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The second picture of Portia and Ellen on this blog so far. Might have to start a new one dedicated solely to them.
I recently found out that our reigning celesbian married couple have now become as homo-norm as you can legally get – yes, Portia has officially taken Ellen’s name. They are now the DeGeneres’s. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, exactly. I can understand wanting to self-define in a way that reflects your married identity, but what’s wrong with Mrs. DeGeneres and Mrs. de Rossi?
According to BBC News Portia is keeping de Rossi as a professional name, to which I say – why bother changing it at all? Ellen and Portia are obviously the most famous married lesbians in the world: Portia doesn’t need to adopt ‘DeGeneres’ to define her, if you are anything like me you know and love them and the fact that they are married, presumably they know and love the fact that they are married, if she’s keeping de Rossi for half the time anyway why not just keep it full stop? Like, de Rossi is an awesome name, why get rid of it?
It’s irritating beyond belief when straight women today continue the old tradition of changing their names, blindly, as if it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Frankly, we haven’t reached the stage yet, gender equality-wise, where marriages are so equal that changing one’s name can just be a lovely custom, devoid of historical context.
Replacing your name with your partner’s implicitly supports a conception of marriage as an contract of possession – whereby the man takes the woman into his family as a nice looking bit of property. Protest as people might that they simply didn’t like their name before (my mother’s favourite justification), the fact is that assuming one’s partner’s name implies a dynamic of possessor and possessed, of one party’s control over what should be a twofold identity. The concept of the ‘head of the family’, the ‘man as provider’, and so on, really hasn’t gone away. Physical and sexual violence are still rife within marriages, and where customs uphold the sexism that feeds these inequalities, I reckon they need to go.
On the other hand, you might think that Portia and Ellen both being women alters the facts on the ground in some way. Like, if it’s lesbians it’s fine, right, because where there is no man it doesn’t matter who changes their name?
No way sailor-girl. Queer marriage is a relatively new thing, and people are still trying to shape it, and to make sense of it, and it’s not particularly clear to me that the adoption of another’s name, whatever genders you are, does anything to transgress or subvert. We’ve all experienced people insisting on viewing lesbian relationships through a straight lens: i.e. questions like ‘but, who is the man in the relationship?’ Worse, (and particularly infuriating if like me you can’t help looking femme most of the time), there’s still an assumption that the butch-er looking partner in any given lesbian couple is the dominant, manly one.
Listen, whilst my attempts at butch gender presentation can often be described as laughable, however successful they might be, I am not the man in the relationship. But neither is my (nonexistent) girlfriend the man – in my (not currently happening) relationship, there is no man: capiche? It totally doesn’t help that Portia is the ‘femme’ one and Ellen is the ‘butch’ one, and that Portia is the one changing her name, this plays right into the notion that the more masculine partner is the man.
Words are powerful, and where words characterise identities, they are doubly powerful. It’s amazing that in some countries in the world lesbian marriage is legal, and I stand up for the right of all people of all genders and sexualities to marry whomever they chose. But if we don’t keep our marriages queer, we end up assimilating into the very heterosexist dynamic that gay marriage should – if we are right to bother campaigning for it at all – transgress. And that kind of behaviour fucks me right off.
‘After a breakup a friend of mine Swarovski Crystaled my...ummm...precious lady. And umm...and it shined like a disco ball, and so I have a whole chapter in there about how women should vajazzle their, vajayjays....It looks like a little disco ball down there, its great....it does...and...and it’s hot pink today, for you. So that’s good.’
- Jennifer Love Hewitt, discussing her new book on ‘Lopez Tonight’.
A year or so ago a good friend sent me a Youtube clip called ‘Clitter! Its Glitter for Your Vagina!’ Featuring the unforgettable lines ‘thanks Clitter, for turning my labia into a yaybia!’ and ‘Clitter turned my yeast infection...into a jewel collection,’ the clip was an obvious yet diverting send up of those ubiquitous beauty adverts which purport to endow lifelong happiness if only women would buy into the relevant product. The clip showed deliberately crude upskirt shots of female celebrities’ crotches covered over with MS Paint-like attempts at glitter. In short, Clitter was ridiculous, and because it was ridiculous, it was quite funny.
Ironic then, that where my friends send me videos mocking the ludicrous idea of decorative glitter for the cunt, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s friends suggest she lie down and get the hot wax out. That’s right, some women in the world, in the real, substantial world, have decided that pubic diamante applications are not self-evidently nauseating but rather, sexy and fun. Clitter has actually become reality, but cunn(t)ingly retitled as ‘vajazzling’. You’ve got to hand it to Hewitt, vajazzling is a pretty clever name. Because it is a pun. It has two meanings at once, get it? Meaning number one: vajayjay, (I’m presuming that this is a word for the vagina) delineating the general area to be glitzed up. Meaning number two: jazz, like jazzy, like jazzy diamantes. Or jazzy Swarovski crystals, if you have loads of money to waste an expensive crystal collection on the area where your pubes should be.
Except, this fad has nothing to do with the vagina. Indeed, in the vajazzling clip from inane TV show ‘The Only Way is Essex’, which I hold to blame for bringing the vajazzle to British shores, the vajazzling beautician (vajazzler) explicitly warns the proto-vajazzled client (vajazzlee) that the vajazzles are not to be glued to the actual vagina (vajina?). As the Anne Summers uniform-wearing vajazzler says, ‘basically, don’t put it on your bits, basically.’ And therein lies the flaw in what is otherwise a reasonably catchy way to repackage something so banal that I still can’t believe it really exists. Hewitt et al are not really entitled to say ‘vajazzle your vajayjay!’ or whatever it is they say, because the vajazzles don’t go anywhere near your actual vajayjay. The word ‘vagina’ refers specifically to, for want of a better word, the hole that all the other bits of the vulva surround. Vajazzles explicitly don’t go on the vajayjay. They also don’t go on your clitoris, your labia minora, your labia majora, your greater and lesser vestibular glands, your vestibular bulbs, your vulval vestibule, or any of your other external genital organs. As a non-scientist, I admit I just looked up some of those names on Wikipedia. Anyway, apparently, the official name for the place that the vajazzles actually go is the ‘mons pubis’. Perhaps unfortunately for aspiring vajazzlers everywhere, ‘monspubisjazzle your mons pubis!’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
To casually subsume such a politically, sexually, and biologically complex part of women’s anatomies under the totalizing concept of ‘vagina’, or ‘hole that the man penetrates’, is utterly objectionable and highly sexist. This is a retrograde concept of female sexuality, one that overlooks the arguably much more vital role that the rest of the genitals, and more, rest of the body, play in sex and eroticism. I see the lazy conflation of the waxed pubic area with the vagina as symptomatic of the prevalence of the ‘teenaged Nuts-reader’ mentality; in viewing endless pictures of women (repackaged as ‘girls’) nude from the front on, we internalise the idea that the pubic region simply is the female genitalia, and conveniently forget that underneath all that are real, odorous, vital, wet, dry, aggressive, soft, hairy, receptive, hard, human genitals. I mean, what could be less suited to a trivialising star/rainbow/pretty butterfly decoration than genitalia? If this is intended as a way that women can affirm and identify with our own bodies, fine, but can we have something a bit less...diamante? Maybe as a way to affirm, identify, empower, etc, we could instead have cultural narratives that embrace a variety of bodies and a set of beauty regimes that are even slightly less demanding, alienating, and infantilising?
Actually, for something ostensibly presented as idiosyncratic of some modern femininities to lazily take on an ignorant, simplifying, het-male-gaze view of female genitalia really just points to a wider problem with this whole vajazzling practice. In all Hewitt’s self-denigrating talk of cute little disco balls, it is unquestioned that a prospective vajazzler will have to completely wax her cunt, thereby further relegating the female body to the realm of unthreatening object: there for male pleasure. Why the necessary full wax? Can’t I put Swarovski crystals in my massive bush, if I choose to? A liberal sprinkling and it would be like a cute little mohair disco ball down there. I’m joking, my cunt isn’t cute, and I would never decorate my pubes with crystals because a: as I’ve hinted, I think it is endlessly stupid, and b: I would hope that any prospective partner of mine would not be able to have sex for laughing if they took down my underwear and found crystals inside.
Practices like these continue the ongoing process of normalisation of a sexist-ualised culture which simply expects women to conform to pornographic standards. It is well documented that women often self-objectify, how could we not when we receive constant cultural conditioning telling us that even if we don’t want to attract men, we should still shave/wax our legs, armpits, cunts, arms, eyebrows, moustaches, we should still wear clothes that are uncomfortable, impractical and constricting, we should still wear shoes that hurt and prevent us from walking, we should still diet until we are stick thin, still always wear full make up before leaving the house, still straighten or curl or dye our hair, still refrain from making ourselves strong and fit, and what’s more, we should do all these things for ourselves, because we like to do them? Sorry, but I can recognise bullshit when I hear it.
It is not just that monspubisjazzling is silly, even though it is. It is also self-othering and self-trivialising in the way that all needless ‘beauty’ practices are. First and foremost women are human subjects, and even if we sometimes take up ornamental practices, we should not reduce ourselves to them. The general genital region is culturally significant, and reasonably so, and I am not sure that its conversion into a site for decor should be seen as less meaningful than it is. Sure, if a woman performs a stereotypically feminine gender act because she enjoys it, or because she wants to look/feel sexy, or for whatever reason, she totally has the right to do that, but even in our modern feminist lexicon of consumer choice, the motivations behind ornamental practices should never go unquestioned or uncriticised. As Clitter pointed out of cunt glitter, ‘known side effects include extreme vaginal irritation, dry mouth, and fabulous looking herpes.’ However disco-fab pubic diamantes might be, I’m sticking with the hair what grows there.
Disclaimer: I'm aware that Laurie Penny has just written about the vajazzle probably better and definitely more succinctly, but I wrote this ages ago and just hadn't put it up yet. Whatevs Laurie, stop copying me.
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.
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.
