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.

Thoughts on Akin and Assange

It has been a grim week for those of us with a uterus.

Here in the UK, Julian Assange gave an Evita Peron-style address from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he is holed up in a bid to fight his extradition to Sweden to face charges of rape, sexual molestation and sexual assault. Assange has many supporters both in the UK and globally, both high-profile and not, and boy howdy have they been at work both outside the embassy and in the press and social media sites. Some of my favourite arguments in support of Assange are as follows:

• that the case against him is a "witch hunt" (various places but in one of the first few comments under Owen Jones's excellent comment piece in the Independent )
• that once a woman consents to sex with a man, any occasion following that is essentially fair game (this is the gist of George Galloway's argument)
• That extradition to Sweden somehow = extradition to the USA, which in turn = execution. Yeah, that one is pretty fruity so it's perhaps not entirely surprising to see Michael Moore and Oliver Stone endorsing it.

Over in God's Own Country, otherwise known as the USA, things are gearing up for a Presidential election. This often brings the mind-bogglingly stupid out of the woodwork, and this week was no exception, only this time the candidate in question wasn't a screaming fanatic waving a God Hates Fags sign on an abortion clinic picket line somewhere in deepest Nowheresville but the Missouri District Congressman Todd Akin. I think Todd must have fallen asleep in his high school biology lesson* because he seems to be confusing the reproductive organs of genetically female humans with those of ducks. Yup...ducks. There are takedowns of this stupidity all over the internet so I won't labour it, other than to highlight the important points from that particular canard (sorry):

• According to Akin, rape victims can't get pregnant, because, and I stress to you that this is a direct, in-context quote: "the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down".
• While you are reeling from that stunner, I am going to hit you with another hook - the above mangling of a basic human physiology lesson was based on aforesaid rape being a legitimate rape (again I am quoting). Imma let that one sink in for you.

So, another week, another fuckton of garbage lies and rape apologia. But I want to say something about it all because there is a massive fucking Venn diagram in the middle of all this (you might call it Occupy Misogyny ha ha GEDDIT) and it is the colour of rape.

There is much online whining about feminists and feminism being obsessed with rape, and it is absolutely true that some of the most important and powerful work being done in the name of the feminist cause, especially on the interwebz, is to do with debunking rape myths and calling out the rape culture. My peoples, THERE IS A REASON FOR THIS. Rape is a crux issue for feminism, not because it is an often violent crime which is hugely skewed towards one gender perpetuating violence against another** (this is what makes it an issue for humanity), but because it crystallises a central feminist argument - that one of the things that patriarchy has done is to legitimise rape (ha ha no Todd, I don't mean it the way you do).

While there is much huffing and puffing that OF COURSE we take rape seriously! Rapists are vile! Ewww are you trying to suggest that we SUPPORT rape?! the events of this week just do not bear that out. A man who is a suspect in a rape trial garners support essentially for running away. A high profile politican suggests that if you are penetrated in your sleep by someone not wearing a condom, who carries on thrusting regardless even after you have asked him to stop and put one on, you have not been raped - you've just been a victim of "bad sexual etiquette". Another politician suggests, on television, that the female anatomy can reject the sperm of a rapist - but only if he's a real rapist, you know, the kind that jumps out from behind a bush in a dirty hoodie. On a popular and serious political programme in the UK, the accuser of a suspected rapist is named, then criticised for not being a good enough victim. You think we don't live in a rape culture? This shit is from one goddamn week.

Rape is a crux issue because the propagating of myths and lies about it is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING EVERYWHERE. For every person tweeting their disgust for all the apologetic rubbish and handwringing WHAT ABOUT THE MENZZZ!! there is another person commenting that 'spousal rape is nonsense' (this was an actual comment on the Owen Jones piece but it appears to mercifully have been removed). And my peoples, I am tired, so very fucking tired of it. There are good things that have come out of this week, like the massive outcry against Assange's speech and Galloway's video, the hashtag #menagainstrape trending on Twitter, and a gathering call for Akin to step down. But I am still unwise enough to read the comments on Op Ed pieces and I fear the worst - that we are nowhere near destroying rape culture. I suspect we have only just begun a very long fight.





* although this comes with the caveat that as Missouri is located firmly under the tight squeeze of the Bible belt, he may well not have had any high school biology lessons. This would be hilarious, if it weren't entirely possible.
** I want to acknowledge here that this is a limiting use of the word gender - I realise I am simplifying. What I mean is that rape is statistically a crime carried out in the vast majority by male-identifying humans against female-identifying humans. Statistics are reductionist and gender is complex, yo. What this doesn't also illustrate is the fact that victims of rape are overwhelmingly 'othered' peoples - sex workers, transgender people, people in jail, children, the physically and/or mentally disabled, gay people and the elderly (NB NOT a comprehensive list by any means, well the fuck done, humanity).

Sticking my oar in...

...forgive the maritime metaphors, I'm channelling Adrienne Rich.

Having started a couple of blogs in the past - one food-related, one poetry-related, both displacement activities (but then most of what I do in my spare time is a displacement activity of one kind or another), I have been lured back online again to try my hand for a third time (it's the charm, right? Although Waugh warned us all in no uncertain terms about the dangers of charm).

Partly because I think there are some possible gems in the abandoned poetry blog (what Rich might call glitter in fragments and rough drafts) which deserve a home, and partly because recently most of my friends seem to have developed a writerly habit, either online or in print, and to be truthful, I feel a little left behind. I used to write compulsively, almost like a nervous reaction; something would happen and I would write about it. I don't do that so much anymore, in part I suspect because of Facebook and Twitter - not that I am knocking them, I have no ambivalence towards them and no angst about using them; but I think they offer a near-constant means of communicating in textual form: a drip-feed rather than the sudden purge of a paragraph of text. Apologies for the bloody imagery. Hopefully this blog might resurrect not my ambitions but my compulsions, and my long-neglected relationship with the written word.

So, with a little hesitation, this is me diving into the wreck again, having read the book of myths and loaded the camera - forewarned and forearmed. Rich was a wise woman indeed.