"Pro Life" - UR DOIN IT RONG

Here I am, banging on about abortion again. It’s almost like I’m a progressive feminist or something, innit? Anyway, Ireland, not exactly known as a safe haven of open-minded attitudes to reproductive rights, was in the news last week (I know, I am behind, bad blogger) in the darkest way possible. Normally things trend on Twitter for the fluffiest and harebrained of reasons, but if you haven’t read the story already I advise you to spend some time on the #Savita hashtag to get yourselves up to speed.

In simple terms, from what we know from the press coverage of the case, a 31 year old (married) woman (intentionally) pregnant for the first time went to A&E at University Hospital, Galway presenting with back pain. She was found to be miscarrying but her requests for a medical termination were alledgedly denied by staff at the hospital as a foetal heartbeat could still be detected. At one point it is alledged that she was told, “this is a Catholic country”, by way of explanation for the non-intervention. The dead foetus was removed once a heartbeat could no longer be found but on the 28^th October 2012, Savita Halappanavar died of septicaemia.

For a thorough and accesible historical overview of the legal situation in Ireland I recommend this as further reading. For a historical overview of what happens when you make abortion illegal, read this, but be warned it comes with a great big content warning as it contains very distressing and disturbing imagery and content.

Now, there are small-scale arguments as to why Savita was not given a termination on arrival at the hospital, principally driven by the argument, which from an intellectual point of view I can understand, that doctors might be fearful of losing their livelihood, of being struck off and so on, given the current legal position on abortion in the country (see above). And you know what? I hear that. Losing your job is pretty terrible, especially given the global north’s current state of fiscal meltdown. But more terrible than knowing that your intervention would likely have prevented a woman’s death? I’m not so sure about that. But my contention with all of this isn’t just at this level, but on a macro scale.

The pro-life argument on a larger scale (i.e. devoid of domestic legislation and divorced from individual experience) is usually that human life, however we define that, begins at conception. Now, I am not going to make a secret of the fact that I think that this is total garbage (and here is a solid scientific explanation of why), but that is a strongly-held belief and while I think it is moronic, I do understand it, as in I understand what its supporters mean by it. So, fine. But here is the thing that I really, truly do not understand. If you believe that a zygote, embryo or foetus is a human life, and you also believe that an adult human is a human life, then the thing that I need explained to me is why the first life trumps the rights of the second. Why? I am not asking this to be facetious, I really just do not understand. Because the argument that the foetus has equal rights with the carrier doesn’t square with the argument that it also has greater rights. I’m no mathematician, but even I can see that that equation just doesn’t work.

And it makes me so, so angry that women – actual human women who are definitely alive and participating in their human lives – are still, STILL dying over this issue – not just in some far-flung corner of the globe where we all ‘know’ (or tell ourselves) that women’s rights and human rights are backwards or non-existent, but here, HERE in the global north on the doorstep of my country, the UK. It should make you angry, too. Because we seem to be wholly prepared to get very fired up about the failed deportation of a radical Muslim preacher who may very well be repellent but, y’know, has never actually been convicted of a crime here, but we are strangely mute about the fact that a different religion has a stranglehold not just over the reproductive rights but the actual right to life of half of its citizens. It is twenty fucking twelve, people. How many more Savitas have to die to uphold the ‘sanctity’ of life?

Professional Overreacting

Well folks, I’m back from the Balkans (holiday) and ready to smash the gender binary and dismantle the kyriarchy in my lil ol’ corner of the interwebs! Bet you’re pleased? Let’s get started.

So of course while I was away gasping in awe at Russian Orthodox churches, stunning lakes, and ludicrously low beer prices, the world continued to grind away. I heard there was a devastating storm, and then an American election? More of that later though, because I’m keen to focus on an issue both global and domestic today – I’m sure the USA can live without my commentary for another week or so.

Everyday Sexism (and if you are not already following them on Twitter then by gum you bally well should be), have an op-ed piece in the Independent today which touches on the idea that sexism is still a socially-acceptable prejudice. Now, I don’t think that it's the only socially-acceptable prejudice which we need to tackle, given how many times a week I hear the word ‘gay’ or ‘retard’ being used as a pejorative (that list is by no means exhaustive), but I want to expand on the point the piece was making about sexism towards women, partly because it’s Twitter-topical but chiefly because it touches on one of the aspects of sexism which absolutely INFURIATES me – that women* are generally and habitually overreacting to sexism.

Firstly, I would like to know what the definition of overreacting is? If someone insults you or otherwise does something damaging to you and you ignore them, I would think of that as non-reactive (NB by non-reactive I don’t mean neutral, as neutral implies not being bothered at all whereas non-reactiveness can be read as a decision to ensure one’s personal safety). Anything beyond that is a reaction. So where is the mythical cut-off point? I would imagine if someone groped my arse and I murdered them then that would be a clear overreaction (jokes aside), but below the level of physical retaliation, what counts as an overreaction? Because it seems to me that the very act of saying anything negative at all about sexism is deemed an overreaction. Read the comments (or don’t, EVER, if you value your sanity) under any piece expressing even the most mild feminist view and I will pay you ten pounds** if no-one tells the writer (or other commenters) that they are overreacting. David Cameron’s infamous, “calm down, dear” is a prime (and very public) example of this fuckery. Why are we so uptight all the time about sexism? Why can’t we see that sometimes it’s all a bit of fun, a bit of a laugh with the lads? What’s wrong with us?

What’s wrong with us? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me. I am sick and fucking tired of being made to treat sexism as if it were a joke. Would you tell a black person to calm down about a shop selling golliwog dolls? Why not? After all, they’re a bit of harmless fun, aren’t they?! A children’s toy! STOP OVERREACTING. Do you see what I’m getting at here? We all (or most of us, hopefully), innately understand that while golliwog dolls are unlikely in themselves to bring about a new era of apartheid, they symbolise one race’s casual and brutal disdain for another’s. Their intentions might be harmless fun, but their reality is sinister. We can see this, so why can’t we see it for sexism, and why are we unwilling to even engage with the idea that sexist behaviour is fucking damaging? For women, a lot of the time, I think it’s because we are afraid not of actually overreacting, but of being labelled in that way. No-one wants to ruin the fun, do they?*** Apart from humourless feminists that is! Ho ho.

Now I want to tell you a lovely little story which illustrates this conundrum. Once upon a time (longer ago than I care to remember in fact), I was walking along a residential street in an undodgy area of London towards the tube, to go out in town. It was about 7pm, but because it was November it was already dark. I had a skirt on, stripey knee socks, and boots – the skirt was short, and the boots were chunky, because back then I was a bit of a goth (in fact I was heading to the legendary Intrepid Fox for a night of drinking cider and listening to the Cult). I had headphones in, so I didn’t hear the group of men (boys?) come up behind me. Maybe if I had I would have avoided what happened next, but probably not, because I suspect they were pretty determined to do what they did anyway, to whichever woman happened to be walking along the street that night. Anyway, one of them grabbed me from behind and slid his fingers up between my legs. Right the way up – I don’t mean he was just checking the close shave of my bikini line. I jumped, and he and his mates laughed and ran away.

And do you know what I did? Absolutely nothing. I carried on walking to the tube station, where I didn’t tell the station agent. In fact I can’t even remember if I told my friends, including my boyfriend at the time, when I got to the pub. I certainly didn’t tell the police. I hadn’t seen the faces of any of the group who had assaulted me, so I wouldn’t have been able to identify them anyway. Besides, by that point (I was nineteen), I had already started to buy into the bullshit of this kind of thing happens all the time, and don’t make a fuss, and at least they didn’t rape me. As in, you’re overreacting. And although this was probably the “worst” thing of this kind that has happened to me (yet) given that had I not had knickers on there would have been genital contact; I completely sympathise with the Everyday Sexism tweeter who tweeted that this kind of thing just begins after a while to register as “not really serious”, because I could tell you of literally dozens of similar incidents which have happened to me, and I am one individual who is lucky enough to live in a fairly safe, fairly liberal first world society.

My point is, what would you call my reaction? Because I wouldn’t call it an overreaction – I did what I explained in the paragraph above, non-reaction – partly as a self-preservation method and partly because at nineteen I had already learned the mantra of not overreacting.

Well, you know what? FUCK THAT FUCKING SHIT. Fuck that dangerous bullshit right back where it belongs, and what is more THREE HEARTY CHEERS  for overreacting, because if overreacting means publicly objecting to the continual, relentless, publicy ignored and sometimes actively encouraged damage and debasement of women then I am all bloody for it. To everyone who’s reacted with a pithy epithet to a cat-call, to everyone who’s told a guy to fuck off in a nightclub when he’s ground his semi against your backs, to everyone who’s called out the sexist joke in the work meeting, I SALUTE YOU ALL, and to all the rest of us who have our days when we can’t do that, when we are too upset or afraid or already damaged to react, we’ve got your fucking back too, because no-one on earth deserves this daily fuckery and I really hope that one day society will finally, finally understand that it is not ok for it to be like this.

 

The only way that is going to happen is if we keep calling it out, if instead of avoiding “overreacting” we make sure that it is in fact one of our main priorities. Think I should calm down, dear? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

 

 

 

*By this I don't exclude the differently-gendered, but I want to talk about the kind of sexism which is directed towards those who have been identified (erroneously or not) as women by the person or people perpetrating the sexism.

**Not really.

***For anyone who would like an absolutely kick-ass and vital illustration of this problem, I urge everyone reading this to go and read this blog post.

Sometimes the Shit you are Writing ‘In Defence Of’ Pieces About is Indefensible

Ahhh, the Caitlin Moran issue. For those of you as yet unversed in this latest shitstorm, Moran, a popular (and some would say populist) journalist and feminist commentator has come under recent fire for some deeply troublesome behaviour. This in turn has kicked off an argument on Twitter and in the feminist blogosphere about privilege, intersectionality, snobbery and racism. And I always thought feminists just sat around making ‘Fuck the Patriarchy’ protest signs and listening to Ani diFranco! I mean, some of us do do that too, but anyway.

Current hostilities flared up when Moran, who had recently interviewed Lena Dunham, the creator of the HBO show, ‘Girls’, had been asked on her feed the not-unreasonable question of why she hadn’t addressed earlier criticisms of Dunham for failing to include any characters of colour in her show, given that it is set in one of the most ethnically diverse cities on the planet. Moran replied that that she “literally couldn’t give a shit about it”. Now, Moran has a reputation for being pithy and robust, but this seemed to quite a lot of her followers and others on Twitter to simply be a racist viewpoint, because essentially what she was saying was that she didn’t care about the concerns that others had raised about race. Even if you don’t think this was at the very least racially insensitive, it’s hard to see this as anything other than openly hostile and deeply unwise to post in a public forum*.

Moran subsequently got a lot of stick for what she had written – some of it not very nice at all (this is the internet, after all), some of it extremely nuanced and considered: Renni Eddo-Lodge’s piece in the F-Word is especially good in terms of Racism-101. But she also had some people coming to her defence. The latest riposte comes from the editors of the Vagenda in the New Statesman and boy howdy, I’m sure they have no fucks to give about a lowly blogger like me but this was the last straw for me in terms of their brand of feminism, and I have subsequently unfollowed them (which is a shame because before they started to cover more dubious material I had really enjoyed some of their pieces and I think they have some fantastic contributors).

Let me tell you why their piece riled me so, although I would very much encourage you to first, instead of reading a middle-class white woman’s response, go and read some responses from feminist WOC, because there’s no-one who understands more how much ground there is to be lost here than those who’ve actively had it ripped from under their feet before. Ready? Good.

It seems to me that the thrust of the argument in the NS piece is twofold:

·      deflecting criticisms of racial insensitivity by asserting that the discussion of class in Moran’s work and in the feminist project overall somehow overrides this.

·      ‘Reclaiming’ feminism from academia, which is portrayed in quasi-Disney villainess terms.

The first tranch is utterly amazing because it manages to mount a spirited defence of the importance of recognising classism while at the same time denouncing intersectionality as a stuffy academic conceit. They have clearly been reading a lot of Kafka (whoops, that literary reference might be  too ivory tower, my bad). For those of you who’ve never heard the term before, I’ll explain in one sentence, because its meaning is actually not hard at all to grasp. Intersectionality is the idea that people are oppressed for many different and sometimes overlapping reasons, such as race, class, gender, age, mental health and so on. Does that make sense? I want to make it totally clear that I do actively recognise that I myself am speaking from a place of educational privilege, but despite that I truly do not think that concept is a difficult one to understand. Yes, it’s certainly used in gender studies classes, but it’s also used all over the internet. If you are able to use Google you will be able to find out what it means in about ten seconds.

The piece actively places class (although it conflates class with poverty, which is not a wholly accurate picture) in a hierarchy where it supercedes other handicaps. The point of intersectionality is to say, look at all of the ways in which the power structure is holding us back – and working on one of them at a time will not get us very far, but if we tackle them all then we raise the overall standard of our entire society for everyone in it, because no-one’s needs have been ignored. Now it’s completely fine if you don’t agree with that ideology, but to dismiss it completely is to have an argument in bad faith.

It’s also not the best idea ever to demonise the idea of academic feminism as “stuffy” and “almost incomprehensible”. Every single academic discipline in the humanities is elitist and intellectually difficult at the hard theory end; this is an inexorable fact of learning. Academic theorists will regard a book which is a journalistic personal memoir as much as it is a feminist work as a non-academic book not because they are being snobs but because it is exactly that – a non-academic book. This doesn’t mean that they are dismissing it, just that they probably wouldn’t put it on a Masters syllabus, just as the Vagenda Magazine probably wouldn’t print an extract from Julia Kristeva. It might just be me, but I fail to see what’s wrong with that.

But the worst thing about this article is the ‘this concept is too elitist, you’re picking on a working class woman because she can’t be expected to understand these ideas’ subtext, because this is FUCKING INFURIATING. As Zohra Moosa points out in her piece linked above, “'working class' does not equal uneducated”. This idea is just so goddamn offensive I don’t know where to begin so I’ll let Moosa have the money quote on this one too, and it’s a good one: “the idea that she shouldn't be called out to have a more sophisticated feminist politics because she grew up working class or because some of her readers don't have MAs in gender studies is patronizing”. To say the least. It also goes without saying that quoting the phrase “my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit”, which is from a widely circulated and high profile piece by a prominent feminist, Flavia Dzodan, without a citation is really fucking bad form.

Look, no-one likes to see figures they admire get criticised, much less accused of racism. But here’s the rub – there are two ways to handle that kind of thing. One is to go on the defensive and write an impassioned plea supporting said figure and attempting to steer the dialogue away from the thing you find most difficult. The other is to shut up and listen. Here’s a maxim I try to follow as a white person and human being – when people of colour tell you that something’s a bit racist, then the chances are it’s a bit racist, because no-one understands the cause and effect of racism better than its victims. Full disclosure, I don’t always get it right either, because, y’know, I live in this fucked-up society too where I have subconsciously swallowed all the bullshit messages about the superiority of my skin-colour and my class and sometimes that poison comes to the surface. But you know what I do when it does? I listen. And then I bloody well apologise, because I really do fucking wish my ‘fellow’ white women would stop defending the indefensible.

 

*although of course probably far more dangerous to be having these thoughts in a private forum, all told.

Whose womb is it anyway?

Much, much internet furore has erupted over Mehdi Hasan’s regrettable recent article in the New Statesman, ostensibly about why being pro-choice doesn’t make him any less left wing (as an aside, I don’t actually recall anyone saying this out loud recently on any public forum, but anyway). In reality the article is an (over) familiar diatribe against abortion itself. There have been many, many rebuttals to this and y’all should go read them too, because they are excellent, but in the spirit of my two cents’ worth, here is...er...my two cents’ worth.

 

Hasan doesn’t kick off to a brilliant rhetorical start by quoting the late Christopher Hitchens, that well-known ally of women’s rights (can you smell sarcasm through an IP browser? I do hope so). He then goes on to use some unfortunate language, suggesting that pro-choice left-wingers “fetishise choice” – for this phrase he has issued something of an apology, but it isn’t actually this choice of words that sticks in my birth canal, sorry, craw, it’s “unbridled individualism”. Hmmm, let’s have a think about that, shall we? Now, I’m an English graduate and I’m pernickety as fuck about language (see how articulate I was there, for example), and I’m not going to lie to you dear readers, but I think that the word “unbridled” is, to use a popular academic term, ‘problematic’. I am reminded of the great Ross and Rachel scene where a perplexed Ross asked Rachel, “you’re over me? When were you under me?”. Yeah. Remind me again, what kind of bit should I be using? But hey, maybe this is just another example of kerrazee feminists being all shrill and hysterical over the use of language. So let’s leave that one, and move on to the rest of his argument.

 

He says that at 24 weeks, a baby is not part of a woman’s body. Whoa there, sparky! Let’s back up a bit. Firstly, where did that 24 weeks come from? As far as I knew, the recent resurgence of abortion as a political hot potato in the UK centred on known medical expert Jeremy Hunt’s publicly proclaimed wish to see the abortion limit lowered to 12 weeks. Why is Hasan bandying about 24 weeks? Could it possibly be because around 24 weeks is widely accepted as the cusp of viability for babies born prematurely? I think even he would have to admit therefore that any foetus born alive below 24 weeks is extremely unlikely to survive. Secondly, the idea that a baby is not part of a woman’s body: below 24 weeks this is just demonstrably untrue, as without the mother’s body the foetus would not survive. To quote a famous historical left-wing activist, where’s the foetus gonna gestate, you gonna keep it in a box?

 

Then he presses on with the three main tranches of his argument. As he has handily packaged these in neat bite-size chunks, I am going to leave my toothmarks in them in the same order. Firstly, he asks us to remember that the UK is the “exception, not the rule” when it comes to time limits. Kelly Hills has a brilliant take-down of this and I quote her here:

 

“France: Abortion on demand is legal up to 12 weeks (14 weeks last menstrual period). After this, France reverts to something akin to what the UK has by default: two physicians must attest to the need for abortion due to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, the woman's life is in danger, or the foetus has deformities that are incompatible with life.

Germany: Much like France, in Germany abortion is legal and available largely on demand for the first trimester. After this point, the very broadly defined "medical necessity" may be invoked.

Belgium: As far as I can piece together from Anglophile websites and translated pages, Belgium allows abortion without stringent prohibitions until the 12th week, and – say it with me – in case of medical emergency or duress after that point.

Italy: While you might assume Italy would have the most restrictive laws, it allows abortion for the first 90 days of pregnancy, which is a bit closer to abortion until the 13th week. However, like everyone else, it merely takes a doctor's confirmation of severe injury to a woman's physical or mental health, or serious birth defects incompatible with life, in order to access an abortion after this cut-off point.

So, in other words, Hasan either does not understand the laws in the countries that he cites, or he is obfuscating in the hope that no one will notice.”

Secondly, he argues that because more women than men support a reduction in the abortion time limit (citing stats from YouGov), this axiomatically means that an anti-abortion stance cannot be sexist. Um, what? Does he really think that women can’t be anti-women? Has he ever read a Jan Moir article? I can’t even go there because this argument is just...beyond. But it gets even better! He goes on to cite that us pro-choice feminists are glossing over our own history because...wait for it...Mary Wollstonecraft was anti-abortion! You remember Wollstonecraft, right? You, know, the pioneer of women’s rights from the eighteenth century?! Well fuckadoodledo, looks like we’ll have to renounce her membership of the sisterhood now won’t we, given that you wouldn’t want to go about actually historically contextualising isms within their developmental timeframe. No sir! Mind you, it’s interesting to speculate whether Wollstonecraft would ever have changed those views over the course of her lifetime, but unfortunately we can’t given that she died as a result of childbirth. IRONY: UR DOIN IT RITE.

 

Thirdly! Ah, thirdly. Thirdly is about the one point where I agree with him. Arguing that Hasan and others like him take an anti-abortion stance wholly due to religious beliefs is at best wrong-headed and at worst, when the religion isn’t a global north religion, simply racist. I’ll have none of that, so I cordially agree with him here, although he does somewhat gloss over the fact that there are plenty of people from all faiths who are pro-choice.

 

But for me the real meat of this debate lies in an earlier paragraph of his article. Hasan states that the rhetoric of ‘my body, my choice’ has always left him “perplexed”. This, THIS, to me is the crux of the argument, because really, of course it should leave him perplexed. I’ll explain why by using a crude analogy, but an analogy which I think will be effective. I am a cisgendered female human, self-identifying as female in a female body. Despite my extensive (ahem) experience in matters of the...human undercarriage, I do not therefore know what it is like to actually possess a pair of testicles (though admittedly it depends what you mean by ‘possess’, haw haw). My point is that I will never know what it feels like to get kicked in the balls. I’ve had it described to me, so I can imagine the overwhelming, nauseating pain of your goolies being unceremoniously shunted up into your pelvic cavity, but, and this is pretty crucial, I will never actually know. Do you see what I am getting at here? Although men* can indeed imagine what it is like to possess a womb and bear children, wanted or otherwise, they do not and will not ever actually know what that truly means. They can gaze in wonder and awe at their daughters sleeping in their mother’s womb (what, an anti-abortioneer using emotive language? Never!) but they will not know what it is like to carry those daughters, or sons, inside their bodies with all of the associated implications of that.

 

Hasan says that he doesn’t need God or a Holy book to tell him what is and what isn’t a person. Then what does he need? Who would he believe? What I am asking men like Hasan to do is to believe us when we say that this is our body. This is our choice, because really, how could it be anyone else’s choice? Believe what we tell you. And trust us to make the right decisions. Overwhelmingly they will be the right decisions. That does not mean they won’t be hard sometimes, or challenging to our moral ideologies: abortion is, rightly, a difficult and highly charged issue. But it’s not an asymmetric issue as he argues. The debate doesn’t simply boil down to right-to-life vs. right-to-choose. What about women’s lives **? What about the lives of babies who were not wanted and were born anyway? Saying that you think abortion is “wrong” is about as politically sophisticated an argument as ‘I know I’m not but what are you’. From the political director of Huffington Post UK quite frankly I fucking expect better. And I really, really hope he actually listens to the many voices debating with him on this.




* In this context I am excluding of course men who do have wombs, as in those who are differently gendered.
** Similarly, I am not including in this discussion those women who are not able to experience pregnancy, though my suspicion would be that they are subject to the same kind of body-policing as those who can.

An Unholy Trinity

There has been some rather awful news of late and it has centered around children and the abuse and neglect thereof. I hardly need to remind anyone reading this in the UK that the investigation surrounding the disappearance of five year old April Jones is now a murder investigation (at the time of writing her body has not yet been found, although a local man has been charged with her murder).

There has also been rather a lot of press coverage online, in newspapers and on the television of allegations that a once-revered (by some) star of children’s television had spent his downtime in his long and successful career in television and radio sexually abusing children. It should go without saying that these allegations have not been ‘proven’ in a legal sense (yet), but given the tidal wave of accusations along with the revelation that he was in fact interviewed under caution in 2007 it would seem unlikely that his memory will emerge unbesmirched from this scandal.

However, another story also broke last week, which also concerned the neglect and eventual death of a child. In the borough of Westminster, a baby boy, who has been reported as ‘child EG’, starved to death alongside his mother, who died of a brain infection and was unable to feed him, having become destitute as a result of delays in transferring welfare support from Home Office services to local authorities. The family had 'successfully' claimed asylum in the UK. This actually happened last year, but has only surfaced as news just now, following a letter being sent to the social housing news hub, Inside Housing.

I’ll just condense that to something a bit simpler, shall I? A child of no fixed abode starved to death in Westminster last year.

I think we can all agree on how absolutely shocking that is? This is not fucking Dickensian London, people. This is not a developing country with a weak social service infrastructure where some familes are forced to eke out a marginal existence in vast slums on the edges of megacities. This was happening within a stone’s throw of Parliament, for as those of you who know London know, Westminster is one of the smaller boroughs, sandwiched as it is between the larger sprawl of Camden and Old Father Thames. Somewhere behind the door of a bedsit a woman and her child starved to death right here in the UK. I wonder if the  blinds were down every morning?

I want to talk about these three news stories together because on the face of it they share some Venn-diagram like similarities: the complete and utter dismissal of the rights of children, the lethal danger of abuse and neglect, the localised nature of child abuse and so on. These are crucially important issues and they need to be addressed – why, for example, was a suspected paedophile allowed to go on for decades operating in plain sight, when his crimes were an open secret not just within his primary institution but in the rest of the media and, as it seems, to the local constabulary? Why is the narrative of abduction always one of ‘stranger-danger’ when in many cases the abductor is local (and sometimes known) to his or her victim?

However, there is another question which nobody seems to be asking: why do the first two stories receive blanket, intricate and in-depth coverage from the national press, broadcast and online media, while the third receives...crickets? I found that third story from a retweet on my Twitter feed. Google “Child EG” or “Westminster child death” and your screen will not exactly be inundated with links. It was reported in the Guardian but not, as far as I can see, in many other places (a search of the BBC site has drawn a blank – please update me if Google and I are wrong).

There is a lot to unpick in this. There is most obviously the inherent racism in the massive discrepancy of coverage between a story about a dead British child and a story about a dead immigrant child. There is also the refusal to confront the idea that neglect is as damaging as abuse (sexual abuse and murder are concrete crimes which can be identified by individual actions. Neglect is harder to pin down, especially when it is being committed by the state). Which brings me to my main point – stories like that of Child EG do not get as much focus and attention as they should because they do not fit the narrative that Britain wants to tell itself – that we already do so much for immigrants, that we are a soft touch, that our reputation for humanitarism has left the doors of our sceptred isle wide open to anyone who would like to come in. We all know these rhetorics, we are entirely familiar with them as they appear in popular press and out of the mouths of politicians on a daily basis. We should also be questioning them.

I was having a conversation by email the other day with a friend of mine who works for End Child Detention Now (and y’all should go read his stuff on Open Democracy, because he is righteous and awesome), which went as follows:

 

Myself:

It’s nice to see that it doesn’t take much to work up some outrage about this kind of thing. Just, y’know, DEAD CHILDREN. Jesus. Also, has anyone realised how fucked it is to need a ‘solution’ for appearing to be humanitarian? I mean what in the actual fuck.

Himself:

I know – guess it just goes to show how effectively the Mail, Sun, Telegraph, etc. have managed to peddle the ‘Britain is a mug’, ‘immigrants take advantage of our better nature’ bullshit to get people thinking that being humanitarian is something contemptible.

...because that’s the thing, isn’t it? The media narrative is so completely fucked up that we don’t even question why cases like this don’t get reported, because we have learned to start thinking that being humanitarian is something contemptible. Our outrage for the victims in all of the above cases should be equal, and it should be equally reported. As Women For Refugee Women wryly, and sadly, tweeted at me yesterday: “We hate to say it, but refugee children often not seen as quite as important as other children”.

What we need to ask ourselves as a nation is: why, the fuck, not?

Poem number 2

And now for something completely different. I think we could do with a bit of a cheering up after that last post, don't you? It is Friday after all, so time for another poem.

This one's a Petrarchan sonnet (iambic pentameter with an abba cde rhymescheme) this time. At the moment I can't get ten syllables into the second last line, so I am cheating a bit  - any scansion experts feel free to leave me suggestions.

The basis of this poem is that I did my first degree at King's in London, a BA in English Language and Literature. This means I am a massive clunking pedant when it comes to wrongly-placed apostrophes and the like - few things can make me more enraged*. However, I am also a natural inhabitant of the internet, where new forms of speech, for example leetspeak, abound - and which I find hugely exciting. It's the pyscholinguistic part of my brain fighting with the sociolinguistic part. I fear there will be no survivors.

In the meantime, I wrote this to poke a bit of fun at my own pedantry:


Literature and Language

Exercise your brain, they say! And stave off
all time’s ravages, senility will
retract his ragged claws, and better still
you’ll tell the young ones they can all sod off
back to ploughing language’s threadbare trough
with txting, LOL!'s, and grammar errors shrill;
I mean, it’s quite enough to make one ill
but choose instead to look askance and scoff,
because, as you know best, the rules apply
from here to kingdom come, although I doubt
you still address your friends as thee or speak
as if upon the BBC, or cry
foul each apostropheric flout;
the stickler’s house of cards begins to creak.



*now we all know that this is a lie, as in fact most things have the capacity to enrage me in one way or another.

Thoughts on Jill Meagher

Jill Meagher, or what will it take for you to believe us?

Yesterday tigtog blogged on the Hoyden About Town website that the Australian police are now holding a man in custody whom they expect to charge with the rape and murder of Jill Meagher, the Irish woman who went missing sometime in the early hours of Saturday morning.

Earlier, there had been a few rebuttals and reposts around the interwebz to Clementine Ford’s conversation centering on the same incident on Twitter. Then there was this post from Ed Butler. I want to be as fair as I can to him by saying that in no way do I think he is the only guy who thinks like this, and in fairness, he does go on to redeeem himself somewhat in the following comments, and in less problematic posts which sandwich that one – go and read them and you’ll see what I mean. So this isn’t a witch hunt by any means. But the post I’ve picked hits on so many bullshit bingo points that it’s the perfect example of a very familiar response that women often get when they complain about the violence committed against them – but it’s not fair to me because I’m not a rapist and now I feel yucky. And anyway you are just totally overreacting. Waaaah!

First of all, I want to address the ‘it’s not fair’ argument.  Look, I totally get that it must royally suck to walk down the street late at night, say, knowing that at least a few women will be automatically wary of your presence. That’s not nice for anyone, is it? But, and while I am officially not a fan of the Pain Olympics™, my guess is that it sucks more to be afraid of being raped and/or murdered. Or, you know, actually raped and murdered. If you are walking down the street feeling, as Butler states, disgusted with yourself, and you are not a rapist/violent attacker, you might want to take a step back and instead of blaming women (or the media) for making you feel like a rapist, maybe start blaming the rapists who rape and the society that very often lets them get away with it.

Secondly, I want to address the other argument – the ‘you’re overreacting’ argument – because it is this that is lethally dangerous. Butler compares the risk of attack to the same kind of risk as getting in a car crash or eating bad sushi. I want to make this extremely plain to anyone who might have the merest shred of doubt about it: rape and murder do not happen by accident. You cannot be accidentally raped. In English law, you also cannot be accidentally murdered – if you were murdered accidentally, that would be manslaughter. Of course, the other side of that is that you can be deliberately poisoned, or deliberately run over, but I think we would agree that while those things happen, they are not the kind of things you would really take general everyday precautions over, unless you were a character from Game of Thrones or a Mafia boss. So the comparison itself is faulty – not eating sushi which looks a bit dodgy is a decision which is up to you. Rape and murder, and I can’t quite believe I am having to say this, are inherently not up to the victim.

See, the thing that makes me table-gnawingly, mouth-frothingly fucking FURIOUS about this kind of response is the idea that we don’t have that much to fear. I wonder if Butler has ever read any rape and murder statistics? It seems as if the answer to that is no, and in fact he goes on to clarify that he is not going to demean his argument with something as filthy as data (I quote), “I’m not digging around data to verify something so unverifiable”. Right, because he can presumably afford to be lazy and complacent about this? Rape and murder victims perhaps do not share that privilege.

I think what he is trying to get at is that the risk of stranger-rape is very low. I want to stress this, because it’s important that we get our facts straight – he is right about this. The risk of being raped by a stranger in Australia is low – you can see the statistics for yourself. But this misses the larger point that the risk of suffering sexual violence seems to me to me brain-crushingly high. The likelihood of suffering physical or sexual violence in your lifetime if you are a woman in Australia is higher than 1 in 2. That does not seem like a minimal risk to me, and it also seems to be a wholly valid reason for being nervous when you are anywhere, not just on the streets. As commenters to his piece pointed out, you can evaluate risk and go about your business at the same time – telling people not to be scared is hugely patronising and thought-policing – and if all women really thought all stranger men were rapists (rather than potential rapists), then they would never leave the house.

The thing is, telling people not to be scared also sends out another, more insidious message – you’re hysterical, you’re gullible, you’re making yourself into a victim, you’re weak, you’re overreacting.

Jill Meagher isn’t hysterical or overreacting. What Jill Meagher is is dead.

What will it take for you to believe our fears are valid? What will it take?

This is What a Feminist Looks Like

Or, self-determination in the age of multiple ideologies.

The Fawcett Society famously produces a t-shirt with the slogan, ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ emblazoned on the front. I love this t-shirt for many reasons – I love the idea of positive self-identification, of visibility, and of variance across the spectrum of that visibility – one of my favourite media images relating to this is the shot of Bill Bailey (hooray for Bill) wearing said t-shirt. Those who know me in meat life will know that I am a tattooed person, and this phrase is one that I seriously contemplate getting inked from time to time.

I also love it for a much simpler reason: truth. But that reason is also complicated (it was ever thus).

I want to use this post to talk about the difficulties in self-determining within feminism, but I would think it would apply to any other ideological stance. Basically, one of the ‘tenets’, if you like, of (western) feminism, and it is a very strong axiom, is that feminism means telling the truth about your own life, and (re)claiming that life (from the patriarchy) for yourself. I am not going to make this a history lesson, but this is essentially what Betty Friedan was trying to get at fifty-plus years ago. Society tells you that you belong to it; the kickback is that you can tell it to fuck the hell off (I may be paraphrasing here).

But there are two issues with this. The first is that the thin end of the wedge of the ‘it’s my life and I’ll do what I want’ mindset is isolated individualism. This is fine if you live in a cave, but generally ideology doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and if you are kicking against a hugely, overwhelmingly dominant ideology, you will need allies, with whom you broadly agree. Strong individualism can often be where faultlines appear in feminism – for example, there are pro-life advocates who self-determine as feminists. While I am absolutely all for free speech and opinion, this jars so uncomfortably with my idea of what feminism is that I have an extremely hard time accepting these people as feminists. And yet if that is what they say they are, who am I to disagree? I don’t ‘own’ feminism – in fact for me that would pretty much be the antithesis of the movement, so as a feminist I have to find a way to synthesise my unease at this kind of stratification with my overall aims (you know, nothing too ambitious, just dismantling the entire hegemonic system of patriarchy and smashing it into the dust with my righteous fists ).

The second issue, which is connected, is that the idea of individualism is a very western concept, which shuts out at the door other global definitions of feminism which, let’s face it, are going to be a far better fit for purpose in the culture they originated in than a post-colonial tacking-on of late 20^th century western ideas. I think we all know what kind of disasters lie down that road. Again, I have some personal ideological issues with this – for me, a woman in a niqab who says she is a feminist: this is hard to admit, but this would bother me, even if I am (rightly) ashamed to admit it. But I have to examine how much of that is just ingrained racism/cultural negativity (and a healthy dose of atheism) and how much fear of feminism’s very precarious gains being toppled. This is the line we all have to walk if we believe strongly in something – there will always be pushback from somewhere, and I think our task as good ideologists is to properly examine our own prejudices and adjust accordingly.

The pro-life advocate feminist may be coming from the angle that sex-selection abortion is profoundly anti-feminist – this is a valid point. The niqab-wearing feminist may be signalling her devotion to a higher power, rather than wordly authority – this too is a valid point. Neither path would ever be where my feminism is going to take me, but before I reject ‘other’ kinds of feminism, I would do better to listen to those alternative voices and what they actually have to say about their motives. This doesn’t mean I am being mealy-mouthed about what I believe – I am about as pro-choice as it is possible to get, and I am hugely against religion-based body-policing. But if I don’t listen to my sisters who think differently from me, then I am a crap feminist – because if these women are telling the truth about their lives, surely the best thing I can do is listen?

I’m going to finish this post with an anecdote. A few weeks ago I was out with friends for birthday drinks. As those who know me know, I am a bit of a glam girl – long hair, make up and high heels. I also happen to have stopped shaving my armpits back in April (for the record, I like it. If I didn’t, I would shave ‘em again). One of my friends noticed, and remarked upon it, and I made some sort of gag about flying the hairy flag for feminism. He was completely gobsmacked, and his words to me, and I quote, were “Fuck off! You aren’t a feminist, you’ve got lipstick on!”. Yes, we were drunk, and yes if we had been sober he would probably have been more articulate, but the whole thing just absolutely summed up for me why, despite its problems, we do need self-determination – because you don't get to define my feminism for me. That is so laughably anti-feminist that I don’t know where to begin!

 

But I do know one thing – my progressive liberal feminist self will continue to bear her hairy armpits and gnash her pearly whites behind the reddest of red lipstick for as long as she sees fit, and for as long as she sees fit to listen to the voices of others. As a very wise woman once sang, I know there is strength in the differences between us, and I know there is comfort when we overlap.

Tiddly Po(e)m

So, apart from my more, hem hem, political rantings, the purpose of this blog is hopefully twofold - I used to write a fair bit of poetry and indeed have a long-abandoned blog dedicated (haw) to this lofty aim. That blog is now defunct, but I feel a bit sorry for the poems, adrift in the ether of the internet. I thought they at least deserve a better home, so now and again I'll be posting them here - and who knows, maybe this will encourage me to start writing again?

A couple of years ago I was trying to tentatively flex my poetic muscles by seeing if I could successfully compose in various established styles, as up until then all I had really written was free verse. This was actually really good fun (#nerd), and this is one of those poems.

I was trying to mimic a kind of eighteenth century sensibility both in tone and form, although the sonnet form itself is older - it's Shakesperean sonnet form, with an iambic pentameter rhymescheme of abab, cdcd, efef, gg.

I wrote it for my aunt, after we knew her cancer had come back, terminally. I never had the heart to give it to her at the time and I think I might have been right about that - it seems now to be to be too didactic. The living should probably not try to tell the dying what to think.

In any case, I thought it apt to publish today. It's my birthday, and I wish she was here to celebrate with me. On that note, I hope you enjoy.


In Language’s Infinity

In language’s infinity I saw
our own immortality, for what thing
could ever dispossess us of that law,
now I can see the threads to which we cling
dissolve as stones abraded by the rain
no longer disclose the names they cited,
whatever their incumbents’ sober pain.
Careful words are by erosion sited
just in advance of meaning’s careless drift;
our luck is to catch sight of some small part
in the brief gleaming of the motes’ slow shift;
and hope this lets enough into the heart
         to crack apart the vain eternal plea
         and grasp the brief and glorious finity.

Solidarity Does Not Undermine You

Last time I blogged I wrote about Twitter. I also wrote about some abject tomfuckery in relation to powerful male political figures' attitudes to rape. In the same week, the hashtag #menagainstrape began to trend. As you can see, if you have a quick look at the tweets underneath that hashtag, this had variable outcomes.

This New Statesman piece by Caroline Criado-Perez highlights some of the ambivalence that many had towards the hashtag - some welcoming it as a show of solidarity in a week where there was a whole fucking shitload of rape apologia going on, some bemoaning it as, variously:

• Obvious, as it is the 'default position' - ha ha, no-one actually supports or defends rape, right? RIGHT? Nope!
• Undermining of 'real' rape - well, I can tweet to that because I'm definitely against rape-rape. You know, the kind of rape I define on my terms. Yep, can defo get behind that.
• Making it ALL ABOUT THE MENZ - feminism needs us, man! They can't do it without us!

The NS piece chiefly discusses that last point - and I will get to that in another post for the sake of everyone's sanity - but I want to discuss the first two...er, first, because while I think there are nuanced arguments to be made about point three, for my money the most important aspect of this discussion is the first.

No-one actually supports or defends rape, right?

Of the innumerable tear-your-eyelashes-out-with-rage conversations I have had in pubs in or around the subject of feminism, this old chestnut gets hoarked out at almost every given opportunity. The default position is that every decent human being* automatically rejects rape, in the same way that they would reject murder, genocide, child abuse and other heinous crimes, and self-righteous flabbergastation follows when one deigns to suggest otherwise. But you know what? I don't fucking buy it. Whether or not you believe we live in a rape culture (full disclosure: I do, and I think those two posts absolutely fucking NAIL why, and how) it doesn't take long to remember that conversation you've had with someone, possibly one of your mates, where the phrase, "she was asking for it" was used. Or when you were at work and someone told a rape joke. Or when someone you know uses a term like "grey rape", "rape-rape", "real rape". Maybe you've used those terms too, or told one of those jokes, or defended a footballer or friend or public figure with some variation on the but she was asking for it line. I probably have too - as Billy Wilder once wrote, nobody's perfect, and no-one likes (to be) the humourless feminist, right lads?

My point is that saying things like that doesn't make you a rapist. Raping people makes you a rapist. But it sure as fuck doesn't pitch you against rape. If you are using the she was asking for it line, in a conversation about rape, then you are defending rape. If you are qualifying terms, such as "rape-rape", then you are supporting rape, because in effect what you are saying is that only some rapes count as rape. In fact what we do in culture and society is defend and support rape all the goddamned time - when we use the term 'sex-scandal' when reporting on a rape case, when we can't believe that someone whose work we admire and like is a rapist, when we, over and over and FUCKING OVER again, blame victims for their own assaults. This is not a society which is against rape. So the argument that we don't need to state we are against something because it is axiomatically true for all humans? All that is is bullshit - comforting bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.

Rape-Rape, or Where do you Stand on the Rape Apologist's Sliding Scale of Bullshit?

Ah, rape-rape. Helpfully coined by Whoopi Goldberg (you broke my heart there, Whoopi), during a discussion about Polanski, the idea behind this is that some rapes are worse than others. I believe the logic goes something like: the crime of rape exists on a scale which has, for example, waking up to find a current sexual partner's penis inside you at one end, and a violent attack which leaves victims badly physically hurt or even dead at the other. The implication is that events that happen near one end are not as serious as events that happen at the other. On the face of it, this is difficult to dispute - most people would agree that ending up dead is a worse outcome than not ending up dead (euthanasia notwithstanding).

But it isn't really as simple as that. The truth is that every crime is different, and of course there will be some instances of, say, robbery, which end in violent death, and some which end in losing a tenner. The actual point is that the shared element is the crime element. Rape is a crime, we have laws to say so and define it, and sentencing guidlines which take into account the 'severity' of the crime. That is to say, rape is a crime and anything on that scale is rape. It doesn't actually matter if you think one example is 'worse' than another - it is all rape. Its position on the scale does nothing to legitimise it either way - it is rape. The scale also isn't exactly kind to victims, as it implies that there is a kind of Pain Olympics going on with rape - which is just? Fucking gross and wrong. If you have been raped, any feeling you have is legitimate (including not being affected).

So that's the issue I have with the idea that a hashtag, which is throwaway and perhaps lacking gravitas, somehow undermines 'real' rape. Because if you've been raped? I think that makes it very fucking real.


Solidarity Does Not Undermine You

To conclude, the point of my tirade here is that I support men tweeting to the #menagainstrape hashtag, because I do see it as a massive show of solidarity. Both of those words are important. The solidarity goes without saying - because for men** to recognise that there is a problem, with rape apologia and with rape itself, is a huge show of recognition to the victims of rape. It is saying, we believe you. It is saying, we call this shit out. It is saying, this shit is fucking disgusting. I am unapologetically ALL FOR THAT.  And the second word is important precisely because of it being a show - it is visible. Making your solidarity visible is hugely important, because it means people can see who their allies are. And you know what happens when you ally yourself to something else? It makes you stronger, not the opposite. #menagainstrape, your solidarity does not undermine you.










* However the bejesus we define that.
** I know there are a whole bunch of people who will point out - quite rightly - that men are not the only gender which perpetrates sexual assault. But as you can see from the links underneath the Wiki entry (more reliable than Wikipedia itself, for obvious reasons), they are in the overwhelming majority of assailants - as high as 99% in some social data surveys.

Tweety Pie

I was introduced to Twitter earlier this year. I don't mean by that that I was such a Luddite I'd never heard of it before, in fact when the London riots were going on last summer I sat on my Hoxton balcony in the surreally brilliant sunshine and anxiously refreshed #hackneyriots over and over again, just to see if anything was coming my way (I will admit that this reaction was not 100% fearful but had a good measure of excitement thrown in, which is perhaps the topic of another bloggy unpicking). What I mean is that I started using Twitter as a fellow tweeter earlier this year - I'm studying for a Masters and this was one of the course requirements (long story) - and, quite simply, I fell in lurve.

I love Twitter. I love it for simple reasons, such as the constant stream of information, the enforced brevity, the fact that you can 'talk' directly to actual people you recognise and admire, but I also love it for complex reasons. I am an avid Facebook user, and being a total humblebrag cliche, I have a lot of friends on Facebook. They don't all share my sociopolitical views. In an ideal world I suppose I would wade into every single argument that I could wielding my righteous banner of fury and my scathing sword of rhetoric, but let's face it, I think my friend count would plummet faster than a stock market crash. Facebook, essentially, is social downtime - how you'd act in the pub with your mates, swapping drunken stories and baby photos, and remembering that one time at that festival when - oh look, here's a picture of it. Whose round is it?

Twitter is completely different. For a start, it feels much more anonymous in the shouting-into-a-void sense (although if you were using it as a shalabrity I concede it probably has the opposite effect), while at the same time far more globally connected. Most of my FB friends live in the same country I reside in. On Twitter I follow people tweeting from literally* all over the world. So, I love the complexity of that duality - your connections are being made devoid of knowing almost anything about the other side of the interaction, especially if you are not following each other, and yet those connections are being made despite this. Further, they are often being made either when you vehemently agree or violently disagree with the other twitterer. A duality within a duality. I like this kind of Chinese-box stuff, it makes my brain hurt, but in a good way, like the way your muscles hurt after a gym session.

Another thing I love about Twitter is that although it is essentially an extremely basic premise, you can actually use it to do whatever you want it to (yet another duality, I should write this shit down yo). What I mean is, you could be tweeting as an entirely fictional character, as a public persona, on behalf of a company, purely for social interaction, to network, to link or retweet, or, you can use it like me, as a soapbox. Which brings me back to Facebook. Although I am at heart a political beast and like nothing more than a good hearty rant, usually on the subjects of feminism, human rights, social justice and so forth, I have lost count of how many times one of my less politically-minded (or, let's face it, more laid-back) friends has come up to me and chosen argument-victim in the pub and basically told us, affectionately, to pack it in. While I will never pack it in in the pub (cue eyerolls of recognition from those who know me), on Facebook, well, it does seem appropriate to pack it in. There's only so much tub-thumping your FB friends want to hear. Most of them want to go back to drunken stories and baby photos - and you know what? I think that's just fine. I need that downtime too myself.

But on Twitter I can be as loudly and vociferously political as I damn well want. I can tweet my disgust to Todd Akin for his rape-based balderdash or WH Smith for their sexist magazine labelling, cement my solidarity with others fighting the good fight on the same rhetorical battle lines, and engage in thoughtful debate on, dare I say it, a higher intellectual plane than usually occurs on FB. This doesn't mean I think there is no dumbassed bottom-feeding mudslinging on Twitter, because of course there is one bajillion tons of that shit as well, but I can avoid it by choosing my interactions. And that feels, unsurprisingly, hugely empowering (NB I do NOT feel empowered by Facebook - but again this is the topic of another post). Twitter, with its strict use of handles and hashtags, channels political feeling, and works to galvanise people towards shared causes.

I'll give you one example: I mention WH Smith above - they are currently the target of a sustained campaign to get them to change their sexist magazine labelling (this is so tired I shouldn't have to explain it, but you know the deal - mags like Private Eye and National Geographic being put in a "Men's Interests" section, as if owning a vagina precludes one from being interested in either politics or anthropology (whereas as we know it's probably the opposite, AMIRITE)). This hasn't quite succeeded yet but the absolutely bloody brilliant part is that the same campaigns have already worked for Morrisons and Tesco! How fucking brilliant is that? You might call this armchair activism, but given that most actual activism appeals to all but the die-hard few, I'd say this is exactly what we need - this isn't just the mobilisation of the voice of the people, but the voice of the people actually being listened to and acted upon. For fucking once.

So, Twitter feels empowering? That's because it damn well is. And it's especially useful in the fight against patriarchy - of which more anon.




*Note correct usage, motherfuckers.