Why I'm (what I call) excited, for Miranda Series Three

A little while ago a very small and gentle TV revolution took place. You probably didn't notice, or if you did you probably thought, 'who is that large unusual looking woman, why is she on TV, and who is letting her try to make jokes?' Certainly, my initial thoughts were mostly that, dressed up in 'this really isn't funny'... 'this is really obvious humour', and other, similar rebuffs often used to denigrate women in comedy. Then I got to the sitting-on-whatIcall-the-sofa-every-Monday-waiting-for-Miranda-point, and it's been plain sailing ever since.



Since Season Two ended a couple of weeks ago TV hasn't been the same. Why is Miranda so great? I'll tell you why. Miranda is great because it is a tiny crack in the facade of one kind of humour presented as the only kind of humour that otherwise permeates British comedy. The fact that Miranda has somehow got on to our screens with a female-led, knowing, whimsical slapstick is nothing short of a miracle. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of mainstream comedy shows like 'Peep Show', 'Mock the Week', 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks', 'QI', &C &C, which as far as I can tell invariably feature men who think they are very funny and clever sometimes saying quite funny and clever things whilst the token women/woman laugh(s) appreciatively. I'm also a fan of many of the male stand up comedians around at the moment, though I can't actually think of any examples. Maybe it goes without saying that I'm a much bigger fan of any of the female comedians that make it onto the little screen - but not since Smack the Pony has there been a genuinely wonderful female-driven comedy that has been as hugely successful as Miranda is. (Though there have been many wonderful female-driven shows which haven't made it so big, particularly Beehive)

By the time we reach about fourteen, or leave our girls-only schools for the mixed world, I reckon it's fair to say that most people have internalised this idea: Women-Aren't-Funny. What that means is, of course, that even when women are funny (i.e. it would be funny if a man said it), they aren't, because nobody finds them funny, because women can't be funny. Any time someone female is making a joke in a public forum there's a kind of bracing in the audience, as if to say, this better bloody be good if you expect me to find this funny. Women comedians/comediennes(?) face a wall of subconscious resistance that men do not face, before they can convince anyone - little wonder that so few make it onto the television at all.

More, as women aren't funny, men get to define what's funny all by themselves. Unsurprising then that humour is still so dominated by celebrations of masculinity, and that a staple of comedy is still the denigration of anybody outside the white-man box. I used to think Frankie Boyle was good on Mock the Week, but the fact that in 2010 somebody decided it would be cutting-edge to give him a television slot solely to say the most offensive things possible for an hour at a time, is as mystifying as it is puerile. Toy trains being orally raped by station owners (cue hilarious floods of semen) is surely not funny to anybody over the age of twelve, or anyone who understands anything at all about rape. Boyle's 'controversial' humour comes across to me as a bit like a bloke on a stage waving a flag saying 'I've found a niche market full of people who think that political correctness spoils their privileged and God-given entitlement to make fun of the less privileged! Those people run television! Go me!'

Which is why Miranda is so great. Miranda doesn't need to play the childish 'haha I done a taboo' card because Miranda is actually a clever, witty and observant writer. Miranda makes humour out of amping up the small awkward moments beyond all reasonable proportion, which has been done many times, but she doesn't it from a pretty much untouched perspective, that of an engagingly normal woman. She opens up a new kind of subjectivity in the field of situation comedy. Women doing slapstick - whatever next?! Woman flirting with the camera, but as a friend not a lover? I've not seen so many excellently timed raised-eyebrow actor/camera/audience moments since Frankenfurter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Women inside a joke shop singing brief snatches of M People to a conveniently placed Heather Smalls mask? Definitely haven't laughed so hard at that before.

It's not just the character of Miranda who gets the laughs either. Patricia Hodge as Miranda's, what I call, mother, is just SUCH FUN!* Frankly, if you have a mother, and if your mother is even slightly overbearing, you will understand how her character can be both sharply observed and completely overplayed. One brilliant episode from the last series is thirty minutes of Miranda and her mother trying to look normal in front of an unflinching psychiatrist. I think I have never laughed so hard. And that's not to mention the wonderful but brief appearances from Sally Phillips ('bear with...bear with...') as the old school friend with a penchant for the most irritating slang possible.

Look, the fact is that you won't appreciate Miranda if you approach it confrontationally. If you whack it on thinking, ok, this better be good, frankly you probably won't laugh. Sit down to your computer with an open mind, watch a couple of episodes, and tell me if you don't think that this wonderful, whimsical, gentle show isn't exactly what British comedy needs a Season Three of. Such fun.





*Please see show for references

If 'doms, why not dams?

It's about twenty to four on a Sunday afternoon. Having spent an hour in Boots frantically but unsuccessfully searching for what I need, I am now in my local pharmacy. This pharmacy stocks literally every product under the sun and is open seven days a week till ten p.m. Do you have a minor skin ailment on the underside of your left knee-cap at certain times during the month? This pharmacy has a multitude of creams and lotions for it. Do you find that your child resolutely only speaks German whenever your second cousin comes round? The person behind the counter will prescribe you something, trust me. I'm taking my time, sidling around the shop, looking extremely casually through every shelf. Then I find what I'm looking for. The contraception section has, very cunningly, or so I think, been shelved next to the oral hygiene section. 'Aha!' I say to myself (silently)'. Someone here has a warped sense of humour, and has slid the dental dams in next to the condoms, but on the oral shelf. Brilliant.

But no such luck. Condoms and lube give way to dental floss and toothbrushes. Not a sneakily placed packet of dental dams in sight. After looking intently at hairbrushes for at least five minutes to placate the multitude of people in the shop judging me during my contraception contemplation, I finally pluck up the courage to talk to the lady behind the counter.

'Excuse me', I shout awkwardly, 'do you stock dental dams?' Unfortunately the operative 'dental dams' bit of the sentence comes out in a strangled whisper so I have to repeat it several times, like, 'what?', 'dental dams', 'what?', 'dental dams?', what??' DENTAL DAMS??!'. It's a bit like that scene in every sketch show where the protagonist of the sketch deliberately doesn't hear what someone is quite obviously saying in order to embarrass and frustrate them. The woman stares at me like I'm a bleeding idiot and gets another chemist out from behind the medicines section to deal with me.

So I have to ask again: 'do you stock any dental dams?'
'Dental floss?' he asks, pointing to the dental floss in case I am unclear on what it is.
'No, dental dams,' I reiterate.
'What is it for?' he asks me, and at this point the feminist conviction that I should be completely comfortable talking to anyone and everyone about sex and sexuality is starting to lose out in my mind against the instinct to run away and forget this ever happened.
Like an immature thirteen year old, I mutter, 'for contraception'. (Even though strictly speaking they are not contraceptive but prophylactic, I know. Maybe this is where I went wrong.)

'Contraceptive pill?' he asks.
'No, dental dam.'

Hey baby, I've got us a little something for later

Firstly, I'm not exaggerating this conversation. It genuinely took place without recourse to verbs or adjectives. Also, my simple request has now caused enough consternation that the chemist gets another chemist out from the medicines section, and together they start debating the merits of dental floss as contraception in a low whisper that somehow manages to highlight to me the flashing 'DOC MARTINS WEARING DYKE REQUESTS PERVERSE ORAL SEX PROTECTION MECHANISM' sign above my head. As if I hadn't noticed it the minute I started talking about dental dams in public. The chemists go back behind the counter and beckon me to follow them to a computer upon which they are presumably looking up what a dental dam is. They're looking at the computer and I'm on the other side. The kinds of websites that might be coming up are running through my mind and I'm trying desperately to keep a straight face as if this is completely routine and normal.

After about five minutes the first chemist looks up and says, 'dental...can you spell it?'

'D, E, N, T, A, L, you know, like dental, that well known thing that you stock many products for, D, A, M. Like a dam. D for dog, A for apple, M for Mother. For contraception.' An eternity seems to go by as the chemists stare at the screen. I can't tell whether I'm making it up but the one on the left seems to be trying not to laugh. I imagine them looking at pornographic pictures of straight-man's-lesbians using dental dams in various ways upon each other. I'm trying not to laugh/cry in sheer horror at a situation in which asking for what should be a pretty routine prophylactic turns into the equivalent of me walking into a shop full of people and shouting 'I AM A LESBIAN! SHOULD I GET INTO A SEXUAL SITUATION I WOULD LIKE TO PROTECT MYSELF AND OTHERS FROM ORALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES! PLEASE ENABLE ME TO DO THIS! OH BY THE WAY I AM A LESBIAN!'

Anyway in the end the first chemist looks up, and says in a faux-conspiratorial tone, 'I think I can get the thing you want. Call us tomorrow.' As if we're in a B-movie drugs heist. So I leave the shop with as much dignity and grace as I can muster. I'm not going back.

But the point of this piece is, apart from to detail both the acute embarrassment I felt in asking for dental dams and the unbelievable level of ignorance that my request was met with, actually surely it isn't just lesbians who need to use them? Presumably anybody who is buying condoms needs also to buy dams, or customize their condoms and then put them back in the little packets for future reference, in order to up the old safety levels? Why aren't people using them, and given that my internet research tells me that increasingly people are, why aren't they stocked in chemists? I'm pretty sure that this shouldn't be as fringe a thing as it seems to be, and despite the fact that covering your partner's genitalia with a latex rectangle is probably quite unsexy for most non-fetishists, the equally vile condoms seem to have caught on. So why not dams? Answers on a bit of plastic, please.

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.