Yes, a moment which was either two or five years in the making, depending on how you look at it, has finally come to pass. I'm a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Public Administration - or, as I prefer to think of it, a Spinster of Arts and a Mistress of Public Administration. A uniquely feminine educated entity conforming briefly to patriarchal standards of intelligence measurement, before flitting off to do whatever it is that educated feminines do with their time. Exquisitely coded cupcake blogs and subscriptions to the Persephone Books newsletter, here I come!
This is now a cupcake blog. Be very afraid.
Except not really, for anyone (wow it sounds great though doesn't it, the Englishwoman equivalent of the American Dream, if only...). What I actually have to do now - and what I actually want to do, I hasten to add - is find some sort of gainful employment, in order to become a Proper Adult in the Real World Regardless of Gender Or anything Like That. My reasons for wanting to do this boil down to two main points:
1) As I have discovered, it's actually quite nice to have money of one's own and not rely on Chinese government handouts and gifts from antecedents to get one through the month. You can buy nice stationery! You can drink more fancy alcohol without worrying about how much cash you need to keep back for the ride home! You can go out for breakfast and have the pancakes with the fruit in for 50p extra and do it more than once in a week! This is especially true now that the Chinese government are no longer in the equation, and getting handouts is going to involve going to the Job Centre.
2) If I spend some time in the real world, I am going to really appreciate escaping from it again in a few years time when I do my PhD.
I don't know who you are, Doctor Joy Browne, but someday you won't be the only Joy Doctor in town...
And so, I make the move from feminist student (the adjective is always important) to feminist job hunter. This, as always, complicates matters. It means that, on top of the usual unemployment pitfalls like "how important is it really to write these e-mails when I could just play XCom all evening" and "taking this EdX quantum mechanics course has nothing to do with my future but will make me a well rounded individual, I'll do it", I also have my difficult womanly brain pointing out to me such facts as:
CVs with women's names on the top tend to be perceived as less accomplished than CVs with men's names attached, even if the qualifications listed are exactly the same. At least, this has been rigorously tested in science faculties and there's anecdotal evidence for it in the "real world" too. Given that I'm looking for gender specialist development research jobs and there aren't exactly many male gender specialists my age, I probably don't have as much to worry about, but still it's annoying to speculate that I might already be a super high flying development executive if only I had been called "Adrien". At least I'm not a mother yet!
I probably won't get as much money as a man doing the same job as me. Yes, even though I'm in the "ridiculously privileged" category by every measure except gender (and weight, but catwalk modelling was never really an option in the first place...)
A "fact" rather than a fact: I'm not an expert at anything at all compared to anybody else, ever. For some reason, growing up in a world of condescending mansplainers and "you're only worthy if you're beautiful" standards for women means that most of us are slow to put ourselves forward as worth listening to on any subjects. There's a whole website set up to combat this in the UK.
Women don't look as naturally swag in business attire as men tend to, unless you get a really nice suit tailored and that costs a lot of money. Can't I find somewhere to work where I can continue to wear ridiculous summer dresses all year around?
Nothing on that list is insurmountable, of course. Except for the unswagness, that is a tragic fact of life. But the time I have to spend thinking about how patriarchy insidiously affects my own unimportant existence and agency is time that would be better spent thinking either about profound, all-encompassing feminist questions like how to overthrow global capitalist patriarchy, OR actually doing things that will lead to a job. Nobody said feminism would be easy!
Soon I will also be an angry stock photo career lady. It's good to have dreams!
There is nothing for it, dear reader. Time to harden up, read some Sheryl Sandberg, send out a million tailored CVs to the awesomest people of the world, and hope for the best! At least my Mum believes in me.
ATTENTION: This is day one of a self-imposed "blog every day for a month" challenge, designed to counteract my blogging inertia (brought on mostly by a crisis of expertise and partly by other people wanting me to write things and partly by... video games...) by proving to myself and others that I can be consistently prolific and interesting if I give myself permission to do it. Everything will probably be a fair bit shorter than what I used to write, and I will probably end up veering off-topic a few times. There may even be some fiction! Anyway, if you like my writing and have a lot of time on your hands then keep checking back all this month for plenty of profound wisdoms all day every day.
At the time of writing this, it is 7.30 on
a Sunday evening and I am sitting in the second floor lobby of my university
department building, “writing” my thesis, where I’ve been for three and a half
hours now. Being able to use “writing” without the scare quotes would be a bit
of an exaggeration- I only managed to add about 200 words to my wordcount
today, although in my defence I also taught myself how to use Automap and I did
write more than 200 words, I just
also had to delete a lot of things. Anyway, it’s safe to say that a
statistically very significant amount of my time over the past couple of days
has been spent here, or in the department library (which is closed today- how I
miss 24/7 library opening hours…), or for a few hours in what can only be described
as a personal cell in the university’s main library. Coupled with the fact that
I’m also working an internship over the other side of town (more on that at a
later date), you might think I have very little time at the moment for silly time wasting.
And you’d be right, of course. But that
doesn’t mean I haven’t been wasting my time anyway. Two months ago, after a fateful conversation with an old friend, I found myself coming five years late to a video game trilogy that has probably
now become one of my favourite things in the entire universe. I have since sunk several weeks of my life into playing- and overanalysing!- Mass Effect.
Let me preface this by saying I love video
games, but I’m also pretty selective in what I play. Like with films and TV
shows, I have an enduring obsession with a few esoteric things that I’ve come
into contact with, whilst having absolutely no knowledge about the “core” stuff
I probably should know about if I want to
identify as a gamer*. I’m also aware that I could be opening an enormous can of worms by even daring to
open my mouth about video games on a feminist blog, and that there’s a whole
host of awful, scary issues surrounding women in this realm of culture which
I’m mostly not even going to touch this time around. Excitingly, the
long-awaited “Women vs. Tropes in Video Games” series started last week, no
doubt to the chagrin of game playing misogynist Youtube commenters everywhere (especially since she disabled comments oh my god how dare a woman not be open to abuse from all people at all times),
so if you want to follow a series that’s going to give a way better specific
analysis then I suggest you keep up to date with that. Here’s the first one!**
Because,
you know what, all I want to talk about is Mass Effect. And as anybody who has
ever picked up Mass Effect knows, this basically just means that I want to
discuss intergalactic alien sex. This is a game which sold its final DLC off
advertising stating “you will get to have sex with your favourite fictional
character again!”, so rest assured there’s a lot of boning going on. Apart from this, there are two other
brilliant things about it:
1)It’s a hugely immersive space opera set in a richly populated galaxy
with a really fascinating history and your interactions with this world
actually matter beyond a linear plot path and you meet lots of interesting
characters whose lives and struggles also become invested in over the course of
the series (and you can also sometimes have sex with these interesting
characters).
2)You can totally play as a GIRL oh my god.
Yep,
the Mass Effect trilogy is pretty brilliant at giving you a really wide range
of customisation over who your character is. So whilst every runthrough of Mass
Effect has a Commander Shepard, and Commander Shepard always saves the galaxy,
pretty much everything else in the game is down to you. Right down to your
gender, appearance and your first name.
Shepard! Ah-ahhh! Saviour of the universe!
This
is incredibly exciting in a way it’s hard for me to fully articulate. It’s not
really to do with character identification, although I can see why that would
be amazing for some people. Being able to play a game where everybody
completely accepts that the most famous and capable person in the galaxy is a
woman who grew up orphaned on the streets of Jakarta**** doesn’t make me any
closer to being a late 22nd century Indonesian space marine myself,
but the fact that she exists in this universe and I can make her exist just
makes me feel that much more well-disposed to the rest of the game.
Commander
Shepard, like all good RPG heroes, spends most of her time wandering around
solving other people’s problems, whether they want her to or not. As this is a
space opera, the problems reflect this. Examples are:
·We have accidentally unleashed a horde of extinct bug-aliens on our
ice-world science facility!
·We are being mind-controlled by a weird plant and also robots are
trying to kill us.
·I am a robot and I want to learn how to live in peace and have
feelings, please kill the other robots who disagree with this aim.
·I hope nothing goes wrong when we set up a nuclear bomb in this alien
breeding facility!
·Our space-wizard academy is under attack from guys who want us to use
our space-magic for evil.
·Humans are going missing from space!
·Some scientists are doing morally questionable things.
·Some mercenaries are doing morally questionable things.
·Gosh, that’s a very big worm and it appears to be shooting acid at us.
As
mentioned, this is also a very characterisation-heavy game, and you make plenty
of interesting friends and allies along the way! Your squad’s relationships are
also pretty important to the game:
·My daughter is a sex vampire who I have dedicated four hundred years of
my life to hunting down.
·My dad is trying to kidnap my clone sister who I already kidnapped away
from him once.
·My mum got seduced by a spaceship into helping the bad guy.
·My dad has spent the last ten years sexually abusing mentally
degenerate young women on a remote planet.
·My dad is dead from robots.
·My son seems to think that becoming an assassin is a good career path,
I can’t imagine where he got that bright idea from.
·My parents are Canadian and also Canada Canada Canada [not much you can
do to fix this one]
There’s also an overarching plot about saving
the galaxy from giant robots but honestly, the game never cares about that as
much as it probably should. If you want to hear more flippant summaries of Mass
Effect plotlines you should check out MSPixel, which does it much better and
with more pictures.
Actually I'm pretty sure I just shot her.
So!
Off Shepard goes, swanning around the galaxy with her adorable cheesy space husband (optional) asking inappropriate questions of
strangers, either being pathologically nice or pathologically rude to everybody
she meets***** and passing the Bechdel test with flying colours whilst she’s at
it. In the meantime, the rest of the galaxy exists in a super weird mix of gender
tropes. I think it’s probably fair to say that because this is a game that gets
so much right so much of the time, the moments it gets wrong become that much
more frustrating, and their treatment of women is no exception. One moment,
annoying gender stereotypes are being magnificently subverted (your first two
squadmates in ME1 are a straightforward shoot-everything soldier woman and a
male space-wizard), and then in the next moment they’re suddenly ignored or
played straight (all the human authority figures are male; one of your
squadmates in Mass Effect 2 is a literally
topless woman who… apparently keeps bullets away with space magic?)
I mean aside from anything else, doing strenuous activity in a leather nipple-strap just can't be comfortable. Also did I mention people are constantly shooting at you? Normalising female toplessness is a great project but I don't think it should be pioneered on the battlefield.
And
then there’s the aliens. Now, I have
utmost respect for the fact that, whilst making this game, somebody clearly sat
down and went “I think we should make sure that sexual reproduction isn’t
inexplicably the same across all these different species”. Unfortunately, I
have a sneaky suspicion that this thought happened after somebody had decided that there was no money to make
different gendered character models for the majority of species, and that they
needed a guilt-free way to fill space bars with alien strippers without being
creepy or exploitative.
So,
we get the Asari:
Liara, I'm about to badmouth your entire species. Cover your delicate ears.
Who
are a female-presenting monogendered species with a thousand year lifespan and also the most
advanced race in the galaxy. Like all blue aliens, they reproduce using
Deep Emotional Bonds and can make babies with any other species. This means
that everyone else in the galaxy- including people who otherwise have literally no
sex drive- think that they’re the hottest thing ever. Given that asari
just look like blue human women with tentacle heads, this is the game asking
you to believe that human women are literally
universally attractive. The asari also divide their own life cycles into “maiden-mother-matriarch” stages, becausenaturally as females their entire existence is based on their relationship to
reproduction at any given time. Asari maidens have three career paths open to
them: commando (completely awesome), exotic dancer (… less awesome) or
archaeologist (because the game wants you to have a young, innocent space waifu
on your squad and having her be a commando or a stripper would make her too powerful). So there are various bars across all three games filled with asari
writhing on poles in skintight clothing, because hey! That’s just what they do
between the ages of fifty and three hundred! Don’t judge!
I could probably write an entire separate essay on why this guy is so cool and why it is so cool that he is cool. But let's not make this any worse than it already is.
Moving
on. The salarians are the aforementioned no sex drive species. They reproduce
by laying big clutches of eggs and only 10% of their population is female. The
game doesn’t have any voiced female salarian characters until the third game,
and then they look just like the male ones. I’m pretty much cool with the
salarians, actually.
The one on the left is widely considered the most attractive woman in the Mass Effect trilogy. No, she never takes off the mask.
I’m
also cool with the quarians- the only quarian you meet in the first game is
hardcore female engineer (and Shepard’s bestie) Tali’Zorah, and although they
do then introduce male quarians in future games, the ratio of male to female
characters remains pretty even. They also have a much better ratio of women in authority than any other gender dimorphic
species in the galaxy.
Heh heh heh.
The
krogan are ultraviolent space tortoises who got forcibly sterilised by the
other races a couple of thousand years ago for being too ultraviolent and
having too many babies. This sterilisation means that almost all female krogan
give birth to stillborn babies and “fertile females” have basically become
commodities that the male krogan go to war over. Despite this being one of the
most important plot lines in the entire series, you don't find out firsthand what krogan women are like and how they have dealt with
several thousand years of dead babies until the third game. This is apparently
because they had to spend five years trying to design a character model that
you would plausibly believe is a female space tortoise.
Eventually they opted to have her wearing a lot of clothes so you can’t see she basically just looks the same as a male space tortoise.
Other
minor races include the four-eyed angry space totalitarians, floating pink
jellyfish, tiny ammonia-breathing mole people, sad eyed lizard people who blink
sideways and these giant grey elephant things called elcor who talk in
monotone and precede every sentence with a description of the tone it should be
spoken in. Every member of these alien species are presented and voiced as
male. But then, you don’t meet that many of those species, so it might be a
fluke- besides, the jellyfish are using weird technology to translate their
speech from bioluminescent flashes and neither the ammonia moles or the elcor
have normal human speech patterns either so who’s to say they are male just
because they sound male to humans?
Which
is fine, if frustrating. But my suspension of disbelief regarding the lack of
space women was completely shattered by the one species I haven’t covered:
Oh HAI Nihlus!
This
is a turian. Turians are metal faced space avians with mandibles. Apart from
these obvious physical differences, they are supposed to represent a species
that is very similar to humanity in terms of their life cycles, whilst also
being culturally very different (they are imilitaristic and very disciplined
and most come across to humans like they constantly have a stick up their arse.
Cloaca. Whatever.) They have complete gender equality and both male and female
turians are expected to serve fifteen years in the military. They make up a
huge proportion of the galactic military, the police force of the city you
spend a lot of your time on and just the galactic population in general.
And
for five years, every single one of
the turians you meet whilst saving the galaxy just happens to be male. It’s explicitly not a case of humans not being
able to tell the genders apart, because when they finally did design a female turian for the second-to-last DLC package, she
looked and sounded different enough to make it impossible that any of the
others you’d seen from the previous games were also women. Specifically, she
looks somewhat like she has breasts, because this is the only way to make an
audience accept that a character is female (unless you cover them entirely with
clothes like Eve the female krogan. But I digress.)
A highly realistic metal faced space-bird lady!
So the people making this game were faced with a difficult logistical choice based on the fact that they could only make a limited number of character models. They knew they wanted a species of gender-equal metal-faced mandibirds, but they could only have one model (technically they do make two but... oh, you know what, just go play and find out). They had to decide: is it more likely that an audience will believe that some of these identical looking characters are male and some are female******, or are they more likely to swallow the idea that there are female birds out there in equal quantities to the males but they just literally never bump into them? They weighed this choice up, and decided that the latter was more credible. People playing this game are apparently more likely to believe that the women are invisible than that they might not be sexually optimised.
To me, it’s stuff like this that really highlights how far we have to go. As much as Mass Effect has shot straight to my heart in the past couple of months, and made me happy in ways both related and unrelated to my unrepentant feminist cogitations, it still terrifies me that we produce culture where the non-existence or invisibility of women is considered acceptable or a necessary trade-off. “Geek culture” has some pretty severe problems understanding the existence of women in reality, most recently embodied in the furore over “fake geek girls” at cons. But women do exist in geek culture, and we exist in the real world too, and believe it or not we are central to our own lives! If companies do want to make video games set in universes where women don’t exist, then that remains their (shitty) decision to make. But please. Don’t set something up as egalitarian, then refuse to put in anything female unless it looks good with tits. I’m not suspending my disbelief any more.
(Whoops,
I barely talked about sex at all! Never mind. Next time.)
*Luckily,
I don’t actually want to identify as a gamer, just like not everybody who
watches films regularly is a “film buff”. I just… play video games sometimes.
**Brief
comment on the video itself: it’s clearly starting the series on a really
basic, obvious note so I’m pretty optimistic about it in general. One video
game which it made me think about, and do hope she covers in the future
(although I think it’s possibly too obscure) is the
super-pretentious-arty-oh-so-subversive “Braid”, which bases its storyline on
messing around with the Mario concept in the most
super-pretentious-arty-oh-so-subversive way possible*** Ostensibly, you’re on a
quest to rescue a princess (or are you inventing the atomic bomb?) but oh!
Cunning subversion of the damsel in distress trope- and spoiler- ahead! Actually you’re the one trying to kidnap her!
Yeah, the biggest super-pretentious-arty-oh-so-subversive twist they could come
up with is that your damsel in distress needs rescuing from a different random
sprite (and also might be a bomb). She still needs rescuing (or, uh, inventing)
in the first place, though. Silly woman.
*** It
also has some genuinely amazing mechanics to do with time manipulation and I really do recommend it. If you can stand the pretentiousness, that is.
**** OK let’s be totally clear, the game doesn’t actually ask you which earth
city your newly created fictional
character spent their childhood in. That’s just a symptom of the rather absurd
amount of time I have spent thinking about who I want her to be (I could
literally tell you her entire fictional life story, I am that lame). Also I’m
fully aware I didn’t spend nearly enough time making her facial structure fit
with the fact she’s from south-east Asia, but she’s also from the late 22nd
century so let’s just assume there’s
been plenty of racial mixing between now and then.
*****Another example of why my Shep is not
a self-insert: she is pathologically nice. I am not.
****** I also just want to point out again:
they’re based on birds. Lots of birds
have colour-based sexual dimorphism that could have allowed different looking
female turians without having to make
another character model. But no. Boobs. Are important. Remember this.
Hello again! I’m out of hiding at last!
Where I’ve been is boring, why I’m back is interesting so let’s skip the
schedule slip self-flagellations (three cheers for alliteration) and dive straight
back in. Full disclosure is that it’s been so long that I’ve sort of forgotten
what I’ve already written about and when, so if any of this starts to sound
familiar then I congratulate you for knowing my own blog better than I do, and
maybe I’ll proof read some day and take out the repetitions. I’ve also been
doing my thesis for far too long so I’m officially Bored With Referencing so if
it ain’t coming straight out of my head, I’m probably not looking it up this
evening. Which may make things more interesting. Let’s see.
Alright! Several months ago, I promised a
man that if he took a time machine into the future, he would be able to read my
post about sexist humour. Given my utmost faith that he does in fact own a time
machine and did in fact take that trip, today is the day when I finally save
the universe from any potential time paradoxes and write the post that I assume
he read.
Let’s start by outlining some obvious
facts. Fact number one is that feminists have no sense of humour. The one
exception to this rule is the eternally infallible feminist icon Caitlin Moran,
who as we all know has been single-handedly keeping feminism alive recently
through her unique ability to simultaneously make people laugh and talk about women in a (uh, mostly)
non-derogatory way. No other feminist laughs, or is funny. No exceptions.*
Women as a subject matter, on the other hand, are regularly quite funny. Perhaps
the greatest monograph on the hilarious idiosyncrasies of women is this piece
by one Biben Laikhuram in the Times of India, which I believe truly captures the essence of our existence in a way no other article could. Perhaps due to our status as half the human population of the planet,
it seems that women are constantly involved in all sorts of interesting and
amusing human interactions! So it’s no wonder that sometimes people want to
make jokes that acknowledge the existence of women.
Taking these facts together, we arrive at
one inevitable conclusion: it is impossible to Do Funny about women without
being a sexist (unless you’re Caitlin). This is why women must exist with a
constant flood of degrading and dehumanising jokes- the only other option would
be cutting women out of humour altogether, and that would just be much worse.
Plus, women make things classier, and sexier, so jokes about them are also
always very classy and sexy. It’s all very simple, really. End of post.
…OK, so the above is pretty fanciful even
for me. But you know, honestly, if some male humour authority came up to me and
went “look, Adrienne, we see you are annoyed about sexist jokes, here’s how it
is”, and then gave me that explanation? It would actually be a bit of a relief.
Because at present, the only apologies for the flood of “hilarity” at the
expense of women go along the lines of “hey, sorry, but it’s funny.”
And it honestly is a flood. I’ve been buried
under a mountain of work and thesis and obsessively playing Mass Effect for the
past month, and even then I’ve not been able to escape. Here’s a very brief
list of things that have happened over the last few days that are funny if you’re
a sexist**:
oSelling t-shirts with slogans
like “Keep calm and rape her” and other similar designs on Amazon.co.uk
oOpening the Oscars with a song
about a man watching films with boobs in.
oCalling 9-year-old Oscar
nominee Quvenzhane Wallis a cunt.
oThe existence of Silvio
Berlusconi (OK, to be fair his existence is not a thing that has happened over the last few days but there was an election
last week so he gets special mention. What a man.)
oMy Mate Jim telling me nobody
will like it if I do a future guest round about feminism at our pub quiz
because all the questions will be boring and hard, and about a million other interpersonal
incidents.
These aren’t all of equal severity, of
course. When My Mate Jim tells me a sexist joke, the joke is that he’s saying
something that he does not actually believe and knows is sexist because I am a
feminist and it will annoy me. He also knows that I know this, and that my “annoyance”
will be mostly performative and he will probably come out of the experience
with limbs and friendship intact. And the whole thing usually happens without me having to perform an over-analytical
game theory breakdown, because we are friends, I trust him***, and we can
mutually and unconsciously negotiate boundaries on a regular basis. Of course,
I’d rather exist in a world where it wouldn’t even make sense to say a sexist thing as a joke, but in the interim I’ll
negotiate my intra-patriarchal friendships however I like, thank you very much.
Of course, this only holds true for people
I know personally- a group of people which, happily, does not include the
perpetrators of any of the other actions on that list. When we interact with
telly programs and politics and adverts and with the rest of endless barrage of
information that we process each day, for all we may be more “connected” these
days, it’s still mostly a one-way street. Sure, I can e-mail or tweet at pretty
much whoever I want to tell them I didn’t like something, but unless there’s a
critical mass of other people complaining along with me, it’s unlikely to have
any impact. We consume so much more information than we could ever hope to
produce, every day- challenging everything becomes an impossible task. And if
we don’t challenge it, it’s assumed we accept it.
She's nine years old and she has an INCREDIBLE collection of handbags which are also stuffed dogs. Why would you ever say something that nasty about her even as a joke I can't even
And the horrible truth is that the more
sexism our society consumes, every single day, the more it affects us, in both
obvious and unconscious ways. The uncomfortable truth of our modern world is
that, no matter how savvy or discerning or antiestablishment we think we are,
our world is constantly being shaped beyond our knowledge by people who have
made an art form out of knowing how
to make us do what they want. And whilst us feminist types may (depressingly)
be outside the curve enough to identify and fight against a lot of the sexist
bullshit that is being reinforced****, it’s also scientifically proven that said
sexist bullshit makes men behave in more sexist ways.
Here’s a different way of thinking about
things. I want
to concentrate for a bit on Quvenzhane Wallis and the
completely reprehensible tweet the Onion published about her during Oscar
night- a tweet which they apologised for, only to then post an
article satirising their own apology, meaning now I frankly don’t know what to think.
I’ve
got two points to make here. One is that, to me, this
is by far the most awful and inexcusable thing on that list. She’s a nine-year-old girl, whoever thought it would be in any way acceptable to call her the most misogynistic and
sexualised slur in the English language (at least from an American perspective)
as a “joke” needs to have a serious think about their lives. I mean, do you
remember what it felt like to be nine? If you were a bit of a weirdo like me,
here is a reminder.
OK,
so that’s a rather over-emotive video (and I am reliably informed the bit about
depression and medication is very poorly researched and not very good at all),
but you get the point. Unlike adults, who are well-equipped with a whole host
of ways to try to brush off and rationalise and explain away the negative
things that happen to us, even when they don’t feel right, when we're kids, we know about how
the small things matter, and that they matter regardless of intent or context
or how wonderful the person saying them might be to everybody else. When you insult
a nine-year-old, by calling her a cunt- or, before then, with the numerous “hey,
the alphabet called” jokes which were more ambiguously on the line between “just
silly” and “pretty damn racist”- you’re sending those insults towards a child
who, no matter how unfazed she seems in the public eye, is going to process
them in a different way to how an adult would. And on top of the fact you just
bullied a kid, you’re also going to throw sexism
into the mix? Wow. Classy.
Point
number two is more general. See, when I grew out of my weird nine-year-old
phase and into my weird teenager phase, hanging out in a big comprehensive
school with a group of similarly weird friends, the way insults were traded
around the playground changed. People rose to the very top who were exclusively
male, very charismatic and constantly
making offensive remarks about everyone around them. They were smart enough
that they could get enough other people onside to stay in general favour, and manipulative
enough to be able to gaslight or if you
did try to respond.
And
my god, it worked for them. So much
so that even if you were sometimes a victim, you still spent the rest of the
time laughing at their jokes- because, as long as it’s not me, it’s OK right?*****
So you would be complicit in whatever persecution they were involved in at any
particular moment, despite a constant sense of fear that at any second, you
might end up in the firing line again for any reason whatsoever. They were
never, ever actually your friends,
but pretending you were OK with them was usually better than the alternative.
Too
often, that’s what it feels like to consume mainstream media as a woman. In
fact, it pretty much sums up my feelings for consuming media as a fat person as
well, and I’ve no doubt it’s the same or worse for those who identify with
other minority (or “minority”) groups. Living in a world of pervasive sexist
humour, where women and our troubles are things to be laughed at whenever the charismatic,
manipulative man at the top decides its our turn to suffer for everyone else’s
amusement, means you never quite get rid of the feeling at the back of your
mind that, however entertained you are by something, it might turn unpleasant
at any moment. It’s why, no matter how many arguments I hear for why shows like
South Park or Family Guy are good, I just can’t get behind the idea that “equal
opportunities insulting” can ever really be done right- particularly not when
it’s just being done by rich white American men. Ironically, until this, the
Onion was probably the only example of doing “equal opportunities insulting”
that I would have completely supported. That they apologised- and apologised
well, until yesterday's article at least- is something, but that’s still a lot of trust
to lose.
What
these people say matters to our societies far more than it should, given that
we can’t actually make the personal connections necessary to be able to really
understand their intent. But we can, as a society, hold our humour to some
basic moral standards- yes, even if also find the thing funny. I know a world
in which it’s unthinkable to joke about a nine-year-old being a “cunt” may
sound like a humourless feminist dystopia, but bear with us. There are still
one or two things to laugh about that don’t
involve oppression.
*FEMINIST NOTE: I’m afraid this means that
if you have ever laughed whilst reading this blog, or found it amusing in any
way, you have negated my identity as a feminist (and possibly also your own). For
shame.
**LOGICIAN NOTE: this is “if” you’re a
sexist not “if and only if” you’re a sexist. Actually I can’t prove that every
sexist finds all these jokes funny either, but rhetoric > logic, yo.
***To all mutual friends who just raised an
eyebrow at that: shush. I would trust the man with my life. Perhaps not with small animals though.
****Usually as a means to an end, I might
add. I’m not yet cynical enough to think that media are sexist purely because the
people in charge hate women; they just want you to keep buying certain things,
metaphorically and literally.
*****On a tangent, this is also why it’s
scary that the Onion has been defended by other feminist writers who appear to
think that we can only focus on a certain number of sexist Oscars incidents and
that being angry about the boob song is more important.****** So now we’re
laughing along as long as it’s just one black nine-year-old in the firing line
and not us Empowered Mature Feminist Types? I don’t care how you personally
feel about the boob song or the word cunt, being complicit in this is a shitty
position to take.
****** Honestly, I watched the boob song
and I was more baffled than anything. Was it just funny because he said “boobs”
a lot and that’s a naughty word? To me the depressing bit was that they added
prerecorded footage of the actors looking humiliated, as if they needed to reinforce
the fact that the joke was at the expense of women, rather than including them.
If they’d started from the assumption that Naomi Watts and Charlize Theron would
also want to celebrate their boobs, it’s
plausible they could have arrived at something, er, not stupid. Think about it,
Oscars people!
Alas, it’s the end of an era. That’s not me
packing it in with blogging before I’ve even really begun, or worrying about the
Mayan calendar (although I did spend far to long on the 20th thinking about Majora's Mask, culminating in this, which is amazing if you get the references). What actually happened
is I’ve now done my last ever class presentation for this master’s degree, and
although having to do class presentations has not made me particularly happy
or, it has to be said, much better informed over the last year and a half, it
still feels like a bit of a milestone. No more will I break out the Foundry
theme to explain the wonders of urban planning in Hefei, or the European tax
haven structure, or… whatever else I did presentations on, it’s all a bit vague
now to be honest. I am surprisingly reluctant to be educated at times, it has to be
said.
Useful things I did with my degree #431
Anyway, I was expecting to commemorate this
final one by churning out something super rushed and boring given that it’s
Christmas and term is almost over and, really, who does good stuff when it’sso cold outside oh god, but actually I
ended up getting really into the topic, which was about gender mainstreaming.
I’ve already whinged enough about how studying in China and being interested in
gender is a bit like being a camel specialist in Newfoundland- i.e. very
confusing for everyone involved. So when I discovered I needed to do an end of
term presentation for a social policy course, which is incidentally the only
academic course I’ve had taught by a female professor*, I figured this might be
a good opportunity to get a vague handle on the world of gendered policymaking- given that it’s sort of what I want to do and all.
So, here's my version of the gender mainstreaming story. Back in 1985, at the end of the Decade forWomen
(you know, one of those international things where if you put a label on a
period of time it automatically makes it SUPER EMPOWERING), someone who was
chilling out in Nairobi for a conference was like ‘hey you know what would be
amazing’, and a nearby person was probably like ‘I am familiar with a lot of
potential amazing things but not sure which you are specifically referring to’,
and the first person said ‘so I had this crazy
idea, where maybe when governments make policy, they could take into account
not only the needs of man people but also the other half of the human
population as well.’
And the second person probably raised an
eyebrow and was like ‘do you mean to suggest that we should consider gendered
analysis not just as its own separate policy area, or as something that should
be tacked onto existing policies, but as a necessary aspect of all policy which
should after all take into account people as they are, not just work from a
rubbish reductionist definition of “people” which actually just means
“heterosexual men of culturally dominant ethnicity?”’
And the first person was like ‘yeah that’s
exactly what I’m saying mate**. It’s like if policy is a river ecosystem,
right, and at the moment gender is in the backwaters, like with specific gender
equality policies, or in the sidestream, like with gender related updates to
“gender neutral” policies- and we all know what gender neutral really means,
yeah- and what we should be doing is moving it from those places into the
mainstream, and then maybe policies will actually be better and stuff.’
And the second person was like ‘Well that
certainly merits further thought, let’s discuss it further at this women’s
conference that we are conveniently at.’
And that is my story of how gender
mainstreaming made the agenda at the Nairobi women’s conference. Fast forward one non-female decade, and a group of similar people decided to have another conference for women (I know, one every ten years, how
superfluous), this time in the land of Beijing! This time, gender mainstreaming
was not only talked about, but was actually made a focus of the conference. That’s right, in 1995 it was finally made
crystal clear that policy should be formulated taking into account the needs of
both genders rather than assuming that what is good for men must be good for
women. They talked about it at an international conference, it must be important.
After this, of course, what happened is
that the entire world realised what a good idea it was to include the interests
of women in all policymaking and men and women lived happily ever after. No,
I’m joking, that’s not what happened. What actually happened is that a lot of
institutions wrote a commitment to gender equality down in their constitutions
and then decided that writing down that they were doing a thing absolved them
from actually doing the thing, or, indeed, continuing any previous initiatives
related to the thing that they were involved in before they decided to show how
committed they were to the thing.
Interestingly, most of what comes up if you image search "Gender mainstreaming" is in German, because Austria is big into the concept. It's also a key concept in Taiwan.
Which brings us to the United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the wonderful, wonderful things that have
been going down in the government for the last few years. As most of my readers
are probably aware, we currently have a government in the United Kingdom whose
policy leanings aren’t exactly in line with the desires of a woman with a
Marxist double entendre in her online handle. Whilst British women are able to
live in a country with a fair bit of decent gender equality
legislation, and there is no co-ordinated political attack on our rights like
our sisters over in America have to deal with, there are some pretty eyebrow
raising gender implications of some of the government’s decisions over the last
couple of years which suggests they really weren’t paying attention to the cool
kids over in Nairobi and Beijing back in the day.
Here is a helpful picture of George Osborne to channel rage at whilst reading on.
Most of these exist in that big disastrous
realm of The Cuts- the things that the country must go without so some elites
can continue to get very rich out of fiddling around with imaginary numbers.
Gender budget analysis of the cuts in 2010 showed that over 70% of the costs of
cutting benefits and public services will be paid by women. How about job
losses in the public sector? Well, 65% of their employees were female (again in 2010),
disproportionately concentrated at lower-end jobs, so that’ll also hurt women
more than men. Women receive 20% of their income in benefits and tax credits,
compared to 10% for men, but changes to the benefit system from 2013 onwards
will “simplify” the working age benefits system by paying all benefits to the
family’s “primary earner” (read: manly breadwinner types, except in the 90%
female headed single parent families, but what are they doing existing anyway,
haven’t you heard of family values, keep your legs shut next time because
immoral sex is literally the only way this situation could have come about etc.
etc. etc). This particularly means the loss of directly paid child tax credits for a lot
of mothers and increases women’s economic dependence on men when they are in
families. And unfortunately, as long as we retain parental leave systems which
focus specifically on maternity rather than providing flexible time off for
both parents, we lock women into being the caregiving economic dependents
unless families are well enough off to completely lose the second income.
I draw a couple of things from this. The
first is that I honestly do think feminism is incompatible with right wing
politics not just from a social perspective but from an economic one as well.
The economic system we operate on is predicated on an enormous quantity of
unpaid work that is disproportionately done by women, and ensuring an economic
fair deal for is not going to happen just because the door is also open to earn
money in the current system when we’re not too busy discharging our natural
womanly caring-and-housework duties. Redistribution seriously needs to happen,
and whilst the ideal would be a radical overhaul of the way we value and reward
work so that traditionally “female” labour is valued just as highly as “male”,
in the interim having governments provide benefits and services is a decent
enough medium. So when, as a government, you design your budgets without taking into account gendered effects, and you end up enacting a double whammy of both disproportionately firing women and taking away government assistance***, and then you still leave gendered analysis to other government branches even after the Fawcett Society takes you to court about it, I have to seriously doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion gender mainstreaming.. It’s all
very well and good saying you want more people in work, but when you’re also
from a socially conservative party and are trying to uphold “family values”
which are traditionally all about using women as unpaid carers, you are failing
to take into account what most women actually
need from your government and the fact that it is often different from men’s
needs.
But seriously George I doubt your commitment to these girls. I do. Sorry George.
Another
thing also worries me, however, and it goes a bit beyond “ugh Tories”. When
systems do take into account gender differences in providing social welfare, by
recognising women as carers, the implication isn’t of reward- it’s about
utilising a carer to pass on money to their dependent. That’s why the two big
working age benefits for women are child
tax credits and child benefit, and
their existence is supported by research that shows that benefits paid to women
tend to be spent on supporting the family (i.e. children) whereas benefits paid
to men are more often spent by the man on himself. This is a worldwide trend,
and is very similar to one of the main arguments used to advocate education for
girls- that female empowerment is valuable primarily in terms of the benefits
it provides for children, rather than being inherently valuable to, or a
fundamental right of, the woman herself.
On the benefit side of things, this is
why we’re able to have negative stereotypes of “welfare queens” who apparently
reproduce in order to force innocent men to give them child support which they
may then partly spend on themselves- the fact that they are spending time
looking after said man’s child is not considered an activity worthy of remuneration,
because women are supposed to be carers and caring involves necessary and
natural sacrifices that we must make in order not be morally awful. I’m not
saying neglectful single mothers don’t exist at all, but the way the system is
infused with gendered norms seems to suggest that anything short of angelic
sacrifice on the part of mothers can be construed as women “playing the
system”. If we don’t have the policy making ideology to recognise and combat
these potentially damaging ideologies within politics, how are we ever going to
eradicate them from real life?
Forget institutionalised poverty or climate change or global epidemics, the greatest problem faced by humanity is definitely "spending decisions that strangers can't immediately endorse"
Hence:
gender mainstreaming. Because the personal is political, and politics is
personal, and, contrary to general belief- or, indeed, the make-up of our
elected representatives- most people are in fact women. If policymakers aren’t
recognising that in everything they do, things are a bit hopeless really. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*I specifically say academic because all of
my Chinese classes have been with women. Language is a ladylike teaching topic,
after all! Hard academia is more for men.
** I’m not actually sure if the person who
invented gender mainstreaming was British or Australian or indeed perhaps part
of the much larger group of people who would not use “mate” in this context.
But roll with it. I’ve also got a translate link on the side if you’d like to
put the whole conversation into another language instead of the lingua franca
of the oppressor!
*** Triple whammy if you take into account
that these cuts are necessary largely because of the actions of elite decision-makers
in banks, who are 96% male. But saying that low income men and male public
sector employees should bear the brunt of something caused by elite men just
because they are both men is definitely a bit far even for this rampant misandrist...
Sexism has had quite the run over the past
few days. For example, there’s been FHM’s lad-to-lad exhortation to not wear
your “victim’s” socks,
Virgin Media’s “rape or present” Christmas advertising
campaign,
and ruminations by Australian Zoo readers
on which half of a woman’s body can be dehumanised more.
Because the top can make you a sandwich but the bottom won't answer back! What wit.
Plus, Michigan’s abortion super bill
passed, the global labour gender gap has increased since the financial crisis, and
Republican opposition means like the USA’s new secretary of state will probably
be John Kerry and definitely not Susan Rice*. Add this to the normal background noise of oppression that goes on-
largely unreported- everywhere else in the world and it’s not looking like we
feminists will have the war over by Christmas, so to speak.
Perhaps the most explosive debate that’s
been going on over the last two weeks, however, is the spectacular and
continuing fail of ostensible feminist allies “The Good Men Project” over some
utterly disastrous rape articles. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know a
huge amount about the GMP- I’d been to the website a few times prior to the
incident but I don’t remember reading anything particularly insightful or
particularly offensive at any point, so I assumed they were a mediocre
incarnation of a potentially good idea and decided to continue life as
normal. Apparently in doing so I missed some grand decay into
one-step-above-legit-MRA-craziness but hey, I’m a development student, I only
have a limited amount of time available for watching the self-conscious cogitations
of white western men. Anyway, what brought the GMP crashing back into my
consciousness, and into full-blown notoriety, was this article from Alyssa Royce on her nice guy rapist friend.
For those who haven’t heard about the case
and don’t want to wade through the article itself, I’ll summarise: Alyssa Royce’s
friend was flirting with a woman at a party. She passed out in the same room as
him, and so he raped her. According to the article, this is a very insightful
case of how complicated the real world is and how those complications can
tragically lead to wonderful men raping women. We are told that because before
she was unconscious, said woman was “[walking] like a fuck and [talking] like a
fuck”** and therefore all valid logical inference pointed towards fucking, and
this poor nice logical guy is for some reason exempted from also processing “flirtation
partner is now unconscious” and making the logical inference to, uh, not
fucking. Or, rather, he’s not, because in the moments when the article isn’t
excusing rape it’s blathering on about “I
know it’s rape guys, it’s totally not OK, but no this guy is so nice so here
are more reasons no not justifications or excuses why would I do that Rape Is
Bad but seriously NICE GUY OH GOSH”, but.. well, yes. If it walks like an
excuse and it talks like an excuse, it’s probably an excuse.
The article is horrible on several levels,
but it’s followed by something that people have taken even more offense to: ananonymous piece by an actual rapist about how having a party lifestyle
justifies a bit of rape (presented here with Jill Filipovic's excellent commentary). He was once drunk at a party and took a kiss from a
woman as a sign to push her up against a wall in full view of the rest of the
party and rape her. He also believes he has been raped at parties, which is
presented as an additional complicating factor in how we should view his own
raping. Again, this is all against a backdrop of “goodness, isn’t the world so
darn confusing, how will we ever get consent at all?” which initially seems to
be played completely straight by GMP as well, although they’ve since stressed
that clearly this guy has some deep psychological issues that it’s probably
best for them to distance themselves from. Both articles have since been
accompanied by editorial responses justifying the decision to publish these in
the name of good intellectual discussion, because these are clearly the
insights we need in order to combat rape and rape culture. If we don’t
understand how confusing the world is for these poor rapists, how will we ever
be able to give them the love and support and easily obtained consensual sex
they need to stop raping?
I’m not going to wade in any further on the
actual cases presented here, besides hoping that both (especially Royce’s nice
guy friend, admittedly the other one is a little less well-described) seem far
too insultingly clear-cut to be the catalysts for a frank discussion about the apparent
deep complexities of rape and consent. If any friend of mine, no matter how
close or nice (and regardless of gender!) told me they’d had sex with a sleeping
stranger, I would be deeply, deeply angry with them, because there is
absolutely no excuse for what a fucked up thing that is to do***. And yes, I
would also be deeply angry at culture, but not in the way GMP seem to want me
to be. I would be deeply, deeply frustrated not at the tragic lack of
discussion about rape and consent and why rapists rape, but at the fact these
discussions do exist, and it’s their
very existence that stops us from being able to enshrine some of these super
simple facts and actually getting on to discussing some real grey areas.
If you want to read well informed, rigorously
researched, interesting articles about the composition and mindset of rapists,
they exist. They’re out there. The original studies are admittedly shut off in
academic journals which aren’t universally accessible, but they’ve then been
reported on by other people and that means pretty much all facts are out there in
free form for anybody with five minutes and an internet connection. The
question “why do men rape” has been asked, and people have already spent significant
amounts of time and energy trying to answer this question as thoroughly and
insightfully as possible. This is the point at which we were at when GMP
decided to present “my friend raped a woman once” as an aspect of the
discussion which we should take seriously. Royce’s response to being told by
other women that she was missing a lot of really fundamental facts was to
suggest that the existence of said facts has stifled debate and atomistic
anecdotal posturing is therefore justified in rekindling that.
But this isn’t what research is for. Yes,
having rigorous studies which state that a tiny number of men carry out a large
number of rapes does stifle potential lay speculation about a large number of men
all occasionally raping, or a rape-amount pyramid dependent on wealth and
social status, or a top secret sect of twenty four men and a non-binary identified
person with a penis who co-ordinate global sexual assault from a hidden base on
Easter Island. It also lets us move
forward from having to endlessly debate that point. Want to have a
productive discussion about rape and consent? Here’s the facts, let’s take it
from here! Said facts are almost certainly missing some nuances- from a development perspective, what jumps out at me is that discussing who
rapes in the USA may not be directly applicable to who rapes elsewhere, particularly in conflict zones- and it is important that findings are demonstrated
to be repeatable and generalisable, so the existence of a few academic studies
certainly doesn’t mean closing the door on a subject forever. However, they do have
important implications for where we take our rape and consent discussion next.
For example: we know from factsthat
consent is actually not this enormous
complicated nebulous issue that poor men are on the wrong side of
misunderstandings about all the time, because to the vast majority of everybody these things are already
utterly crystal clear. Evidence: 94% of men are not rapists. So why are
we still pretending that it is hard and stressful and oh maybe we know somebody
who was once confused by it and accidentally raped, poor thing- pretending that
this is a point that a debate should start from!- when the majority of people
this actually protects are serial rapists, whose behaviour we generalise at the
expense of our own moral integrity? That
is a discussion worth having, but we only get there when we actually use the
knowledge we already have to inform where we’re going, instead of just
wandering around in little discursive circles all the time and pretending it’s
for the sake of debate.
It is, I suppose, an unfortunate byproduct
of how much brilliant feminism goes on in blogs and open online communities,
that for every discussion we’re constantly open to the noisy, stupid opinions
of the lowest common denominator. Sometimes it’s high level stuff like the protracted
GMP fail, more usually it’s comments and responses from people who seem utterly
devoted to their opinions on subjects on which they know nothing and are
committed to learning nothing about.
For one tiny example among millions: A good
friend of mine wrote a fantastic letter to FHM and Bauer News Media about their
little victim socks “joke”, whose comment section was entirely co-opted by some
very concerned gentleman who insisted that a call for a magazine to respect the
ethical reasons for not publishing damaging
offensive jokes about men having victims was equivalent to us asking for legal
censorship on all jokes that could be construed as offensive by any person
ever- painting a picture of a dystopian future where the price of women not
being assaulted would be the non-existence of “Family Guy”.
Discussing the things that might actually
have been interesting about the letter was
therefore subsumed by beating our collective heads against the immovable wall
of this guy’s ignorance. None of us learned anything, because the “debate” was
beneath the level where anything interesting could be learned. There’s actually
a word used by some of the race blogs I follow, whose owners are also too often
trapped going around in circles with the obnoxiously ignorant (including,
unfortunately, some white feminists), which describes these sorts of people
perfectly: “basic”. People who are not on the right level to be debating
topics, and who are completely unwilling to get there. Unfortunately, the more
open we are to everyone’s “opinions”, the more we run the risk of simply
rehashing the most basic of debates with the most basic of people. In doing so,
we leave less time and energy for actual progression to non-basic topics.
I’m aware that this might sound horribly
elitist, and that’s not my intention at all. One of the most vital points of
feminism is in changing and diversifying the voices we hear in our societies,
and providing platforms for people to speak is the most important part of this.
We also live in a world where intellectual capital is not equally accessible to
all people, and where women are far more likely to underestimate and undervalue
their own expertise than men are, meaning that the terms of participation for
these platforms can’t be academic or elitist in nature and still meaningfully
achieve their goals. But listening to more voices is not the same as
legitimising everyone, and it’s an insult to the entire concept to suggest that
the voice of an unrepentant rapist needs as much (or more!) of our time as rape
victims, or women who can’t leave their houses after dark for fear of rape, or even
of repentant rapists. It’s impossible to cut out nonsense entirely of course,
or even for any one person or group of people to objectively say what is and
isn’t listening to. But at the very least, trying to provoke or lead a debate
about rape or any other feminist topic carries with it a responsibility about
knowing the point of having that debate- what came before and what it teaches
us, and what gaps in our knowledge we still need to explore. Similarly, participating
requires having insights and being willing to be educated when our own
knowledge is incomplete.
This requires creating the right spaces,
making information accessible and readable to as many people as possible, and these
are definitely areas to work on. It may also involve denying access to debate
for people who have proven themselves utterly unwilling to learn. However, it
does not involve saying controversial, incorrect things and then stating that “provoking
discussion” justifies their existence. Doing that, as GMP have proved, just
leaves us stuck in the realms of the lowest common denominator, and that’s not
a discussion that’s truly worth our time. (P.S. For a better discussion of the actual case, this is amazing. That is all.)
*Just to clarify, feminism doesn’t mean I
automatically support all female candidacies above all male ones, but all else
being equal I do think putting people who aren’t white men into visible
political positions (especially ones with such international weight) sends out
a much better signal than business as usual. China, take note.
**I’ve made you scroll all the way down
here just to meditate some more on how horribly regressive and objectifying
that statement is. “It” is not a “fuck”. She is a woman. Good grief. Anyway,
yes, carry on.
***Related: George Galloway just won a sexist of the year award for calling previously discussed scuzzbucket Julian Assange’s
use of this tactic “bad sexual etiquette”- even beating Assange himself,
apparently.
