Circus Of Horrors: A Review

I wrote an article for Bellyflop magazine. Find it here: Circus Of Horrors

A Step In The Right Direction

This is what an anti-rape/rape awareness campaign should look like. This is SO much better than those horrific, triggering, titillating, victim-blaming ads that Tfl have only very recently taken down. Here some of the regressive, sexist ideas that I got from the last Tfl campaign:

a. It is a woman's responsibility not to get raped.
b. If you have been in an illegal minicab, worn revealing clothing, had a drink, flirted, spoken to someone, walked home alone, kissed someone, walked home in the dark, walked home with female friends, been outside with female friends, danced in a club, been inside with your windows open, failed to fight back enough, passed out in your friend or boyfriend's bed, fallen asleep generally, not shouted 'no!' repeatedly, loudly and clearly enough when someone is trying to rape you, AND SO ON AND SO ON AND SO ON you are in some way responsible or to blame for the fact that someone has raped you.
c. There will always be rapists because rape is a natural male urge, therefore anti-rape campaigns should just be damage limitation.

The point is, no matter how many precautions you take, you may still get raped. The point is, men face no such restrictions on their movements. As long as there are still rapists, there will still be rape survivors. As long as advertising solely urges women to take precautions, there will still be a world of ignorance out there, in women and men, about what is and isn't rape. So, you know, maybe the London authorities could allocate just one of their campaigns to raising awareness about what rape actually is? So that when a woman, having taken all other precautions on all the other days of her life HEINOUSLY SLIPS UP AND HAS ONE TOO MANY DRINKS, the person who may otherwise have committed rape, thinks about it and does not do so?

Here are three counterarguments to what I've just said. First, there will always be rapists so it is unrealistic to expect advertising to stop rape. Second, 'women-take-precautions!' adverts do something concrete to help so it is counterproductive to argue against them. Third, we don't campaign against other crimes by asking people not to commit them, i.e. a campaign saying 'don't murder' would be ludicrous.

I find the third the most immediately convincing of these counterarguments, and certainly its the one I've seen most used on internet forums and other places where such issues get discussed by calm, rational people. But the problem with it, as an argument goes, is that it fails to take into account just how much confusion there is surrounding rape. Like, killing is killing. If you kill someone you are a murderer, unless you are in some way legally less responsible, in which case it is manslaughter, which is also a very serious crime. Nobody thinks it is not real killing if you get killed by your partner. The only way you might be in some sense responsible for your own murder is if you have a history of violence against the person that kills you. If you walk home by yourself it's not your fault if you get killed. There might be other issues to discuss, but it is still killing. Rape is a different story. So many people, myself included, are unsure, in some cases, about whether what has happened is rape or isn't rape.

The recent 'Wake Up To Rape' (I think it's an unfortunate title, but hey) survey run by The Havens, based on a random sample of 1061 people in London, found that:
-Close to one in five respondents agree with the statement, "most claims of rape are probably not true" (18%)
-Close to one in five respondents do not know whether in a committed relationship it is rape when a man makes their partner have sex when they don't want to (18%)
-One in ten do not believe it is rape when a man makes their partner have sex when they don't want to (10%)
-20% of people have been made to have sex when they didn't want to.

Even taking into account a possible bias either way from the kinds of people who respond to rape surveys, I think some of these statistics might be related? Here's a feasible argument: if quite a large percentage of people are unsure what is and isn't rape, some people are committing rape through ignorance rather than willful criminality. Isn't it possible that some people may be stopped from raping if they know that what they are doing is a crime?

Let's talk about the second of the counterarguments, that if this kind of advertising stops even one person from being raped, it's doing its job and therefore, to campaign for removal is ridiculous. To some extent, this argument has a point. Of course it is better to have advertising that helps even slightly than nothing at all. But neither is it right to be entirely uncritical about what there is. When what there is could be improved, why not improve it? I do not frankly believe that there could be many women who have not been told repeatedly all their lives not to take endless, onerous security measures. I can't walk home by myself without hearing my mother's 'I don't like you out alone at night, it's not safe. Don't wear that skirt. Be careful not to drink too much.' voice resounding around my head. I don't think there is really a lack of awareness amongst women about staying safe, but there definitely is a lack of awareness among people about what consent is, what consent isn't, and about in what situations sex is rape. I will continue to contend for as long as it takes to anyone who will listen that it is in no way necessary or good to have anti-rape advertising that is so very distressing to both rape survivors and non-rape survivors (I MEAN, WHY ARE WE LOOKING AT THE WOMAN FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE RAPIST IF THE AD IS TARGETING POTENTIAL ATTACKEES?! Talk about male gaze!). The same point can be made in a million different, almost invariably better ways. The Tfl campaign was made with little to no collaboration with women's groups who, you know, work on this stuff for a living. The new one, which has just gone up, is a little better if just less graphically traumatising, but still doesn't really hit the mark in the way that 'Don't be that guy' does. If it is felt that a safety based campaign is necessary, why not couple it with one like the Canadian one featured above? Its not like there could be too many.

Last, the first counterargument, that it's unrealistic to expect advertising to stop rape. I've pretty much answered this already anyway. It's hugely patronising to men to suggest that rape on such a large scale is inevitable. We can, at the very least, reduce occurrence of rape to roughly the same occurrence as most other crimes.

Back to the Canadian campaign. Its not just that it places the onus squarely where it belongs, on those who may not know what constitutes rape or who may otherwise feel tempted to rape. It also makes clear that those men who become rapists are not, generally, psychopaths or lurking-behind-bushes-weirdos, rather, rapists are everyday men who for whatever reason (pick some: they don't think its rape, lack of awareness/understanding/empathy, patriarchy, dehumanisation of women, misogyny, participation in culture that blames women for rape, internalisation of raunch culture ideals about female sexuality, fallout from society that demonizes women for saying yes or no or nothing, etc etc etc) choose to exercise unwanted power over a woman, man or queer against their will.

I'll leave you with a really great comment I saw on a facebook group called 'Please please stop victim blaming on the London Underground', from a person called Kay Ri, who I hope won't mind me reproducing it here:

"Incidentally, when a thief is found with his hands full of stolen Christmas gifts, legal professionals tend not to conjecture that the theft was a willing donation.

"But Mr. Smith, you give to charity all the time-are you sure you didn't just make a big donation and then regret it the next morning?"

"You say that they were Christmas presents Mr. Smith; is it not true that Christmas is a time of giving? And yet you *claim* they were stolen...""


And finally finally, here are some other good links on this:
-Sexual Assault Prevention Tips That Work
-But Why Shouldn't She Take Some Responsibility Too For The Rape?

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.

A Suitable Aside

This is who I actually want to be: Fran Lebowitz. Just - famous for being a bit dilettante, not writing a book, and wearing bespoke suits. What an amazing woman.

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.