proto-vajazzled client (vajazzlee) that the vajazzles are not to be glued to the actual vagina (vajina?). As the Anne Summers uniform-wearing vajazzler says, ‘basically, don’t put it on your bits, basically.’ And therein lies the flaw in what is otherwise a reasonably catchy way to repackage something so banal that I still can’t believe it really exists. Hewitt et al are not really entitled to say ‘vajazzle your vajayjay!’ or whatever it is they say, because the vajazzles don’t go anywhere near your actual vajayjay. The word ‘vagina’ refers specifically to, for want of a better word, the hole that all the other bits of the vulva surround. Vajazzles explicitly don’t go on the vajayjay. They also don’t go on your clitoris, your labia minora, your labia majora, your greater and lesser vestibular glands, your vestibular bulbs, your vulval vestibule, or any of your other external genital organs. As a non-scientist, I admit I just looked up some of those names on Wikipedia. Anyway, apparently, the official name for the place that the vajazzles actually go is the ‘mons pubis’. Perhaps unfortunately for aspiring vajazzlers everywhere, ‘monspubisjazzle your mons pubis!’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

To casually subsume such a politically, sexually, and biologically complex part of women’s anatomies under the totalizing concept of ‘vagina’, or ‘hole that the man penetrates’, is utterly objectionable and highly sexist. This is a retrograde concept of female sexuality, one that overlooks the arguably much more vital role that the rest of the genitals, and more, rest of the body, play in sex and eroticism. I see the lazy conflation of the waxed pubic area with the vagina as symptomatic of the prevalence of the ‘teenaged Nuts-reader’ mentality; in viewing endless pictures of women (repackaged as ‘girls’) nude from the front on, we internalise the idea that the pubic region simply is the female genitalia, and conveniently forget that underneath all that are real, odorous, vital, wet, dry, aggressive, soft, hairy, receptive, hard, human genitals. I mean, what could be less suited to a trivialising star/rainbow/pretty butterfly decoration than genitalia? If this is intended as a way that women can affirm and identify with our own bodies, fine, but can we have something a bit less...diamante? Maybe as a way to affirm, identify, empower, etc, we could instead have cultural narratives that embrace a variety of bodies and a set of beauty regimes that are even slightly less demanding, alienating, and infantilising?

Actually, for something ostensibly presented as idiosyncratic of some modern femininities to lazily take on an ignorant, simplifying, het-male-gaze view of female genitalia really just points to a wider problem with this whole vajazzling practice. In all Hewitt’s self-denigrating talk of cute little disco balls, it is unquestioned that a prospective vajazzler will have to completely wax her cunt, thereby further relegating the female body to the realm of unthreatening object: there for male pleasure. Why the necessary full wax? Can’t I put Swarovski crystals in my massive bush, if I choose to? A liberal sprinkling and it would be like a cute little mohair disco ball down there. I’m joking, my cunt isn’t cute, and I would never decorate my pubes with crystals because a: as I’ve hinted, I think it is endlessly stupid, and b: I would hope that any prospective partner of mine would not be able to have sex for laughing if they took down my underwear and found crystals inside.

Practices like these continue the ongoing process of normalisation of a sexist-ualised culture which simply expects women to conform to pornographic standards. It is well documented that women often self-objectify, how could we not when we receive constant cultural conditioning telling us that even if we don’t want to attract men, we should still shave/wax our legs, armpits, cunts, arms, eyebrows, moustaches, we should still wear clothes that are uncomfortable, impractical and constricting, we should still wear shoes that hurt and prevent us from walking, we should still diet until we are stick thin, still always wear full make up before leaving the house, still straighten or curl or dye our hair, still refrain from making ourselves strong and fit, and what’s more, we should do all these things for ourselves, because we like to do them? Sorry, but I can recognise bullshit when I hear it.

It is not just that monspubisjazzling is silly, even though it is. It is also self-othering and self-trivialising in the way that all needless ‘beauty’ practices are. First and foremost women are human subjects, and even if we sometimes take up ornamental practices, we should not reduce ourselves to them. The general genital region is culturally significant, and reasonably so, and I am not sure that its conversion into a site for decor should be seen as less meaningful than it is. Sure, if a woman performs a stereotypically feminine gender act because she enjoys it, or because she wants to look/feel sexy, or for whatever reason, she totally has the right to do that, but even in our modern feminist lexicon of consumer choice, the motivations behind ornamental practices should never go unquestioned or uncriticised. As Clitter pointed out of cunt glitter, ‘known side effects include extreme vaginal irritation, dry mouth, and fabulous looking herpes.’ However disco-fab pubic diamantes might be, I’m sticking with the hair what grows there.

Disclaimer: I'm aware that Laurie Penny has just written about the vajazzle probably better and definitely more succinctly, but I wrote this ages ago and just hadn't put it up yet. Whatevs Laurie, stop copying me.

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.

The Lesbian MP Scandal

This week Theresa May admitted to having once walked ('intimately' said the press) next to a nice woman who looks a bit as if she might be a lesbian. The Sun, with typical irreverance, led with 'MAY-BE A MUFFDIVER?' and the Telegraph, 'THERESA, NO SAINT'. She later released a public statement denying the circulating rumours, also confessing that her husband has suffered from kidney stones in order to dispel the claims. Of course, this follows on from Harriet Harman's separation from her husband last year in the wake of the Daily Express's secret filming of her conducting slightly flirtatious conversations with other women ('HARMAN'S FOR NO MAN'). And we all know about Baroness Amos and the famous footsie under the cabinet table with an as yet unidentified female MP ('AMOS' AMORE AMYSTERY MISTRESS?')


Theresa May, caught walking 'intimately' with women who might be lesbians

Well, not really, and perhaps I shouldn't give up the day job in expectation of a headline writing career just yet. Also I have nothing but respect for Harman and Amos. But unless I'm missing something big the national fascination surrounding 'gay' MPs is currently, boringly, for the boys only. In fact the only sexual news involving a female MP that I can remember was the one where somebody's husband watched some porn. Now, given the number of female MPs in the cabinet (like, four?) its not even slightly statistically likely that a lesbian scandal would happen to an MP prominent enough to make the news. Also, there's no doubt that the minute something like this is even whispered of, the press (and I) will have a field day. There's also no doubt that my paralyzing desire for overblown lesbian drama goes hand in hand with my dependence on The L Word. But wouldn't it be fun, if, in particular, massive homophobe Theresa was discovered to have a secret bevy of nubile beauties stashed away in her room that we all thought was dedicated solely to the dreaming up of ways to further disadvantage sexual minorities?

Wishful thinking aside, the furore surrounding gay scandals can be thoroughly disingenuous: cases of soap opera masquerading as concern for political honesty/concern for wives, and so on and so forth. In this respect it bears some similarity to the reporting of rape cases, where often the level of detail given about what exactly happened during the rape looks more like deliberate titillation (i.e. perpetuation of the 'rape isn't that bad and women mostly just make it up' myth) than news coverage. The obvious response here is that we've come to expect this from the tabloid press; the whole of its success might be put down to the ability to turn serious news into bite size drama to be juxtaposed next to someone's actual tits. But even if we expect it, it doesn't say much for the relevance or integrity, rather, of the media when the thought that two men shared a bed outside wedlock, and the subsequent fallout, is big news in every national paper.

Aside from the non-existence of lesbian political scandal, there's also a curious juvenility regarding the options given to MPS accused of sex with men. Thinking of the way the David Laws case was handled, or that of Crispin Blunt, would give anyone the impression that people, particularly MPs, are either normal and straight, or dishonest homos. Our cultural appreciation of sexuality does usually include a 'bisexual' button, but you wouldn't know it to read the press. If a male MP has sex with a man, the speculation is always over whether said MP is 'really' gay, or if he's been lying about really being straight but now is really gay, etc etc. Bisexual is never considered. That he (and I mean he, see above) might have been really straight but now be really gay and not have been lying at any point, is likewise never considered. The thought of a straight man having sex with a man once, or twice, or a hundred times, is likewise inconceivable. The contention seems to be that having sex, even once, with a member of the same sex, even if you've been married for thirty years and have five children, makes you completely one thousand percent homosexual. Its nonsensical. That's not to say that lots of people don't come out as gay after 30 years of marriage, or that sex with a member of the same sex might not change your mind, or that you might not be gay really anyway. My point is that homosexual sex isn't sufficient for homosexuality, and that this shouldn't really be news to the news.

Unfortunately its still the case that sexual orientation is understood by many people as being defined in binary fashion by the kind of genitalia you allow your genitalia to touch. Many people believe that if you solely have sex with 'people of the same sex' (whatever these 'sames' and 'opposites' mean), you are homosexual, and that if you solely have sex with 'people of the opposite sex' you are heterosexual, and that if you have sex with both you are bisexual, and that's all there is to it. This understanding is fundamentally deficient. The implicit belief in this understanding is that sexual desire aligns neatly with the gender binary (which, on this view, is real) - and so heterosexuality involves desire for the opposite gender, repulsion from the same gender, and no funny business round the edges. This, of course, says nothing about the wholly transient nature of gender identification, and more, it says nothing about the more complex nature of desire, which can so often, as we see in the news, fail to live up to expectations. This shallow understanding fails to take into account that we might desire different kinds of people in different ways, or that its possible to have sex with someone you aren't fundamentally attracted to (because you were horny, or because you were drunk, or because you were curious, or because you felt like it that day), or that there are queer and transgender and transsexual and intersex people for whom the notion of 'hetero' and 'homo' and 'bi' is something quite different, or that you might be attracted to the kind of sex acts that a person of a gender you don't usually desire wants to perform, and that this might outweigh your natural repulsion for their otherwise wholly uninviting body.

The most important problem with the above shallow understanding of sexuality is that the label 'homosexual' does, and I believe, should, carry something of identity about it in a substantial way that is ignored when same-sex sex is equivocated with sexual orientation. To suppose that homos should be just like heteros in every way except that they fuck people of the same sex supposes that hetero-norms, hetero-culture and hetero-ideology are somehow more real or natural than the homo equivalents. This is all about gender: men are a certain way, women are a certain way, and homosexuals just swap opposites for sames. But its important that homos aren't just like heteros, its important that homosexuals challenge and dispute and blur the lines of gender, and the way that different genders are supposed to look, act, and feel. Heteronormativity is no more than a bad habit that has become ingrained, to everyone's detriment. We don't see how arbitrary, how reversible, it really is.

Coming back to gay MPS, and their attendant scandals, the above is why I believe that none of this is really about dishonesty, or ability to do one's job, or that we are in any way justified in turning these things into scandals for the sake of weeding out the unworthwhile politicians. Maybe William Hague had sex with Christopher Myers, and maybe he didn't. But even if he did, there are still numerous, important reasons why he might be being entirely honest to deny that he is, or ever has been, gay.

But it's just harmful fun...

Ladies, Gentlemen, and those of you who are neither, your attention needs to be drawn to a rebranding exercise of grandiose proportion. The Cambridge Union Society's decision to put on 'pole fitness' classes this term is the ploy at hand. For those of you who may be confused by this new terminology, pole fitness is apparently something empowering, fun, harmless and sexy, and not to be conflated with pole dancing, a more contentious activity done in lap dancing clubs. The choice to put on these classes has already been defended by the powers that be at the Union and by some of the less salubrious characters on Comment is free. It's also been brilliantly torn apart by David Mitchell in this article: Actually, you won't find female empowerment halfway up a pole

An ongoing discussion on the email list for college women's officers highlights some of the mixed opinions going around. Women's officers clearly care enough about the nuts and bolts of female participation in university life to volunteer for the job, and yet the suggestion that pole fitness classes might go against Women's Campaign tenets like working 'towards political and social gender equality in the University of Cambridge and in wider society' has drawn out a certain amount of ire.

To give you a flavour of the discussion, comments on the list included such gems as:

'It's not insulting to those who don't go and it won't marginalise them because it's optional',

and

'After discussion with fellow undergraduates, women had nothing but positive things to say about the idea of pole fitness, and a strong theme throughout all conversations was that feminism should be about empowering women to make the choices that are best for them individually...They also felt that pole fitness could indeed be separated from the sex industry, if a conscious effort was made to do so.'

The same comment goes on:

'To try to elude that by supporting such things, we are also condoning some of the horrific sides of lap dancing clubs and similar is quite frankly insulting to the intelligence of fellow women's officers and the general undergraduate body.'

'Empowering'. It's become such a buzz-word for proponents of post-feminist ideals, like the idea that being able to choose to writhe up and down on a pole scantily clad was actually what feminism was aiming at all along. Another excellent article has been written about this on The Onion,'Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does' so all that really needs to be pointed out is the obvious: choices aren't formed in an ideological void. Yes, feminism is about empowering women to make individualistic choices, but it's also about campaigning for a setting of equality in which to make choices, so that women are not just presented with the same range of choices as men, but so that the attitudes that pressure choice-making aren't gendered. In this situation, it's clearly not the case that the privileged and intelligent female undergraduates choosing to take up pole fitness are being forced into it, or victimised. But as Greer pointed out back in the day, pussy power, the power to make men look, to entice sexually, is a limited kind of power.

Obviously it feels empowering to gain the ability to be sexier to men; winning the approval of anybody with more power than you feels good. And whilst many of the women who take part probably do, or at least in future will, wield economic and political power of a very real kind, given that relatively few numbers of men are choosing to take up pole fitness classes at present (the classes are women only), I'd say that more work needs to be done on the context in which choices are being made. I'd say that real empowerment lies being able to stand up against things, like pole dancing, that perpetuate the construction of a cultural sexuality in which eroticism is defined by male/female inequality, without being scared of being seen as less sexually attractive. What I'm trying to get at, in a very roundabout way, is this: if pole dancing is really empowering, why don't men do it? If they don't do it, as the common response to this question suggests, because men and women don't find it arousing when things are the other way round ('errrr... it's a basic supply and demand situation, stop trying to make it gendered, you bloody feminist') why is it the case that men and women don't find it arousing the other way round?

There's a couple of possible answers to that. Perhaps the sexualities of hetero men and women are biologically and naturally constituted this way. It just happens to be true that, due to like, testosterone, or chromosomes, or something, that men find the visual aspects of naked women arousing to the point where fetishising the unclad female body as a collection of object parts is an omnipresent part of everyday life. It just happens, biologically and naturally, to be the case, conveniently, that women find it arousing (and empowering!) to be objectified so, and increasingly, to self-objectify in this manner, to the point where it has been institutionally accepted at Cambridge University, the most prestigious centre for learning in the country.

Or maybe both these tendencies are developed as part of the social construction of our sexualities, and maybe it doesn't make sense to talk about what is biological and natural given the fact that we are born into and have lived every day of our lives in an unequal society in which men historically have held all the real sexual (and economic and political and physical and academic and cultural and and and and) power, in which expressions of female sexuality have been historically decried as unnatural, unethical, and crazy, and in which today, the only acceptable female sexualities that there are are those that conveniently play into the dominant subject/object paradigm of sexual relations that has been set up under a framework of prejudice. Why does the rhetoric of empowerment only big up things like pole dancing, in which the only real arousal is male? Could it be the case that the female arousal suggested in pole dancing, in stripping, in prostitution, in porn, is more the arousal generated by the taboos inherent in the brazen and graphic imitation of genuine, actual arousal? I'm not suggesting that pole dancing can never be erotic for the dancer. Like everything else about us, sexuality is created by the myriad of pressures we internalise. What is arousing is what we've been told is arousing. But actually, pole dancing, in its sex industry form, is about the continued relegation of eroticism and arousal to paradigmatic heterosexist power relations. You might say it's no more about fun and harmless expressions of female sexuality than my right foot.

Pole fitness, in no way like pole dancing.

So far I've mostly talked about pole dancing in a loose sense. The other stand out point from the women's list discussion is the idea that pole fitness classes are separable from the sex industry, and that to condone the classes is in no way to condone the nasty bits of sex work of the institutionalised variety. This is a claim that needs some unpacking. Why are the kinds of people who would probably never be caught dead frequenting a lap dancing club, who know that there are substantial problems with the sex industry, who may describe themselves as 'egalitarian' if not *clears throat* feminist, so keen to stand up for this 'pole-fitness-is-completely-different-to-pole-dancing' business? Can it be just that they want to be seen as in line with the pole dancing is sexy and fun agenda so that they aren't seen as frigid and uptight and hairy and probably lesbian? Or do women at Cambridge genuinely believe that pole dancing is fine as long is its just about fun and fitness rather than dancing for men? Well, David Mitchell puts it rather well, 'Even if you say that it's just dancing and good exercise, surely it would be more empowering to learn a dance that can be employed in contexts other than strip clubs?'

As someone who enjoys other kinds of dance for genuine fun and fitness, it seems pretty obvious that learning a form of dance where the fundamental thing that you need to do the activity (i.e. the pole) is something that you only have in the studio (or in strip clubs) seems rather to miss the point. Practice makes perfect, after all. Also, are they going to get a pole for every participant, or will there be just one pole, so that the other women stand around...er... watching... when it's not their turn? Can't be that good for fitness if you spend half the class waiting for a go. It just seems a little bit like wishful thinking/willful denial to try and rebrand pole dancing as just fitness when it is clearly an activity that takes place almost exclusively in lap dancing clubs (and, I suppose, the homes of people who are keen enough to have their own poles). Calling it something different doesn't make it something different. In a cultural vaccuum, yes, those same moves might be completely fine, sexually charged or no, but actually, the sex industry does exist, and it does exploit/abuse/rape/violate/traffic women on a daily basis. Being a pole fitness apologist is a bit like writing a book called 'I'm not writing a book', about how you aren't writing a book because what you are writing is actually a new form of thing called a schbook, which is completely unlike a book.

Until we have gender equality of some sort, there is no context in which pole dancing can ever be something other than the perpetuation of limiting sexual norms that it is, and whilst it is not at all bad to engage in forms of highly sexualised display, it won't be until these things are openly engaged in on a footing of gender equality, in a culture that doesn't constantly reduce women to sexual performance monkeys for male benefit that I will believe that its just 'fitness'.