She returns!

So I’ve been doing a few things since my last update, including but not limited to:

• Enjoying the return to form in the new Legend of Korra show, which has finally hit its stride on characterisation and dynamics between characters, and set up an interesting and morally ambiguous storyline where we actually can get wholeheartedly behind the protagonist for once. Also every location has been amazing, early-20^th-century-sci-fi-aesthetic metal flower cities are the greatest thing ever I will fight you.
• Buying rattan furniture, and other furniture, and a washing machine, and then putting the furnitures and appliances into an awesome new flat. For a while I was living in a different flat that already had someone else’s furniture in, but that someone else turned out to be The Worst. New furniture and new place, on the other hand, is great!
• Going dancing at clubs in flip flops and then having women in heels step on my feet, then wondering if the strange hard lump on the top of my foot that this incident created is literally going to be there for the rest of my life.
•  Playing Bastion. Playing Transistor. Thinking about super beautiful apocalyptic indie games for a while. Then downloading DOSBox so I can play a super old shareware Capture the Flag game forever. (A lot of FTL and King of Dragon Pass have also happened.)
• Listening to Development Drums, a podcast which I discovered through a recommendation that read “why would anyone pay for a development degree when they could just listen to this podcast instead?” After listening to 4 episodes I am sympathetic to this statement – though luckily I never paid for a development degree, so that is something.
• Haircut!
• Walking a lot and eating much less processed sugary crap and consequently losing over twelve kilograms. Now I have very few items of clothing that fit me properly, whoops! But hurrah for healthy life choices regardless of their incidental consequences.
• Supporting losing teams in the World Cup, then failing to follow the Commonwealth Games.
• Oh yeah and also moving to Myanmar to intern for the EU delegation. Possibly should have put that one first.

As you may have noticed, one of the things I have not been doing is writing. Or rather, I have been writing, but the writing has been thousands of words of political analysis which is sent away to highly important people (probably) with someone else’s name at the bottom. I have not been writing for me, or for you: an unforeseen and disappointing consequence of a job which has otherwise been one of the best things I have ever done in my life.*

Since March, I have learned many important things. Some of these things have been about this country, which is beautiful and overwhelming and difficult and vastly different to engage with compared to the inscrutable and ridiculous happenings of China.** I have had the opportunity to learn about many fascinating political processes and events, and talk to some equally fascinating people about said political processes and events. On a no less extraordinary note, I have discovered many things about what happens when it rains literally every day for three months and counting. Did you know that unopened packets of spaghetti can develop black mould inside and disintegrate within weeks? I did not know this, but now that I do it will probably influence my pasta buying decisions for the rest of my life. Other things that happen in endless rain include flooded roads, constant grime, wooden doors which inexplicably no longer want to close, having one’s covered balcony turn into a refuge for half the neighbourhood’s pigeon population, and a growing sense of emotional discontent and misery. Luckily, the rains cannot last forever… I hope.

Besides, the ins and outs of monsoon weather (and also political transition and conflict resolution, let’s not forget those), I’ve also been learning a few more things about myself – silly, trivial things about priorities and relationships and affirming my own self-worth and discovering what I want to do with the rest of my life, stuff like that. I will never regret the time I spent in China, or the things I got up to while I was there, but at the same time I’m aware that in many ways those were years of stasis – I studied some fascinating stuff and made some lifelong friends, but I didn’t really grow in the same way that I have here. This new growth is exciting and terrifying, and it’s also made me a little unsure of where the “new” me (oh dear, how pretentious) stands in relation to my old stances and interests. I’m no longer the “gender expert” in a classroom full of interested peers, nor am I in the UK trying to figure out where I fit into the domestic feminist movement. I’m in Myanmar, as feminist as ever but focusing on a very different set of issues in my regular work. Where does that leave AAF?

The short answer is, I don’t know. But I’m also aware that if I don’t reclaim my space for personal writing soon, it will only become harder in future. So I am coming back, and I am writing weekly again (although I know I have said this before and it has not happened, so we’ll see), but I am making absolutely no guarantees about subject matter for a little while. I still have tons of thoughts on media and British politics and China and gender in development, but these are also competing for space with a lot of new thoughts on life and politics in Myanmar and on the complexities of being a 25-year-old intern finding out what her career might have in store. I have no idea what is to come of this, but there is only one way to find out. Adrienne’s blog is back!

*I was also not writing for a little while before then, because being unemployed for many months with no end in sight was not very good for my mental wellbeing or upkeep of hobbies. Let’s not dwell on that too much though.

**This is not to say that things here are never strange or inscrutable, but in terms of second-guessing motives for political decisions, trying to figure out what is going on in the minds of the Chinese government is a very special kind of futile.

What I learned in school today episode 1: Gender mainstreaming

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 20^th 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’s so 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.

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*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...

“Don’t cross me, or I’ll loose the Beast that’s kennelled here”- Lysistrata and Togo

I awoke yesterday to two notable occurrences. The first was that I was back, at least for a week, in my parents’ home in rural Cambridgeshire (or “The Shire” as we hip non-London youngsters tend to call our respective counties of origin- so ironic! So amusing!). I’d spent the previous week on Zakynthos, on a family holiday for the first time in 8 years, so the lack of 30 degree morning heat and the prospect of spending an entire day without going anywhere near salt water was a pretty depressing thing to wake up to. The second was that a friend of mine had sent me an article about the women of Togo, who have gone on a week-long sex strike to pressure their husbands into pushing for political change- including the resignation of Togo’s president, Faure Gnassingbe. What, As A Feminist, did I make of this?

Well, having one of the best educations that money didn’t buy, and keeping as I do some very erudite company, my first thought was of course to go “Oh my god, this is just like that Ancient Greek play I heard about once with the boners!”* A Google search (with Safesearch on) of “Greek play with boners” informed me that the title I was looking for was “Lysistrata”, an Aristophanes comedy about… well, about men with boners. And women on sex strike. Just like in Togo!

I duly responded to the e-mail with my As A Feminist thoughts as well as my new As A Smarmy Git classical Greek literature namedrop. I think it’s a product of some of the other stuff I’ve been reading recently that, after the “ooh, ancient Greece!” thought, my thoughts ran to worries about the potential for gender-based violence and whether spousal rape is recognised in Togo (answer: nope). Thus far, coverage of the Togo sex strike has focused on the call to strike, rather than the response from women. Perhaps the lack of legal protection will affect the number of women who feel they can safely participate? (Answer: probably.) In which case, the action becomes a rather limited and symbolic one by women at the top (who, to be fair, are more likely to have husbands capable of pushing for political change anyway); or, if widespread, it turns the action into something rather more complex and meaningful than just withholding a week’s worth of sexytimes. My friend was more interested in the implications of using gender relations for political purposes, suggesting that “whatever works” is probably acceptable in this case- and I think we were both a little bemused by the implication that a week without sex could be an unendurable hardship for a man.

But aside from these, the standard As A Feminist concerns about male entitlement and objectification of women and all that jazz, something else was bothering me about the women of Togo’s sex strike. Having covered the politics of Togo for a class assignment last semester, I am probably more informed than the average person about the politics of this small African country- which is to say, I know next to nothing, rather than nothing. So it didn’t really surprise me that there wasn’t much specificity about the Togolese political situation in the article I was sent, or in any of the ones I looked up afterwards- the general story is that Togo under the Gnassingbes (Gnassingbe senior, or Gnassingbe Eyadema, ruled through various coups and “elections” from 1967 until his death in 2005, and his son Faure Gnassingbe has been president since then) has been getting progressively less successful, and the awesomely named “Let’s Save Togo” coalition have had enough of that sort of thing. So, no sex until it’s sorted out (as long as it’s sorted out in a week). The initial article had several quotes from Isabelle Ameganvi, the leader of “Let’s Save Togo”’s women’s wing, explaining how the strike would help women to combat the political problems which they all-too-often bore the brunt of. But I still felt there was something in this I wasn’t quite grasping.

Perhaps, I thought, the answer lay in Aristophanes. The wonders of modern technology meant that I could get a free copy of Lysistrata direct to my Kindle with about a minute (and that’s including time to fiddle with the Wifi settings, which were apparently still in (modern) Greek Mode), although unfortunately free books which have been translated tend to translations old enough to be out of copyright themselves, and therefore subject to the inexplicable literary whims of stupid Victorians. In this case, all Spartan dialogue had been translated into thick Scottish dialect, which means that the following literary analysis will have nothing to do with anything the Spartans said.

I don’t know what I was expecting from my first ancient greek play, but Lysistrata was a pleasant surprise in that it was both short and absolutely choc-full of references to genitalia. It is about an Athenian woman, Lysistrata, who has called together representatives of all the other women of Greece. Unfortunately, aside from her BFF Calonice, nobody has turned up- because it is hard for women to get dressed in the dark, apparently. Also they may be too busy having sex. Lysistrata and Calonice proceed to discuss dongs, then everyone else rocks up and Lysistrata proceeds to explain her foolproof plan to stop the cities of Greece from warring- the women are going to stop having sex until their menfolk get it together and sign a peace treaty.

The other women are horrified! How can they possibly give up sex, even for causes as lofty as peace, unity and making men look stupid (good to see this important feminist cause represented even in ancient Greece)? It is only after a lot of persuasion that everyone agrees- they will all get dressed up and sit around looking beautiful, then refuse to give it up. The possibility of rape is discussed- Lysistrata says that women should give in to force, but lie absolutely still and look bored so that men don’t get any enjoyment either. And absolutely no doggy-style (or, rather, “lion style”. Rawr.) Incidentally, the woman-to-woman dialogue in this is some of the worst I’ve seen since I had the misfortune of watching “Showgirls” a couple of years back- luckily, there’s no more significant man-free scenes after this.

The rest of the play concerns the chaste sufferings of both the men and the women of Greece; the women, holed up in some building or other to give each other strength in solidarity, start defecting one by one to go home and “spin their flax” (whatever that means), whilst the men all have to modify their clothes to hide their enormous hard-ons. A lot of the dialogue happens between two choruses, the “old men” and the “women”, where the women make, to the modern eye, quite reasonable demands to be respected based on their knowledge of homemaking and child rearing , and the old men call them idiots and sluts (sound familiar?) In the end, the men are dragged by their boners (metaphorically and literally!) to the negotiating table, where they discuss their desire to stop warring and go to “plough their fields”. Then everybody gets drunk, the men get back in charge and presumably a lot of babies are born approximately 9 months later. Incidentally, the duration of the Lysistrata sex strike is also given as just over a week.

It goes without saying that Lysistrata is more overtly sexual than any highbrow news account of an African political event- it is, after all, a play about boners. But what’s surprising is the way that female sexuality is portrayed- or ignored. In ancient Athens, women were not seen as capable of the same levels of self-control as men, and are therefore characterised by wanting sex more- the great female victory of the play is that enough women are able to hold out long enough for the men to give in. The sex strike is about abstaining, not withholding- control of men is never assured, because women’s self-control is being called into question.

Reports about Togo, on the other hand, don’t seem interested in the sexuality of the women in their story. Isabelle Ameganvi, whose picture regularly appears, is a fat, middle aged, traditionally dressed African woman- not the kind of person to whom we are accustomed to attributing an autonomous sex drive. This is what is missing from the story, for me- an acknowledgement that the women of Togo are not just disgruntled suppliers erecting (ahem) a picket line in front of their vaginas, but people making choices which are motivated in part by the same sexual instincts they are seeking to manipulate.

Missing, that is, with one exception: a quote from participant Abla Tamakoe, who says: “For me, it's like fasting, and unless you fast, you will not get what you want from God.” Not quite the bawdy lament of Aristophanes’ women, but an acknowledgement of loss nonetheless. Women’s sexuality might be absent from the story, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there in reality.

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*In fact, I didn’t get this knowledge from my (explicitly classics-free) education OR my cool friends. I’m pretty sure I was told about it by some pretentious person at an “educate the plebs” week at Eton that my school sent me on back when I was still young and impressed by pretentious people. Although I suppose all she ever explained to me was “it’s about Greek men who all have boners!” so she can’t have been that pretentious.

**Speaking of! When I googled Lysistrata Togo, one of the first results that came up was from the Daily Mail of all places. Some fellow with a beard he probably draws on in felt tip every morning had used the parallels between the cases to argue for classics in schools, because the main barrier for the average British person to understand the politics of Togo is that they have not read enough Greek comedy. Nothing to do with the fact that 99% of people probably don’t even know what continent Togo is on- it’s definitely about Latin in schools.