Olivia Singer

One Year Anniversary in Paris.

2011-08-01T15:06:00.001+01:00

Today is my one year anniversary in Paris, it's been just under a year since someone tried to rape me here. Two weeks ago, I had a friend visiting so we went for a drink at a bar I know and I trust is safe, because I don't go fucking anywhere here that I don't know with just another girl because I feel like I'm at some sort of constant risk of being raped. So we go to catch up, and we get kind of drunk, and we have a really good time and then I go to take her to get a taxi because I don't want her hailing one on her own just in case. And so we are standing on the corner of Rue Trousseau where there are bloody loads of people at about midnight, maybe half past, and instead of a taxi, a car with three 25-year-old-ish white French guys pull up and start making jokes about how we were hookers. They didn't think we were hookers, they were just being a bit lary, and we told them to go away. The next thing I knew, I was punched in the face and bleeding on the floor. Another car drove up, a tinted out Mercedes, and two more guys got out and joined in, punching and kicking me and my friend whilst we lay there. Some men came to help us, they broke their noses. Some more men came and I'm not really sure what happened, I looked up and someone was fucking covered in blood and then my friend got me on my feet and we ran back to the bar we had been at. I was spitting blood and all gross so I went straight to the bathroom. When I came out, my friends were all confused, and I tried to explain what had happened but by that point the cars had just driven off. I wish I had stayed to get some registration numbers or something, but I was really fucking scared. And hurt. And confused; we had done nothing to provoke anything- and even if we had, what could we possibly have done to inspire 5 big guys to get out their cars and beat the fuck out of us? Who kicks someone in the face when they are on the floor?

About a week and half before that, a friend, another small girl, got beaten up so badly by her cab driver she had to have stitches. Two nights ago, I turned my taxi around to collect a friend who had run into a hotel lobby away from her taxi driver after paying him, and he had followed her and beaten her up. In the lobby. In front of the hotel guy, who left him to it. We had watched her get into the taxi to make sure she was safe. That isn't enough. A man tried to hit my coworker in the face at the store we work at the other day. We weren't really sure why; it's a vintage clothes store, it's pretty chill. At the moment I feel like you aren't safe anywhere here unless you are with about 50 men, or in your house. I'm freaking out. It has been a great year, I've fallen in love, I've found a job I adore, I've met amazing feminists through Ladyfest, heaps of great friends, lots of other smug stuff. But I have made two victim reports to the police that haven't been followed up, regarding unprovoked physical attacks on me. I have had a lot of friends in similar situations. I feel like I don't even want to go to the supermarket because I am fucking sick of people saying stuff to me, anything. I am sick of men saying 'bonjour madmoiselle' and getting pissed when you don't engage with them. I'm sick of being told I'm 'charmant' or 'tres sexy', or that my ass is like a piece of meat they'd like to fuck when I go to get my lunch. I'm sick of men trying to stick their hands up my cunt on the metro when I'm on my way to work, and nobody saying anything, and me not even caring that much any more. I'm sick of being looked at constantly, constantly, constantly, whatever I'm wearing, however I look. I'm sick of sometimes having to respond charmingly to these things because I am scared, I am sick of how scared I feel constantly.

It is really hard to explain how invasive it is to have someone force you to engage with them, outside of your own consent. This is anything from them grabbing at your body- which happens mad amounts here, it's unbelievable- and expecting some sort of response to whatever they choose to say to you in the street, in a cafe, in a bar, at your work. It is also really hard to explain how violated you can feel when someone stares at you non stop for a twenty minute metro journey, when three men stare at you, when a carriage of men stare at you because you are standing up because you don't feel safe sitting down next to someone because yesterday someone tried to put his hand in your pants when you did and you're wearing a short skirt because you are tired of buying long ones. It's not the same as anywhere else I've ever been. I don't know if that is because, for me, so many of these interactions are tinged with the potential for someone to assault you, or whether these interactions really are this invasive. Most girls I know here- most expat girls- feel pretty similar. A friend walked down the street with a man the other day for the first time since she lived here and said she couldn't fucking believe the difference. It is so different. It is so sad. It's like being constantly assaulted, a thousand times a day, being constantly reminded that you are worth nothing because sometimes you can't fight them off or when someone asks why you won't respond to them telling you they want to fuck you in the most explicit ways, tells you you are being rude, you don't know how to express your frustration that they should just keep their fucking mouths shut. I was going to start writing down all the things that happened to me every time they happened because I don't feel like people believe it, but there isn't enough bloody time. And you cant write down some of it because it doesn't make sense written. I feel like I am a strong woman, I came to Paris for feminism and for empowerment, and I am ending up broken and scared and I don't want to get in a taxi and I dread getting on the metro and I don't want to walk anywhere. When I left Ladyfest at Cafe de la Danse after paying bands to walk two minutes to the afterparty at Le Motel, two different groups of men grabbed me. Like really grabbed. Grabbed my tits so that they hurt. I was in the midst of my feminist weekend, I was wearing what I'd been wearing all day.

This seems like a bit of a pointless thing to write. I'm just so furious with everything here, I can't explain. I can't believe how much the things I love are being affected, are being taken away from me, so that at the moment, all this city is for me is somewhere that I am unsafe. My friend Bri put it pretty well the other day when she said that your mobility is so affected here that it is like someone is kneeling on your fucking arms and pinning you down. It really is. Ladyfest 2012 has a lot of work to do here. In the meanwhile, it'd be cool if the police called me back and if anyone wants to come to get some mace, I'm going tomorrow.

This Week in Rape News

2011-05-18T20:45:00.006+01:00

So, amazingly, for a change, feminism is big in the news. Between the intense reactions on both sides of the fence to Slutwalk to Ken Clarke's appalling interview on BBC 5 Live (transcript here), everyone is talking about rape almost as much as when I last blogged, back in December.

People have gone crazy talking about SlutWalk; all that SlutWalk purports to protest is victim-blaming; the notion that if you look like a slut, or not, whatever 'looking' like a sexually promiscuous woman is constructed to look like, no still means no. If you say yes 9 times out of 10, your 'no' on that one other time still counts. People can talk about how this is an obvious point as much as they like, but women are still reminded by police all over the world that it's a bit their fault if their thong is showing (the posters by Manchester police put up all of last year reminding us girls to 'keep our assets hidden') or if they are selling sex (I don't think I need an example for how rape of sex workers is consistently ignored). When Conservative author Jo-Anne Nadler states:

'There is an interpretation of what the policeman said, more sympathetic to his view, which is that actually women can be making themselves vulnerable, particularly young girls. Our very sexualised society puts pressure on young girls to dress that way. If they gave it more thought, they wouldn’t feel comfortable with what they were saying about themselves.'

it seems like she might be managing to convince herself that she has everyone's best interests at heart. But, actually, what is anyone ever wearing, that says 'rape me'? The sexualisation of young girls AND of women is very sad, but it is a different issue, and if you are wearing nothing but your thong in the street, you still aren't permitting someone to assault you. And I hardly ever agree with Julie Bindel, but she has it down when she asks why we are wondering what to tell women what to wear and why we aren't just teaching men no means no. And, as much as people try and contort SlutWalk into something else, into 'reclaiming' the word slut, or whatever else anyone is going on about, it is about victim blaming. And that's why Ken Clarke's interview this week resonates with such devastating intensity.

I don't need to quote statistics, I hope, to remind people how anti-feminist our coalition government is; scores of people have written on it with more eloquency and detail that I could hope to paraphrase. But it still seems a surprise when our Justice Secretary comes out talking about that 'not serious' type of rape, and why it is okay to give those 'not-proper rapists', those rapists whose actions don't have life shattering and terrifying consequences, a year or so's prison sentence. His ignorance as to sentencing laws is frightening enough, he is the political head of the justice system, but seems almost dismissable when it comes to understanding what he describes as 'rape in the ordinary conversational sense'. What is that rape? Is that gang rape? Is that just the 'violent' rape that he specifies- because rape, on its own, without a woman having bruises on her face or knife wounds somewhere isn't violent enough? Catherine Waldby puts socially constructed bodily imagos of women with regards to rape very aptly when she notes:

'the mobile and indeterminate nature of women's boundaries renders violation of women difficult, in the phallic imagination at least. Sexual penetartion without the woman's agreement does not count as violence in this imagination because no line is considered to be crossed. It will oly count as violence, in courtrooms and forensic laboratories, for example, if it is accompanied by other kinds of violence - visible signs, bruises, cuts, etc., some empirical marks of damage.'

We don't even really need to go crazy on the Lacanian notion of woman's openness to recognise the resonancy in what she writes with what Ken Clarke said. He later goes on to clarify that rape is 'man forcibly having sex with a woman', but his previous suggestions of rape only really mattering when it is violent implies that it is just physical force that comes in to play in cases of rape. It is not. There are myriad factors, there are myriad cases, and I am not suggesting that we must come up with a blanket law for rapists; but I am suggesting that the Chief Justice need think about what he classifies as violating a woman's body, because sex on it's own doesn't seem to count for him. And if, in a democracy (hah!), he is claiming to speak for the public which he represents, that is terrifying. It took us a very long time to recognise that marital rape was still rape (legal until 1991 in the UK), and it seems to be taking us even longer to recognise that date rape, emotionally abusive coercive rape, Assange-esque 'sex without consent' all still count as sexual assault. We must all remember that no always means no, but equally importantly, not saying no doesn't mean yes. It isn't any less serious. Repercussions differ from woman to woman, post-rape trauma is never going to be the same for anyone, so let's not think in terms of severity of rapes committed accompanied by violence versus 'mysterious other cases' but rather treat all sexual assault, or attempts of, as equally severe but judge cases individually. Surely that's not too much to ask?

Julian Assange

2010-12-20T11:53:00.005Z

On Friday, The Guardian published the first account of the complete allegations against Julian Assange here . This is welcome relief from the copious amounts of conjecture that has flooded everywhere from The Daily Mail to Huffington Post, conjecture which has highlighted far more than right-wing conspiracy to bring down WikiLeaks or the supposed dangers of militant feminism. There is very little disagreement that the vehemence with which Interpol and the Swedish authorities are pursuing Assange is in accordance with this month's political upheaval. As Maya Dusenbery pointed out in response to Naomi Wolf's tweet that 'Rape is being used in the Assange prosecution in the same way that women’s freedom was used to invade Afghanistan', yeah, cynical use of feminism for anti-liberal and oppressive means sucks, the notion that women's rights are valued only when politically expedient sucks. Sweden has the highest rape rates in Europe and a decreasing rate of convictions; credulity as to why this case is being given so much attention is thin on the ground. But it is incredibly important to be careful how we discuss these matters in the grander scheme of things.

Nobody (or at least nobody of the remotest merit) is accusing Assange of being guilty as charged; as far as I am aware, it is nobody's place to- these are charges and not convictions. Even if he was charged; it's still possible for him to have done good stuff career-wise with WikiLeaks. And a lot of the frenzy regarding Assange's arrest seems to reveal more about the hypocricy of a society that generally doesn't care about rape and suddenly does now, when it's convenient, rather than actual care for rape victims, than anything. But now the focus has instead fallen on the difference between Whoopi Goldberg's gross assessment of what is 'rape-rape' (a stranger, gunpoint in an alley?) and what isn't (someone you know holding your arms and legs down whilst you try and reach for a condom? fucking you whilst you sleep?). Robert Stacy McCain coined the catchy epithet 'You buy the ticket, you take the ride' which becomes a bit of a problem when between 75 and 89% of rape victims are estimated to know their attacker... does hanging out with someone really mean they can fuck you when and however they please? Millions upon millions of people are reading the articles around this case. These narratives are infinitely harmful, leave a legacy of victim-blaming and make victims less likely to both take their own experiences seriously and more afraid to report sexual crimes. (See Stacy Malone of Victim Rights Law Centre, Renee Franiuk's 2008 study). Anne Munch reported that, when the Kobe Bryant case offered a similarly harmful narrative, reports of rape at one Colorado university went from 47 (2002) to 6 (2003), calls to a Colorado rape crisis centre fell by third, callers were increasingly hesitant to report to police.

The law does not take rape seriously, and nor does the media, symptomatic of general opinion. Last month, a woman was sent to prison in the UK for retracting allegations of rape against her husband, with whom she had been in an emotionally and physically abusive relationship and whom she explains coerced her and guilted her into a retraction. Keir Starmer of the CPS writing a non-specific and useless apology in The Guardian titled 'Rape: justice will be done' doesn't address the problems victims of assault face. Women do not lie about rape any more than people lie about any other crimes; the figure is placed at 8% by the CIA. The rhetoric of these women exaggerating their distress or just making it up (come on, since when did the left start listening to people like Israel Shamir? For fuck's sake, he's a holocaust denier) is coherent with a significant amount of rape reportage. Lindsay Beyerstein offers a pretty strong summation when she says “We can agree that the legal response to what Assange allegedly did reeks of politically-motivated prosecution without passing judgment on the merits of the allegations against him.” If someone agrees to have sex with you like THIS and not like THAT and you have sex with them like THAT then that is not consensual, that is rape (see Jill at Feministe). Withdrawal of consent is grounds for a rape charge in Sweden and should be pretty obvious. If you are having sex with someone, and then you say stop, and they don't stop, that is not okay. And if they keep on saying stop, and you keep on having sex with them, that's rape, surely? It is important to re-evaluate how we consider rape, not as being only bad when you are in a dark alley but still incredibly harmful when you are in your own bedroom, with someone you trusted enough to invite there. So it stops being so much about did-he-didn't-he but about how these cases have been reported on, because it is NOT just these two women who face problems like this, who make breakfast the next morning and don't call the police for a week because they don't understand what's going on, but a significant amount of rape victims.

So yes, the CIA and Interpol have clearly prioritised this far higher than they would have done otherwise. That doesn't devalue the case itself, it highlights the problem of all the other cases lagging behind. And what the media narrative surrounding it all has done has devalued all rape cases that aren't gang-rape filmed with a video camera for evidence. According to RAINN, about 60% of rapes aren’t reported. In those cases, there’s about a 51% chance that the 40% of reported rapes will have an arrest made. There’s an 80% chance of prosecution. And, given various factors including conviction and sentencing, there’s only about a 16.3% chance that someone who commits rape will serve time for that rape. Meaning: If we factor in the rapes that go unreported, only 6% of rapists ever serve time. The women who have accused Assange have had their names, home addresses, social media accounts all leaked. The woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape refused to testify after her name being leaked and she was repeatedly intimidated, similarly the Ben Roethlisberger case. These men are not 'destroyed' like so much anti-feminist reporting claims. Actually, nothing happens; nothing happened to Al Gore, Bill Cosby, R. Kelly, nothing much even happened to Polanski and he was convicted, so was Mike Tyson (and, even after maintaing his innocence, he said he would rape the victim and her mother). They still do okay for themselves. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a Governor famous for sexually harassing women, he wrote an article about incredibly questionable gang-sex for 'Oui' magazine. So let's stop pretending that being accused, or even convicted of rape, is really that much of a career-crushing big deal because it just isn't.

Innocent until proven guilty does not mean 'charges without merit' or 'the accusers are liars', and to operate under these assumptions discourages voices of objectivity, let alone any more rape accusations against either Assange (because one off sexual assault is rare, perpetrators offend an average of 5 times) or anyone else finding themselves in similar situations. By claiming that these are false accusations or questioning the notion of consent under bullshit lolzy blogposts about 'sex by surprise', it is more than WikiLeaks, Assange or the women who are accusing him who are degraded. It is a world of women subjected to sexual assault who have a hard enough time of it anyway. Discussions about rape are microcosms of how we think about women, whether they can be trusted, if they just get sooooo jealous of other women that they accuse their partners of rape and a lot of that seems to depends on the status of the accused rather than the legitimacy of anything else. So most of all, it seems imperative that we question how and why the Assange case is being addressed by the media as it is, and question our motives for perpetuating a victim-blaming legacy alongside questioning why the case is getting such Interpol attention. None of it is Moore's 'phooey', because surely this is the kind of liberal transparency and encouragement to progression that WikiLeaks encourages?

It's not Terry's, It's Mine.

2010-12-01T20:03:00.002Z

It's finally nearly Christmas, and with the M&S adverts comes too the constant and carnivalesque sense of festive gorging- and we all know that is what us ladies love best within the terrifying permanence of Edenic legacy. I know that the notion of gorging woman is easily dismissed as irrelevant in a culture that encourages the starvation of women but it is often 'revealed' as the natural female impulse. Women in food-y advertising are constantly desperately trying to avoid stuffing themselves in a weirdly Bacchanalian fashion with high-cal junk food, from biscuit jars with 'don't do it!' and 'you've come this far!' stuck onto them in Kellog's Special K ads, trying to find a low fat alternative they can binge on (the guilt free Flyte bar, historically literally angelic lo-fat Philadelphia) or just giving up- 'It's not Terry's, it's mine'. These adverts and the notion of female attractiveness as synonomous with thinness seem to address appearance but as Wolf says, ‘[t]he beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance’, is women’s psychological depletion which is being galvanized through their starvation, not just their physical wellbeing. Bodies don't work as well when they are hungry, and minds don't work as well when they are constantly trying to figure out how they can make lo-cal Ryvita and Philadelphia into a nutritious meal because of the guilt encouraged regarding normal eating habits (eating food you like when hungry).

Nick Eriksen said that ‘to suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence’, the myth of the sensually insatiable woman exists, is intrinsically connected to food and, as is not anomalous nor restricted to far-right BNP candidates. Sara Goldfarb, in the film adaptation of Requiem for a Dream is harassed by her fridge whilst the young woman in yet another Special K advert for snack bars is followed by a chocolate muffin. The idea of woman’s temptation as eponymised by and derivative from our orignial sinner, Eve, is heavily played on in Western media, from Forbidden Fruit snack bars to the apple-illustrated cover of the Twilight novel and scarcely requires elaboration. Virginia Woolf once had a vision of young women with access to the forbidden libraries of men’s colleges, offered mental freedom. It is no longer library rules which restrict women, but starvation- Joan Jacobs Brumberg believes one in five female students on college campuses is anorexic, Kim Chernin that half of the women on campuses will at some point suffer anorexia or bulimia, in the United Kingdom, 95% of anorexics are women. These are gendered statistics. Just telling us that being skinny is great is getting a little tired, even for Cosmo, so now we’re being attacked by images of how bad it is to really want and subsequently consume food. But simultaneously encouraged to want it.

Gorging-related-guilt operates as both an iconic means for misogny to self-represent a fear of female desire and liberty but also a far more literal tool of oppression. Both obesity and anorexia are obviously mentally and physically dehabilitating, time you are thinking about food (in an obsessive sense rather than a fancying a bit of lunch sense) is time you are not thinking about more important things. However, whilst even the lewdest adverts are hard pressed to allow the ASA to permit them to directly encourage starvation, they can still make you feel pretty guilty about being hungry whilst on the Special K diet (do people really function on two bowls of cereal and a small evening meal? Does writing yourself guilt-ridden notes on the biscuit tin ever work?). Food related disorders truly are gendered, and the ideologies that promote them can distinctly be traced throughout history but have never been more prevalent than now- and that's even more than when nuns had to starve themselves to get in touch with the Lord Almighty. We are constantly trying to dispose of the materiality of the body- as Susie Orbach notes, it is almost as if we have developed a Western late-Capitalist need to exhibit freedom from need and ultimate 'choice' in a (privileged and exclusive) world of abundance - and simultaneously a means from woman to be able to distance herself from her insatiable mother Eve. We are removing eating from appetite; concepts of hunger and satiety elude a significant proportion of food advertising and the lives of many. It’s not normal, it’s not healthy and it’s nothing if not bizarre.

Our bodies are considered unstable, we have a whole new rhetoric of determined cleansing, detox, responsibility and moral accountability for one's body as a personal project that can be completed. The body is no longer a means of production but a product and if any time of year focuses on a Capitalist notion of production and consumption it is right now. And then again, post-December-26th, when WeightWatchers etc come out in full swing- if our bodies are ever forcedly thrust into literal and mentally constructed physical instability, it’s over the next 60 days. Good will to all of us.

I can't quite bear to make a pun on Stephen Fry's 'Attitude'.

2010-11-02T15:51:00.005Z

So Stephen Fry has left Twitter again, in an utter strop that his 'humourous' comments about women in his Attitude magazine interview were misrepresented. I think we can all be fairly certain that Steve Jobs or someone will lure him back soon enough and we shan't have to suffer a sustained loss of his 140-character epithets of enlightenment, but the whole fiasco seems to bring up a whole heap of misery. It has been a pretty awful few weeks for women. Today, November 2nd, is Equal Pay Day. In the UK, women are paid just over 16% less than men. It works out as women working for free from now until the end of the year, whilst men keep on getting paid. Osborne's cuts have hit women almost unbelievably dispropotionately. What has been a fortnight of financial disaster for women has been topped off by the luvvie of our country reminding us that, as if fiscal inequality wasn't depressing enough, even those we often imagine as beacons of liberalism are sometimes victims/perpetrators of brutally archaic misogyny. Not even our most revered celebs are sacred. Oh lord. What a sign of the times.

The Guardian has gone absolutely up in arms, which is pretty gross, as they can scarcely claim an active interest in feminism when their feminist writer of choice is still the vile Ms Bindel. The Daily Mail etc clearly don't have a leg to stand on. But these dismissals of those who have passed judgement on what are a series of nasty and stupid statements about how straight men deserve the pity of the gays and how the only women who really like fucking are whores, literally, are maybe the most depressing thing of all. Because Fry isn't the first person to say this stuff by any means, it is either explicitly stated or implied in a million things a day, we just thought he was above it. And saying that these papers have no right to criticise him because, most of the time they are just as bad, reminds us just how shabby a situation we are all in with regards to insitutitionalised misogyny. A google search brings up the worst articles ever about the interview- the Irish Times tells me I'd rather have a look at Mr Darcy on a horse than have sex, some guy at the Independent uses some poor evolutionary theory to say Fry is right. He is not anomalous, he's just taking a heterophobic angle.

Fry seems to buy into the notion of a collective gay identity, of an immutable and congenital truth that gay men really want to be shagging eachother all the time. This promiscuity myth is neither liberating nor accurate- its categorisation enables codification and regulation, there is no liberty in men being stereotyped like that and, quite frankly, it is unfathomably confusing to have a man who spent a significant proportion of his life famously celibate tell us all that guys just can't keep it in their trousers. Almost as confusing as a man who has never slept with a woman tell us that we only have sex as relationship currency. But, it's nothing out of the ordinary to say, it's just a massive disappointment to realise than another person we all thought was better than inaccurate and unsubstantiated generalisations about gender and sexuality isn't at all. But as long as Caroline Lucas doesn't turn out to be a Nazi or something, I think I'll survive.

Spectacular Porn

2010-10-14T20:56:00.005+01:00

In Paris, men don't seem to play much of a visible role in advertising; weirdly, all of the adverts feature women. I say weirdly- there isn't much new about using pretty ladies to sell things. As Adorno says, women seem to 'have escaped the sphere of production only to be absorbed the more entirely by the sphere of consumption', our comparative absolution from capitalism scarcely a liberal victory. The family, beauty, female fashion or the home as points of consumption are often the targets for these adverts- (assumed heteronormative) woman is, in fact, the expected consumer but manages to retain a bizarre sense of passivity in the sense she, as consumer, is seemingly turned into man. The figures who advertise to her are advertising with their breasts or their heads flung back or suggestive posturing; they aren't selling aspiration, they are selling sexuality. Women and sexuality, looking at woman and looking at her sexuality are once again conflated. Even when we are selling women a new pair of Levi's or some shampoo and it's not a good sign for pro-pornography movements which claim that woman can claw back her dignity because women like it too. When Laura Mulvey talks about the voyeurist active/passive mechanisms of film, of 'women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end [titillation in her passivity]', she talks about a decline of the traditional film form. It doesn't seem to be ending, it seems to be mutating and bleeding with increasing intensity and declining awareness onto our billboards.

On a slightly tangental note, South Africa is getting its first all-black porno, with a safe-sex message. South Africa has a very culturally conservative attitude to pornography- propositions for digital 'Adult TV' channels were recently met with uproar, a few months ago Malusi Gigaba, their deputy home affairs minister, was investigating an actual porno ban on internet and mobile phones. Tau Morena, the producer of the new film 'Mapona', has taken this censorship as a positive indication of how his film can be seen as pretty feminist, stating:

"The great thing with South Africa is that there is no status quo with the way pornography is shown. We have a chance from the beginning to root out exploitation. In our case, a woman was paid more than the men."

He sort of has a point, sort of. In an ideal world. But, as Mulvey says, 'the very image for the most visible exploitation that women endure in a sexist society cannot be used with impunity, cannot be used without a certain complicity' - a woman having sex on screen cannot be resolutely unexploitative because, day to day, woman is spectacle. Dworkin states that ‘the uses of women depicted in pornography are objective and real because women are so used’; pornography is meaningful because the subjugation it depicts is rooted in reality and in few places is this reality so conflated with female oppression as in South Africa. Tatiana Mamanova, a Soviet feminist, discussing the difference between the West and Russia said 'The pornography ... it's everywhere, even on billboards ... [it] is a different kind of assault. And it doesn't feel like freedom to me'. Because it isn't. I am not one by any means to preach censorship, it's obviously futile, but when in a week when Playboy says it is coming back to South Africa after a long-term hiatus, when Morena says things like 'We're still trying to identify who we are as South Africans' as if porn is going to give everyone some new and utopian liberal identity because the women are getting paid more than the men (which they pretty much always are in all porn anyway, as if that's the biggest deal ever), I feel a bit like some people need to be reminded that when you can't advertise a lampshade without sex in the supposedly liberal France, you are really hard pushed to justify selling pornography as progressive in South Africa where a woman, according to the UN, is raped every minute.

Photo: Leonard McCombe '[Eyes right is executed with almost military precision by dining car males aboard New York bound 20th Century Limited as Kim Novak eases into a seat]'

Keeping Cancer Sexy

2010-10-07T18:11:00.000+01:00

Over the past few days, Facebook has been flooded with status updates starting 'I like it on...'. I don't even know how this is meant to be connected to raising breast cancer awareness, but it is. As a friend of mine said, she'd like it far more if we could raise awareness, as women, about breast cancer without the agency of men's (or anyone's, in fact's) sexual desire. Or without reminding ourselves that we can only be seen or heard when we're sexualised. When my rape story was recently put in a publication, I thought about some accompanying it with a provocative photo, with the 'whatever we wear' slogan. Because, more than anything, it would have gotten a few more people to read it; it isn't being put in a feminist based paper, and I am pretty sure that most people are likely to skim past an article with a title like 'WHEN I WAS NEARLY RAPED' when they are on the bus. And we all know how many people like having a look at women's tits on the bus, and the lack of shame that accompanies it when you see a million and one people studying The Sun's 'News in Briefs' as intently as they do. Last year, one of the women I respect most said to me that, as a woman, we should let men hold as many doors open for us as they please until we get our 17% gendered pay difference back. I mean, there have to be some benefits to being a woman, and one of them is being able to wink your way out of a metro fine when, the day before, someone tried to put their hand up your skirt on said metro. But this is a seemingly vicious cycle. Use sexuality as means of winning back a little bit of liberty, remind self/world that the little liberty women are often afforded is through the efforts of Wonderbra rather than wonderous social revolution. I'm constantly riddled with trying to align some of the things I do with feminism, and I just can't all the time, and I know that's okay because nobody is perfect (and I am far from) but I am finding this breast cancer thing infinitely frustrating because, fuck, breast cancer is awful for a million reasons, it affects men and women, I'm almost sure that the absolute majority of people posting a status update that makes us all think about where they like to have sex aren't doing it just to titillate and get the person they fancy on facebook to think about fucking them but because they do care about a cause that needs caring about. But, like feminism, breast cancer isn't sexy- it just isn't anything to do with sex and I don't know why we have to try and make yet another serious, proper thing into something flippantly about tits. I don't understand why women's sexuality is now being marketed for charities all over the place; as if PETA didn't bore us all enough with the 'I'd rather be naked than wear fur' campaigns, as if 'what colour is your bra (and post a picture of it)' wasn't tiring enough last month or whenever it was. If anything isn't a masturbatory aid, it's breast cancer. Surely we can do better than this.

No means No.

2010-08-12T00:31:00.003+01:00

I moved to Paris last week. On my first day, a man asked if I was looking for something- it was late, I was on the corner and I had my map out. I said yes, I did, I was looking for a road. He thought I was a prostitute, he thought I was looking for business. I was wearing a floor length dress and a jacket. He was a little man, he looked like Sarkozy, perfectly presentable, and I screamed and screamed at him. He said it was a Latin country, what could I expect? He said he was sorry to shock me. I said you do not shock me, you disgust me. I gave my monologue on the horrors of prostitution. I was furious; not because he thought I was a prostitute but because he wanted to buy one. Since then, I have been offered a whole heap of jobs in Pigalle as a stripper; no insult is intended, when I said no to one man, he simply asked 'but why? you can make good money'. I am not disarmingly beautiful. I am wearing a lot of long skirts in Paris, my mesh is right at the back of the wardrobe. I'm boiling hot but I have never had people treat me like this. I am either ignored, if I am with a man, or I am treated as a whore if I am not. It is the most beautiful city in the world, and it is the place of my favourite writers, my favourite feminists, my favourite art and I adore it here, but I can't comprehend this utterly shameless notion of misogynist ownership that the men so often feel entitled to hold over the women. I've never been this happy, and I've never wanted to work in feminism so much.

And then a few days ago, I had a great evening with some friends, and I just missed my last metro. I was at Gare du Nord, and it was a beautiful evening so I thought I would walk- the roads are huge and busy, it's safe. After a while, a small guy started talking to me, offering to direct me to Chatelet. I needed directions. He was nice, he was funny, he was a 23 year old Moroccan typist and I told him about myself, my family, said I had a boyfriend just to keep things simple, and vice versa. After a while I felt slightly uncomfortable, I felt like he was getting too close to me when we crossed the roads and things, but he didn't lay a finger on me. I texted a friend and told them to call and they did, I apologised to him, said it was my boyfriend and that I was safe now, thanked him for his time and continued walking home. On the best lit, busiest streets in Paris. I finished my phone call, I put on my Michel Thomas tape and I walked for another half an hour. I was two minutes from my house when I saw him again. It was a huge surprise; he lived an hour away, and suddenly the street was very empty. I said hello, I was really confused as to why he was there. He asked for my number and I said okay because I was scared. He tried to kiss me, I resisted. He tried again, I resisted, so he grabbed at my tits and ripped my dress off me. He then picked me up and threw me on my back on the floor. I'm not really sure what happened, I think he picked up my phone. I said to him I had money, he could take anything, and I screamed and screamed and I kicked and hit him and then after a while he just ran away. I have no idea how long it was, it must have been quick. I don't really know what happened. I don't know how I can't remember. I feel like I lost myself.

Afterwards I went to the internet cafe by my house because I needed to call my family or something and my housemate wasn't home. I tried to explain someone had tried to rape me but I was sobbing, my body really hurt and my French sucks. A woman came and translated for me, and helped me, and was kind. She asked if I had called the police. I asked 'what's the point?'. It was then that I realised I have spent so many years writing about rape, reading about rape, that not only did I feel a bizarre sense of immunity but that I was being an awful hypocrite. Of course fucking report it, futile or not. I spend my life trying to tell people to report things. When Andrea Dworkin was date raped, she said:

I couldn't be consoled. I couldn't talk to anyone. How could I say the words to the people I loved, most of whom work precisely to stop violence against women: this is what he, someone or they, did to me. Yeah, I know I represent something to you, but really I'm a piece of crap because I just got raped. No, no, you're not a piece of crap when you get raped, but I am.

She's got it right. But I went to the police, they were surprisingly kind. I looked at two thousand photos of young Moroccan men, we drove the streets looking for him, I cried all night. When I got home in the morning, I took some valium and went to sleep. I dreamt that people told me I had deserved to be raped. When I woke up I was disgusted with my anti-feminist subconscious, but I couldn't help it. I can chant 'Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means and yes and no means no' as many times as I like on marches, but when it comes down to it I keep questioning my responsibility. Was my dress too short? Was it stupid to take directions from him? Why did I do it- was I trying not to antagonise him, was I bored, did I want the attention? Did I look like I wanted it? Did I lead him on? I told him my sisters names, I told him about the books I want to read, I wasn't just an abstract, he knew about me and he still treated me like I was there for his pleasure. And then I keep thinking actually, you know what, he didn't rape me. This isn't a big deal. What if it he's a really nice guy and they find him and I give evidence and his life is ruined? But he threw me on the floor, he bruised me, he ripped at my clothes, he didn't even take my purse. He wanted to rape me, he took my phone for the sake of it as much as anything else and I know it's not okay and I know I'm not making it up but I keep feeling like maybe I'm just being too dramatic. I know that I'm not. But I keep feeling maybe I am. So many people say women lie about being raped, make it up for attention, the ConDems definitively implied it in their rapist anonymity suggestions. And I keep thinking maybe I just imagined it. But I fucking didn't.

Yesterday a man tried to talk to me on the metro. I had my headphones in. He persisted and then he touched my arm, like grabbed it. I couldn't stop screaming. I love it here, I was unlucky. I could have been unluckier. This happens all the fucking time, everywhere in the world, and it happens far worse than a few bruises on women's backs and some scratches on their breasts. To use my much loved Lawrence quote on pornography, rape too is a symptom of a diseased body politic. We must fix this. How can you not call yourself a feminist when Amnesty tell us that 267 women a day on average get raped in the UK? How can you not call yourself a feminist when, as a woman, you are at constant risk of the most invasive assault, when as a man your mother, sister, girlfriend, whoever, is. I don't know how to fix any of it, nobody knows how to fix any of it. But I have never wanted to try this hard, and I have never thought it so necessary for us to talk about it more.

'Stylist' magazine, you are cunts.

2010-06-10T17:59:00.003+01:00

Read 'Stylist' online here. Be warned, it sucks.

There are heaps of rubbish misconceptions about feminism; that to be a feminist entails being a woman or a lesbian, or frigid, or ugly, or whatever; a few weeks ago, someone I was working with asked me 'do feminists have anal sex?'. A lot of the misconceptions seem to be about how feminists are anti-sex because a lot of feminists are anti-pornography and raunch culture but it's pretty shabby logic. Feminism preaches gender equality, liberty and choice; it doesn't dictate your sex life, it doesn't dictate your lifestyle, it is just about human rights and to suppose anything else is just ignorance that is desperately encouraged by a patriarchy which has fought for as long as there have been feminists or proto-feminists for those seeking equity to be dismissed as jealous spinsters. The more we try and sex it up, talk about lipstick feminism and use phrases like 'Feminists get laid more' (thanks, BMB, for the presumption) the more we engage with a discourse that is oppressive and still focuses on women as sex objects, just in a slightly different way.

Over the past few weeks, Sex and the City 2 has meant that 'feminism' has been discussed in women's lifestyle magazines more than usual. The shameful plan to provision anonymity for alleged rape offenders has meant that women's issues are in the newspapers more than usual. This week's 'Stylist' has a front cover featuring Rosie the Riveter with the question 'Are you a secret feminist?' We can ignore the fact that Rosie the Riveter is an oppressive and limiting symbol of 21st Century feminism who acquiesces to gender binaries and propaganda capitalism under the guise of temporary wartime gender equality. Because we should pick our battles, I feel. But it really sucks to take feminism as a controversial issue and sully the word and the cause, a very valid cause, with some desperately offensive and badly written pseudo-liberationary journalism.

In the UK, women are paid 17% less than men. 267 women are raped in the UK per day, on average. At least 2 women a week die as a result of domestic violence. There is not universal suffrage for women. Women are genitally mutilated, both in the UK and abroad. These aren't facts that can be sexed up, because they suck. They aren't easy reading because they are bad facts. Domestic violence is discussed when it happens to Rihanna, rape when it comes to footballers, rarely any other times because it isn't fun and scarily little is being done to liberate those who really need help- if anything, the first legislation to do with women being discussed by our new and progressive Coalition Government is terrifyingly backwards and accusatory. However, 'Stylist' journalists seem to try their absolute best to ignore any reasons why anyone bothers being a feminist by approaching some advertising agencies and seeing how they would rebrand the cause. Let's ignore the painfully offensive notion of feminist alignment with capitalist advertising for now, we should pick our battles.

TBWA London tells us that 'we could 'reposition the movement as less grrr, more purrr' (I dare them to say that to Kathleen Hanna's face). Beattie McGuinness Bungay that we should 'make feminism cool, sexy' by use of a 'must-have fashion item' (said item is, by the way, a plan white t-shirt with a sash reading 'Miss Feminist'- I don't know how my wardrobe is without one). JWT thinks we should just give up on the word altogether and think of a new name, 'democratically' chosen. Surely, we just need to educate people as to what feminism is- 'less grrr, more purrr' is the most sickening piece of marketing buzzwording I have heard since David Brent, to rename 'feminism' is to discard a legacy of powerful activism fought for by men and women alike; why not just reclaim it? They continue to mumble a few horrifically middle-of-the-road paragraphs about Sam Cam, Samantha Jones and 'the face of modern feminism' before asking four very inspirational feminists the most boring questions in the world and giving them room for the shortest answers of all time. Ultimately, it is four pages that is just not worth reading punctuated with photos of Lady Gaga and Katie Price.

I spent a really long time begging for the word feminism to ever be used because it's true that nobody seems to want to call themselves a feminist. I don't really hang out with anyone who isn't a feminist in the same way I don't hang out with any fascists or racists, because to be anti-feminist on principle entails not ignorance but a perpetuation of abject cruelty grounded in nothing, but that doesn't mean that my friends would all describe themselves as feminists. But it seems like I was searching for the wrong thing; now feminism is on the cover of bad supplements being read by tons of people, SATC feminism is being discussed all over the place, 'Company' magazine is publishing grotesque 'Are you a feminist?' quizzes. And actually, it seems worse. Women's journalism is latching onto the term feminism as a buzzword because it seems liberal and progressive to discuss in the politically charged atmosphere of 2010 so far, but it is damaging it. You could read ten of these articles and not know why anyone bothers devoting their lives to feminism because they make it about Demi Moore being a cougar and heteronormativity. Feminism is, and should be, revolutionary, it is about changing things for the better- changing everything for the better; gender equity cannot be reached without economic equity, racial equity, social equity. Let's not rebrand it as easy and fun and 'sexy' and pink because, as Hadley Freeman said in the Guardian a few weeks ago- if this is feminism then 'I think I just burned my fingers while retrieving my bra from the fire', and I'll bet the Pankhurts are turning in their graves.

Homework. Innit.

2010-05-22T23:59:00.002+01:00

The misogynist lyrics of gangsta rap are hateful indeed,
but they do not represent a new trend in Black popular culture,
nor do they differ fundamentally from woman-hating
discourses that are common among White men.
- Johnson (1996)

What is particularly interesting about Milton is how he has consolidated a legacy of misogyny that has continued to silence women for centuries after Paradise Lost was written. Virginia Woolf refers to this as ‘Milton’s bogy’, his construction of woman as subordinate Other in accordance with Christian doctrine in Genesis (‘she shall be called “woman”, for she was taken out of man’) but also his elaboration on her vice and manipulation of her character. Whereas in the Old Testament, Eve’s sin is simply described ‘when the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it’, Milton attests that ‘Eve / Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else / Regarded […] Greedily she ingorg’d without restraint’. Woolf’s ambiguity in her phrasing when she discusses ‘Milton’s bogy’ is noted by Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis but it is undeniable that through Milton’s eyes, Eve, mother of all women is insatiable, lascivicious, the ‘Satanically inspired Eve, who has also intimidated women and blocked their view of possibilities both real and literary’.

Gertrude Stein terms the literary repercussions of this as ‘patriarchal poetry’ and it is the assimilated and institutionalised legacy of misogyny that is canonised in Milton’s epic poem that has relegated woman to the outskirts of literary history. That is, if she is even permitted a place on the outskirts rather than rendered a ‘nothing to see’ by her castration and interminably silenced. Paradise Lost constitutes woman’s ‘origin and their history’, it has been read with a ‘painful absorption’ by women, detailing their congenital corruption; even Woolf expresses an ‘uncharacteristic humility, even nervousness’ in her criticism of Milton’s work. She crowns Milton the first of the masculinists in her diary, he appears almost her author of misogyny and this authorship has sustained throughout not only the Early Modern and Modernist eras of literature but prevails in popular culture narratives today; as bell hooks notes, ‘[s]exism was an integral part of the social political order white colonizers brought with them from their European homelands’.

The Miltonic Eve is a recurring character throughout Western literature, she is the archetypal dangerous woman. Her presence is as interwoven in gender narrative as misogyny in hip-hop culture, music which is symbiotically embedded in popular culture and operates within culture’s established set of behaviours and attitudes which it then exacerbates. Jay-Z takes the idea of insatiable woman almost to its limit when he reimagines her in ‘Empire State of Mind’:

Lights is blinding, girls need blinders
so they can step out of bounds quick, the sidelines is
lined with casualties, who sip to life casually
then gradually become worse, don't bite the apple, Eve
Caught up in the in-crowd, now you're in style
And in the winter gets cold, en vogue with your skin out
City of sin is a pity on a whim,
Good girls gone bad, the city's filled with them
Mami took a bus trip, now she got her bust out
Everybody ride her, just like a bus route
Hail Mary to the city, you're a virgin
And Jesus can't save you, life starts when the church end
Came here for school, graduated to the high life
Ball players, rap stars, addicted to the limelight
MDMA got you feelin' like a champion
The city never sleeps, better slip you an Ambien

The song describes New York City anthemically, as a land of opportunities- ‘concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there’s nothing you can’t do’; Jay-Z, a working class black man, comes to replace Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack white man whose success is globally recognised. That is, New York is filled with potentiality unless you are a pitiable woman who requires instruction to resist temptation to ‘bite the apple’ so that you don’t get ‘caught in the in-crowd’ and get your ‘skin out’ for fear of being ‘good girls gone bad’, who seem to inevitably and inexplicably descend into either whoredom or prostitution: ‘everybody ride her, just like a bus route’.

For women, this is the city of Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’- a song sampled by hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest in ‘Can I Kick It’, later sampled by Jay-Z in ’22 Two’s’ in his debut album ‘Reasonable Doubt’. This notion of woman directly contravenes the city itself, described as virginal through devotional formula: ‘Hail Mary to the city’ followed by the more ambiguously directed ‘you’re a virgin’- it is made apparent that it is not the woman but abstraction that Jay-Z is addressing in prayer in the music video. Woman is isolated from the ‘predominantly male landscapes of fulfilment’ because of her inherent whoredom- it is important to note that the Virgin Mary can scarcely be considered a woman in her impossibility (something elaborately explored in Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex). Expand. In ‘Can I Kick It’, rapper Phife is referred to as a ‘poet sayer’ and in ‘Hot Sex’, he claims that ‘the poems that I create ain’t in paper-back books, the poems I create are for hookers and crooks’. Hip-hop culture maintains Stein’s notion of patriarchal poetry, relegating women to the object as Paradise Lost did.

Even if the woman attempts to attend school, the ‘ball players’ and ‘rap stars’ (traditionally male pursuits) who can bequeath her limelight second-hand are too irresistible, the lights are too blinding; she is alienated from the hypermale trope of hip-hop success culture. Unless she is forcibly protected from seeing the opportunities of whoring herself and submitting to temptation (they ‘need blinders’) she will be unable to resist. It is not the Eve of Genesis who is tricked by the ‘crafty’ serpent and desirous of knowledge but rather the sensorially rapacious Eve who, in Paradise Lost desperately gorges without capacity for restraint. Women are presented as literally ‘addicted’ to the high-life and implicitly consuming excessive amounts of drugs (MDMA and Ambien), an analogy of excess if ever there were one. She has easily slipped into the ‘City of Sin’ aspect of New York whilst the men in the song, whether drug dealers or athletes, seem exempt from judgement.

In February 2010, Jay-Z revealed to the Miami New Times that he was ‘two seconds away’ from calling Mary J. Blige to take Alicia Keys’ part in the song, but decided that Keys’ ability to play piano just tipped her over the edge. In spite of the fact that it was two women who collaborated to write the song, Jay-Z retains a sense of masculine authority over its production, Keys’ part in the song is absolutely secondary to his, her chorus formed from the rib of his performance as it were. Both explicitly in lyrics and through its production (additionally, the music video unsurprisingly is scarcely liberationary), Jay-Z reinstates the Miltonic assessment of Eve/woman as other and unable to control her own desires. Interestingly in the song, it is Keys who sings and Jay-Z who raps- a gesture towards Julia Kristeva’s proposition of the semiotic as related to the ‘fissures and prosody’ of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. Woman can only begin to find her voice, the voice that has been robbed by centuries of masculine authorship, through the associations of female instinct rather than the considerably more definitive Lacanian Symbolic Order.

Uh-O

2010-03-13T20:56:00.002Z

So I have developed a compulsive obsession with ocular verification in queer theory, of how we need to see to believe, from Boys Don't Cry stripping Brandon Teena of her clothing to reveal her penis to the pornographic `money shot' of ejaculation. Capitalist society is often said to consume images even more avidly than objects (Marcuse, Debord et al.), and it is this obsessive and impossible desire to visually verify the eponymously Freudian `dark continent' of the female orgasm that brings what Linda Williams so aptly terms `the frenzy of the visible' into contemplation. From Edison's the Sneeze, filmed in 1896 (a single-shot short film of Fred Ott sneezing- although a `pretty young woman' was initially requested, but unable to be found in time) onwards, film has permitted us a Foucaultian `will to knowledge', where knowledge is rendered ocularly through technology.

In Speculum of the Other Woman, Irigaray points out that woman's sexuality is derived from her similitude to man- man has a phallus, woman is defined by having none. Biblically man is created, woman from his rib (she is linguistically the woe of man). Woman is defined by her invisibility and passivity; in the Early Modern her body was literally too cold to eject the penis hidden up inside her (there is the notorious myth of the shepherdess who ran too fast, heated her body up too much, and ended up a man), in contemporary pornography, we try as hard as we can to see the impossibly visible female orgasm. In contrast to Foucault, Irigaray stresses the continual visual organisation of what we render reality, empirical knowledge, in accordance with theorists like Plato and Baudry but she emphasizes how this ocularity has operated as perpetually blinding with regards to woman. Essentially, what Irigaray gets at is that as long as women have to argue about pleasure, or power, or discourse on phallogocentric terms they will always automatically lose. One can clutch at straws reading Jilly Cooper's faded eroticism for women or, some people claim, the legitimacy of `Femme Productions', but as long as it is rendered within a linguistic and therefore contemplative power structure that renders actual recognition of female pleasure invisible, there is a major problem. Orwell summates this pretty well when he describes `Newspeak' in 1984, language which was not only to `provide a medium of expression… but to make all other thoughts impossible'- heretical thought would become unthinkable, as far as it is conceivable linguistically; if there is no word to rebel, there is no means of rebelling internally within one's consciousness, if cultural narrative is patriarchal and misogynist inherently, if female pleasure can only be understood in terms of masculine ocularity and ejaculation which is visually verifiable then it can not be understood.

So, as Linda Williams states, `the late nineteenth-century invention of “machines of the visible” [creates] even more peculiar forms of blindness', and it is this blindness that seems potentially the small salvation for liberty in a culture that normalises pornography. We have abandoned the Keatsian notion that unravishment is the ultimate, that `heard melodies are sweet / but those unheard are sweeter' but want to see woman and see every aspect of her. We are compelled to finally comprehend every dimension of her sexuality, we have television programmes which insert cameras into the vagina whilst a woman has sex so we can see what that looks like (who wants to know?!), women in Playboy spread their legs as far apart as they can go, but we still can’t have the equivalent of the money shot of male ejaculation. Knowledge is power, and in order for this power, woman must be known- and you literally cannot see her come. And so the female orgasm is fetishised as the groans, the standardised posturing of a woman's flung back head, etc in hardcore, but also everywhere else. As Naomi Wolf points out (and I can’t bear to summarise):

‘The perfected woman lies prone, pressing down her pelvis. Her back arches, her nipples erect, there is a fine spray of moisture over her golden skin. The position is female superior: the state of arousal, the plateau phase just preceding orgasm. On the next age, a version of her, mouth open, eyes shut, is about to tongue the pink tip of a lipstick cylinder. […] for Triton showers, a naked woman, back arched, flings her arms upwards… In these images, where the face is visible, it is expressionless in a rictus of ecstasy. The reader understands from them that she will have to look like that if she wants to feel like that.’

And so the body, the appearance of the female body that is, comes to be innately associated with female orgasm. As Wolf says, ‘seeing a face anticipating orgasm, even if it is staged, is a powerful sell’- and it is not the ‘explicit’ nature of this, there’s nothing taboo about female sexual license and pleasure, it is the falsification of something that we demand verification of. Men come to expect this as a signifier of their virility, masculinity and sexual power and women come to expect this within themselves. Pornography, implied within advertising or full hardcore doesn't represent real sex between real people; these people are actors and actresses, their pleasure mimed, the sex stopped, started, and stopped again. It presents actual sex with a bizarre aim: to mimic the staged and, quite frankly, we cannot mime the female orgasm because it is internal (with the occasional variant, as I'm sure someone is going to point out somewhere if I don't: see Samantha's lesbian encounter in Sex and the City or any number of RedTube clips). Hardcore pornography inevitably fails us and when couple pornography explores `what women truly want', it becomes a forbidden confession of female desire, a betrayal of secrets, masculine spying, coming to know the unknown or apparently unknowable. It is catching the involuntary confession of pleasure, of titillating with knowledge that remains the aim of pornography that cannot represent the invisible and woman becomes dehumanised, her ultimate experience of pleasure represented as a foil for someone else’s. Having a conversation about faking orgasms on a TV show, one of my friends joked ‘and we all bloody well know how to do that’. I just figured that summed up everything I felt about how much more there has to be done before there is a sense of actual sexual equality. If 21 year old girls are faking it, and faking it in the style of perfume ads or softcore porn or hardcore porn or whatever way female orgasm is culturally constructed, that sucks.

I don't mean this as a polemical tract about how men must hate female sexual liberty or whatever may be supposed, because I don’t think that’s true at all, but rather that it's important for men and women to remember that people just don't come like they do on the Herbal Essences adverts, let alone like Linda does in Deep Throat, and question why we construct that they do, why we repeatedly demand a stereotyped visual verification of something that cannot be visually verified.

Oh, and P.S. - Perhaps most importantly, there is no such thing as a money shot in an industry that engages with safe sex practice and demands human rights for the workers already so compromised, make them wear a condom for God's sake.

Saint... Jesus?

2010-02-09T00:02:00.002Z

Last night was the American Super Bowl, and about 100 million people watched it in the USA alone. A 30 second advert costs $3,000,000, and one was bought by ‘Focus on the Family’ and the advert shows Tim Tebow’s (quarterback winner of the Heisman Trophy) mother, Pam, talking about how much her son means to her, which is kind of sweet, albeit a little creepy in parts. So, you are meant to go to the ‘Focus on the Family’ website to learn more about how to ‘celebrate family, celebrate life’, and I did. And there it was, a 7 minute interview with Tim’s parents talking about how Pam was told she was at high risk of death if she didn’t abort Tim, but she couldn’t bear to- essentially (and very implicitly) because she is a good Christian woman and, in the eyes of the Lord, abortion is murder- as the handy evangelical fact file on abortion charmingly tells us.

Now, CBS has a long-standing policy of not allowing issue advertisements (those which discuss ‘controversial issues of public importance’- their words) to be played during the Super Bowl; even PETA isn’t allowed a slot. A gay dating website was not allowed to advertise this year; apparently animal rights and homosexuality are still desperately controversial. ‘Focus on the Family’ spokesperson, Gary Schneeberger, claimed that, ‘there is nothing political or controversial’ about the advert, that the ‘celebrate life’ message is just ‘family values’. However, there is nothing that is a family value about the pro-life movement, a movement that robs choice and liberty by appropriating female reproductive rights. There is nothing that loves life in these organisations, there is just a repeatedly oppressive message about hating women.

‘Focus on the Family’ has a very clear agenda, and one that is distinctly opposed to what I would consider my family values. Not only is it adhering to that wonderful tenet of misogyny that proliferates through so many evangelical Christian strands of belief, that woman is ‘designed to ultimately reunite to her source [of man] through Holy Matrimony’, and a ‘wife must yield to her husband’ for ‘God holds the husband accountable for the ultimate decisions’ but it is also venomously homophobic. Besides the ordinary preaching- ‘choosing’ to be gay goes against God’s given design etc- we are enlightened to a particularly charming facet of homophobia, that of directly condoning heterosexual sexual aggression. On the page that tells women what to look out for in their potentially gay husband (apparently someone hanging out at gay bars is a real pointer), we are reminded that ‘many women are attracted to the sensitivity, astute communication skills, vulnerability and easily expressed emotions that often embody temperament commonly found in homosexual men. And that the lack of sexual aggression first seen as a desirable trait may just be a lack of normal sexual interest.’ So, not only are we predictably reinstated with that well-rounded stereotype of the effeminate gay man, but we are reminded that real men are sexually aggressive; something which women apparently (and curiously) aren’t into.

I really don’t think I’m reading too much into the phrase ‘sexual aggression’ when I read domestic violence- a term which encompasses a great deal of disturbing issues, from a slap across the face to rape. Super Bowl weekend has one of the highest rates of domestic violence out of any weekend in the USA- holidays that encourage family time (Christmas etc) always suffer from these reported leaps in abuse, and now so does the culture surrounding a sport that promotes quintessential macho behaviour- that beer-drinking, hardline manliness that the rest of the Superbowl adverts can point you towards if you need a reminder. But between these adverts which explore some wonderfully anti-liberationary gender stereotypes, we are given our break for family values, family values which essentially condone doing what you please to your woman because her body does not belong to her and a plea to visit a website which consolidates that message.

So finally CBS has explicitly picked a political side during Super Bowl, and surprisingly enough it isn’t the liberal one. In the adverts shown, the Green movement was depicted as Nazi-like, semi-naked Megan Fox was sexy enough to turn gay men straight, and even Mr Burns loved Coke. Obama is failing on his promises, the right-wing are getting back in place in the USA and over here, it is a matter of months before we have our own equivalent of the Repblicans, the Conservatives, in power. So as little as these suggestive adverts seem to matter, these adjustments in CBS legislation that permit them, as much as people can be said to be over-reacting to Pam Tebow saying she just loves her all-American kid, these things are an indication of an increasingly regressive state of liberty within Western consciousness, and one that is (at the very least) incredibly disturbing, one that poorly colours the optimistically underdog win of the New Orleans Saints this year.

From buying sex on DVD to the streets of Soho.

2010-01-24T22:43:00.006Z

A few people asked me about how I could possibly talk about how porn can lead to rape when I addressed the anti-liberationary messages encoded in pornography. A recent study into prostitution in the UK has let us know that there is a distinct correlation between men’s acceptance of prostitution and cultural myths about rape (things like ‘women say no but mean yes’ and ‘if she’s wearing a short skirt, she deserves it’). A lot of the men (all who had used prostitutes) thought that prostitutes were ‘un-rape-able’, 16% said they would rape a woman if they couldn’t get caught, nearly half said that rape happens because men’s sex drive gets ‘out of control’, absolving them from direct responsibility. So, immediately, rape and prostitution seem to correlate- but how does porn have anything to do with either?

Luce Irigaray talks about how prostitution factors into a capitalist gendered economy, with regards to Levi Strauss’s examination of men as consumers and women (and their bodies) the commodified objects of exchange that consolidate homosocial relationships. The prostitute becomes the ultimate Marxist bearer of value; her body has clear usage for men, and one that has been definitively realised by her as well as the market. Unlike the women relegated to operating as mothers (reproductive usage) or virgins (pure possibility of usage), she is valuable because she is used and is therefore a ‘vehicle for relations among men’. The recent Eaves survey showed that some men will brag about their experiences, this week’s harrowing BBC documentary on sex tourism in stag parties shows the lads’ night out experience of all visiting prostitutes together; as Levi-Strauss claimed in ‘Structures of Kinship’, woman is often there to cement masculine bonding.

60% of the men in the Eaves survey (which is compiled of a representative demographic of British men who use prostitutes) said that they classified the women in pornography as prostitutes. Monto and McRee reported in 2005 that men who used prostitutes were far more likely to use porn. This isn’t a desperately misandric claim that men who watch porn love buying sex, or raping women, or anything of the sort; but there is a correlation. And what seems particularly interesting is how this correlation occurs- once one is used to seeing woman as an object for sexual pleasure in porn, ‘pared down to her entrances’ as A.L.Kennedy so eloquently phrases in Original Bliss, there are more repercussions than we can initially imagine. An ex-prostitute interviewed by Jaget’s survey claimed that prostitution resulted in a ‘neutralisation of the body’; a sense that it is no longer one’s own, they are raped of their authority over their own selves, in a similar fashion to pornography.

Prostitutes are often seen as the worst kind of woman- labelled sexually lasciviscious, insatiable, profiting from male sexual desires and yet every survey I can find has claimed that between 90-97% of women selling sex are desperate for an alternative, Farley finding 75% had attempted suicide (prostitutes have a 40 times higher death rate than everyone else). One Seattle prostitute interviewed by Boyer (et al.) said ‘We’ve all been molested. Over and over, and raped. We were all molested as children, don’t you know that? We ran to get away […] We were thrown out, thrown away’. These aren’t women with choices, these are women who have usually been sexually abused as children and have never seen their bodies as their own (Farley established by an average of four perpetrators across nine countries), who aren’t just doing it to fund a penchant for Manolo Blahniks like Billie Piper’s Belle de Jour in ‘Secret Diary of a Callgirl’ and they are the majority. And, quite frankly, when they don’t have a choice because they are homeless (75% present or past), controlled by pimps, trafficked into the UK, dependent on drugs, don’t see their bodies as their own, or whatever reason (because you have to really, really like shoes in order to risk getting raped an average of 15 times a year for them), then surely the sex she is having for money is against her will in some way, it’s just that her will has been absolved; surely the vast majority of prostitution is just ‘paid rape’ as Farley puts it, violence against women that is, actually, pretty socially acceptable.

To bring everything full circle, I hate to use the idea of ‘gateways’ but, watching porn and seeing women as the eponymous facilitators of male sexual pleasure and fantasy, their bodies there to arouse rather than be aroused (or, God forbid, anything else) surely facilitates prostitution, which surely facilitates (and has been proven in Nevada, where there is more rape than the surrounding states which don’t legalise prostitution) rape. And plenty of women are straight-up forced into porn; Linda Lovelace has written four books about how she was held at gunpoint to make ‘Deep Throat’, saying that ‘every time someone watches that movie, they're watching me being raped’ and people are still buying it, watching it, getting off on it. This isn’t to say that people who watch porn or go to prostitutes are automatically defined rapists (although the line between ‘johns’ and rapists seems blurry at the best of times by my definitions) but these practices are ‘symptoms of a diseased body politic’, as D.H.Lawrence said, and maybe it is an epidemic that, nearly a century after he wrote it, we should be curing rather than exacerbating.

PorNo

2009-11-17T17:27:00.006Z

If one takes the human body to be signified rather than neutral, rendered intelligible and produced through social discourses surrounding it rather than intrinsically, well, anything, myriad opportunities for liberation arise because it isn't our bodies that oppress us but the narrative surrounding them. If we examine the contemporary and historical ideals of female beauty- starving oneself and thereby limiting intellectual capacity and potentially fertility, corseting oneself into contraptions that manoeuvre internal organs to wherever they fit rather than belong, wearing heels or foot-binding to elongate the calves or shrink the feet, it becomes apparent that it is practices rather than the female body itself which are subjugating. Andrea Dworkin states, ‘women are also often mutilated, physically or by fashion and custom, so that whatever physical strength they may have is meaningless’ and when physical strength is constructed as a condition of power intrinsic within masculinity, it removes that too. The manipulation of biological narratives into those that weaken women physically and mentally and, in binary opposition, strengthen men, proliferate throughout Western society with dangerous consequences. It is through how the female body is constructed, the Lacanian imago of woman, rather than its essential performance, that women come to be oppressed.

And so I have entered into the heavily problematic debate of pornography in feminism. I have spent years desperately trying to avoid engaging with what seems to be construed as the most stringent and militant aspect of the loathed f-word, and have been self-shamed into addressing an industry that propagates the objectification of women and the dangerous consequences that amount as a result. Heterosexual pornography (and here all I purport to discuss is heterosexual, one-man one-woman pornography, not that there isn't plenty of oppression outside it) is meaningful because the subjugation it depicts is rooted in reality for women. It is naïve to ignore the repeated visual criticism of scores of academics ranging from John Berger to Laura Mulvey stating that ‘men act and women appear’, men gaze and women are the gazed upon. ‘Pornography’ is etymologically derived from the ancient Greek ‘pornē’ and ‘graphos’ to mean ‘writing about whores’ and depends on the lexicon of patriarchal oppression; without it, there would be no ‘whores’- women whose existence is definitively exclusively for men’s sexual pleasure- to write about/film/rape/etc. Irigaray examines our society as based upon the exchange of women, made possible because of the signification of their bodies as worth, for sexual pleasure, for reproduction, for domestic utilisation etc etc. Woman’s body, in Irigaray’s analysis and pornography, is presented as to be used.

Pornography removes woman’s right from her own pleasure- her body is not her own but exists in the realm of capitalist commodification of man. Berger charmingly reminds us that ‘to be born a woman has been to be born… into the keeping of men’; there is still an astounding taboo surrounding female masturbation, she can expect to orgasm at the hand of man (no pun intended) and man only, she is to be watched by men. But what seems most interesting (to me, anyway) is how porn has come to dictate the ideal female body. Big boobs, blonde hair and- amazingly- a certain type of genitalia. Women are literally mutilating themselves in labiaplasties all over the place nowadays, plastic surgeon Dr Matlock states that ‘women look at 'Playboy', the ideal woman per se, for the body and the shape and so on. You don't see women in there with excessively long labia minora.’ Once ‘real’ women, the ‘non-whores’ outside of pornography start wanting to look like whores (because it is what is demanded of them in order to be sexually attractive), they become uniform in their operation for man: sex.

Linda Williams notes the pornographic films that show rape (and they seem to be amazingly popular) show that ‘the victim wants to be victimized’, she just loves sex so much, whilst hentai video games like RapeLay suggest that women subject to repeated sexual assaults become increasingly aroused. These things are in a minority, but are not anomolous and are progressive from and symptomatic of the 'ordinary' porn industry. A member of the ever-liberational BNP recently told us that the concept of rape is crazy, it’s like feeding a woman too much chocolate cake- she’s always up for it, it’s less inconvenient than getting her handbag stolen. People do think like this, rape does happen an alarming amount, there is an insanely low prosecution (let alone conviction) rate for rapists. And this is because woman’s body is seen as the facilitator of male pleasure, something which pornography only serves to perpetuate. Pornography uses women, uses women’s bodies and rapes women of their right to say no in a domain where they are constantly and repeatedly commodified and used for male fantasy.

Photo used is original porn star Linda Lovelace, star of smash hit ‘Deep Throat’, forced into porn and prostitution at gunpoint.

Is 'what a drag' too obvious?

2009-10-07T15:53:00.003+01:00

The front page of today’s Metro is headlined ‘Rage of the very cross dressers’- an article about ‘two youths who attacked a pair of cross-dressers [who] picked on the wrong guys – they were cage fighters on a night out in fancy dress’. Illustrating the issues surrounding both transphobia and drag, it seemed like the ideal time to break out of my hiatus.

As I am sure I have mentioned before, Esther Newton and Judith Butler are two of many critics who examine the gender pastiche that is often identified with drag. A mockery of all that is ‘feminine’ in its extremity, claiming ‘appearance is an illusion’ (Newton), ‘female impersonators’ can reveal the fabrication of the constructs of gender identity. Whilst feminist theory often views drag as offensive in its presentation of the ‘ideal woman’ (short skirted, fishnetted, made up), there are aspects of drag that can take bodily subversions down a different path. I attended my first drag ball over summer, where one of the performers ‘wet themselves’ (or at least gave a convincing impression of) on stage- a pretty blatant reference to breaking the elegance of femininity whilst wearing ten tons of mascara. My favourite was the exotically dressed and exceptionally beautiful black man performing ballet, which seemed to address a colonial fantasy simultaneously with a Ballet Boyz-esque contravention of the Billy Elliott problems of man taking on a ‘female’ performance. It seems like drag can contravene stereotype- both gender and racial- for a kind of gain with regard to challenging discourse.

The goodie bag was a 50th anniversary Barbie doll; the standard woman in a bikini- but holding a mobile phone. The box includes a picture of 1959 Barbie; same hair, same print on her clothes but sans technological accessory- and it seemed to ask the killer question; if we take away our mobile phones, how much has really changed? 62% of FTSE 100 companies do not have women on their boards of directors, women are still paid an average of 11% less than their male counterparts and, as last Tuesday’s ‘BBC Women’s Hour’ attested to, institutionalised sexism really cements the glass ceiling of the corporate world. And it seems that it is when drag goes down the route of substantiating a gender binary through merely performing feminininty to excess without challenging it, it has a fair amount to answer for; namely perpetuating issues that are still being left unresolved. After all, drag isn’t about actually ‘being’ a women in a transgender sense, it is about performance and I couldn’t quite work out whether the Barbie was the most subversive present I could ever want for or the worst in its presentation of the ideal woman; a role which many drag queens can choose to abandon in their day-to-day lives but revel in for shows.

Drag balls and Barbie dolls aside, the article raised myriad questions. Transphobia is the last acceptable media oppression; Manchester’s ‘Student Direct’ has published terribly offensive articles that seem a microcosm for the tabloid press still using the word ‘tranny’ as if it isn’t in the same category as ‘dyke’ or ‘faggot’. The tone of the article alongside comments left on the Metro and Daily Mail websites by readers indicated a celebration of the cage-fighting heroes beating ‘yob culture’ rather than any sort of concern over the intentions of the attackers or the reality that, whilst the victims were two men in drag fancy dress on a stag night, usually the victims are actually just transgendered people ‘caught out’ and riled against. Those like Tyli’a Mack, stabbed to death in broad daylight in September in the USA around the corner from a trans support facility, who don’t have the faculty to defend themselves, and whom the non-LGBT media seem loathe to report sympathy for. The Metro article semantically suggests that, while the ‘cage fighters’ were the ‘wrong men’- because they were just doing it for a macho stag night laugh- there are ‘right men’ for this sort of situation, the genuine trans community. It seems that the tabloid press has offered little more than opportunistic irony, neither addressing the issues of drag nor transphobia once again, not that any more has come to be expected.

Antichrist

2009-07-28T17:57:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, I went to see Lars von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’. I now feel embarrassingly like Bryan Appleyard’s ‘suckers in the arthouse crowd’, falling for the hype of a film so desperately longing for controversy, and so patently achieving it. Cannes’ Ecumenical Jury titled the film ‘the most misogynist movie from the self-proclaimed biggest director in the world’ which seems fairly apt because, for all of the condemnation regarding the gore and pornographically explicit sex (which is, actually, surpassed by Saw anyway), I am surprised to not have been more explicitly warned about how the entirety of the film seems founded on utter loathing for womankind.

Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourgh perform admirably as a husband and wife whose child dies whilst they are having sex. They retreat to the woods of ‘Eden’ where Defoe, a cognitive therapist, intends to ‘cure’ Gainsbourgh of her maddening despair and encounters a prophetic talking fox. The utilization of Edenic and Satanic themes seems pretty shallow, von Trier seems to stick a little Christianity in to pack another taboo punch rather than for any authentic exploration of a theme that is, generally, harrowingly andocentric (in the Miltonic fashion) but worth exploration nonetheless. He does not shy away, however, from presenting woman as fallen, weak, and sexually obsessed.

Gainsbourgh plays an academic, composing a thesis on gynocide throughout history, of the expulsion of evil women from society through murder and torture. She gives up her writing when she seems to become convinced of the cruelty and irrationality of her sex, both coerced by the dictatorial narratives she is researching and her own nature. A mother who puts the wrong shoes on her child as a torturous exercise in (possibly unconscious) hatred of a being which impinges upon her sexual freedom and orgasmic liberation, from the opening scene where she prioritises her own sexual satisfaction over the life of her son, she is a bad mother/woman/person. Her motherhood and sexual desires become bizarrely misaligned; she simultaneously revels in but despises her motherhood/femaleness and, ironically, sex becomes both her escape from but the trapping of both; definitive of the lusty nature of woman and obvious creation of child. During the Medieval period (until the Early Modern), female orgasm was considered necessary for procreation, and it seems that one cannot isolate this idea from Gainsbourgh’s sexual fulfillment- particularly when she comes to speak of the death of acorns which do not come to fruition as oak trees. Every time she comes to orgasm as an escape from her psychosis, she seems further ridden with guilt- she cannot separate sex from her responsibility of the death of her child, substantiated most when she can only orgasm through masturbation as Defoe hits her repeatedly across the face- punishing her for not only her own ‘petit-mort’, but the death of so much besides; as indicated by the corpses which apparate around her as she comes.

With regards to the evil of nature, a theme which woman becomes associated with in a deplorably dated fashion, Gainsbourgh has said that ‘I think as a mother you do have an animal feel… You try and disguise it, to put thoughts on to it. I know I have to battle against my first feelings, to try and be reasonable. And that often goes against that animal feel’. Man is rational, therapeutic, almost numbed by reason and woman is still suffering from the 19th century sense of hysteria that has plagued us so steadily throughout history. The film feels like it was written centuries ago, where female sexual lust is dangerous, threatening and must be tamed. It is only controlled by a self-imposed genital mutilation; Gainsbourgh must cut off her own clitoris in order to escape from the constraints of her sex and frenzied orgasmic hysteria. She finds escape from her madness through sex with Defoe, sex which is violent, aggressive, and almost rape-like. He acquiesces to her desires to continue whilst she sobs and performs as a fairly willing foil for her animalistic desires.

The entire first half of the film is like having a prolonged anxiety attack; it is imposing, invasive, I came out feeling on the verge of a breakdown. The cinematography and music is beautiful, the acting is great. But at what point does one come to ignore these things and realise when a film is gratuitously engaging with the art-house torture-porn genres to get some column inches, at the cost of something more important than a few hours of heart-pounding fear?

The Dollshouse Legacy

2009-06-29T00:31:00.002+01:00

So I finally got around to reading Henrik Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ the other week, and have been compulsively re-reading it since. Having acquired a philistine-like aversion to reading modern drama over the past few years, it has taken me a while to get down to a play which, ultimately, summarises everything I would ever want to write (at least, a close second to Borges or Marquez). The play’s protagonist is a woman, Nora, and the story about her struggle to find her true self outside of the captivity of her husband’s adulation of her ‘lark twittering’ and beauty. She is his doll, her domesticity his perfect doll’s house, her children and relationship merely accessories to the ideal family staging. I was drawn to the play by my obsessive desire for everything from the Dollshouse Emporium, a magazine that sells ludicrously ornate and expensive miniature furniture, housing and characters- something that started in childhood and has not fazed out as I grow older. The irony of the idea that I apparently yearn for continued projection of fantasy domesticity onto inanimate objects does not escape me entirely, and the other day my little sister made my mother cover her doll’s house with a blanket. I feel she is maybe far more empowered than I.

It seems that Nora is not restricted to the 19th Century. Myriad partners ‘stay together for the kids’ in a situation where staying together for the kids is more about perpetuation of the fantasy nuclear family than saving on therapy bills. Shows like ‘Wife Swap’ and ‘Britain’s Worst Mother’ indicate that there are plenty of families that are still propagating the myth of ideal womanhood (as if we needed any evidence to substantiate that), wifehood and fatherhood. I am sure that I am not the only woman with a love of doll’s houses drilled into me. What Nora finds, however, that plenty of women don’t, is an escape; an escape that involves the abandonment of her kids. The child-hating Simone de Beauvoir would be proud.

In spite of this, it isn’t the abandoned domesticity that proves most interesting but rather the idea that a lot of the time woman is merely used to define man. Nora is a foil for her husband, Torvald, her naiveté and charm proving his assiduous manliness. His belittling of her as his little skylark and his toy to prove his sense of worth becomes her sole raison d’etre in his, and therefore her own, opinion. Luce Irigaray states in ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ that female sexuality is conceptualized on the basis of male parameters, that male is the only real ‘sex’ and women merely the near-invisible surround to the Lacanian mirror, without sexed autonomy. It is Nora’s abandonment of her own sense of morality for her husband’s wellbeing that proves her downfall- and his discovery of this independence that results in his rejection of her. Nora both engages with and then dismisses what is essentially the dolls house convention, of the ultimate passivity, the constructivism of the female and the projection of male identity by proxy. Torvald is Nora’s creator and keeper- and is certainly not an exclusively 19th century character. It is in this sense that Nora’s abandonment of this convention, of acquiescing to an identity that merely proves her partner’s seems equally (if not more tacitly) inspirational today as in 1879.

Billy Tipton vs Mimi Marks

2009-06-22T14:53:00.003+01:00

Last week, Channel 4 re-screened their feature length documentary on ‘The World’s Most Beautiful Transsexual’ contest, bringing transgender and transsexuality into the public eye in a way it rarely is. The problem with my increasing obsession with queer theory (taking Halperin’s establishment as queer as being whatever is at odds with the normal) is that it seems distinctly at odds with a great deal of trans realities. As third-wave feminists deplore beauty pageantry and the reiteration of gender identities, programmes like 'Tears, Tiaras and Transsexuals (Trantasia)' remind us that it is these boundaries often upon which a trans identity is based. If there is no definitive ‘man’, no definitive ‘woman’, what is this transition between? As Butler states, anatomically different bodies are not the guarantee of heterosexuality (and, implicitly, gender)- it seems naïve to suppose that breasts are all that make you a woman and chromosomes all that make you a man in a decade when Jaime Lee Curtis and Olympic gender testing throw centuries of biological assertions into the air. As Jackie Kay’s protagonist, Millie, asks in the novel ‘Trumpet’ (which refigures the life of Billy Tipton, who is definitely worth a wiki search), ‘what is the force of that reality [of being a woman]?’

The documentary establishes the pageantry reality of trans womanhood as fairly definitive: an hourglass silhouette, bouffant hair and a fuck load of lipliner. Many of the contestants parade around Vegas, deliberately soliciting sexualisation, loudly and openly commenting on the force of their orgasms and the firmness of their breasts. What Esther Newton supposes with regard to drag as a subversive act, that it is ‘a double inversion that says “appearance is an illusion”’ becomes applicable to these trans women who relish in stereotyping and eroticism of self. Whilst Butler says that Aretha Franklin’s line ‘you make me feel like a natural woman’ reasserts the learning and performativity of ‘natural’ sex, of womanhood, drag further establishes the lack of discontinuity of sex as biological and gender and sexuality and represents a parodic identity of gender performativity. Many of the featured trans women appear to garner a kind of relief from this performance, from turning on the 18-year-old guys they promenade in front of on the Vegas strip and getting their tits out for the cameras in a way you would expect only from the Jodie Harshes and Katie Prices of the ‘ordinary’ world.

I am by no means trying to categorise transsexuality and drag in the same box; there are a few women featured who seems distinctly disappointed by the actions of their peers, women who seem to be seeking more regular ‘womanliness’, more orderly conduct, keen to draw less attention to their new gender identities rather than more. Their clothes are less revealing, they are less likely to turn heads on the street, but rather settle comfortably into the orderly suppositions of a middle-American, middle-class, middle-of-the-road wife or mother. Whilst so many of the women in the documenraty find comfort in their ostentatiousness, these women seem to lust after the ordinary, neatly slotting into their chosen gender roles; I keep feeling like one of them would make a really good muffin basket. They seem to represent the majority of trans people, of those who aren’t taking part in the pageant world, of the ones who make a far less interesting documentary, of those who just live normal lives under their ‘new’ gender title.

This is where the problem with the media representation of trans comes in. Garber tells us that we must categorise our sexualities because they affect economics, patriarchy and marriage, that eroticism depends on transgression, that society depends on the formations of categories of sex, gender and sexuality. We must therefore document trans as the outrageous, the shockingly beautiful (pageant winner, Mimi Marks), the bizarrely made-up, the women whose hair is massive or, like the UK’s favourite transsexual, Nadia, shower in heels- so that they are removed from ‘passing’ as women or men in the normal sense. Billy Tipton's aftermath proves that we get ever so upset when someone we didn't know was trans ends up in possession of anatomy we hadn't presumed. To be fair, it is probably fairly boring to watch the day-to-day lives of an average trans woman, as boring as it is to watch any woman, but it means that the glimpses we get into the lives of the subversive are desperately skewed and dangerously misaligned with their ‘reality’.

Nouvelle Vogue?

2009-05-22T13:24:00.006+01:00

It cannot be claimed that we are all utterly oblivious to the myriad accidental subversions and contradictions of sexuality and gender operating in contemporary society, but they often slip by surprisingly unobserved. We have androgynous women pioneered on the covers of Vogue, flat-chested but revered. We have women with huge breasts on the cover of men’s magazines, Nuts and Zoo. We have celebrity magazines sporadically reminding us of how sexy our curves are, but also how disgusting our cellulite. It seems that we are being presented with the reverence of the skeletal (and ‘masculine’) as the ideal of beauty removed from sexuality, but the ideal of eroticism as Jennifer Lopez/Lucy Pinder style curves. Heat told us, but a month ago, how fat certain celebrities were and how vile they looked, but two weeks ago did a survey that identified men as essentially wanting to sleep with ‘curvy’, ‘normal’ women. Everyone notices the disparity between the two: but which do we pick, and why do we accept such duplicitous ideals?

It seems that the eroticism of the voluptuous woman is founded in an easy sexual voyeurism, a sense of her girl-next-door attainability and immediate objectification. We can infer sexual lavisciousness from her low-cut top (British polls telling us that, if a woman is wearing a short skirt, she is seen as 'asking for it'), her child-bearing hips. Men’s magazines say that they sell a heap more copies with a fairly ‘ordinary’ looking woman on the front with huge breasts and a 'good' bum than with a celebrity because men can apparently imagine sleeping with them, hence want to masturbate over them. Our emaciated supermodels become the ideal of an entirely separate domain, the virginal, pure, fantasical- Kate Moss the virgo to Pinder’s virago, the Mary to her Eve.

It seems that our Western desperation for a myth of narrative progress collapses, even as masturbatory aids women are separated into a binary, we are scarcely ideologically different from our Medieval ancestors. As Marina Warner states in her analysis of the Virgin Mary’s repercussions on female sexuality in ‘Alone of All Her Sex’, through ‘ascetic renunciation of the flesh… the faults of female nature could be corrected’. Centuries ago, St Jerome told us that ‘when [woman] wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman, and will be called a man’, of the impossible perfectibility of inherently flawed women due to their salacious nature. The adulation of androgyny in fashion models as the unattainable, desexualized and masculine yet heterosexually and homosocially alluring seems to imitate this idea a surprising amount. There is much to be said on the degendering of the Virgin Mary through her ‘immaculate conception’, the extent to which she cannot be a role model for motherhood and womankind through her impossibility- she cannot be emulated, she is a false 'woman' (at least by second-wave-feminism standards). In this sense, one can find sexual gratification in the Mary Magdalenes, the busty Jordans, the ‘true’ women but idolise the Agyness Deyns, the almost degendered; nothing has changed, we still need our virgins and our whores.

Backlash Bitchiness

2009-05-08T19:38:00.002+01:00

I am by no means about to claim the fashion industry as a post-feminist revolution. But it seems that, as Naomi Wolf points out, glossy magazines offer women something nothing else does; an entirely female domain achieved rarely outside of female changing rooms. Although the pages are littered with the trappings of oppression (not by any means limited exclusively to advertising), there is an increasing variety of empowering articles; how to get better pay, what to do about domestic violence, contraception, the all-important sex columns (which provided an imperative part of my sex education). In a world where women are relegated to daytime television and back page articles, 200 pages on being ‘female’ is occasional relief (although clearly problematic once we bring in third-wave feminist anti-essentialism and the pervasive Foucaltian argument). Although far from the ideal, sometimes these magazines act as the lesser of two oppressive and female-dismissing evils, although I am loathe to be in tacit support of concepts of ‘sisterhood’ and the ‘eternal and essential feminine’ because, quite frankly, I think they are utterly falsified. Essentially however, although there are myriad extreme contradictions within the pages of Elle, Cosmopolitan, Grazia and such forth, some aspects of them can be relieving.

We can read interviews of the ‘most beautiful’ of celebrities and realise that, actually, as the February edition of Elle pointed out so insistently- Gwynyth Paltrow is just a normal woman. These pedestaled celebs worry about their weight, skin, hair, stretchmarks, breasts, husbands, kids, nail varnish choices just like ‘you and I’. We are all united by our womanhood, supposedly (although, ironically, these ‘female’ concerns are distinctly propagated by media to disempower us). However, it seems that someone other than the readership has noticed the sense of unity that a great deal of women can discover through these magazines. Someone has realised the problematic repercussions of this (skewed) empowerment that so many find from the opportunities afforded by sisterhood. If women aren’t in competition for everything from jobs to men, if we accept the new myth that we are all the same, what is our imperative for looking good? What stops everyone from rising up and demanding equality together? Women make up over half the global population; if we all unite, we are an powerful collective unrivaled in numbers.

Over the past few years, there has been a rampant increase in the amount of programming centered on the fashion world. These aren’t documentaries or investigations but rather competitions, ‘America’s Next Top Model’ and its global spinoffs are the most famous alongside other modeling shows like ‘Make Me A Supermodel’ but now there are heaps like ‘Stylista’ and ‘Running in Heels’; shows that are, quite literally, about the female glossy magazine industry itself and positing women (and the occasional ever-so-camp-man) in direct competition with one another for the prize. The gyncocentric tasks are utterly menial, nothing to do with editorial or stylistic aptitude but rather a means to inspire the basest level of bitchy competition, of women undermining women. Shows like ‘Paris Hilton’s British Best Friend’ or ‘Living With Kimberley Stewart’ remind us that, even when it is just about friendship, we must be fighting with other women tooth and nail. The advertising agencies must be sighing in relief that we’ll all be kept in desperate insecurity some way because, as Wolf points out, ‘what editors are oblige to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women’.

Wolf asks the question on every editor’s lips in the 60s: ‘would liberated women read women’s magazines’? It seems that the encouragement of the beauty myth has taken a huge step up over the past 50 years but this encouraging of female ‘community’ through magazines and the utilization of prime-time television to make us really want to see specific models in print, the editorial layouts of specific stylists, the comment of specific editors offers the magazine industry a secure audience rife with internalized contradictions. Read the magazine, all women are united. Watch the backlash show, all women must fight. Besides the disfigured ideals of body image that are propagated, we are offered a subtler manipulation, a message that ultimately reads keep your friends close but your enemies (and every woman is your enemy) closer.

The Sale of Sexual Liberation

2009-04-23T14:33:00.002+01:00

Last week, Lady Gaga was on Jonathan Ross’s chat show. Over Easter, I could hardly avoid watching the video for ‘Poker Face’, the single which has infected all but very few radio stations and television channels and was surprisingly shocked. Crotch grabbing and thrusting seemed pretty rife, and then the line ‘bluffin’ with my muffin’ took presentation of abject sexuality all the way from innuendos about guns and hand techniques to out and out vulgarity. When interviewed by Ross, Lady Gaga seemed particularly proud to be able to tell him that the song was about ‘poker-facing with your sexuality' and ‘muffins’ (a vile euphemism for vaginas). She also supposedly controversially revealed that she occasionally fantasized about girls when having heterosexual sex- obviously a problematic point because it really isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be propagated as) that big of a deal any more to admit to a tendency towards bisexuality; not only are her techno hooks dated, but her skewed sense of empowerment, too.

Crotch grabbing has been disgustingly ingrained within MTV masculinity, from Fred Durst to Snoop Dogg. It seems bizarre therefore that rather than abandoning what is a pretty grotesquely blatant indication of what can only be labeled as fucking, women without the same legacy of gender and sexual empowerment through clutching their crotches should start to practice it now. Madonna is spreading her legs all over the place to sell handbags and CDs, Katie Perry appropriating 1950s finger-in-mouth erotics to sell cherry chapsticks and sporadic lesbianism. Madonna and Katie Perry are seen as liberated examples of post-feminist empowerment but what empowerment is anyone gaining through their prostitution of their bodies, and why is thrusting ones sex, sexuality and sexual practice in an audience’s face the ultimate liberation from patriarchy? Liberation is not about turning the sexual objectification tables round and wreaking revenge, nor sexualizing ones self to sell an image, film, book, album. It is about recognizing that sex isn’t something that needs to be consistently discussed with such lewdness in order to be the domain of both man and woman, it is about objectifying neither and recognizing that this kind of sex-sells attitude is moral prostitution.

The ITV daytime chat show ‘Loose Women’ perpetuates this problem; a rotating panel of women supposedly talking about political issues and current affairs but just talking about sex (as if the name isn’t a depressing enough reference to louche sexual practice). Not only are women crying over pre-menstrual stress for hour upon hour creating an ‘us versus them’ gender divide in a realm where men have no voice to fight back, but they are repeatedly talking about their frisky sex lives. I know about when one of the women got black satin sheets from her husband in order to excite their sex life, and the couple slipped off the bed when she was giving him a blowjob. She told everyone, and the panel all laughed and called her a slag (which seems to be some kind of compliment) and then regaled the audience with more sex stories, much to their rapturous laughter. When a man comes on to be interviewed, the next 15 minutes are rife with tawdry innuendos and disgusting objectification. When Enrique Iglesias appeared, they told him that they didn’t want to ask him anything, just look at him- and then he made the mistake of calling one of them ‘cute’. She then cupped her breasts at him by means of seduction. Actually cupped her breasts and put them in his face, on a daytime television show that is meant to discuss politics.

Essentially, the preoccupation with talking so openly and with such vulgarity about sex in the media has become to be seen as a reclaiming of something that was once lost for women. It perpetuates the idea that sexual identity is utterly integral to who we are as people, that it is what defines us and yet, once sex enters the discursive sphere to such a great extent as it has recently, it becomes more codified and increasingly restricted. We simply cannot avoid talking about sex and yet, when discourse contains us to named practices and codified sexualities which have scarcely progressed over the past century, it seems more repressive than liberating. As Foucault tells us, we have developed a ‘will to knowledge’, a desire to find ourselves liberated from the supposedly silencing shackles of the 19th Century, as if there is a hidden truth to be discovered. We can no longer recognise the restraints upon us because they have become so subtly and deeply embedded within cultural practice, from linguistics to music videos. It is not about talking about sado-masochism and urophilia that will offer us liberation but comprehending how we construct our own, and other, sexualities and why some have or can end up to be repressed or marginalized. This is so that it doesn’t continue to happen rather than a childish desire for retribution and a lowering of female sexual liberation to the basest levels of entitlement. Nobody should be entitled to objectify anyone the way that Lady Gaga does, or Snoop Dogg, or 50 Cent, or Katie Perry- so why are women starting to do it in a world which seems to be discouraging it for men?

Bromance: Platonism for the noughties?

2009-04-13T16:10:00.001+01:00

Yet another MTV show has inspired consideration about the conflict between contemporary representations of sexuality. ‘Bromance’ is a show that follows the heterosexual Brody Jenner (of ‘The Hills’ fame) and nine men competing for his homosocial friendship. What is particularly interesting about the show is how, despite the undeniable presence of homoerotic undertones with ‘eliminations’ held in hot-tubs and candle-lit dinners for two, a lot of the ‘challenges’ the men must undergo to prove their friendship are incredibly heteronormative and heteropositive. Of the three weeks that have so far been on UK MTV, Week One featured a challenge where the contestants must encourage as many women as possible to come to a ‘lingerie party’ (the winner being the man who invites the sexiest ladies, as decided by Brody) and Week Two involved men making a raft out of blow-up dolls and bras to use in a swimming challenge (involving obviously suggestive movements). Interestingly, the show’s only gay contestant left in the first week because he felt isolated by the conversation; read: all that was spoken about in the house was ‘tits and ass’. It seems as though MTV producers are fighting desperately against homosexual presumptions but presumptions that, interestingly, are rarely made about men.

The term ‘bromance’ was coined in the 1990s, supposedly by a skateboarding magazine ‘Big Brother’ referring to male skateboarders who spend great deals of time with one another. The concept of incredibly close male friendship, obviously, is nothing new. Plato’s ‘Symposium’ celebrates masculine love but berates physical intimacy: essentially, promoting homosexuality without the sex, of a purity of relation supposedly exclusively attainable between men and described as Ouranious (celestial) rather than Pandemos (vulgar). John Addington Symonds, homosexual rights campaigner and an apologist for this idea of ‘Greek Love’ perpetuated these ideologies in the 1900s with a consistent derision of homosexual physical intimacy but maintenance of the transcendence of male homosocial relation. This seems pretty similar to the contemporary notion of ‘bromance’; guys getting on really well, better than they ever could with women, but not making out. I’m sure Plato would make the connection.

The proliferation of ‘buddy movies’, defined by ‘The Complete Film Dictionary’ as films that are about the relationship between two male friends seems particularly interesting in this light. We have ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’, ‘Lethal Weapon’, ‘Midnight Cowboy’, ‘Superbad’ and now ‘I Love You, Man’ amongst myriad others. Despite the clear potential for homoerotic interpretation in each of these, criticism often resists it- and bromance rarely features men going shopping together, but rather drinking beer (or any other conventionally heteronormative activity). However, stick two women together in a car (‘Thelma and Louise’), a house (‘Golden Girls’) or a bar (‘Sex and the City’) and, unless the focus is entirely male- which it normally is- lesbianism is immediately inferred in a Hollywood world where, as previously mentioned, a kiss between women (however brief) signifies full on Sapphic relations. The activities which have been constructed as homosexual are as avoided by women in these situations as by ‘bromantic’ men, but assumptions are made about them that wouldn’t be if gender roles were reversed.

Ira Konigsberg defines a buddy movie as a film that ‘extols the virtues of male comradeship and relegates male-female relationships to a subsidiary position’, which seems particularly interesting when we identify the contrast of when there is a dominating cast of women, men must be the focus. When we examine criticism of ‘Thelma and Louise’, lesbian interpretations abound from a film which, ultimately, can only rationally either be seen as about an utterly asexual relationship between women or a film that is exclusively about men: either way, it resists lesbianism at every turn. There is a highly eroticised Brad Pitt, a female gaze, women who extol the virtues of orgasm through penetrative sex and a landscape that directly indicates phallocentrism. The limitations of a gynocentric world become finally substantiated through the close of film freeze-frame which eternally posits woman unable to enter the utero-vaginal Grand Canyon. Whilst in Platonism, buddy movies and bromance, the world can be presented as satisfactorily andocentric, women are rarely afforded the same privilege.

I am not condemning ‘platonic’ (and I use platonic in the non-capitalised, contemporary appropriation of the word) masculine relations in any way. I am as happy to see Ben Affleck and Matt Damon having dinner together as anyone is to see someone so close to a friend. I do not believe in intrinsic ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’; I do not feel that gender is anything that correlates us to one another. I do, however, think it is particularly notable that similar female relationships are simply not celebrated in the same way; or rather, the lack of them at all in the media whether fictional or real. Women are represented as competing against one another, with men usually as their mutual interest or face exclusion from dominant society as sapphists. But, really, don’t our relationships all kind of work in the same way, isn’t a ‘bromance’ just an ordinary friendship, in the same way woman/woman friendships can be, or (God forbid) woman/man? And why is 2009 becoming the year of the bromance, with television shows, films and magazine features abounding?

Crazy in Duplicity

2009-04-07T15:20:00.000+01:00

My comprehension of contemporary R’n’B is admittedly fairly limited, but there do seem to be some songs that become anthemic, pervade even the least permeable of us. Beyoncé Knowles’s new release seems to be one of them, her double-disked third album entitled ‘I am... Sasha Fierce’. The second half of the album focuses on her ‘alter-ego’, Sasha, her stage persona. Beyoncé explained in ‘Entertainment Weekly’ that this alter ego allows her the sensuality that she forbids herself off-stage, that her sexuality and provocation is exclusive to her performance. A self-professed devout Methodist who has been known to lead her concert audiences in prayer, Beyoncé’s construction of self has become incredibly duplicitous; purportedly chaste off-screen, salacious on.

This separation of ‘normality’ (Beyoncé) and sexuality (Sasha) is clearly divisive, particularly when endorsed to such great extent by a woman proclaiming herself as a role model for teenage girls. One is encouraged to see sexuality as performative and dangerous, in her case signified by the donning of a glove and armband- once removed, she reverts to her purity, her ordinary life, and her religion. ‘Sasha’s’ sexuality is lascivious to say the least, all about gyrating and thrusting; the appropriation of ‘consumerism appropriating feminist rhetoric’ that Jessica Valetti complains of. But it seems that even if we ignore the dubious message sent out by Beyoncé's hips and overt sexualisation, we are still left with a woman who is very difficult to align with a sense of unity or empowerment.

‘Single Ladies… Put a Ring on It’ was labeled ‘favourite song’ at the 2009 Kids Choice Awards, Canada’s biggest newspaper The Toronto Star labeling it an anthem of empowerment, comparable to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’. It has hit number one all over the world, Rolling Stone claiming it as the greatest song of 2008. This all seems very bizarre, as if the vocal hooks and exuberant dance routines have distracted us all from the problematic message behind the song, the album, and Beyonce herself. A woman who once preached independence in Destiny’s Child, who instructed female autonomy (both financial and, implicitly, otherwise) in ‘Independent Woman’ is now telling men and women that marriage, a Christian symbol of interdependency, is the exclusive reason for relationships in ‘Put a Ring on It’. The lyrics ‘Say I'm the one you own/If you don't, you'll be alone’ are clearly voraciously objectifying and disempowering, let alone the references to herself (and therefore women) as ‘it’.

For a woman apparently so aware of her own influence, role model to even the Obama girls, Beyonce seems rife with contradictions in her own image construction. A black icon whose skin seems surprisingly lighter in the adverts in which she features, a model of female empowerment who isolates sexuality from regular ‘womanliness’, it seems that she is doing more harm than good. Admittedly, she is not taking drugs or dropping to size 0, but the confusing messages she sends to her fans seem almost more dangerous, more subversive and covert. She is the kind of woman that parents are encouraging their daughters to stick on their wall yet represents the regression of female sexual liberation that, as previously examined, is becoming so pervasive within American (and therefore Western) culture; the terrifying message of chastity as equating purity and performative sexuality as isolated from normative behavior.

Sex and the City : really a feminist manifesto?

2009-03-31T23:09:00.000+01:00

Over the past few years, I have realised that the closest thing that women have had to self-proclaimed on-screen feminism has been the TV show/film ‘Sex and the City’ which is very problematic. We have four heterosexual (minus Samantha’s brief ‘glitch’), skinny, rich, white women (in the film, there is a little more ethnic diversity but pretty much exclusively tokenism: black PA, Chinese adopted kid). And that is fine as a scene setting, or rather it would be if we weren’t continuously reminded that women fit into one of their four categories. The whole series also revolves dangerously around a polarity of man-loving vs. man-hating, but man-obsessing all the same. As Miranda asks in one episode, ‘how is it that four such clever women only ever talk about men?’… a valid question which the show never answers.

The women in the show are utterly blessed in that they are independent of financial or family ties, allowing them full time devotion to the only thing that seems of significant importance to any of them: men (as Imelda Whelehan points out, with the phallically named Mr Big right at the centre of it all). The only times that someone’s family truly comes into issue is when Samantha sleeps with Charlotte’s brother, or when Miranda looks after her husband Steve’s mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. These are still issues that revolve around men. When Samantha gets breast cancer, the show touches on some ideas of the difficult ideological repercussions of mammectomies but focuses mainly on the strength of her relationship with Smith, her boyfriend.

The focus of the much-discussed film is marriage. Carrie is desperate for her perfect wedding (despite her previous supposed hatred of all of that), Miranda is cheated on by her husband, whilst Charlotte is just playing the perfectly Upper East Side wife (and, amazingly, an utter imperialist in Mexico), which leaves Samantha. Now, Samantha’s storyline seems the most interesting because in order for her to claim the only female independence in the film, she seems to have to abandon her long-term boyfriend (and I am not saying that independent entails being single, but merely that the others are utterly dependent in a variety of ways). Smith looked after Samantha through her chemotherapy, through her cheating on him, was a really great guy- but the film turns him uncaring and egocentric as a means of cutting him out the picture. We are left with two options: women can’t be independent if they have good men around them, so Smith must go, or a rather misandric and marginalising message that there just aren’t really any good men at all.

Akass asks, ‘Is it the case that a strong women can't desire a husband?’. No, not by any means, but it is certainly becoming a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman, in possession of good fortune or non, must be in manic want of one. Home-makers all over the world are telling us that feminists just won’t get husbands- recently Zoe Lewis renounced feminism in The Times, attributing it responsibility for her loveless life with no children. Films, television and advertisements have stopped marriage being about lifelong commitment but perpetuate the consumerist fantasy of love, something thoroughly underlined by Carrie’s stance that is utterly glamourised by a Vogue wedding dress shoot and only condemned when it loses her the man.

Women like Samantha Jones employ aggressive sexual rhetoric to affirm their empowered sexuality and therefore gender liberation in a bizarre manner, often objectifying men. Phyllis Chesler aptly states that these fantasies, ‘Ally McBeal and worse’ (I think that she was presupposing Samantha), ‘are not feminist role models. Just because they say they're bad, that doesn't make them revolutionaries or feminists’ and it looks like they give us all a dangerously bad name. As Jessica Valenti stated on the recent BBC4 radio show ‘Call Yourself A Feminist’, we now have the subversive assertion of female sexuality posited in direct opposition to ‘girl power’ and writhing women on MTV, consumerism appropriating feminist rhetoric in order to sell back sexism to women and enlightened men. It seems that Samantha, and even the sexual discussion in Sex and the City, falls into the second category a lot of the time. There is nothing subversive about it, it is often lewd, it is pretty boring. A lot of people claim that it is part of the ‘sex toy revolution’, that women are now less embarrassed about talking about fantasy and eroticism than they were pre-SATC, but these people seem to be ignoring the progress being made outside of the show anyway.

The problem about seeing ‘Sex and the City’ as utterly empowering for women is that it leads us all into a dangerously post feminist frame of mind, seeing everything as having been done already, women as emancipated. It hasn’t and they aren’t. They aren’t even truly emancipated in the show, when Samantha and Miranda take on ‘masculinity’ traits and the general outlook is that accepting the social constructions of femininity is accompanied by true happiness. Gender equality hasn’t reached its full potential in real life, where 5.6% of women in the UK are raped in their lifetime and there is only a 7% conviction rate (when a significant proportion of these cases have DNA evidence substantiating them). A shocking third of people in the UK think that if a woman is wearing a short skirt, she was asking for it. Women are still paid 18% less than men. There is not universal women’s suffrage, let alone equality.

There is still a desperate need for an active feminist movement and ‘Sex and the City’ makes us forget that sometimes, in addition to making liberated women easy scapegoats as SATC-esque objectifying, misandric consumerists in a world where men are two-dimensional and presented as woman’s enemy, unless they are gay in which case they are automatically her BFF. In a New-Labour Britain following ‘Blair’s babes’, ‘cool Brittania’, ‘girl power’ and sex-positive post feminism it is desperately important to remember that there is not gender equality, something which affects both men and women, and that we aren’t bad people if we don’t adhere to one of four very disparate and unrealistic categories, however much we can love the show.

How could one possibly 'Play It Straight'?

2009-03-25T20:21:00.000Z

Contemporary programming seems to have appropriated a confusing feature- that of identifying homosexual characteristics. TV shows like ‘Playing It Straight’ and ‘Gay, Straight or Taken?’ all offer financial rewards for having a good ‘gaydar’ whilst shows like ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ take the concept of the aesthete homosexual man and run with them. What seems very bizarre is that we have taken our gay men and our lesbian women and turned them into gender inverts, established them in a sense that makes it seem that gay men long to be women and therefore affiliate themselves with the ‘feminine’ and interior design and lesbian women long for ‘masculinity’, for DIY.

Obviously this throws up one major problem. What is the masculine/feminine? For hundreds of years, there has supposedly been something innately passive about women, active about men. Women have, until recently, been seen to be passive in reproduction; their egg stays still, the sperm penetrates, an imitation of penetrative active/passive sex. This has now been disproven, the egg actually consumes the sperm and it is all a bit more mutual than we had assumed, but the idea remains; women the penetrated, inscribed, Sedgwick’s ‘exchangeable property’ etc. There is nothing about being a ‘biological woman’ which makes you like picking out wallpaper and reading Vogue, nothing about being a ‘man’ which makes you like fast cars and Zoo magazine. The ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are clear constructs, we have all just made them up, and most of the time we are more than happy to fill them.

What becomes even more problematic for discussion of sexuality constructs is when we see gender as constructed, too. Simone de Beauvoir famously tells us that ‘One is not born a woman, but rather becomes one’. Julia Kristeva says that ‘women’ cannot be said to exist, Luce Irigaray that ‘woman does not have a sex’ (and I am taking quote after quote out of Judith Butler here, who discusses ‘gender’ with far more articulacy than I could ever hope to imitate). Foucault tells us that it is sexuality itself which establishes the notion of sex (sexed body rather than intercourse). The idea of social construction of gender is a complicated one, but one that seems increasingly, not decreasingly, relevant in society. Women often revel in defining themselves as sexually empowered by likening themselves to Samantha from 'Sex and the City' rather than seeing her as a perpetuation of the characterised ‘feminine’ playing ‘masculine’, ‘woman’ playing ‘man’. She is business minded (a typically ‘masculine’ characteristic) and fucks like her male peers (even sleeping with women, the supposed epitome of transgressive sexuality); she is not carving a new identity for women but rather reinstating this idea of gender inversion and therefore binary identities. But when there are no ‘women’ or ‘men’ independent of culture, how can we possibly define sexual identity? Well, we can’t, except as a cultural construct. Back to Foucault.

Before Kraft-Ebbing published his ‘Psychopathis Sexualis’, essentially an encyclopedia on sexual ‘deviance’ coining terms like festishism, there were no ‘homosexuals’, there were only those with same-sex desire and sodomites. In 1886, Foucault aptly states that we created a ‘species’ that became attributed characteristic traits. When Oscar Wilde was publicly prosecuted for gross indecency with a man in 1895, society pinned the characteristics of the famous homosexual (characteristics appropriated as a means of positing himself in opposition to heterosexual norms rather than as a means of positing himself as a woman), effeminate dandyism, on every male homosexual. After World War I, when masculinity was practiced by women without men around, ‘mannishness’ and manly fashion became bohemian and eccentric independent of sexual inclination. That is, until Radclyffe Hall, the author of the lesbian novel ‘The Well of Loneliness’ became well renowned in 1928, when dressing like she did became associated with sexual deviance. This is utterly incongruous and yet these are not ideologies which we have abandoned; men who dress ‘like women’, in pink, for example are considered gay and women who dress ‘like men’, in rugby shirts, sapphists. But homosexuality just doesn’t equate to gender inversion, transsexuality or transvestism. They are utterly different things, and we all seem to know that already, so why do we keep on pretending they are the same?

Essentially we continue to perpetuate these stereotypes in the media with only a couple of variations. Now we offer cash to those who can guess who is gay and who isn’t, based on what they are wearing, what they like to do with their free time, and even more bizarrely- what they look like. As if one could possibly have facial features that signify your sexual desires; a heterosexual nose, homosexual ears. Ultimately, this all seems very ironic, seeing as we made up the indicators of each to begin with- but it seems like MTV have found new facile and regressive means of making minimal cash payouts for maximum cash gain.

O Misery!

2009-03-22T20:58:00.001Z

Last term, I had to read a book called ‘The Color of Water’ for an American Literature class. It is horrendously bad- poorly written, artificial, boring, but I was asked to read it because it had such great success in America. It is James McBride’s autobiography about coming to terms with his own identity and his resultant triumph over dangerous ‘street life’ in the projects. It has sold over 2 million copies and has a 5 star rating on Amazon and all I could think for a really long time was ‘why?’.

You will be hard pressed if you are not in a tube carriage with at least one person engrossed in some sort of ‘misery memoir’, books like ‘Lucky’ (Alice Sebold’s harrowing account of her rape) or ‘Angela’s Ashes’ (Frank McCourt’s fraught Irish childhood)- they make up 9% of UK book sales. Why do we revel in people’s pain with such relish, or is it their triumph over adversity that enthralls us? It seems faintly perverse to be reading in detail and at length about the sexual abuse or torturous and impoverished childhood of a stranger, a stranger whose memoir is, no doubt, to be featured on Richard and Judy’s book club and posited as light entertainment. These are not complicated books to read, they are linear, linguistically simple, but their stories are riddled with emotion, their descriptions often pornographically explicit- how have they come to take the role of a pastime in the same sense (and with the same audience) as the ‘Shopaholic’ series?

I have no intention to play down the horrors that have happened to some of these authors, because some of it is utterly appalling, unimaginably shocking. And it is in this depiction of the unimaginable that seems part of the success- they offer our conception of horror greater horizons. These are inconceivable things that have really happened to good, innocent people (often children). The significance of reality seems particularly pervasive when it comes to ‘A Million Little Pieces’ by James Frey, the author of an appallingly bad description of his drug rehabilitation (and even worse sequels). It has been compared to ‘War and Peace’, it was right at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List for 15 weeks, was on Opera’s book club to huge acclaim (big snaps for an author nowadays, seemingly more so than a Pulitzer). But then everyone found out that he had made some major embellishments and freaked out. Random House offered refunds on all copies of the book, public apologies were made by him, by Oprah, by everyone involved however unintentionally. Nobody was interested in Frey’s story anymore, or the supposed impact that it had on them, because it wasn’t all true… but why? It seems it is only in ‘truth’ that we are titillated. And it seems that titillation is what we are looking for.

Tragedy has a very particular format. Aristotle says in ‘Poetry’ that it requires conditions involving the protaganist’s downfall to be a result of hamartia, that they must achieve anagnorisis and it must ultimately be cathartic for the audience. The concept of tragedy has survived for thousands of years, but we seem to be abandoning it for misery, a misery that revolves specifically around factual account. I have a penchant for the ‘Love It!’ genre of magazines, I’ve read a whole pile of misery memoirs and speak from experience that one doesn’t get the same beautifully emotionally purgative satisfaction as in ‘Oediupus’, ‘Hamlet’ or even ‘The Crucible’. This inspires the thought that if it is emotional clarification and cleansing we seek, why aren’t we looking for tragedy, why do we seek the shallow gains and despicable voyeurism we get from misery?

We consume our misery memoirs with the same hunger we do our soap operas. We can buy them in Tesco, Harper-Collins say that they sell about 85% of their ‘mis-lit’ in supermarkets. They do not seem empowering or enlightening to fellow victims of similar tortures, they seem sordid and published out of the financial zeal of publishing companies (and, possibly, the authors). They allow us moral outrage and sadistic schadenfreude simultaneously. With a proliferation of falsified ‘autobiographies’ amounting, between tales of Auschwitz and the Holocaust (Benjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca) and LA ghettoes (Margaret Jones), one would hope that we’d all start losing faith in the novels which entertain us whilst they are true and are pulled from bookshelves when not, and question our own motives. If only to stop people fabricating Nazi torture or child abuse. But it seems very doubtful.

RoLo?

2009-03-18T22:03:00.000Z

The representation of lesbianism in the media seems to have become rather confused since Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson started up a relationship. LiLo (as she has been coined) or LezLo (as she is now so charmingly known by the Perez Hilton collective) has featured in a whole heap of films since Disney’s infamous ‘Parent Trap’ launched her illustrious career. She has launched a music career (of course) and operates pretty much as a modern day pin up. She is indubitably one of biggest celebrities of the 21st century. And she was straight. Until she met Sam, an open lesbian, and they hooked up.

The media was shockingly reluctant to describe what was clearly a sexual relationship as anything more than a ‘close friendship’ for an incredible length of time. When the pair were spotted out, kissing and holding hands, photos were still being captioned ‘Lindsay and friend Sam’. Even her former publicist referred to the situation as just ‘spicing up’ the friendship. Short of leaking a porno, it seemed like there was little either of the two could do to be recognised as a sexually active lesbian couple rather than just friends and about as gay as two girls kissing in truth or dare. Lindsay and Sam aren’t the first two Sapphists in the public eye, although precursors are distinctly limited. When I looked up famous lesbians to check that I wasn’t being incredibly insular, Sappho herself was listed as one, Aileen Wuornos’s girlfriend as another (and the list was fairly short). But there are a few: Cynthia Nixon, Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen de Generes, Portia di Rossi. However, what is most bizarre is that when two women in cinema so much as take a road trip together people automatically insinuate sexual desire (I refer to my distress over Thelma and Louise’s critical reception) and lesbian porn, catering usually to male fantasy, is by no means in short supply. A kiss on the lips encodes full blown lesbian sex in Hollywood. We know that lesbianism is about, and it is accepted (as much as male homosexuality, at least). So why are we so reluctant to admit that same-sex desire applies when it is Lindsay?

John Berger famously tells us that female identity is constructed through male desire, but never suggests the reciprocal effect that this has on masculine identity (and I use the terms ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ in a strictly conventional sense here). If the woman is no longer desirable in the sense of potential attainability, how does that construct masculinity? Well, it doesn’t: she becomes irrelevant to masculinity except as a threat and cannot be defined within the realm of heterosexual relations. She is not controllable by male desire, because she just isn’t interested. Lesbians are the unpenetrative, unconquerable, eternally elusive women and that poses a pretty clear threat to some people.

Laura Mulvey lets us in on the fact that pretty much all of Western visual culture is created for the heteronormative male, with women eroticized and the gaze attributed to observers distinctly male (in film, photography, art and implicitly all other forms of culture). Lindsay Lohan is busty, she wears tight dresses, she has long hair, long legs. She has been aptly marketed for the male gaze. I’m sure she features in a lot of men’s top 5. I’m sure she is a lot of men’s desktop wallpaper and I’m prepared to guess that you can download some for free from her website. She’s always been desirable but she used to be an attainable desire (attainable in the loosest sense of the word for most people) and now that she has entered a Sapphic relationship, she isn’t.

It isn’t just men who have been loathe to describe Lindsay as a lesbian, or as bisexual. This idea of transient sexuality is pretty threatening, it seems, possibly more so than lesbianism itself. That we are not categorised into binaries of straight or gay, but there can be people in between. Or you could not realise you had any inkling of same-sex desire, and then one day, boom! You are making out with Sam Ronson on P.Diddy’s yacht. Freud called it ambivalence, the inability to discuss one’s character (including sexuality) in a unitary formulation but it seems more like common sense; sexual desire is too complicated to be categorised into the polar opposites we are so fond of. Obviously, for some people, homosexuality is utterly damning so the threat is direct (the same sort of people who are plugging Twilight as secular, I think). For most people though, it seems just unnerving to think that we do not have and cannot have a circumspect understanding of our own attractions until they arise. Which is fair enough I suppose. But I bet Sam Ronson never thought she’d have to come out twice, and it seems utterly bizarre that we made her.

Poetic Cost

2009-03-15T18:53:00.000Z

In two months, Andrew Motion, the first Poet Laureate to hold a fixed term rather than a lifelong position, will be our laureate no more. This has inspired myriad debate- who will be next? Will a woman be selected for the first time? Do we want, or need a poet laureate? Is it a waste of money? Andy Burnham (the culture secretary) has decided to involve the public in the election, but who is left to care about poetry in a society where it is rarely celebrated or discussed?

Poetics are what have defined and shaped our nation. Our first laureate was Dryden, one of the greatest poets of all time, our history including Southey, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Hughes. These are men who define what it is to be British, whose phrasing pervades the essence of our being and identity. In a country that celebrates diversity and amalgamation of cultures, it seems even more important to continue to establish and develop what we perceive it is to be British, and literature appears the most apt means. Andrew Motion has let us all down a bit. But it is not on his shoulders that we can bear the cross of the fall of poetry, the fall of the poet from Shelly’s ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ to nothing at all.

Hugh Grant, posing as our foppish prime-minister in the quintessentially British ‘Love Actually’ tells us that we are ‘the country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham's right foot, David Beckham's left foot’. We are the country of Jackie Kay, Benjamin Zephaniah, Wendy Cope- of black Scottish lesbians, Rastafarian performance poets and white Oxbridge educated women. I hate to bang a beaten drum, but at what stage will people get bored with Katie Price’s boob jobs, of Jade Goody’s fatal demise? Will we have to wait until our identity is entirely formed by David Beckham and Sean Connery to realise that we have missed out? That we have abandoned a legacy of creative potency in favour of our diversity becoming represented by an examination of Sharia Law… in light of Paul McCartney’s divorce (and I refer to this week’s BBC3 programming)?

A few days ago, some friends and I were discussing the presented inaccessibility of poetry, of how we are taught it is difficult, tricks of metre and rhyme. One of my friends- well read, very clever- stated she had no idea what iambic pentameter meant or entailed but, like most of us, was told to stick it in any Shakespeare GCSE exam. Poetry is seen as a closed book nowadays, and taught as such, which- considering that it developed out of oral culture for mass entertainment (and later even enlightenment)- seems faintly ironic. If we all read as much poetry as we did about Kerry Katona, if it were presented as enjoyable rather than a chore, we wouldn’t have as much of a problem. Byron was as famous in his day as Britney Spears is in ours but, as A.A.Gill pointed out last weekend in the Times, who would recognize Seamus Heaney in Waterstones?

The Poet Laureate is paid £5,000 a year. Even in credit crunch Britain, it is a price we can afford for (as Gill so eloquently phrased) a ‘lightning rod for us all’, for poetry that ‘maintains a connection with the lyrical beat at the heart of the tribe’. It is a cost we cannot afford to cut when contemporary identity is so fluid and becoming so disparate- poetry offers us opportunity for unity, an opportunity we should embrace in a time of diverse multiculturalism. And, as much as anything else, how embarrassing would it be if, in a few centuries time, people look back and see not as we do, those who read Chaucer, Marlowe, Sidney but those who only read Heat?

The Perversion of Passivity

2009-03-12T22:13:00.000Z

Recently an article about ‘upskirting’ was pointed out to me in the Guardian. If you aren’t aware of upskirting, it is the candid practice of sticking your camera/cameraphone up the skirt of an unsuspecting woman and snapping. These images are either used as your own masturbatory aid or shared amongst your peers, often via image sharing sites such as flickr, where macho camaraderie regarding the practice normalises it. Essentially, it is the objectification of women at its most disgusting and invasive extreme.

We brought the article, and the practice, up at the Riveters (the UMSU Women’s Group), where it was obviously met with outrage. I regaled the group with my dilemma when a disposable camera was stuck up my own skirt: what does one do? Do you smash the camera because you have no way of deleting the photo? Do you ignore it, in case something even more sinister arises? I smashed the camera (and it was, apparently, within my legal rights to do so). But what can we do when we don’t notice, when cameraphones and mini digital cameras are making this obscene intrusion even less identifiable? We can write to flickr and complain (already been done, women’s faces are now- usually- blurred out, but the proliferation of images and groups remains). We can encourage awareness, so that women know that this is even a possibility when they are sitting on the District Line. But ultimately, we can’t do a whole lot. However, there seems to be a more important question: what is fetishising this idea of passivity in women? What is it about contemporary culture that propagates a fascination with candid pornography, leering over the unsuspecting, a practice that a proportion of men (even if a distinct minority) seem so consumed by?

The sexual passivity of women is obviously historically aligned (and sexuality historically established, at least according to Foucault) but with curious fluctuation. The Greeks posited their female sculptures in the Venus Pudica pose, hands covering their modesty, eyes facing down. In medieval times, women’s lust was considered insatiable, they were condemned for their supposedly wanton sensual abandon. Something changed in the Early Modern to give intercourse a very different meaning, with writers like Donne and Shakespeare creating an Andrea Dworkin-esque ideology of penetration as coercive and colonizing, woman as a territory to be claimed. Titian’s Olympia is passive. Progressive sex manuals and sexological studies of the 1910s described women either as lusty cyclically in accordance with ovulation, or not at all. Women were, until recently, a vacuous canvas to be inscribed upon or penetrated- an image carried through to the ‘Sound of Music’ where Rolfe tells Liesl that she is an empty page that men will want to write on.

But we have had female sexual emancipation. We have, to use crude analogy, Kim Cattral in Sex and the City, an assortment of post-watershed programming on enjoying female sexuality, Sam Taylor-Wood creates an Olympia not only sexually assertive but atune with her own body in Soliloquy III. Nuts, Zoo and FHM (not to mention my student newspaper) are filled with tips on how to please your lady. Women are (usually) seen as actively sexual entities nowadays across the Western World, and ones to be impressed by not only virility but by sexual aptitude. Is it the imminence of a final collapse of a world where orgasm is the domain of the man that this kind of candid pornography becomes a restoration of power for some, the most threatened demographic, the men whose fears of impotence restrict them to lust of the passive?

It is only very recently that sexual equality has become established (or even attempted at) and yet it seems practices like these- and the expansion and normalising of them through online community, the irresponsible permittance of them from international organizations like flickr and the maintanence of objectification ideology- that puts both women and men at a great risk of regression. We are in danger of men becoming the desirous and women the desired once more- a disempowering situation for all of us, male and female, operating well for few.

The Twilight of Emancipation

2009-03-09T20:07:00.000Z

Over the past few months, anyone who has had a conversation lasting longer than about ten minutes with me will be aware of my absolute turmoil over the sensation 'Twilight', both book(s) and film. Introduced to me by a friend who returned from America a few months back bearing a case filled with books and proclaiming that we in the UK were missing out on the narrative of our lives, the film followed over the Christmas break to immense success. The second widest cinematic independent release of all time (following only Scary Movie 4), every girl I know flocked to see it. The film has grossed nearly $400,000,000 to date, the first book the best seller of 2008. Even the woman at the Odeon counter said she had seen it and loved it, much to her own embarrassment. Even I loved it, much to mine.

For those who aren’t aware of the phenomenon, the story line is as such: girl (Bella) moves to a new town, falls in love with brooding boy (Edward), who turns out to be a vampire. Chaos ensues. Edward Cullen is the Byronic hero of the vampire world, along the same lines as Buffy’s Angel. He is brooding, mysterious, unfathomably attractive both in book and film. Pretty much every girl I know wants to jump into bed with him. But this is where the trouble lies; the book is written by a fanatical Mormon, Stephenie Meyer, a woman who longs to make restraint the new 'promiscuity' (in a world where promiscuity refers to premarital sex) through her writing, described as the ‘erotics of abstinence’.

A very ambivalent message is thrown at us. There are two types of vampires in the realm of ‘Twilight’, the goodies (who don’t eat people) and the baddies (who do). Edward’s family are good, he longs to ‘bite’ Bella, she smells really alluring apparently, he can hardly resist her… but he does, because he knows the repercussions are those of evil, and he loves her more than to inflict that upon her. Pretty obviously, biting becomes the metonymic representation for sex, the vampires the bitten (the non virginal). Vampires have been culturally presented to us as the embodiment of soullessness, antonymous to Christian and therefore moral humanity, repelled by the crucifix. It is no coincidence that Meyer chooses them, rather than ghosts or zombies, as the premise for her fantasy universe. When Bella, at the end of the film, tells Edward that she longs to be bitten so that she can live eternally alongside him, he denies her- because he knows better. To be unbitten is to be pure- it’s a pretty transparent allegory to follow, particularly in the wake of the rising imminence of the American chastity movement. As tempting as it is (and ‘it’ is a whole heap of things), steer clear, because it will be your ruin.

The original cover of the book is an apple, the forbidden fruit, symbolic of the purity of the prelapsarian, the damning of sensory illusion: don’t pick that shiny red apple, don’t have sex, listen to the Jonas Brothers and put your silver rings back on or be condemned to an eternity of fire and brimstone. This is a powerful message that is being presented to teenage girls, a message of abstinence which has been supported by a quarter of a billion dollars by the US government over the past decade. It is a message which is becoming increasingly manipulated to find a place in society and dangerously decreasingly Christianised- a message now mutated to fit into secular society through propaganda in teen culture. Over summer, I laughed when I saw the Jonas Brothers at the MTV Music Video awards; they are a parody of what I imagine the chastity movement to be, unbelievably ‘pure’. Edward Cullen is not, he is sexy. Meyer's plotlines are alluring teen fiction, they are the magic of Harry Potter combined with the aspirationality of Gossip Girl; a lethal combination. The chastity movement has stopped openly preaching choice and has started practicing a bizarre indoctrination of teenage girls across the world and we are becoming at risk of raising a generation of women who see female sexual emancipation as filthy and shameful. We are regressing from the liberation discovered over the past decades under the guise of entertainment at a stunning rate and it is a travesty that will have myriad repercussions if not addressed directly, and quickly.