Please keep our children safe from men's football commentators

The Daily Mail Mantra for Successful Article Writing

What an amazing day for news stories to boil the blood! The first occurrence was the deafening arrival of Melanie 'probably a lesbian' Phillips into my field of reference. In that bastion of enlightenment known as the Daily Mail, she wrote an opinion piece containing some unbelievable lunacy about 'The Gay Agenda' and its supposedly relentless drive to indoctrinate children. Here are some real, live, actual sentences from the article:

'...mad as this may seem, schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.'

and

'Alas, this gay curriculum is no laughing matter. Absurd as it sounds, this is but the latest attempt to brainwash children with propaganda under the camouflage of education. It is an abuse of childhood.'

and

'It seems that just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda.'

You read that correctly. Melanie Phillips actually, in nationally published print, described the possibility that children might one day be taught that same-sex oriented penguins exist, as 'an abuse of childhood'. Not just 'something I disagree with', but 'an abuse of childhood '. I think out of any subset of people that includes Melanie Phillips, somebody needs to acquire some perspective.

Anyway, if she's right about this unjustifiable incursion of tolerance and understanding into our national education, I for one would like to find the gay agenda and her sinful sexual partner (the 'belief in equal rights for all agenda'?) wherever they're currently living, and give them a good talking to. There'll be no dirty homos in my B&Bs or in my schools, that's for sure. Disgusting. We all know that homosexuality doesn't exist in Iran, so maybe we should take a leaf out of their book? On the other hand it was difficult to get too worked up about this (I thought, some time after I'd calmed down) given that it is just so, so, blatantly hateful that nobody can feasibly be taking it seriously.

But then a Tory MP from the esteemed Fathers 4 Justice school of gender analysis decided that teh menz are terribly oppressed, and called for 'men's equality'. His comments were made in light of recent news concerning the disproportionate and unfair number of successful women in politics, business, sport, all other companies, and the world. He also said something about how women now rule the world, officially, because now, all of a sudden, it is primarily men who suffer from domestic and sexual violence at the hands of women, and also women own like a thousand times more land and property than men, and women's affairs dominate the world political agenda, and 70% of the people who live in poverty in the world are men, and men are continually denigrated in all world cultures, and in many countries men aren't allowed out by themselves and have to cover up their faces in case they inflame the violent passions of libidinous women, and most words that represent negative qualities are masculine ones, and we tend to refer to all people as 'she', conveniently ignoring the relevance or importance of male existence. Then he went on to describe the way in which the main burden of childcare and domestic household responsibility still falls on men, and about how men still don't have much medical or legal control over their bodies or reproductive capacities. And apparently there are now massive problems with the manipulation of the male image in the media, leading to disproportionate numbers of young men developing anxieties about their bodies, leading to eating disorders and so on. And also this is only exacerbated by a multi-billion pound porn industry which is mostly comprised of male-submissive fetish material rewrapped as normal heteronormative sexuality. Oh wait, hold on...

Anyway, the Tory MP has been all over the papers saying something about men being oppressed and feminists being the worst kind of bigots, which sounds extremely reasonable and is definitely backed up by true facts.

Why do people in positions of relative privilege feel so threatened by the smallest advances in civil rights movements? It is surely hardly anything to Melanie Phillips if kids get taught about the existence of homosexual and transgender people in schools, and it is hard to see how it can be particularly threatening to well-moneyed Tories that the women's movement has made some legislative progress over the last thousand years.

It also wouldn't take much for anti-feminists of the masculinist ilk to actually read a bit of feminist theory and find out that all the issues they point to, fairly, as gender constraints on men, are all the same issues that feminists have previously pointed out as gender constraints on men. Nobody wants additional paternity leave and stretching of understandings of the male gender role more than feminists do, and given that this information is well-known and easily available, I can't help but think that the focus on straw-feminism masks nothing more than internalised contempt for feminist challenges to female gender roles.

This brings me, finally, to what was originally intended as the focus of this increasingly lengthy diatribe. The final story of the day concerned two men's football commentators, Andy Grey and Richard Keys, making abhorrently sexist comments about lineswoman Sian Massey. The video below doesn't quite detail the extent of the comments but it gives a representative indication of the flavour of the conversation.



The thing is that all of this isn't particularly unbelievable. Where I'm surprised that homophobes like Melanie Phillips still get a voice today, even in the Daily Mail, its not at all surprising that those involved so deeply in men's football are sexist. Well, duh? Professional men's sports in the UK, particularly football, are among the most overtly sexist fields that there are. Sexism is accepted as part of the culture of men's football. Whilst there are loads of men in women's football, with some very honourable exceptions aside, there are next to no women working successfully in men's football. Nobody currently bats an eyelid that the women's game hardly ever gets on TV and invariably isn't in the papers, even when the women's side are world champions.

This was really brought home to me the other day when speaking to a woman from Sweden, who told me that moving to England had been a massive shock for her, because she'd turned on the TV to catch up on the football, and found that women's games weren't covered. Think about it. There are approximately twenty million Sky TV channels exclusively dedicated to sports, but I'd estimate (with no particular backing evidence, are there any studies on this?) that time given to women's sports is less than 15%, with much of that given over to women's tennis and athletics. In almost every newspaper in England there is a section at the back misleadingly entitled 'Sport', which openly and unapologetically reports on only half the sports that take place. I see this as grossly obvious sexism, yet it seems to go unnoticed, or at least, unmentioned, by most people for most of the time.

This is important because men's football is one of the big, stereotypical drivers of male homosociality, a.k.a the way in which some men cluster around worship of masculinity in a bonding way that excludes female participation except at a secondary level. I fundamentally object to the idea that I should go to a pub and peruse a male sporting event; that I should use masculinity-appreciation as a tactic for bonding with my friends when I know damn well that the same thing would never happen for a women's game. More, in the appreciation of traits we associate with maleness, strength, skill, stamina, and so on, there is an implicit celebration of man as not-woman. It is this kind of attitude that keeps women's sports relegated to the sidelines (what?! women who can do these things too?!) and that preserves involvement in and appreciation of high-end men's football as a men's-mostly pursuit.

Some commenters from the political-correctness-gone-mad brigade (also known as the 'don't challenge our prejudices' club) apparently thought Andy Grey and Richard Keys' comments were, and I hesitate to use to word, 'banter'. I personally think that they should both be summarily executed, that men's football should be banned from television or newspapers, and that it should be illegal to show men's sports in public places. As ever, though, this is just my all-powerful gay feminazi bigot's agenda, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, so let's just sack the both of them, have more coverage of the women's game, and have done with it.

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?