Let's not get derailed in discussing violence against women

Originally published at Liberal Conspiracy: http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/06/24/lets-not-get-derailed-in-discussing-violence-against-women

It’s the same every time. A feminist politician or campaign group proposes a patently sensible idea, and the derailing begins.

The End Violence Against Women (EVAW) report is a comprehensive study on the massive prevalence of violence against women and girls, calling on Michael Gove to make a priority of educating against sexism in schools.

Great stuff. Simple common sense, even; unless you are generally in favour of violence against women. But developments like these are a starting horn for discussion derailers.

Here’s one we’ve heard before, ‘but men are victims of violence too!’ Another derailer chips in, ‘and what about female perpetrators of violence?’ We might even hear a bit of, ‘Why focus on women? Shouldn’t we just be educating children about violence generally?’

I recently saw a column by the Somalian women’s minister derailed in this way. It was outrageous, apparently, that a women’s minister should dare to write about the abominable problems specific to women in her country.

When the derailers get going, the debate takes a sudden turn to the right. Instead of discussing the part of the proposal which calls on Gove to develop schools in which girls are not subject to abuse, rape, sexual harassment, bullying or shaming, we are arguing about whether it is right to take gender-specific actions at all.

For the last time, YES, people of all genders perpetrate violence. YES, people of all genders are victims of violence. YES, there is domestic violence between same-sex partners. Now can we go back to EVAW’s proposals?

The derailers are univocally, universally missing the point. Education about violence against women cannot be simply subsumed under education about violence against people generally, and to suggest it should be deliberately ignores the scale of the problem of violence against women.

Consistent evidence demonstrates that it is disproportionately men who enact violence, and disproportionately women who are subject to it. If you want to contest this, go away and do some research.

So don’t get it twisted. The fact that other kinds of violence happen doesn’t negate the need for feminist education to combat the virulent combination of institutional misogyny, equation of masculinity with violence, and culture of sex negativity which makes sex a commodity that boys ‘get’ from girls, not something that all parties enter into consensually.

Violence against women is normalised and perpetuated when sexism goes unchallenged, but if young people are taught better across the board I’d be willing to stake my right arm, left leg and favourite hat that we will see cultural change.

No one denies that men and boys are also victims of violence. But do you know how it feels to be a woman, or a girl, where the sexual harassment, abuse and shaming starts at school and carries on into adulthood? If you don’t, talk to your girlfriend, female friends, mother, sister. They’ll put you on track.


More to look at:

http://www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk/

Where rape is concerned, talk isn't good enough.

I have a guest blog on The F Word. Hopefully it is not triggering, but it does concern rape and recent discussions of rape. If you'd like to read it, click here: http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2011/05/rape_in_the_media

What ludicrous distinctions, its obviously the same person. Oh, I didn't need to say that. This brilliant image makes the point all by itself.

"Business" is no excuse for prejudice

This scientific pictorial evidence confirms irrefutably that the "male brain" exists.

Today I'm mostly ranting about potential parental leave reforms at Labour Uncut. If that sounds half as overwhelmingly exciting to you as it does to me click here: http://labour-uncut.co.uk/2011/05/17/business-is-no-excuse-for-prejudice/

SlutWalking is rooted in riot grrrl attitude

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

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

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

The so-called Liberal Democrats need more discrimination

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

Less of this please

How to play institutional conservative sexism for beginners

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

You say bureaucracy, I say kinky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Princess Kate’s reality TV wedding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The topless Miss Salley and 825 double standards

Page 3 of yesterday's Evening Standard was a pioneering exercise in journalistic integrity. It seems that topless pictures of an art teacher named Miss Salley had been spread among students at Harrow, a public boy's school. The coverage dwelled simultaneously on Miss Salley's distress at the sharing of the pictures among pupils, and her status as a former model and 'Miss Ireland'. In other words, first, Miss Salley is a woman for whom having topless pictures is just about understandable (as models do that kind of thing). Second, because she is sexy it is understandable that the boy that found the pictures passed them around to his friends, who passed them around to their friends, and so on (because young humans with penises naturally do that kind of thing). Third, because she was upset, she was slightly redeemed. Slightly.

Harrow School boys, possibly not the bullies in question









The articles in the Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, and (unsurprisingly) the Daily Hate could have been broken down in this manner:

1. LOOK AT THIS PICTURE OF A HOT SMOKING WOMAN!
2. Guess what happened, another teacher took some pictures of her with her tits out and all the boys saw! How shameful!
3. But it's ok, she isn't a slut, she's actually a model and they were artistic photos.
4. Also, boys at the school confirm that she is sexy. For example, one eloquently described her as a 'total babe'!
5. And don't worry, she repented. She was really upset and had to go home. Natural balance restored!
p.s. She used to go out with a rugby player!

The reasons why this story is abhorrent are almost too numerous to count. It is not just that we are supposed to look upon the schoolboy's behaviour as naughty yet permissible, it is that at the same time we are encouraged to find it all a bit titillating - reinforcing the idea (as if it needed reinforcing) that a woman's sexual shame is erotic, and that more, female sexuality is in itself shameful when not officially mediated by male permissions. In this story, the story of many women and girls, Miss Salley is the one shamed for sluttishly allowing a semi-naked representation to be taken of her, to be stolen by others. She redeems herself only by being attractive, and by being rightfully upset when others find out what she has done. Heaven help Miss Salley if she is ugly, or if she dares to not recognise her shame. This story has been told a million times and it is rarely, if ever, questioned, particularly not in the schools where it so often takes place.

I will always remember the multiple ways in which girls at my school were sexually bullied. On just one of the many occasions I could pick from, I remember hearing a conversation about the existence of a video of a girl fellating a boy in a toilet. Apparently whilst this was going on the boy's friends had taken the video over the wall of the toilet door. Just rumours about this video were enough to make me feel shocked at the temerity of the girl in question, and thoroughly embarrassed for her. What was she thinking, to give a boy head in a toilet?! How bad she must feel! What a slut! I would never do anything so base! The idea that if she should feel ashamed, the boy receiving head should also feel ashamed was never even mentioned. Nor, for that matter, was it seen to be at all embarassing or shameful to be hanging over a toilet stall door video-ing a couple having sex.

Lets take it as read that there is a massively gendered heterosexual double standard at play here, presenting the idea that it is in some way shameful to give head, but not shameful to receive it. Aside from this, it is highly strange that at no point in teenagers' lives does anybody usually sit them down and explain that this is wrong.

(Imagine you are sitting in a class full of thirteen year olds. Your teacher, a Miss Jean Brodie soundalike, stands up and says this): 'Contrary to everything else you will have probably have learned from films, television, books, parents, friends, and other aspects of our society, it is normal and ok for people to have sex. Women are not sluts for having sex, nor are they prudish for not having sex. Men are not studs for having sex, nor are they losers for not having sex. It is ok to have sex, or to not have sex. Anybody who uses the word 'slut' will henceforth be called to the Head's Office (ha) for a full explanation of their actions.'

In my feminist utopia, this lesson is read instead of morning prayers. Except, this doesn't happen, and instead sexual bullying happens time and time and time again. Obviously girls will take naked images of themselves to send to boyfriends, or friends, when the most prevalent, obvious outlet for burgeoning sexual desire is misogynist heterosexual porn, and when there is no education to suggest otherwise. Whilst young people are growing and developing their sexualities, there is little to nothing taught about gender equality, about sex being compatible with humanity, or about sex being positive and normal. Waving a condom around during one biology class is not sex education.

At what point do we begin to question where the blame really lies? Is it on the woman who experiences her sexuality in such a way as to create a naked image, or is it on a cultural attitude to the female body and to female sexuality which sexualises, commodifies and controls, whilst also blaming, shaming and denigrating? It is scandalous that the British education system is still too embarrassed, too naive, or too outright sexist to talk about sex and relationships to those who need to hear about it most. How long will it be seen as better for sexual bullying, rape, domestic violence and male-centric sex to prevail than for teachers to spend a bit of time teaching children what they don't learn elsewhere?

Here, to my mind, is how the story should have been reported:

1. Picture of public school boys.
2. Boys at Harrow public school were suspended today for attempting to bully a teacher, sexual shaming and property theft.
3. This kind of thing really shouldn't happen any more. How unfortunate. Why weren't those students educated better?
4. X, the photography teacher whose photos were stolen, is pressing charges.
5. We hope that prestigious Harrow school will recover from the shock of such behaviour, and implement better education to make sure it won't happen again.

Positive discrimination: only the best for the board (you can quota me on this one!)

2011: A corporation near you

The majority of people do not believe that gender or race is more important than merit when it comes to getting a top job within the lofty heights of a corporate company. The majority of people* believe that merit is the name of the game. Contrary to what is often casually asserted, the people who don't believe purely in merit are not those people who believe in positive discrimination, but rather, the people who are sexist, racist, homo/transphobic, or ableist. Why? The answer is one that seems blindingly obvious: if pure considerations of merit were behind promotions to top positions, demographic distributions across company boards would be roughly representative. But they aren't, and more, they aren't really getting any better. The 'Women on Boards' review, released today by Lord Davies (link below), found some pretty damning statistics on the question of women's participation on boards in FTSE 100 companies, but stopped short of recommending quotas, suggesting rather that companies take active steps to reach mountainous targets such as 25% female representation on boards by 2015.

In fact, his recommendations seem quite good, but as Julia Finch pointed out in Women directors: why I've changed my mind, these are 'recommendations' to the same companies who are also made 'recommendations' to about acting ethically, regulating trade fairly, not causing financial crises, not fucking people over generally, and so on. That kind of speaks for itself.

On the topic of women on boards, there are several oft cited reasons why we have not yet reached gender-balance. Number one, company boards aren't representative because female candidates are invariably less good than male candidates. If women candidates are chosen who are less good than the male candidates they are up against, it is patronising to women, unfair to men, and bad for business overall. Number two, company boards aren't representative because feminism only started forty or fifty years ago, and it will take a while for women growing up during the golden era of the second wave to filter their way through to the top jobs. Number three, women don't get the top jobs because they don't really want them as much as men do. Women would rather leave to raise families, spending time on greater, purer pursuits than the mindless accumulation of empty, soulless, capitalist money and power. Women just don't like being CEO's! Everyone's a winner!

On this first point, on occasions when I have spoken to professional women about, for example, introducing quotas for women in top positions, the overwhelming response has been that it would not only be wrong but that it would create an unpleasant atmosphere within companies if it were known that a female candidate had been promoted to fulfill a quota, rather than on her own merit. Women I have spoken to, quite fairly, want to feel that they have climbed the corporate ladder by themselves, because of their own achievements, rather than because of some political drive to introduce equalities legislation. I understand this feeling. Nobody wants to get a job they don't deserve. Yet implicit in this argument is the premise that a quota for women would inevitably sometimes result in better men being passed over for inferior women.

Well, yes. Where there are quotas for female promotion and inclusion at higher levels, it is at least feasible that sometimes a more qualified man will lose out to a less qualified woman who has to be promoted because of the quota. But right now more qualified women are losing out to less qualified men, to the point where only 12.5% of FTSE-100 directors are women, where 50% of FTSE companies do not have even one woman on their board , and where there has been little improvement on this for years. We either have to argue that this represents only considerations of merit, and that men are just much, much better than women (sometimes known as misogyny), or we have to admit that the playing field isn't level, that it isn't getting better by itself, and that we are not going to have approximate equality unless some action is taken to get women onto boards. I for one find it highly unlikely that a 30-40% quota for women on company boards will very often lead to anti-male discrimination, simply because I do not believe that male candidates are better than female candidates. To my mind, if such a quota were enforced it would more often than not simply result in promotions for the equally-qualified women candidates who currently don't get promoted. Because currently the system is sexist, you know?

This brings us to the second argument, above. It's often argued that as girls now do better than boys at school, and that as half, if not more, of university graduates are now women, it will just be a matter of time until those proportions even out with a roughly equal spread at the top. Arguably, the forty years or so since the second wave are not long enough for women growing up in the 70s to have reached company boards. Touching as the faith in feminism's power of those who argue this is, it would surely only apply if feminism had already been completely successful. Though equal rights legislation is much improved, it is by no means perfect, and sexism is by no means gone. All people, to some extent, have internalised the norms of a society which has certain preconceptions about roles for men and roles for women. One only needs to watch The Apprentice, source of all my knowledge about business, to see that the qualities which seen to be apt for business are most often masculine ones, and only seen as such in male-bodied people. Confidence, drive and intelligence in men are read as aggressiveness, coldness and over-opinionatedness in women. Whilst much can be done socio-culturally in order to combat such ideas, it seems to me to be rather putting the cart before the horse to say that as feminism progresses and attitudes change women will get through to the top ranks. Rather, women need to be there to effect the change, and positive discrimination, to my mind, is the only way that this will genuinely happen.

On to the third point. Often this argument about most women just not wanting to give up their lives to moneymaking is seen on Comment is free, and other such reputable forums for debate. Of course, any essentialism about women's and men's intrinsic natures is pretty objectionable, and it's all rather convenient that women are supposed to happen not to want to succeed in the same way that men want to, when they currently aren't succeeding in that way. This is the point where the old 'children' chestnut gets brought in - if women will insist on taking time off to have babies and look after them and such like, how is it fair that they can be at the same corporate level as a man who hasn't done so? Any logic behind the notion that extending paternity leave to be equal with maternity leave will hurt the economy is mindbogglingly absent, unless it is assumed that men will always have higher positions than women. Though women, for obvious reasons, have to do the actual birth, there is no reason that childcare should not be shared equally, and indeed, the advantages men will gain from legislation for a fuller fatherhood will only be balanced by the concurrent removal of discrimination against women who want to have children. Sweden has it better than us in legislating for a minimum two months paternity leave (Dads in the UK only have two weeks), and its worth pointing out that their economy has not yet collapsed in any greater way than ours has.

There is still a considerable amount of misogynist prejudice in society, both obvious and latent. Right now, what we have is discrimination overwhelmingly against women, and where there are completely fair examples of areas in which men face discrimination, it is clear that when women make up less than negligible% of top corporate jobs, a very serious prejudice still holds fast. When no progress is being made otherwise, positive discrimination needs to be enacted to right the balance. Not to tip it over to the other side, but just to even the currently uneven grounds. More problematic than the notion that a hostile atmosphere will result from this is the implication that there is not currently a hostile atmosphere where massive injustice is being doled out. Bear in mind that even if a 30-40% quota system were introduced, sometimes stronger women would still be passed over for weaker men (because 60-70% would still be on a non-quota basis, in a still sexist society). But if nothing is done to create change, little will ever change.

Incidentally, I google image searched 'women sitting in boardroom' to find a picture for this article, and it came up with, 'Did you mean 'woman sitting in boardroom'. Telling?

*I know this because I have conducted an extensive survey which involved personally speaking to the majority of people.


More to read:
- Lord Davies' report: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/business-law/docs/w/11-745-women-on-boards.pdf

Please keep our children safe from men's football commentators

The Daily Mail Mantra for Successful Article Writing

What an amazing day for news stories to boil the blood! The first occurrence was the deafening arrival of Melanie 'probably a lesbian' Phillips into my field of reference. In that bastion of enlightenment known as the Daily Mail, she wrote an opinion piece containing some unbelievable lunacy about 'The Gay Agenda' and its supposedly relentless drive to indoctrinate children. Here are some real, live, actual sentences from the article:

'...mad as this may seem, schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.'

and

'Alas, this gay curriculum is no laughing matter. Absurd as it sounds, this is but the latest attempt to brainwash children with propaganda under the camouflage of education. It is an abuse of childhood.'

and

'It seems that just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda.'

You read that correctly. Melanie Phillips actually, in nationally published print, described the possibility that children might one day be taught that same-sex oriented penguins exist, as 'an abuse of childhood'. Not just 'something I disagree with', but 'an abuse of childhood '. I think out of any subset of people that includes Melanie Phillips, somebody needs to acquire some perspective.

Anyway, if she's right about this unjustifiable incursion of tolerance and understanding into our national education, I for one would like to find the gay agenda and her sinful sexual partner (the 'belief in equal rights for all agenda'?) wherever they're currently living, and give them a good talking to. There'll be no dirty homos in my B&Bs or in my schools, that's for sure. Disgusting. We all know that homosexuality doesn't exist in Iran, so maybe we should take a leaf out of their book? On the other hand it was difficult to get too worked up about this (I thought, some time after I'd calmed down) given that it is just so, so, blatantly hateful that nobody can feasibly be taking it seriously.

But then a Tory MP from the esteemed Fathers 4 Justice school of gender analysis decided that teh menz are terribly oppressed, and called for 'men's equality'. His comments were made in light of recent news concerning the disproportionate and unfair number of successful women in politics, business, sport, all other companies, and the world. He also said something about how women now rule the world, officially, because now, all of a sudden, it is primarily men who suffer from domestic and sexual violence at the hands of women, and also women own like a thousand times more land and property than men, and women's affairs dominate the world political agenda, and 70% of the people who live in poverty in the world are men, and men are continually denigrated in all world cultures, and in many countries men aren't allowed out by themselves and have to cover up their faces in case they inflame the violent passions of libidinous women, and most words that represent negative qualities are masculine ones, and we tend to refer to all people as 'she', conveniently ignoring the relevance or importance of male existence. Then he went on to describe the way in which the main burden of childcare and domestic household responsibility still falls on men, and about how men still don't have much medical or legal control over their bodies or reproductive capacities. And apparently there are now massive problems with the manipulation of the male image in the media, leading to disproportionate numbers of young men developing anxieties about their bodies, leading to eating disorders and so on. And also this is only exacerbated by a multi-billion pound porn industry which is mostly comprised of male-submissive fetish material rewrapped as normal heteronormative sexuality. Oh wait, hold on...

Anyway, the Tory MP has been all over the papers saying something about men being oppressed and feminists being the worst kind of bigots, which sounds extremely reasonable and is definitely backed up by true facts.

Why do people in positions of relative privilege feel so threatened by the smallest advances in civil rights movements? It is surely hardly anything to Melanie Phillips if kids get taught about the existence of homosexual and transgender people in schools, and it is hard to see how it can be particularly threatening to well-moneyed Tories that the women's movement has made some legislative progress over the last thousand years.

It also wouldn't take much for anti-feminists of the masculinist ilk to actually read a bit of feminist theory and find out that all the issues they point to, fairly, as gender constraints on men, are all the same issues that feminists have previously pointed out as gender constraints on men. Nobody wants additional paternity leave and stretching of understandings of the male gender role more than feminists do, and given that this information is well-known and easily available, I can't help but think that the focus on straw-feminism masks nothing more than internalised contempt for feminist challenges to female gender roles.

This brings me, finally, to what was originally intended as the focus of this increasingly lengthy diatribe. The final story of the day concerned two men's football commentators, Andy Grey and Richard Keys, making abhorrently sexist comments about lineswoman Sian Massey. The video below doesn't quite detail the extent of the comments but it gives a representative indication of the flavour of the conversation.



The thing is that all of this isn't particularly unbelievable. Where I'm surprised that homophobes like Melanie Phillips still get a voice today, even in the Daily Mail, its not at all surprising that those involved so deeply in men's football are sexist. Well, duh? Professional men's sports in the UK, particularly football, are among the most overtly sexist fields that there are. Sexism is accepted as part of the culture of men's football. Whilst there are loads of men in women's football, with some very honourable exceptions aside, there are next to no women working successfully in men's football. Nobody currently bats an eyelid that the women's game hardly ever gets on TV and invariably isn't in the papers, even when the women's side are world champions.

This was really brought home to me the other day when speaking to a woman from Sweden, who told me that moving to England had been a massive shock for her, because she'd turned on the TV to catch up on the football, and found that women's games weren't covered. Think about it. There are approximately twenty million Sky TV channels exclusively dedicated to sports, but I'd estimate (with no particular backing evidence, are there any studies on this?) that time given to women's sports is less than 15%, with much of that given over to women's tennis and athletics. In almost every newspaper in England there is a section at the back misleadingly entitled 'Sport', which openly and unapologetically reports on only half the sports that take place. I see this as grossly obvious sexism, yet it seems to go unnoticed, or at least, unmentioned, by most people for most of the time.

This is important because men's football is one of the big, stereotypical drivers of male homosociality, a.k.a the way in which some men cluster around worship of masculinity in a bonding way that excludes female participation except at a secondary level. I fundamentally object to the idea that I should go to a pub and peruse a male sporting event; that I should use masculinity-appreciation as a tactic for bonding with my friends when I know damn well that the same thing would never happen for a women's game. More, in the appreciation of traits we associate with maleness, strength, skill, stamina, and so on, there is an implicit celebration of man as not-woman. It is this kind of attitude that keeps women's sports relegated to the sidelines (what?! women who can do these things too?!) and that preserves involvement in and appreciation of high-end men's football as a men's-mostly pursuit.

Some commenters from the political-correctness-gone-mad brigade (also known as the 'don't challenge our prejudices' club) apparently thought Andy Grey and Richard Keys' comments were, and I hesitate to use to word, 'banter'. I personally think that they should both be summarily executed, that men's football should be banned from television or newspapers, and that it should be illegal to show men's sports in public places. As ever, though, this is just my all-powerful gay feminazi bigot's agenda, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, so let's just sack the both of them, have more coverage of the women's game, and have done with it.