Last week was the start of a new term* for me, and with the
start of a new term comes that most wonderful event, the first classes. An
entire week of unusually high attendance, earnest professors,
self-introductions and my personal favourite, the mystical marking schemes and
course outlines that appear once embedded in a PowerPoint and then are never
referred to again. The sense of ennui that this whole process inspires was
exacerbated by the fact that most of the people in most of my classes are
people whose self-introductions (and more…) I have been subjected to for over a
year now, so whilst we all continue to find each other fascinating in oh so many ways, hearing for the eighteenth time
where somebody was born or went to university is not one of them.
Fortunately, to counter this, many of my professors have
apparently decided to be “hip” this term and punctuate their teaching with
multimedia experiences! And so it was that at 4.00 on a Friday afternoon, after
sitting through a couple of hours of questions about our lives and preferences
which nobody should be asked an hour before the weekend, we all got to watch
the first part of Jared Diamond’s “Guns,Germs and Steel”. The documentary is all online, so here's a link in case you have an hour to kill watching National Geographic
adaptations of development classics.
This isn’t a development blog, so I won’t go into too much
detail about Diamond’s theories**, but the basic premise is that all of human
inequality can be explained by recourse to- yes, you guessed it- guns, germs
and “steel”, i.e. technology. The part of it we were watching concerned the
initial development of humankind, and how the development of wheat and barley
farming and the domestication of goats in the Middle East, technologies which
then spread across Eurasia, led to Europeans becoming colonising douchebags
thousands of years later and screwing every other continent over despite only
being superior by geographical accident. In other continents, where there
weren’t good animals to domesticate or nutritionally balanced crops to exploit,
communities didn’t have the people to spare to become technological specialists
rather than food producers and technology therefore went nowhere.
It’s an interesting theory which makes good intuitive sense
right up until one asks oneself why, if both Europe and Asia benefited from the
same favourable conditions, it was specifically Europe who became the
colonising douchebags and not East Asia. China was, after all, technologically
superior for most of human history!*** I honestly don’t know if Diamond has an
answer to this or not in the rest of the TV show or the book (although it’s a
pretty glaring oversight if he’s not thought about it at all), but it does seem
to me the book ought to be called “Guns,
Germs, Steel and Poor Life Choices Made By Western Europe”, for accuracy’s
sake. Although, to be fair, Jared Diamond is a published author and I am
writing feminist tirades on Blogspot, so perhaps I should defer to him on the
subject of book titles. He seems to know what he’s doing.
I’m getting severely sidetracked here. The point is, I
watched the video with my classmates, and it was very interesting, even though
it is narrated by an American and therefore very hard to take seriously. But it
also made me extremely mad, in a way that has nothing to do with half-baked oversimplified
approaches to history and development. In order to help us understand global
inequalities, the movie regularly juxtaposed scenes from modern Papua New
Guinea, where being asked a question about inequality by an angry man one day
provided the inspiration for Diamond’s search for truth, and acted-out scenes
from Back In The Day, when mankind was first learning to farm and building
settlements in the Fertile Crescent. And yes, I used mankind deliberately just
then, because the makers of this video (or, at least, their casting directors!)
seemed pretty clear on the fact that it was mankind
who made these great initial leaps in human history.
To make my point, I decided to take a foray into the world
of screencaps. I learned two things from this little endeavour: the first is
that taking screencaps is quite hard, and everything seems to be blurry; but
unfortunately we’ll all just have to live with that. The second thing is that
National Geographic needs to have a serious think about its casting directors,
because these things do not line up.
So
the video starts off with hunter-gatherers doing hunting and gathering, both in
modern Papua New Guinea and in Cinematic Prehistory. These dudes are all men,
which makes sense because I suspect it’s quite hard to be a hunter whilst
pregnant (though having never tried either, I would welcome evidence to the
contrary). Then we’re told that hunting doesn’t really provide enough food, so
pre-agricultural communities also had to rely a lot on gathering! Here are the
modern gatherers of Papua New Guinea, felling and processing a sago tree:
Women and axes!
Women carrying stuff!
Women and a stick!
This
all looks very difficult and time consuming, and we therefore get a shot of
Diamond sitting in a swamp pontificating on the scarcity of these trees and
their nutritional inadequacy. Whilst he is doing this, he is surrounded by
hard-working New Guinean women, because as the voice over explicitly points
out, it is women who do this work.
Meanwhile, in Cinematic Prehistory, the gatherers of the
Fertile Crescent had easier and better things to gather, namely wheat and
barley. Here are the people of Cinematic Prehistory gathering wheat and barley.
Hey guys, I lost my wedding ring!
Face shots are for posers.
Prehistoric silhouette dude
The video is more coy than I remember about actually showing these people clearly, but it's my contention that over 50% of the actors, and all of the prominently featured ones, are men. Which is interesting, because it was
also the men of Cinematic Prehistory who were chasing that deer through the forest
earlier. Our cinematic male antecedents must have been extraordinarily
resourceful people if they were able to find more than twice the necessary
calories for their individual survival, just so they could keep their women and
children alive whilst said women sat around looking photogenic on a rock
somewhere.
(I’m joking, of course, because standing around looking
photogenic on a rock was a non gender-specific activity in Cinematic
Prehistory.)
This difference continues into the discussion of agriculture.
You see, the real reason that the people of Cinematic Prehistory were on that
rock was to survey the terrible effects of Cinematic Prehistoric Climate
Change. It turns out that existing so temporally close to an ice age really
wreaks havoc on one’s Cinematic Prehistoric life plans! But we must remember
that Cinematic Prehistory is very full of resourceful people men, and
these men are about to do something amazing, i.e. farm those grasses from
earlier! Here is Cinematic Prehistoric Man learning to farm.
Important men doing important manly activities. Like progress.
Manly man sowing. Not sewing, that's for girls.
... Women? Is that you?
Someday, son, you too will have an awesome Cinematic Prehistory beard.
SO HARDCORE.
Yes, I accept those people at the back of a couple of shots
might be women, and that child with the goats may in fact be Arya Stark. I
spent a long time looking at these scenes and I played a lot of “spot the
female”, and I accept that they probably do exist in these shots. But they are
not foreground in any of them. Sure, Prehistoric Cinematic Woman helped out a
bit in the most revolutionary lifestyle change in human history, but there’s no
way she was the main event!
For comparison, here’s modern Papua New Guineans farming.
Women! There you are!
A man is helping here. Good on you, man.
A man in a tree. Yep.
Pigs are not helpful livestock, alas.
The
roles are literally reversed. Apart from the man in the banana tree, who I will
admit is pretty prominent, these are “spot the male” photos. Women are getting
this stuff done in this society which is supposed to be parallel to Cinematic
Prehistory in every way but the type of plants and animals being used.
What
does this say about how we think about human development? I’m sure that when
National Geographic were thinking about how to present Cinematic Prehistory,
they weren’t sitting in a board room going “well we all know women didn’t do anything, so we don’t need to show any of them prominently”. But, apparently,
despite probably knowing how things were done in Papua New Guinea, it made
perfect intuitive sense that the people to depict as innovators of the human
race should all be male. Because Papua New Guinea is, the video takes pains to
tell us, stagnant. It produces no
“cargo” (the New Guinean word for “cool stuff from abroad”, apparently). And
maybe, on some level, it makes sense to us that this stagnant society is one
that relies so heavily on womanpower, and that this aspect of its agriculture
could not possibly be one of the
hallmarks of a society that innovates. I mean, we live in a society where it is
apparently not insane to believe that the entire of human civilisation was built by men so thatsexy women could sit around looking pretty and getting adored***! How
could a society where women were playing these roles have the same level of
progress?
I sincerely hope that
to most of my readers, the above looks like bullshit- if you’ll pardon my
French. Certainly the little I know about prehistoric innovation (which
basically comes from this one article that doesn’t cite its sources) suggests
that this view of prehistoric human history is bullshit. But I also suspect
that to a lot of people, this also looks like a total non-issue. Cinematic
Prehistory is not real prehistory, after all, so does it really matter what
gender the actors in it are?
Perhaps not, as an
individual case. But one of the strangest things about being A Feminist is how regularly
things start to look this way- designed by people who almost certainly had the
best intentions, but for some reason just couldn’t avoid unconsciously making
these incredibly stupid decisions. Doctor Who is like that, these days, and for
all it is still my favourite television show ever and I will love it, and Amy
Pond, until the day I die, it still hurts that it’s apparently being helmed by
people who just won’t think. My
previously mentioned Favourite Writer Ever, Caitlin Moran, has a chapter in
which she mentions how women have never ever done anything of artistic or
technological worth, complete with a “feminists will try to tell you this isn’t
true but think about it ladies, you know it is”, which just goes to show how I
couldn’t even cover half the nonsense that got through the editing process in
that book. We live in a world now where most of us know beyond a shadow of a
doubt that women are supercool awesome powerful terrifying people capable of
moving mountains (and, most importantly, for reasons other than babies), and
yet when we retreat into culture, or start making culture of our own, we come
up against all of these odd tropes and prejudices that too often have nothing
to do with reality or how we experience it.
Like Diamond, I carry my own set of “statements made by [sometimes]
angry men” which spur me on to figuring out what the truth about our human
world and the people in it actually is.
One of them is the assertion by a classmate, R., that he will never be a
feminist because “feminism is a reaction, and women deserve better”. He is
right on both counts, though obviously I don’t agree with his implied causality
or his conclusion. I would love to
live in a world where I can watch a stupid development video on Friday
afternoon without going into a blinding feminist rage; my feminism will be
pretty much useless when these unconsciously depressing gendered decisions stop
being made. I very much look forward to that moment. Until then, annoying
people like me are going to keep reacting to and pointing out these things,
hoping that someday we might not have anything left to react to.
"History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind. With the bucket."
*They’re technically “semesters” but as I am British (and so
are the vast majority of my readership), I refuse to bastardise my language any
more than is necessary in a world which mostly doesn’t know what a “chip” is.
So let’s stick with “terms”.
**I also haven’t read the book or seen the rest of the TV
show. So please direct all your sophisticated Jared Diamond-related questions
elsewhere.
***
There are loads of fascinating theories about why this pre-modern superiority
didn’t lead to an Asian industrial revolution which might have at least
prevented China from its own nasty experiences with colonisation. Unfortunately
they’re completely off-topic for this blog, so I’ll keep myself in check.
About
eighteen months back, when I lived in the Staircase of Feminine Awesomeness*, a
friend of mine- in fact, let’s stop coyly referring to “friends” every time I
have to speak about someone, affect a silly Victorian letter-writing convention
and call her H.- had a birthday tea party and invited a bunch of people
around. Being a totally hardcore Feminist Fitty herself, H. had received several
Books About Women as presents, including a book called “How to be a Woman”, by Caitlin Moran, from fellow
staircase denizen E. . Now, at the
time my familiarity with Caitlin Moran was entirely through a story about her
once appearing in a BBC English textbook which I had to teach from in China, so
I was highly amused to discover a work of feminism written by this extraordinary
TEFL superstar. As we sat on H.’s sloping floor stuffing ourselves with various
baked goods and herbal brews, somebody got the bright idea to read a bit of an
extract out of this new female instruction manual.
I
don’t really remember what bit we read, although we probably didn’t get past
the first few pages, where she’s being chased across a council estate by yobs
and communing with a stupid dog whose vagina is more integral to the plot for
the first ten pages than Moran’s own. The point is, at some point very early
on, we stopped reading, looked at each other, went ‘I don’t think this is
really a feminist book,’ and got on with our lives. And by ‘got on with our
lives’, I mean ‘started reading extracts from “The Sex Diaries” instead’. Great
party book, that one. And that was the end of the feminist importance of
Caitlin Moran.
Except,
alas, it wasn’t. Fast forward to this summer, and S., another coolkid of my acquaintance,
sends me a link to an article about the
US launch of “How to be a Woman”,
along with the words ‘a compatriot of yours, perhaps?’ Yes, it turned out that
Caitlin Moran, TEFL superstar, had apparently written a very influential book
back in those heady days in the Staircase of Awesome, and we had been so preoccupied
with the bit about dog vaginas that we hadn’t noticed that this magnificent
being had single-handedly re-energised our movement! I disguised this earth
shattering moment in my existence with some highly intellectual musings on
Birmingham City Centre, and promptly resolved to discover more about this mysterious
tome. My very maturity as an organism was apparently at stake.
A
stroke of luck was upon us that day. S. had unwittingly chosen to enlighten me about
the movement of feminism (not to be confused with the feminist movement) on a
day when, not only was I in London, hangout of most of my awesome British acquaintances,
but H. had also just come back from her bohemian Vienna lifestyle to grace said
hangout. I purchased some patriotic M&S snacks and went to talk to my
fellow expat about the magic of our lives and the fate of our ideology. Many
were the insights had on that day over a therapeutic cat-petting session**- we
compared linguistic abilities, leg hair***, awesome foreign lifestyles and how
best to pet a cat. On Caitlin Moran, however, H. had only one thing to say: ‘If
she’s going to write a book saying “here’s the facts”, it would have been really nice if she’d looked up some
actual facts first.’
So
then I stopped faffing around and actually read the book. And there’s an
interesting habit I’ve picked up recently when reading books about feminism,
where I cannot help but make corresponding facial expressions when I’m reading
along. Sometimes, like with the bits of The Female Eunuch I dipped into**** a couple
of weeks back, this involves wearing a smug smile and nodding slowly along for
several hours; when making my way through Catharine MacKinnon the effect is
more of a full-face twitch as her reasoning lurches (in my indoctrinated mind, anyway) from brilliant to deranged and back again in
the space of a paragraph. I was going to see if I could emulate some of the
faces I pulled during “How to be a Woman”,
but then I Google image searched Moran and I discovered that the faces I pulled
whilst reading it were probably very similar to the faces she wore whilst
writing it. So, at first it was like this:
And then it went a bit like this:
And once or twice this:
And by the end, I was like this:
No, wait, that’s Benedict Cumberbatch.
Let’s try again:
That’s quite unfair, of course. This was a pretty hilarious
book, and the memoir parts of it (which is in fact most of it) were fascinating.
See, it turns out that the textbook-approved story about the plucky teenager
who wrote a book about her homeschooling experiences was actually a slightly
desperate, lonely teenager who wrote a book about being very poor in a huge
family in Wolverhampton. Having done so, she proceeded to create one of the
biggest life turnarounds ever managed by an impoverished teenager in
Wolverhampton, moved to London where all the awesome people are, and went on to
write hilarious newspaper columns and throw drinks on members of Blur, or
something along those lines. It’s all very heartwarming. But my goodness, whoever
thought you could write a book on feminism in a five month blaze of glory
needs a punch in the gonads.
Because, you see, for me the deal breaker wasn’t the bits
where the existence of facts was casually ignored in favour of a sort of Edgy
Modern Feminist reinventing of the wheel. I raised my eyebrows (figuratively
and literally, see above) when Moran starts musing on whether we are in the
fifth wave of feminism by now- show your working at least, Caitlin!- and again
when I was co-opted into the Edgy Modern Feminist movement of “strident
feminism”, but “How to be a Woman” is
pretty unapologetic about not being an academic text of any sort so I figured I’d
let this kind of postulating slide. Similarly, I am not so far gone into my
little bubble of feminist theory that I don’t recognise that for some women, it
may be new and exciting to be told that waxing your “foof” and wearing high
heels every day despite the pain are not an inalienable part of the female
condition. Full disclosure: I even quite liked some of the things she said
which fell well outside what passes
in feminism for a Party Line- so hey, don’t feel guilty for being bitchy or
flirting at work because men don’t have to feel guilty about being bitchy or
flirting at work! Obviously, being Manly Hunter Mans means that men never do
anything as feminised as bitch or flirt anyway,
but if they did, they sure wouldn’t feel as guilty about it as you probably did
before Caitlin Moran told you feminists shouldn’t tell you not to. I was even
in favour of the moral of the book, which is that we’re all just trying to be
one of “the Guys”; a bit linguistically unfortunate that, seeing as “guy” is
definitely not as gender neutral as I’d like it to be, but sure. Feminist
bestseller, whatever.
No, all of those things were just fine. But there are a few glaring
moments of “excuse me, what?” which
possibly moulded my face into whole new shapes with their depressing badness,
mostly because none of them needed to
happen. The first major one of these was the moment the “what should we
call vaginas” chapter descended into a prescriptive list of things we should
and should not call our vaginas. There I was, smirking along at the thought of
a teenage vagina called “Rolf Harris”, doing a little fistpump of recognition
as “Birmingham City Centre” entered the story for real, putting on my sceptical face for the whole sequence involving babies… and then Caitlin Moran told me
not to call my vag “vag”. It sounds like a middle aged woman, apparently (which
is fitting, because so does my vag*****). Not “here are names which make me
cringe”, which would have been functionally equivalent given the whole book is
based on one woman’s personal adventure, and allowed all the same jokes. Just, ‘I
know what feminism is, don’t call your vag “vag”’. I may have in fact said “Piss
off, Caitlin” out loud.
And this happens a couple more times. These occasional
jarring moments where, in the name of being funny
and down to earth and feminist at a bar and we’re all friends here
it’s just a laugh innit mate, these things just burst out of what could
otherwise be a pretty darn amazing book. The real killer for me was the chapter
on strip clubs (I think it is aptly titled “I go to a strip club!”) in which
Moran, in the heady days of the early noughties when apparently going to strip
clubs was a Thing (even the Spice Girls did it! The Spice Girls went to strip clubs!
My childhood is ruined!), goes to a strip club, doesn’t think much of it and
then gets kicked out by a bouncer who mistakes her for an ugly Russian
prostitute. This prompts a long discussion about how awful strip clubs are,
because everyone in them is a bit serious and angry, and then the assertion
that strippers are letting the rest of women down. No, sorry Caitlin, you don’t
get to make that claim. You got to leave home at 16 with an enormous vocabulary
and a published book and become a magazine-person-and-TEFL-superstar; other
women leave home with just their bodies and also do what they can.
This bit I almost forgave, however, after the following bit
about burlesque, which as we all know is Good Stripping: turns out that the
real clincher in favour of Good Stripping is that it is stripping frequented by
gay men, and women should pay close attention to the things that gay men like
as gay men are effectively a better version of women. Now, I’m not in the habit
of filming myself whilst reading (yet) but I’m fairly convinced that my
eyebrows actually left my head, anime-style, after I discovered this little gem
in the Feminist Manual of the Century. I know gay men who are experts in
linguistics, a capella, being amazing boyfriends, hipster fashion, misanthropy,
the music of the Final Fantasy video game series and taxidermy, among other
things, but perhaps I don’t know the Right Sort of gay man because none of them
have been even slightly good at being
women. In fact, it is possible that suggesting that the best type of woman is
in fact a type of man with their own set of societal prejudices to tackle might
be incredibly obnoxious to both parties involved! Yes, it’s just one little part
of your book, that you made as a bit of a wry joke, and you did basically get
your point across about burlesque, but now this thing you have written is being
read by people around the world who are taking it exactly as seriously as “hey
women, you don’t need to shave your pubes into the shape of Sicily!” i.e. very
seriously. I’m afraid I can’t see this as progress.
And it’s sad, because it’s unnecessary. Proudly writing your
feminist magnum opus in five frantic months, like a modern lady Kerouac with
less substance abuse, is only a good thing if you’ve got enough people in those
five months to read the thing over and, on occasions, point out that you don’t need to say that. It’s not
censoring your edginess to suggest you don’t slut shame just to have a wham
line at the end of your tragic strip club experience. It’s making your book
better, so that maybe next time we can have a New Awesome Feminist Book that
actually makes me grin like an idiot all the way through (then buy a hundred
copies and give them to everyone I know). Also, you would really save my poor
aching face muscles. Think about it.
*I’m not sure whether “staircases”
as a university living arrangement is self explanatory or not? It’s basically a
small group (5-15) of vertically arranged rooms. The Staircase of Feminine
Awesomeness was actually a couple of old townhouses converted into student
rooms, and there were 6 of us altogether, although only 4 on the officially
Awesome bit.
**I know this entry is about a book
where that would be a euphemism but honestly, here it’s not. There really was a
cat. It bit me.
***Yes, my best feminist sis had not
seen me with fully grown-out leg hair until this summer. This fact is going to
come as quite a surprise to some people and that is probably my own fault.
****Not a euphemism!
*****This is possibly the opposite
of the kind of content I should be populating my serious feminist blog with,
but it’s impossible to discuss the sounds of vaginas without including the
opinion of a different Moran:
So yesterday I hopped a couple of time zones to get back to
my termtime home in charming Beijing. I’ve got a half-unpacked suitcase staring
me in the face, my jetlag coping mechanism is frankly bordering on narcolepsy,
and many of the things I wanted to write about are becoming progressively less
and less relevant as time continues its tyrannical march forwards. A perfect
time, in other words, to write about the timelessly tiring case of Julian
Assange.
Now I’m aware that this blog has, thus far, not exactly been
a multimedia experience. And that also, although I may spend several hours
every day meditating on the feminist puzzles presented by Assange and his like,
others may be less clear on who this man dude is and what he has got up to
recently. In order to kill two birds with one stone, therefore, I present a mood board
which should refresh your memory on everything Assange in one easy visual step:
This hopefully absolves me of having to actually go through
all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of What’s Up With That Wikileaks Guy
(transcontinental edition!), because frankly I’ve been going over the whole
thing for hours and I still have no idea how to make a coherent story of this
whole case. The basic tale is that Australian “Rockstar
Journalist” Julian Assange, head of controversial news agency Wikileaks
(which famously got hold of a whole load of US diplomatic cables a few years
back thanks to a certain B. Manning- the USA was not pleased), went off to
Sweden in 2010 and found himself in bed with a couple of women. Said women then
went to the police, initially to force Assange to take a HIV test, but processes
led to charges of rape being filed. Sweden filed extradition requests with the
UK, who complied; Assange, however, had other ideas- fearing extradition to the
USA, where he might face the death penalty for treason (or whatever Americans have
that is treason but different, I can’t be bilexical all the time), he goes
through various appeals against extradition, during which time he was placed
under house arrest. Appeals fail, man takes logical next step and goes to Ecuador.
Or, at least, the next best thing in London city centre, which is the
Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador, for its part, gets to be a paragon of upholding
the values of human liberty, at least among certain circles. How novel.
It’s all a bit murky, even before one gets into the sex bit.
For instance, there have not yet been any formal charges by Sweden against Assange,
because these can’t be filed before a second round of questioning with the man,
and prosecutor Marianne Ny refuses to do this until Assange is extradited. Fair
enough, but Assange doesn’t need to be extradited for these interviews
to take place, as arrangements between the UK and Sweden are in place to allow
the whole thing to take place in Britain- but for reasons of her own, Ny hasn’t.
Meaning the case drags on, Assange remains in “Ecuador” and the Wikileaks website gets to put up the number of
days Assange has been arrested without charge in angry black letters at the top
of its homepage. And the whole business
regarding potential extradition “onwards” also seems weird, given that Sweden
does not habitually send people to countries where they face the death penalty.
The part of the story where Ecuador- a country currently trying
to outlaw protest so the state can acquire resource-rich land with less social
uproar- becomes the chosen land of diplomatic freedom is probably more
darkly amusing than confusing, although it does give me a fabulous reason to
hate Rafael Correa, who publically sympathised with Assange’s plight by
basically saying “that’s
not rape in Ecuador”.
Yes, here we
go, onto what you knew was going to be the subject of this Most Feminist
Inquiry into the Life And Sexytimes of Julian Assange. I mean, we’re hundreds
of words in and yet I’ve only mentioned three or four women, right?* So let’s
move on to the murkiest, and most disturbing, and, As A Feminist, most
depressing, part of this story: rape. Or “surprise sex”. Or “sexual assault”,
or “harassment”, or “molestation”, or whatever words we want to use to get out
of applying that rather unpleasant r-word to a case which, really, we’d rather
just be about the politics.
Because that
word is scary, and we therefore want it to be narrow. If anything, I’d say that
the vague obsession with talking about Swedish rape law as “surprise sex” is
because whatever happened in two Swedish apartments in 2010**** was
emphatically not, to throw another silly descriptor into the mix, “attack sex”.
It wasn’t a Bad Man standing in a dark alley waiting to attack an innocent
virgin girl; it was a meeting between two adults that turned bad. The women
even wanted him there to begin with, and say that they engaged in consensual
sexual acts before the non-consensual ones. In other words, this was the kind
of sex that Republicans
think you can become pregnant from (for the record, just typing that hurt
me a little). Throwing a rape allegation into a case about freedom of
information and the legitimacy of secret intelligence networks is extremely
discomfiting, so we are offered all these “softeners” to help it go down
easier. It wasn’t really rape, it was surprise
sex- and what an odd law that is, eh?
No. Hell no. It
seems that this is a point where my feminist goggles truly do make me different
from quite a lot of the world, because despite the apparent prevalence of the
above opinion I cannot fathom how any intelligent, humanity-respecting
individual can’t process something as simple as “no consent = rape”. We’re not
in caricatured feudal Europe here, where roving castle lords get to take lusty
maidens whenever and wherever they want. Women are not “asking for it” every
time they wear an outfit that reminds men that they are a woman. Sex slavery might
still an awful reality, but it’s not legal. I’m sorry to say- and I really,
truly hope that this is not coming as news to you- that you cannot buy a season
ticket to a vagina. Not even a full-day pass. Consent is a moment to moment
thing, and without consent, sex is rape.*****
It’s really,
truly, not rocket science. After all, in this day and age sex is supposed to be
fun! Many women have freed themselves from semi-compulsory babies and
semi-compulsory marriage, and whilst it’s still not an equal playing field out
there in terms of gendered social stigma, things have got better for women who
like shagging. If sex isn’t fun, then the prevailing opinion is that you’re
doing it wrong. People who advocate consent aren’t suggesting that sex partners
sit down beforehand and thrash out a legal contract- just to be crystal clear
on what is no (the word “no” is a good start) and what is yes (again, the word “yes”
works wonders, at least in the English speaking world), and to have enough
respect for the other person (or people) to ask what’s going on if the signals
aren’t clear. So why are we not automatically, as humans, condemning people who
are fully aware that their partners don’t want to have sex, but are carrying on
regardless (or even enjoying the lack of enjoyment)? How can that be anything,
ever, except rape? Why are we trying to turn it into something decent- not how
we’d want sex, of course, but if that’s what they’re into, and if person B didn’t
like it then they shouldn’t have let person A into their house in the first
place, and so on? After all, men
aren’t werewolves (and nor are women)- no amount of horniness in a impairs
judgement to the point where one “cannot stop”. We can all stop, if we’re
decent human beings. Rapists choose not to.
None of this
has anything specificity to Julian Assange. If he did what his two accusers
said he did- use his body weight to pin down a woman so he could have sex with her
after she’d asked him to stop, or initiate condomless sex with a sleeping woman
he’d only known for a day (after she’d been arguing with him the entire
previous night about using condoms every time, because STIs are kind of a thing Assange, and so are babies)- then under Swedish law and under what I truly wish were
commonly held standards of interpersonal decency, he raped them. If that’s not
true, he didn’t. Unfortunately, there’s a whole deeper level of murkiness which
throws doubt on whether this will ever play out in a court of law. Naomi Wolf
(more on her later!) made
the feminist world cringe with a lot of her
reaction to the rape allegations, but her remarks
about the weirdness of the case are pretty insightful. The depressing
take-home message is that the case isn’t being prosecuted like a rape, because on
some levels it’s being taken seriously, and even in “feminist paradise” Sweden
that’s not a normal state of affairs for a non Bad-Man-In-Dark-Alley rape.
Maybe that’s a necessary evil in a realm of law which is so tied up in people’s
most private lives, where almost every case is going to be one person’s word
against another. The percentages of deliberately misreported rape- these “honey
pots” that various men in power just tragically
seem to fall into on occasion, pretty women put there just to tempt weak silly
men, poor things- are on a par with other misreported crimes, at around 2-4%,
but it’s always going to be hard to prove things that happen (usually) between
two people in very intimate settings. But surely that just makes it more
important to stress what consent is and how we can police ourselves.
And that’s why
Assange’s case is so depressing. Because behind the murk and the politics,
there’s just a whole lot of doubt about these rape charges and why they’re
around. Maybe this individual instance really is a honey trap, a cunning ploy
by a CIA agent to get Assange double-extradited to the USA where he can sit in
a jail cell for revealing what the world’s dictators eat for breakfast. But
that wouldn’t change what they would mean if they were true. Focusing on Sweden’s
“odd” rape laws rather misses the point of what they are trying to achieve-
even if Swedish authorities have little interest in enforcing them. Whatever happens
here, we’ve tied up what should be a progressive definition of rape into a web
of skulduggery and intrigue that throws scepticism on the entire process. And
unfortunately that means, whatever happens to Assange, women lose.
*Although I’ve
also only mentioned two or three men**, so my closet misandrist ratios aren’t
suffering too much. Plus an excellent picture of William Hague on a waterslide!
His throwing of that little diplomatic wobbly where he threatened to revoke the
sovereignty of the Ecuadorian embassy didn’t make it into my earlier summary,
which is a very tragic state of affairs. I hope you are nobody is relying on
this blog as a sole news source***, you would be missing out on a fair bit of important contextualisation…
*** Related: I’d
just like to extend a very special welcome to the six visitors who apparently
found their way here through a Russian sex site earlier today. It’s great to
see my audience getting so cosmopolitan this early in the blogging process.
****And I’d
just like to stress at this point that we
don’t know what happened, Assange is not a convicted rapist or even a charged
one. He is, however, a man taking a lot of pains to avoid being charged and
brought to trial.
***** This goes
for people of all genders, but I think bias towards rape as a women’s issue is somewhat
justified both in terms of statistics (i.e who gets raped) and through the simple
fact that there are fewer men who find themselves in bed with women who can physically
coerce them. But of course it happens, and we should take it just as seriously.
It would seem that we reached an important milestone in
gender equality last week: August 24, 2012 marked the first time that a trite
feminine platitude became important enough to write a New York Times opinion
piece about. Or, at least, it marked the first time I became aware of a New
York Times opinion piece inspired by a trite feminine platitude, which in my
selfish little universe is basically the same thing. I refer, of course, to “Men,who needs them?”, by biology and criminal justice man dude Greg Hampikin: an
intriguing piece of literature sent to me as faux pacification after I went on
a Caitlin Moran related reading strike of all poorly-thought-out woman-related
media* (more on that in a few days). The big controversy raised here is that
the answer to “Who needs men” may in fact be “not babies”, an answer which, as
controversies go, seems a bit surreal given the way gender stereotyping
has traditionally divvied up the whole childcare business anyway. In other
news, it turns out that pears may not be necessary to the process of cider
making! There, I just turned thousands of years of human history and the
brewing traditions of charmingly-accented western folk on their head. I think I’ll
reward myself with some of this new-fangled apple cider.
I am being disingenuous of course. It’s not yet possible to
write an article as glaringly superfluous to the human condition as “Women are better
than men at growing small humans and feeding them milk!” But it does seem like
this, and the existence of sperm banks, and an apparent lack of ideas about
what fathers might do that might complement the whole physical baby-farming
business, is supposed to lead to a sense of futility about the entire male
gender. A large portion of this is based on the absence of men in what must be
the ultimate anti-choice fable about the origins of life: our identity apparently
begins not at conception or even at ovulation, but at the formation of our ovum inside our mother’s foetus. That’s right, you were once inside two reproductive
systems at once, like a little unicellular Matryoshka doll. Then you came out
of one vagina, hung out in an ovary for a while, went on a rocking waterslide for
a couple of days, possibly saw an enormous
penis which is even now the root of many of your subconscious insecurities**
and then you met a sperm which, for the purposes of this story, was not very
relevant because men are not very relevant. After that complete non-event, you
ruined your mother’s body, came out of another vagina, ruined your mother’s
body some more, and that’s the end of all meaningful stories about where babies
come from. I’m so glad a New York Times sanctioned biologist was around to share
this profound origin story with me!
To be fair, I think Hampikin’s only fundamental flaw is that
he fails to situate this narrative of the human condition in its natural home:
in the kind of pseudo-profound metaphysical worries one gets at 3am when you
accidentally make yourself a non-decaf coffee before bed and then discovered
your pillows have, to all intents and purposes, been replaced with sandbags. For instance:
“What is my purpose in life? Should I have been born? What
if I hadn’t been born? Will I find love? Will I be reincarnated? Was I reincarnated
before? Did I find love when I was reincarnated before? What if I am supposed
to find love with the same person I was in love with before I was reincarnated,
but then he was really bad and got reincarnated as a jellyfish? Or a dragonfly?
And then maybe I will be a jellyfish when he’s back to being a man and we’ll never meet again. Or wait- what if he
never got born? Maybe he’s sentient somewhere as a gamete, but unable to find
me! What if the person I am supposed to find eternal reincarnating love with is
trapped in an ovary????”
When I consider that the
likes of Greg Hampikin have to contend with “What if men are less biologically
necessary to the continuation of the human race than women?” on top of all that
nonsense, I do have to wonder how men manage to sleep at all.
A skim of the article’s comments shows that this is serious
threat to certain invidivuals’ masculinity- perhaps the social construction of
male-as-first-sex might not be completely justified from nature? Hampikin doesn’t offer any alternatives to sperm in
terms of fertilisation, thus saving the male organism from complete obsolescence,
but it seems it genuinely is jarring for anybody who isn't accustomed to being referred to as
“the weaker sex” or “the second sex” or “the fairer sex” to suddenly confront even the theoretical notion that they might be… “The extra sex”. “The
questionably relevant sex.” “The sex which just needs to wank in a cup (and
technically not even that but let’s not push this too far).” Suddenly, thanks to the night time worries of a biologist with a Y Chromosome (and True Feminist Ally) the
really obvious truth that men don’t grow babies inside them has become a deeply
subversive issue at the heart of gender relations! Again, I am blown away by
this novel and profound conclusion. I can just hear the machine of gender discrimination grinding
into reverse with this bombshell- we’ll be writing World Bank reports on male
infanticide and missing men before the decade’s out.
Mocking male egos is a cheap shot, however, especially when
the egos in question are those of people who habitually comment on online news opinion
pieces. The interesting thing about the whole thing is, for an article that is
ostensibly about child-rearing, this article has nothing whatsoever to do with child-rearing. It’s true that babies
have to come from somewhere in order to be reared, and the storks are probably
all busy catching fish and sitting on stork eggs or whatever it is storks do
when they’re not posing for “you just had a baby!” greeting cards. I can’t help
but note, however, that I’ve got two parents who are both very important in my
life, who have done a little more in the past twenty-four years than just contribute
genetic material and ensure I got born. My memory is a little hazy on some of
the details, but I distinctly remember some passing on of important life skills
happening there. Learning to walk and talk and read and ride bicycles and do
cross stitch and scuba dive, for instance. Some assistance in getting nutrients
and resources. General love and encouragement as well, that sort of thing. In
fact, the only thing not provided by a parent is practically the only post-womb
activity the article mentions- a long-running supply of breast milk. I’m sure
this oversight was second only to the pre-conception penis exposure in
irrevocably scarring my poor infant psyche. I have been, in both the traditional
and the important senses, very lucky- traditionally because I was raised by my
two direct antecedents, who still spend a statistically significant amount of
time living under the same roof and have been married 26 years today (go
parents!), and importantly because I got to spend my childhood being looked
after by loving adults, who were interested in raising children, in a secure
environment.
And that’s where this whole 3am-male-irrelevance-nightmare
seems to miss the point in quite an important way. Sure, the production of
babies requires more direct involvement from females than males, but as a
conception of parental responsibility that’s a starting point at best. Human
reproduction needs men because human children are rubbish an incapable and need
responsible adults to stop them from falling off mountains or getting eaten by
wolves. And aside from the semi-necessary involvement of women in breastfeeding
there is nothing to stop these all-important caretakers from being men. In
fact, As A Feminist I’d say it’d be positively encouraged! Perhaps it could even help us poor woman people to collectively move on from the whole work/child/”supermum”/double burden business
that keeps popping up and confusing us and making stupid people question if "feminism has gone too far?" now that women have to make life choices. Which then keeps me and my X chromosomes up at night: not worrying if feminism has gone too far, but worrying about how exactly I am going to be able to convey to the people talking about it just how stupid and misguided and utterly ridiculous they are.
Of course, there’s far more to this whole child-having business than I can
realistically cover here (which is probably why it's consumed rather a lot of humanity's collective energy for a very long time). For instance, I am dimly aware of (and Hampikin
briefly alludes to) swathes of sociological research on whether one’s caretaker
humans should indeed be those all important direct antecedents, or whether
being raised by four men, a non-binary femme and a talking mongoose would have
the same impact. There’s also the matter of how society differentiates between
mothers and fathers: paternity leave and custody laws and a whole host of
issues which, bizarrely, are a prime stomping ground for that wonderful beast,
the Men’s Rights Activist- the kind of charming gentlemen who tend to concern
themselves more with finding submissive women to give them blowjobs without
expecting reciprocation than fighting for the right to blow noses and change
nappies. I’m going to leave ideal family structure to the experts and MRAs for
another time, however, and finish with a plea for us all to think about the
real victims in all this: unfertilised ova people. Having to live for 10-50
years in a cramped ovary, seeing two vaginas but both of women related to you and from the wrong side, and they don’t even get to be a fully chromosomed person
at the end of it! Now there’s a thought that can truly cross gender boundaries and keep us all awake at night.
*The astute reader will note this is an excellent
justification of my lack of proofreading. It’s always good when one can
disguise ones laziness with “principles”.
** NOTE FOR BIOLOGICAL ACCURACY: You never saw
this penis. It was on the other side of the cervix to you. But Freud never let
little problems like realistic female biology get in the way of his psychological
theories, and neither shall I.
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.
*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.
