SlutWalking is rooted in riot grrrl attitude

I was extremely (sexually) excited this week to have a piece published on The Guardian's Comment is free. Find it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/09/slutwalk-feminist-activism

An image from a SlutWalk, or possibly an image from some sort of microwavable women's autonomy march. Not sure.

Also, here is a link to the official SlutWalk London website, now taking place on 11th June: http://slutwalklondon.tumblr.com/

A wolf in sheep's clothing (just a little rant)

"Peer pressure is a key contributor to early sexual activity in our country. Society is focused on sex. Teaching a child at the age of seven to apply a condom on a banana is almost saying: 'Now go and try this for yourself'. Girls are taught to have safe sex, but not how to say no to a boyfriend who insists on sexual relations."

- Nadine Dorries MP

Deceptions. Fictions. Dogmatic idiocy. Conservative MP Nadine Dorries is certainly a controversial figure. Tonight, Political Correctness Goes Mad takes an undercover* look into the sexual politics of the woman some call 'a psychotic, sexist lunatic' to find out - what the fuck is she thinking?

Hey, if we don't teach them about sex then maybe they will just never do it until they get married to nice vanilla heterosexual male-bodied people?

Last week Nadine Dorries MP managed to slime through a 'Ten Minute Rule Bill' on abstinence sex education. For girls only. I'm aware that there is not a hope in hell that this bill will become law, but still, the fact that it passed (67 to 61) is staggering.

Nadine Dorries MP's method is a little bit backhanded. She doesn't go directly for what she believes, having come to the rational conclusion that anybody with a brain cell will oppose the infliction of her prejudices onto wider society.

In this vein, the above quotation is strange. If not for the absurd and evidentially incorrect idea that teaching children how to put condoms on bananas will lead to an uncontrollable spate of young banana-rubbering hobbyists, one might even agree with it. Peer pressure does contribute to 'early', whatever this may mean, sexual activity. Girls are not taught how to say no to a boyfriend that insists.

Sure, we are taught that saying no is an option, but we aren't taught how to do it. We aren't taught how to say no when you're attracted to the other person and you want to fuck them but you don't have any means of getting protection. We aren't taught how to say no when you sort of want to, but you sort of don't want to, and you sort of think maybe another time might be better but you don't want to reject the other person completely and you don't want them to get angry. Dorries is also right insofar as we aren't taught to say no when the other person wants to and you totally don't. That's still a problem, and a serious one.

But we also aren't taught how to say yes, and this should be equally important. There are no lessons on saying yes when you want to have sex so badly and blood is pumping around your body and your cunt is a more pH neutral version of the Thames but you don't know how to convey to your (willing) partner that you also want to. Its difficult to know how to say yes when you're scared of being rejected, or called a slut, or that they might tell their friends at school.

Perhaps its different now, but in my day sex education focused solely on the conveniently erect penis going in the mysteriously self-lubricating vagina. ('When the penis goes in the vagina, the vagina becomes aroused and moistens') Really, sex education in 2001? What if your vagina prefers vagina, or what if you don't like penetration that much, or what if you need a bit more than that to get you off? Where in god's name is the discussion of the clitoris? What if you like to be tied down and spanked with a portrait of George Elliot whilst free jazz plays in the background? (this has nothing to do with my sex life, by the way)

Ok, so Nadine Dorries MP's conclusion from all these difficulties with navigating sexual exploration, is not that children need to be more comprehensively educated, but that we should attempt to stifle their burgeoning sexualities by TEACHING ABSTINENCE.

Sorry Nadine Dorries MP, but being taught to say no when you mean no, and yes when you mean yes, and how to do it differently when you need it to be done differently, has nothing to do with abstinence. Being taught abstinence suggests that sex is dirty, or wrong, or evil. This kind of 'education' has a counterproductive effect, heightening occurrences of rape, unwanted pregnancy, STD transmission, and generally unsatisfying sex because you haven't been taught how to do it at all, let alone how to do it well. This kind of ideology can't even really be described as education. It is the opposite to everything education should stand for: regressive, dogmatic, and ultimately, very very sexist.

That Dorries tries to wrap up her odious beliefs in slightly palatable seeming policy is all the more reason to oppose her. It is staggering that there are 67 people in Parliament who thought her ideas were reasonable rather than self-evidently GROTESQUE. We need to be constantly aware that these people still exist.


*Please note, by 'undercover' I mean that I'm writing this in bed. Now, back to practicing condom application on this bunch of phallic fruits.

The so-called Liberal Democrats need more discrimination

The most important thing happening today (wedding? what wedding?) is clearly this article, up on Labour Uncut: http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2011/04/29/the-so-called-liberal-democrats-need-more-discrimination/

Less of this please

How to play institutional conservative sexism for beginners

This article originally appeared as a guest post on Cath Elliott's wonderful blog Too Much To Say For Myself. Find it here: http://toomuchtosayformyself.com/2011/04/18/guest-post-how-to-play-institutional-conservative-sexism-for-beginners/

You say bureaucracy, I say kinky.

In a slightly homophobic game for straights known as ‘gay chicken’, two straight people of the same sex pretend to kiss, leaning closer and closer together until one ‘chickens out’ – pulling away from their game partner’s proverbially moistened lips. The point of it is to enable public bicurious flirting without the stigma of actually pulling that same-sexed someone who now, three pints into the party, seems much more snoggable than before.

Over the last year it has become clear that the government and friends are having a similar private joke, a kind of ‘sexist chicken’, if you will. The game functions in a similar manner; it could be aptly summarised as a game of ‘let’s see how many misogynist measures we can slide through under the guise of ‘healing the economy’ before we make ourselves physically sick and have to stop’. The obvious problematic difference between gay and sexist chicken is that after the flirtation of Cameron, Clegg, et al, with policies of the kind that really cause harm to people, the landscape of women’s support services and corresponding equalities legislations will be unrecognisable.

As each anti-feminist measure is announced, couched in the bogus rhetoric of economic necessity, it becomes obvious that this government sees gender equality as an irrelevance. As the concerted barrage of political attacks on women continues, the feminist infrastructure that has been slowly built up over the last thirty years, the institutional resistance that is in place to oppose such measures, will be steadily weakened.

Three events over the last few weeks really stand out as symptomatic of the success the coalition has already had in rolling back feminist achievements.

One is, of course, the Red Tape Challenge website, which enables ‘consultation’ on those annoying, bureaucratic regulations designed to protect the public from the state, the vulnerable from the strong. Those regulations deigned to be ‘burdensome’ will go unless Ministers make a strong case for them to stay. Unsurprisingly, the 2010 Equalities Act is high on the list.

From the Red Tape webpage, it is entirely unclear whether the aim is to remove/change, for example, the definitions and applications of terms, or to remove/change the substance of the act – the stuff that makes it illegal, at least officially, to discriminate, and defines what that discrimination consists of.

And indeed, this is the point. This consultation is not really about public accountability, nor is it about improving the legislation we have. A quick glance at the website makes it obvious that this is really about rolling back that pesky equalities agenda. To suggest that what we really need is to reassess the legislation that has only just been put in place or, worse – scrap it altogether – is like suggesting that it is invariably better to replace War and Peace with a box of nice coloured crayons, i.e. fucking stupid.

(I imagine discussions inside Tory HQ to be a bit like this: ‘Hey George! Do people really need to be legally protected from discrimination on the grounds of sex, race, gender identity, disability, etc? Can’t we just cut the list down by one so that we can say we’re cutting red tape?’ ‘Yeah Dave, you’re totally right. Let’s get rid of sex, then we can reintroduce legal discrimination against women working in small businesses, so that small businesses don’t have to give statutory maternity leave. We can sell that as ‘healing the economy’.’ ‘Great idea, George, you’re the best. Let’s make out.’)

Another ludicrous, revolting, attack on women is the decision, announced this week, to reallocate much of the Poppy Project’s government funding to the Salvation Army. Words fail on this one. This decision appears to completely deny evangelical Christianity’s record on women’s rights, women’s bodies, women’s autonomy, sexual shame and guilt, contraception, homosexuality, abortion, women’s sexuality. The list goes on.

Whether one agrees with Eaves’ (the charity that runs the Poppy Project) perspective on sex work or not, I know that if I were trafficked into prostitution, voluntarily or otherwise, I would want to receive support from a women’s charity that supported a feminist discourse of rights, rather than a missionary-esque Christian group that by their own definition promotes monogamous heterosexuality.

This is not to forget Nadine Dorries and Frank Field’s proposed dirty amendments to the Health and Social Care Bill. Dorries has the sheer galling audacity to describe herself as ‘pro-women’, whilst simultaneously proposing that women be forced to have counseling before having an abortion. Presumably in Dorries’ mind, a pro-woman attitude is analogous with the attitude that abortion could so easily be eradicated if only those recalcitrant, stubborn, contraception-evading sluts would stop being so selfish and start carrying babies to term! The amendment is quite obviously a classic case of sexist paternalism; a template instantiation of women’s bodily autonomy denial amateurishly masquerading as care.

In all of this there is a very human cost. As these misogynist measures pile up the painstakingly crafted edifice of institutionalised non-sexism is steadily eroded. On the one hand, the more material feminist commentators have to point to to say: ‘look! these policies are anti-women!’ the more ammo anti-government voices will appear to have to a sometimes indifferent-seeming public. On the other hand, I fear that by the time any powerful majority wakes up and admits that this is what is happening, and that it matters, the structural services that promote women’s equality will be decimated.

Princess Kate’s reality TV wedding

Article originally published at The F Word: http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2011/04/princess_kate_royal_wedding

Leave me out of your utterly banal "happy national celebrations", kthx bye.

“It would be extremely unwise of anyone to try and spoil a happy day of national celebration.” - Boris Johnson, feminist icon

Once upon a time, in the far away land of Berkshire, a beautiful little girl called Catherine was born to the nouveau riche Middleton family. As she grew older, she would sit by a wishing well, singing daintily to the mysteriously sentient birds that clustered there. It is said that proletarian residents of the Middletons’ village would hear strains of ‘Someday my prince will come’ floating over the wall of the house where little Kate was confined. Very shortly after Kate began singing about wanting a prince to rescue her from her debilitating solitude, he appeared. Aside from a few minor dwarf-oriented subplots, they were soon conjoined in holiest matrimony and lived happily ever after.

Wait, now I come to think about it, that might be the basic plot of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. Nowadays, Disney heroines are very slightly less a misogynist’s wet dream, but you could be forgiven, after reading much of the media coverage of the forthcoming royal wedding, for thinking 1937 has come again (hopefully much like Snow White’s prince. And Snow White, obviously. I do hope that they both managed to come regularly during their happily married lives.)

Fictional characters’ orgasm frequencies aside, the media build up to the royal wedding has slowly but surely lubricated the royalists’ clunky marketing machine, as a result of which Kate Middleton, a rich and privileged but otherwise normal person, is re-branded as the central figure in an odd sort of fairy parable. Allusions to this archetypal story in which a peasant woman marries a prince and becomes a princess buttress the lurid media coverage. The objectionable assumption is that the archetype still has the power or relevance to transfix the nation’s imagination.

The sheer relentlessness with which attainment of princesshood is being presented as both desirable and admirable is frankly a little bit sickening. I’m under no illusions about the number of people who keep the radical feminist analysis of prince/princess mythologies that is Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating under their pillows (if you are one of these people please call me). But one doesn’t have to be a die-hard Dworkinite to recognise every story reporting on some irrelevant minutiae of the wedding’s organisation, and every scare about ‘anarchists’ targeting the national celebrations, as more grist to the mill of the whole gender-role-pushing, vulgar, money-spinning bandwagon.

Imagine strong, handsome, ruddy-cheeked Prince William giving up his job as a helicopter pilot to marry a prince (or a princess of the kind that is actually heir to a modicum of state power, even as figurehead)

On many accounts, Kate has given up her previous career, at least for the build up to the wedding, in preparation for the onset of princessness. It would be unfair to simply blame her for this. I can only imagine what kinds of pressures she may be under to conform to what is expected. But at the same time, I have not really seen any journalist challenge the seemingly foregone logic that marrying a prince primarily entails a full-time role as official princess.

The implication is that subsequent to the marriage, Kate’s career will be distinctly secondary, that really, her subsequent career will be ‘princess’. It is as if the title confers a difference in kind on its grateful acquirer, once merely mortal, now passively reified, admitted to the sacramental circles of the blue blooded.

As far as I can make out, the role of someone who is only a princess by virtue of marrying a prince is this: a prince’s wife, a mother to heirs, an attender of state functions, perhaps with some occasional token charity work. William will not give up his job as a helicopter pilot, nor is it suggested that he should.

Extrapolating from the favourable media reports that William asked Kate’s dad’s permission for her hand, we might be able to just about deduce that this is no modern, feminist marriage. As if Kate’s dad owns her hand, or any other part of her. A recent ‘big story’, that William will not wear a wedding ring, though Kate will, is further icing on the cake of their royally betrothed power dynamic. Unlike William, Kate will be defined merely in virtue of her marriage - something utterly antithetical to the great strides feminism is supposed to be making into the upper echelons of institutionalised sexist tradition.

Equal celebration and denigration of woman-only-as-wife are still rife in much, if not most of the national media. One needs only to contrast the considerable coverage allotted to, for example, male politicians and footballer’s female partners, with the relative obscurity of female politicians and footballers, to see this. Some writers seem to consider the right to free speech as a go-ahead for an insidious misogyny which threatens to force traditional gender roles down our throats until we stop muttering nonsense about women being human too, or whatever. The media’s wholehearted advocation of Kate Middleton as being successful, more successful than those other women who only do things like conflict resolution or working on a cure for cancer or sitting on the board of a company, is not just sexist and retrograde, but also slightly surreal.

At stake here, however, is not just the idea of woman as wife, but a specific instantiation of a riches-to-aristocracy princess mythology. Princess Kate is good, kind, beautiful, well-mannered and passive, like all fairytale princesses. What Catherine Middleton is actually like as a person is irrelevant to the story we are being sold.

The trick here is to imagine the gender roles the other way round. Imagine strong, handsome, ruddy-cheeked Prince William giving up his job as a helicopter pilot to marry a prince (or a princess of the kind that is actually heir to a modicum of state power, even as figurehead). Imagine that it is assumed he will spend much of his time henceforth raising heirs, being beautiful, going to parties and dressing well. Can you imagine this happening? I can’t. The maintenance of polarised binary gender is well and truly alive within the royal wedding’s national narrative. Kate might as well stock up on pink, glittery princess outfits from the Disney store right now, preferably from a range that does matching mother and daughter dresses (though perhaps she will hope for sons until such time as the UK sees fit to overturn male-preference primogeniture laws).

The promotion of stereotypical gender roles is blatant, but other, less conspicuous assumptions support the credulous, glowing media reports. One such assumption is that even though our society is ostensibly just about OK with homosexuality, unmarried cohabitation, non-monogamous couplings and so on - what we really should all still be aspiring to is Wills and Kate’s ideal, heterosexual marriage between young, attractive, rich white people in a church. This is marriage’s ultimate Platonic form, the reporters seem to be implying, this is what you should all aspire to. We understand that not everyone can marry their Prince Charming, but by god we should be trying to. If we can’t bring ourselves to completely renounce our wicked, sinful, fornication-outside-of-holy-matrimony ways, then we should at least pretend to be buying into the culture that supports the opposite.

Indeed, buying is the operative term. Feeding into the royal wedding’s unsubtly enforced premise of national celebration, is, of course, an unabashed assumption that we will consume as we are told. Look at how happy the nation is on this wonderful day! Buy this poorly designed tea towel! Here, have a mug as well! Not lucky enough to be invited to the special event? Oh well, cheer yourself up by pre-ordering an official commemorative coin! Even the kingdom’s peasants can take away some Wills & Kate merchandise.

Aside from being entirely revolting in itself, the furore around the royal wedding provides a current on which those with a vested interest in making money out of selling sexism can ride. One example are the odious Princess Prep classes, advertised with the tag-line ‘All little girls dream of becoming a princess’. This summer school is provided to girls (and only to girls) too young to have much developed their capacity for analytical engagement with the implications of the activities on which they are enrolled. I can’t help thinking that if the girls attending princess classes are not at the same time provided with the critical tools to make up their own minds about whether the stifling docility of the princess role is for them, it is a form of, at least… severely questionable teaching.

Even for those, both young and old, who escape such official indoctrination, the internalisation of such retrograde ideas about gender is tough to avoid in a cultural climate which is currently doing its very best to promote moral admiration of the heterosexist ‘Wills & Kate’ ideal.

This is a reality TV show wedding. It’s a little surprising that Modern-Day Princess™: Kate’s Big Day Approaches, “a fly-on-the-wall show following Kate Middleton as she prepares for the greatest day of her life”, hasn’t yet been made. The unremitting marketing, merchandising and the promotion of a sexist status quo that underpins it all is everything that might be associated with the crass value system of reality TV. The Guardian’s April Fools’ joke, that they would be running a 24-hour live blog of all the preparations from 1 to 29 April, was spot on. But I, for one, am not buying it.