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.