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

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. 

"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/

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?

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.