Every time you say ‘sex worker’, a fairy gets period pain.

The outcome of the Roman Polanski debacle showed us two of our more vomititious cultural mores:

1)  the law (specifically rape) is secondary to some indefinable and subjective notion of ‘art’;

2)   a) some celebrities are rape-excusing idiots;

b) the opinion of said celebrities makes the excusing of rape more valid than the legal obligations for it to be punished.

So we learn the power of celebrity, of selective justice, and the depressing fact that those who have platforms to be role models for young women are using such a privilege not to empower women by reminding them of their status as human beings, but instead to excuse forced sexual intercourse between an adult man and a drugged female minor as, y’know, ‘not rape rape‘. Whoopee.

I’m reheating the morning leftovers of this story not because it has lacked any media attention (though it didn’t receive the lambasting one would have hoped for), but in order to demonstrate how normalised we have become to rape culture, specifically when it comes to the rape of young girls by rich, powerful men. This wasn’t rape, some libertarians will imagine; this was the timeless erotic trope of a robustly nubile artist being hopelessly seduced by his Lolita. He just had to ignore the inconvenient bit where she said ‘no’ and drug her with Rohypnol first. Is it cynical to imagine that, had this been, say, a bishop and a young boy, the outcry would have taken quite a different turn, and that the flimsy exuses of ‘but he has suffered enough by having to live in Paris and make films’, or  ‘but he is a great artist’ (whatever that means), could then quite rightly go piss in the wind?

I bring up this story because the normalisation of rape culture matters. There isn’t a single female person who isn’t affected by it. If you’re lucky the worst you will get is the threat of violence from a pack of chest-beating sub-primates who have somehow comandeered a Vauxhall Nova and think it is their born privilege to slur vague sexual threats as they speed by with Daniel Beddingfield pounding out of their sub-woofers. If you have a little less luck than average, you’ll be asked or coerced by your partner into performing sexual acts in the same manner as people who are paid to pretend they are enjoying sex. If you’re pretty damn unlucky, you will be forced into sexual intercourse against your will by someone who thinks they are somehow entitled to your body.

At the very worst, you will have to endure the hellish, soul-destroying, downright dangerous ordeal of repeated industrial rape which is the reality of most prostituted women.

Besides being often the people in society who are the most marginalized and the most oppressed by poverty, drug dependence, mental illness, and other positions of social disempowerment, prostituted women are the people who pay the real price of rape culture. They are the ones on whose bodies the whole sick fantasy is acted out again and again, in ways too brutal for any of us who are lucky enough not to have resorted to prostitution can imagine. They face misogyny, violence, and hatred every day they work, and know that they will face the same again tomorrow, assuming, that is, that they’re not killed or don’t kill themselves first. It’s enough to make the lairy sexist boy racers suddenly seem like Stephen flipping Fry.

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to catch a talk by Rebecca Mott and others, who were sharing their experiences of prostitution. Anyone who thinks that prostition is a free choice, can be empowering, or just needs unionising to make it all alright, should read Rebecca’s blog and get the truth first hand. Then they should pass it on to the next misguided liberal intellectual type who, like, totally supports women’s rights to be sex objects, and then reel them back into planet Earth too. As Denise Marshall, Chief Executive of Eaves Housing for Women and speaker on the panel, pointed out: ‘prostitution can be considered a valid career choice the day it turns up on the careers list at Cheltenham Ladies’ College.’  Which, for any readers unfamiliar with the specific bastions of British privilege, will be when hell freezes over.

There is an avalanche of bullshit from both the right and the left on the issue of prostitution, to navigate through which would require one to have more free time than the whole staff of the Gary Glitter fanline. The cultural assumptions propping up the whole sorry affair are that women’s bodies are a commodity which can be bought and sold, and that men have some kind of fundamental right to sex which women, as members of the sex class, do not possess (translated: if a man is too odious to succeed in getting laid, he can expect the ‘right’ to go out and pay for sex; if a woman is too odious to succeed in getting laid, she can go buy a vibrator and…er, that’s it. Not bother, exploit, or pay to rape anyone.) We need to strip society of the illusion that the ‘right’ to sex – and the ‘right’ to buy it – are somehow fundamental. In short, we need to get the men who would use prostitited women wanking back into their socks.

When we as a society excuse rapists like Polanski, or anyone else who violates another human being against their will, we are actively enabling rape culture and denouncing the seriousness – and indeed the criminality – of the act (and with conviction rates already lower than a snake with vertigo, that is hardly a state to be desired). We are also allowing the privilege of our indifference to be paid for by every prostituted woman who has to face the real, painful, bodily consequences of  a social system which tells her she is no better than property, with no agency of her own. Anyone who thinks that the exchange of coins either provides full agency, or proves that the women enter this trade fair and square, would do well to spend a night in Soho talking to the 9 out of 10 prostituted women who can prove otherwise, or to their pimps.

All of which is roughly why so-called ‘liberal’ newspapers like the Guardian who use the term ‘sex work’ and ‘sex workers’  in a bid to show how edgily cool and accepting they are can sit and swivel. ‘Sex work’ is to ‘prostitution’ what ‘collateral damage’ is to ‘dead citizens’; a contrivedly neutral reconfiguration of a term, which has been sanitised to protect the interests of a party who you can bet is someone other than its referee. Without pornification and rape culture to keep women in the habit of being viewed as sex objects and not fully valid human beings, the workforce for prostitution would haemhorrage away, and so, in an ideal world, would its clientele. It’s time we listened to the experiences of people who have endured the daily abuses of prostitution and declare finally that enough is enough. To those who argue that men will and should always objectify women, on account of being from Mars and having ten heads, I offer the humble suggestion that they go and perform some ‘hand work’ in a sock.

Far

Listening to the new Regina Spektor album is a bit like experiencing the day in the life of a Daily Mail journalist: you are constantly looking for the appropriate person to blame. Or else: it’s like watching a good friend leave the house dressed in a gold tracksuit with a pink feather boa and a frog umbrella; wearing her quirkiness on her fluted sleeves, but knowing that the people she meets, if they have any sense, will suddenly pretend they don’t speak English, or realise that they have to go and buy a thing from somewhere rather far away.

A lot of the blame for this has to go to the producers of the album, who have managed to make some tracks sound like the live recording of a serviceably idosynchratic piano ballad as drummed/bassed along to by a greasy-fingered teen on a My First Hohner in a living room with egg boxes gaffataped to the walls. Some of the most offending tracks in this respect (The Calculation) make her sound like the runner-up in a ‘sing-a-long-a-Sheryl Crow’ competition; others (Eet, Blue Lips) result in Keane-style hammering piano mixed with lyrics of all the emotional clout of a bag of lentils. It’s fair to say that ‘Far’ is Regina’s most radio-friendly album in terms of lyrical content, which of course means it contains a level of lyricism which shocks only for its entire lack than for its substance; gone are the evocative Chemo Limos and Dens of Thieves, to be replaced by cringingly earnest musings (‘blue, oooh ooh ooh , the colour of our planet from far far away, blue, ooh ooh ooh, the most human colour) to the tritely throwaway (‘the future, it’s here, it’s bright, it’s now’). Even the utterly po-faced ‘Laughing With’, respectable only for its unswerving dedication to the central tenet of its own humorless sing-a-long-a-theology, ends in a nonsensical summary that ‘no-one’s laughing at God [when bad things happen], we’re all laughing with God’. Er, except we’re not. We’re not even laughing with Regina when she bursts out into dolphin song on ‘Folding Chair’, though the geekier amongst us are possibly noting the borrowing from Kate Bush’s ‘Hounds Of Love’. A nadir is reached on Two Birds, whose brass section indicts itself with each guilty parp quintuplet.

Despite the best efforts of the various producers to pour that liquid Regina alchemy into so many sub-Keane lolly moulds, some of the old loveability seaps through; Human Of The Year is a welcome reminder of all that is beautiful about Spektor’s songwriting, including some dazzling classical arpeggio-straddling of both piano and voice, as well as true lyrical inventiveness and a sense of melody and phrasing which would leave Frank Sinatra looking experimental. The song is only slightly impaired by whoever decided it would be a good idea to press the ‘fake chorus’ button on the keyboard (which sounds as though it was bought from Argos for £19.99 in the 80s), and the rolling ‘allelujah’s which bookend the central melody. Dance Anthem of the 80s, too, has the elements of all that is fine from Maryann Meets the Gravediggers, except that the word ‘sleeeeeeeeeeeeelelelelelelelleeeeeep’ is repeated way too many times past human endurance. Not one to crank up on the iPod.

Overall, the record has a more minor key and less inventiveness than one was beginning to hope for. The bonus tracks, for those who are considering shelling out the extra pound on iTunes, do nothing to detract from the overall mopeiness  and sense of lyrical lackadaisicality. The two ska-influenced tracks do bring a sort of jaunty rollick, and for these I find myself warming to this album more than I did to Begin To Hope; but while Regina’s musical knobbly foot is shoehorned into a Brit-Indie winklepicker, the result for all concerned is going to be sore.

Choose the best of the worst… in the name of Pankhurst

A strangely unmusical posting for a Tuesday this may be, but with the June 4th elections mere days away, those on the fence vis-a-vis where to place their feminist cross in the ballot box may appreciate the following rigorously cut-and-paste job in answer to the question on everyone’s lips: which party is the best for women’s rights?

Labour

Their website says: [They] introduced the National Minimum Wage – two thirds of the beneficiaries are women and it has played a part in narrowing the pay gap. Some unsubstantiated guff about ‘delivering a cultural change to ensure equality for all’, and the aim of ’empowering black and ethnic minority women to build cohesion within their communities and as a bridge between communities’.

EYS says: there’s no arguing that the Labour party are at least superficially committed to the equality of women, with a relatively high proportion of prominent female MPs and members of cabinet. Their track record on LGBT rights is also commendable (civil unions, anyone?). Unfortunately, hailing the fact that so many women are now on minimum wage doesn’t really cut it as a feminist triumph; their vague gestures towards ‘cultural change’ appear completely unsubstantiated; and their re-election after the expenses scandal/illegal war/creation of spin culture is about as likely as hen’s teeth.

Conservatives

Their wesbite says: a great deal more than Labour’s, unfortunately. The Conservatives lay out a 5-point plan on women’s rights, namely women in the workplace, vulnerable women, women in their communities, women and ethnicity, and women in international development, with at least an outline of relevant policy. There is also a link to the Conservatives’ equal pay campaign.

EYS says: David Cameron has certainly paid someone to tick the right boxes. The Conservatives have a rather odd relationship to women’s rights, their social policies being traditionally an unlikely refuge of the feminist, but being at the same time the only party to produce a female prime minister. It’s also noteworthy that the Tories have repeatedly voted against equal rights for lesbian mothers, which suggests there’s still a wolf lurking amongst the shiny new paddock.

Liberal Democrats

Their website says: nothing about women that I could find on the toolbar. A search on the site for ‘women’ resulted in a page brings back a message saying ‘we’re sorry, but something went wrong’.

EYS hopes: that isn’t their actual policy.

Green Party

Their website says: the most about their vision for the equality of women. In fact, they have a website dedicated to women’s issues in the Green party. Plans for action include increasing the number of women in Westminster and Brussels, as well as ensuring a 40% female presence on the boards of major companies. The Greens would carry out pay audits to monitor and regulate the pay gap, and introduce a ‘citizen’s income’ for women who choose to stay at home and bring up children.

EYS says: an impressive amount of detail, but much depends on your opinion of positive discrimination. Personally, I’d prefer a society in which companies weren’t forced to hire women to managerial posts; however, it may be worth it purely for the hope that the Daily Mail combusts itself to cinders with rage. Another policy of the Greens which smacks of well-meaning but ultimately misguided liberalism is their controversial plan to decriminalise prostitution; those feminists worth their radical salt will be concerned with the message which this sends out re: the normalisation of rape culture and the commodification of the female body in mainstream society.

I won’t even give the BNP the oxygen of publicity, since they have thieved enough actual oxygen already; suffice to say their London leader has been quoted as saying that rape is “simply sex”, and since “women like sex”, rape is only as bad as “force-feeding someone chocolate cake”. Oh the irony that this bunch of asswipes bang on about deporting ‘foreigners’ back to their ‘home countries’ when clearly they themselves should be returned with all haste back to the Planet of the fucking Apes.

Feminist egg on his foolish face

A certain co-blogger of mine would be far too modest to blog her own moment of feminist triumph, so I presume to relate the tale on her behalf, as a Friday-sized dose of feelgood feminism.

The scene: evening in a busy restaurant, where the Blogger Who Shall Not Be Named works waiting tables when her nose is not firmly lodged in the Renaissance. Zoom in on a table of garrulous wealthy white American males, who have just finished eating.

Blogger who shall not be named: Excuse me, I’m afraid I can’t reach your plate, could you pass it to me please?

Honky alpha male American: (does not respond)

BWSNBN: excuse me…

Honky alpha male American: I’m sorry, I was just thinking about the amazing sex we’re going to have later.

BWSNBN: What, all of you?

(Honky alpha male American turns a satisfying shade of puce at the twin concepts of, like, totally emasculating man-sex AND  being outwitted by a walking vagina)

Sometimes it’s fun to play morons at their own game.

The 2-minute Week in Feminist Grievances

Two main causes for feminist facepalms all round the Eat Your Sherbert towers in the news this week. Firstly, in an appalling move to appease religious fundamentalist godbags and womanhaters in Afghanistan, president Hamid Karzai has signed laws which legalize rape within a marriage, stating that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least “once every four nights” when travelling, unless they are ill. Not content with removing the requirement for sexual consensuality, the bill also tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman’s right to leave the home. Under the law, men would also be given preferential inheritance rights, easier access to divorce, priority in court, and the right to “grant permission” for their wives to seek employment or get a doctor’s appointment.

It is hard from this report to contemplate any way in which they could have more comprehensively shat on the notion of women as human beings; it seems evident that women’s rights are not such an antediluvian topic as Virginia Woolf had optimistically asserted 84 years ago. At least our own uber-enlightened post-medieval society pays lip service to the idea of women as something more than a God-given trinity of sexbot/slave/property. It isn’t by coincidence that our post-medieval society is also a post-religious one.

The second plank of splinterous wood to lodge itself firmly in the feminist eye has been the media treatment of Barack and Michelle Obama. Splashed all across the Independent and the Guardian are reports of Obama’s planet-saving negotiations, key speeches, aims and targets, and opinion piece after analysis after fancy graphic-bedecked charts scrutinizing his role in the moderately successful G20 outcome. Splashed across the same newspapers are columns devoted to the type of cardigan Michelle Obama was wearing, and her choice of shoes. One can only imagine that the Times Women Section had a field day; I personally found the coverage in the Guardian and the Independent too full of patronizing crap for words, so didn’t venture into tabloids/fake broadsheets for fear of unleashing a very portal to hell.

Futuristically speaking… never be afraid

This week’s TOT comes a little later than expected, partly due to forgetting that it was my turn to write, but mostly to the recovery period required from last night’s gig, Yo! Majesty at Cargo in East London. Yo! Majesty are a lesbian hip hop duo, and if that wasn’t the nichest category since ‘feminist electro-punk bands that have featured Kathleen Hanna’, they’re Christian to boot – though riffling through the lyrics book to the CD I bought last night I can’t see much mention, let alone laudation, of a putative Grand Omniscient in songs such as ‘Leather Jacket’ and  ‘Booty Klap’.

The pair hail from Tampa, Florida, and it’s clear that they are accustomed to audiences who express their appreciation of gut-shaking basslines and  precision rapid-fire bullshit-blasting verbiage by means requiring considerably more energy than an on-the-spot shuffling of feet and a nod of the head (not too vigorous, less one’s carefully-coiffed ironic fringe should make contact with one’s half-pint of shandy). The atmosphere of a “fucking karaoke” bar was picked up by the pair repeatedly during the gig, not unfairly given the rivulets of sweat pouring down their faces after numerous displays of “rolling” and general freestyle acts of liberated ass-shakery, including the occasional, quasi-political flash of boob (our minds, we were told, were “not in the space for anything more”).

The audience’s unduly underwhelmed reception aside, the band proved themselves fairly devastating as a live act, with songs like ‘Don’t Let Go’ and ‘Booty Klap’ causing a collective front-row hernia, and levels of bass the effects of which can only be described as ‘vomititious’. The band comprehensively fulfilled their Myspace manifesto of “smashing against the sonic perimeter”, my hearing having only just returned to normal after a day of high-pitched screeching in my head (if I listen hard, I think I can still make out the occasional chorus of “rub your monkey” in amongst the chimes of tinnitus). While an unabashedly sexual pair of angry lesbian rappers may (for shame) stay out of reach of the tastes of the mainstream (I dream of the day when a politician admits to a bit of Yo Maj on their iPod), this should be only the beginning phase of Yo! Majesty’s sonic enlightenment, and ought to be a considerable blast to their arch-enemy “captain misogyny” in the process.

Smashing indeed.

Not Just Cricket

The EYS Bullshit Detector has been going into overdrive this week as the Pope announces condoms make HIV worse, 1 in 6 counsellors in our own back yard think homosexuality should be ‘cured’, and Chris Moyles’ lame homophobic jeerings, and pisstakingly fat wage packet of £600,000 per year are exonerated by the BBC. I eagerly await the figures of exactly how many counsellors think we can be cured of Chris Moyles; however in the mean time, two news events have come to light this week which prima facie have little to do with each other, save for the fact that they both involve women, and it is these seemingly vaguely-related pieces I want to focus on today. For those in possession of attention spans the length of a Paris Hilton jail sentence, I provide a synopsis of my argument, which is as follows: dismissing women as a class as less able or less deserving of respect and attention is the more socially presentable end of the misogynist mindset that perfectly logically leads to the assumption that women can legitimately be killed or forced into suicide. Women don’t deserve this as they are human beings.

I came across this article in the sensationalist ragbag and once-decent paper The Independent by the right-wing commentator and patriarchy coddler Dominic Lawson. Again, for the attention-bereft who may be already thinking of logging back into Facebook to see if anyone’s invited them to do a ‘What Flavour Mini Milk Are You?’ quiz in the last 20 seconds, the summary of the article is this: entitled ‘Well done our women cricketers. Just don’t expect me to watch them’, the article argues that women essentially aren’t any good at cricket, and that “It’s no criticism of women to point out that they are physically incapable of propelling a cricket ball at 90 mph”. Shit as women are, sometimes if one does well on a national level we can overlook her inherent womanness-shitness for the sake of our own jingoistic pride, though of course it won’t match up to the thrilling experience of watching a man: “with the truly exceptional man..there is something extra, a kind of gasping astonishment on our part that such strength and power could be encompassed by a human being at all.” Lawson then goes on to consider for a nanosecond the idea of fair attention for people who represent half of the population, before insinuating that women shouldn’t get too big an idea of themselves. The whole thing is delivered with a level of pomposity which would make Anne Widdecome look like Jim Royle, and ends on a baffling comparison of women to disabled people, apparently legitimatized by the fact that his own daughter has Down’s syndrome.

Two conclusions may be drawn from this sexist pile of ardent cock-worship: one is that, for spurious ‘reasons’ of biology, the commentator, for the purposes of his piece, does not believe women are as valid as men. The second conclusion which one might draw, and which I arrived at after a bout of inner vituperation, is that while the first conclusion may be true, the fact is that it is a belief held by one overprivileged, underenlightened newspaper columnist, and for various expletives’ sake, is only about cricket anyway.

This belief had a diazepamic effect on my addled brain for a time, until I opened the same newspaper a few days later and was greeted with this odious little instalment of cultural misogyny, a news article about the plight of womankind in Turkey. Over there, a recent attempt to crack down on the patriarchal phenomenon of “honour” killings has meant that men, instead of killing their female relations in cold blood for the crime of wanting their autonomy, are now pressurizing them instead to kill themselves. The repugnance of this situation should be obvious to anybody with a braincell or a beating heart. What may be less obvious to some is how entirely propped up this appalling situation is by patriarchal institutions: a father owns his daughter; wishes to trade her off to a new owner via the property-exchanging mechanism of marriage; when she dares to respond with contrary actions or wishes, he destroys his soiled property as it is no longer fit for consumption. The whole system is founded on the idea of woman as commodity, and in the newly-emerging twist, the woman is forced to take patriarchy-sanctioned autonomy and end her own life in tacit acceptance of her worthlessness as damaged goods.

Judging from the comments left on the website at the time of writing this, most people seem to think that, whilst unquestionably barbaric, this phenomenon is really a problem of the Middle East, and nothing of the sort would ever be capable of happening on these fair enlightened post-medieval shores. And it is unquestionably true that the Islamic religion, like any of the main religions, is anathema to women’s status as full human beings. But the difference between a commentator like Dominic Lawson opining that women are less valid and deserving of respect than men and the Turkish patriarchs killing their daughters or forcing them into suicide is merely one of degree, certainly not one of ideology. Once one introduces the notion that women are somehow less fully human than men, one rationalizes that they may then be objectified, commodified, subjugated, and ultimately disposed of when no longer required. The dehumanization of women operates on a spectrum of the barely perceptible (archaic conservative newspaper writer who has clearly had a bit too much cognac with his afternoon pheasant thinks women aren’t as good as men) to the severely critical (man in Turkey thinks killing his daughter is no worse than throwing out an old TV), but let there be no doubt of the continuum. Hence any opinion, medium, or vehicle which attempts to convey women as anything less than human ought to be blasted out of existence with the same aggression you would a malignant tumour.

Now can anyone guess my views on porn?

Riding from Barcelona with Balloons in your Pocket

Three quick tracks off my iPod shuffle for your aural pleasure this week, since Lauren is visiting and I need to be on a bus across town five minutes ago on this snowy, watery night.

Joan as Policewoman – The Ride

When I look at the name of this band (the moniker for the musical outpourings of Joan Wasser), my eyes can’t help but be drawn to that line-up of vowels, the persistent ‘o’s and ‘a’s parading through the consonants like ribbon through straw, each one briefly unremarkable yet cumulatively giving the impression of an uneasy familiarity, like reading about an old school friend in the paper. Wasser’s voice, for me, achieves the same effect, uniting the stuttering piano and meandering drums, and orchestrating the song towards meaning, even if it is couched thick in world-weary repetition. There is still something quite beautiful in the way she opens out the vowel sound of ‘all’ in the chorus like the flowering of complaint into a hymn.

I’m From Barcelona – We’re From Barcelona

This song sounds like it really wanted to be a Macarena, or a Birdie Song, an Agadoo, or a Teensy Weensy Itty Bitty Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, but arrived too late for the era of unselfconscious disco cheese, or, like a gawky indie kid, stood shuffling its feet in the corner while all the other songs earwormed their way into the nation’s cultural wiring. Nonetheless, it is a paen to the same spirit of blazen-glorious naffness and it wants so desperately to make you forget how cool you think you are, and bring out your inner indie drunken uncle for all to see.

Joanna Newsom- Bridges and Balloons (Pocket Remix)

Pocket has been engaged in the dubious practice of taking the classic gentle heartpourings of the indie/folk world and attempting to render them groovable for some time now – previous other subjects have been Cat Power, Of Montreal, and Antony. Some might say this remix of Bridges and Balloons is like taking a hammer to a set of priceless teak drawers in order to make rough paper for the draft of a Dan Brown novel. Some would have a fair point. But this is the nearest you will ever get to Joanna Newsom in clubbable form. One guaranteed to send music connoisseurs into spasms of small-minded delusions of sacrilege (so techincally worth it for that alone).

This is what a feminist in-fight looks like

Having picked a fight last week with an overly easy target, this week’s feminist Thought For The Week comes courtesy of a facebook group of which I am a member, and overall fan; and which I consider generally as a small islet of sane feminist thought amongst the eel-laden bog of misogyny and prejudice that is popular culture. So watch me now, as, taking the gun to my foot, I make the case for it as a feminist offender. The group is called ‘This Is What A Feminist Looks Like’, and, at the time of writing, had a little shy of 24,000 members, male and female, many of whom are active on boards and forums (to put this in perspective, a group called ‘If 500,000 Join This Group I Will Change My Middle Name To Facebook’ has 170,378 members. But that’s a rant for another day).

My problem with this group lies in the wording of its opening apologia:

It’s not about not shaving your legs, staging protests, man-hating, becoming a lesbian, or boycotting anything & everything “feminine.” Being a feminist is about believing that all genders deserve equal opportunity. Period.

I can to some degree comprehend why they feel the need to dispel the stereotype which has risen up around feminism and which has had for its aim trivialising or marginalisation. The aim of the apology is presumably to attract people with little or no previous experience of feminism and persuade them that feminism has something to offer them too; the implications of which being that women and men of all sexualities, appearances, behaviours, etc. are under the same blanket of patriarchy. Feminism thus opened out, the pernicious attempts by the dominant class to restrict feminism to a relatively marginal few are thwarted, and people of all classes, appearances, sexualities, and races are united in the fight for equal rights, multiplying the army by manifold, and getting people involved in and thinking about their own societal rights and interests, and raising the cries of newly-conscious oppressed women until they can no longer be ignored.

All noble intentions, but I can’t help feeling ultimately that statements like the one above, in mixing fallacies and truths about feminism, are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. A closer analysis of the ideas that the group tries instantly to dispel reveals quite a cross-section of activities, ranging from the patently undesirable to the perfectly legitimate. There are few if any feminists who would argue that feminism is about man-hating, for example; we spend a disproportionate amount of our time explaining over and over to people who present this fallacy that what feminists hate is a patriarchal social structure which privileges men at the expense of women, and that we object to the rule of patriarchy, not to each and every single man on this earth (though of course, there are some men who are patriarchy on legs). The man-hating myth is a perfectly untrue stereotype of feminists, which, while far too much time is spent reassuring men that they (dear lord the irony) are not being victimised, does misrepresent feminism and is indeed incompatible with the goals of the ideology.

But examine the remaining items on the list of these feminist stereotypes and you will find that the image which this group seems so keen on exorcising from its very soul is actually the image of a perfectly legitimate feminist. Heaven forfend, for example, that we should ever stage a protest. Mark Thomas makes the indubitable point that no privilege that benefits an oppressed class was ever handed to them willingly; every ounce of progress that minorities have made has been fought for (and yes, women somehow count as a minority, despite being at least half of the world’s population). The perceived need to apologise for the vocality of women and for their willingness to take action can only be a symptom of compliance with a system which expects that women tolerate their lot as an oppressed class. However one may choose to package it, feminism as an ideology is ultimately – and should rightly be seen as – a protest, and a person who chooses to subscribe to it and call themselves a feminist is engaging in a protest of ideology against the patriarchy-addled status quo.

The same idea of apology for non-compliance applies to the question of leg-shaving and retention of ‘feminine’ traits. The fact that they have ‘feminine’ in quotation marks apparently pays ample recognition to the arenas of appearance and behaviour as sexually codified constructions, whilst at the same time reassuring non-feminists that they can retain their socially-programmed beauty codes and fully embrace the anti-patriarchal ideology of feminism. I speak as someone who wears makeup when she goes out, and shaves her legs and other piliferous regions on the blue-moon years she thinks someone will see them. I’m hardly therefore in a position to advocate the rejection of all socially-expected beauty regimes as a sine qua non of true feminism. That doesn’t stop me, though, from holding this up as an ideal, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I have to distance myself from feminists who refuse to concede to societal expectations of them, or even refuse simply to be hypocrites. I rationalise my own double standards by protesting that I want to see more men in makeup, not fewer women – but the idea that purists are the people who have it wrong or are somehow distorting the message of feminism is in itself a prime example of distorted thinking.

As for the denial of compulsory lesbianism, I can again sympathise to an extent with the exasperation of a heterosexual female who wishes to be considered feminist without compromising her own sexual identity; indeed, feminism ought to embrace and acknowledge all sexual preferences, since a woman’s absolute right to bodily autonomy extends to her choice of sexual partner. But by this very same logic, lesbianism ought to be given the same respect and validity as heterosexuality, instead of being held up as an abhorrently grotesque misunderstanding of what it is to be feminist. I attended a debate on feminism at the Oxford Union a few months ago, at which a representative of the Fawcett Society unashamedly railed against the very notion of feminists being lesbians, with the readiness of Judas.

My point has not been to discredit the entire ideology of ‘This Is What A Feminist Looks Like’; for the most part, I find it a refreshingly active and engaging feminist space. My problem is with the wider assumption in certain feminist circles which it exemplifies; namely that lesbians, people who don’t shave their body hair or wear makeup, and those scary active vocal protester-types all somehow need apologising for, or distancing from. These apparently undesired behaviours are all perfectly valid within the logic of feminism; their rejection or reprobation is toxic according to feminist principles (not to mention common sense).* The time has come to stop apologising and to fearlessly defend the stereotype of The Feminist, reclaiming those needlessly-perjorative tropes; as well as accepting and welcoming those who choose to conform more explicitly with what we see as patriarchally-influenced social expectations. This is the challenge for inter-feminist relations. If you agree, I suggest you take your comments to the facebook group, and make your voices heard.

* here is how I would reword their introduction:

It doesn’t have to be about not shaving your legs, though if you do shave your legs you should question why men don’t feel the need to do the same; it fundamentally is a protest, though not always done with shouting and signs; it isn’t about hating men; it’s not about compulsory lesbianism  but nor is it about the heterosexist idea that lesbianism shouldn’t be given the same attention as a culturally dominant sexuality; it is about encouraging the deconstruction of the ‘masculine-feminine’ binary. It is about believing that nobody should be socially, culturally, or physically oppressed on the basis of their sex.

Catchy, no? No. But truer, maybe.

Infortunity Knox

Well, I’ve been keeping (um.. I mean having joint custody of) this blog for nearly a month now and the biggest lesson that I have learnt is that WordPress is a stalker’s heaven. Seriously, this thing not only lets us see exactly how many people have been reading us, but where each and every one of you came from, from wayward googlers looking for fizzy recipes to Rose Polenzani fans (there are lots of you), to private facebook messages. And it plots it all on a nice little graph, pointing out our busiest days and unwittingly creating a popularity contest for most-looked-at post.

Which is all very interesting to geeky blog tech-virgins (i.e. me), but this is, after all, Feminism Friday we’re supposed to be thanking Fuck for. My point is that basically I know, thanks to various maps and diagrams that show facebook to be the number one referrer, that if you’re reading this blog, chances are you know me, and therefore will be able to picture my face in all its ‘half-frozen-with-shock, half-paralysed-with-laughter’ Picasso-like contortional glory when I came across this little turd, dropped from the arse-end of internet religious nutjobism. Called ‘The Monstrious Regiment of Women’ after the tract from 16th-century Protestant Reformer and misogynist John Knox, it’s a documentary that sets out to ‘extoll feminity’ and ‘blast feminism’, going ‘all out to destroy the feminist word view’. And what a pile of ideologically incoherent, logic-dodging load of rancid old wombat wank it really is. I hesitated to give the link so as not to flatter the Gunn brothers into mistaking hits for genuine interest and support for the documentary , but a finer example of antifeminist fruitcake I cannot imagine (though for those of you who complain of easy targets, I would like to point out that as this is my inaugural Thank Fuck It’s Feminism Friday, I’m willing to indulge this kind of thing for comedy value. It’s a once-only deal : there’s enough religion-based misogynist guff on the Internet to keep me blogging for the rest of my days, and I have better things to do. Like watch old French TV shows, and eat creme eggs).

For those of you who prefer not to indulge such people in such iniquitous pursuits, or for those whose feminism/common sense isn’t quite fluent enough to penetrate the sometimes bafflingly thick dialect of TOTAL SHIT in which their argument is mired, I have taken the pains to provide a transcript of the video in bollocks-free language. The video is just a series of short statements from womenz of different ages and backgrounds, all united in their condemnation of Satan’s equal rights. It goes a little something like this.

Phylis Schlafly: The problem with feminism is that it deludes women into thinking that men as a class have at least hitherto enjoyed some sort of unfair socially- and culturally-imposed privilege, and that makes these women so moody. They’ll never get a husband looking so grumpy!

Carol Everett: My very presence in a school (as some kind of pro-abortion worker) caused girls to get pregnant. Which is something that last time I checked, no man could achieve. Perhaps I am in fact the risen Christ. P.s. – all sex leads to pregnancy, just as all eggs lead to omelettes.

Jennie Chancey: The goal of feminism has been to allow mothers to eat their babies. Feminists would rather no-one was a parent, ever, which is just socialist. The state? Don’t even get me started on the state. The state wants to remove our right to live our lives as we choose. Now where was I – oh yes, feminism, dreadful thing, offering women a chance to live their lives as they choose.

F. Carolyn Graglia: Hillary Clinton, having had the chutzpah to simultaneously regurgitate and defecate on the American Dream by only having a single progeny AND carrying on a successful political career, cannot possibly identify with that alien breed of women who also have offspring but stay at home. Having her cake and eating it? Where does she think she is, Western civilisation in the 21st century?

Jane Doe: Women in the military really shouldn’t be allowed. Some of us cry (which obviously the men never do, because they have evolved to have the tear ducts of lizards.. oops, I mean they were created that way), and that makes the men uncomfortable. Some of them raped us, which is horrendous, an attack on our soul – some of us never fully recovered from that (pause – *note this was the one sentence in the whole documentary which required no translation.* – OK, now back into translation mode), which obviously means we shouldn’t be there to begin with, because we got what we asked for, expecting to be treated as humans too, you know?

Stacy McDonald: If you wear a policeman’s uniform, people will think you’re a police officer. If you dress like you belong to a decade that knew electricity, people will think you’re a slut and it’s OK for men to rape you. It is a criminal offence to impersonate a police officer.

Dana Feliciano: Feminists hate children. Society hates children. Anyone who works, they really hate children. I love children. Until they grow up and turn into women.

Dr. Sharon Adams: I have a shelf of books behind me, an academic title, and one of those chiffon scarves that are so hideous you assume I must be too intelligent to require even a sense of taste, and I am here to tell you that learning is bollocks. See all these books behind me? Just spines glued onto a wall of MDF, all of them! The Bible’s the only book you ever need to read, ever!

Three more points about this monstrosity: firstly, the use of classical music in the background to make it sound in any way sophisticated, intellectual, or ‘imbued with the wisdom of the ages’ (that’s not a quote, I just can’t use that phrase without the arm’s length that quote marks provide). Secondly, the all-female line up – what could be better than having a whole cast of WOMEN to decry feminism? Except, check the credits – it’s made by a pair of brothers. Feminism denounced by men by proxy. Genius! And finally, the blatant misunderstanding of the word ‘regiment’, which, in Knox’s work refers to a ‘regime’ or ‘system of government’. Knox was positing the ‘monstrosity’ of a female being able to rule the country. The way the Gunn brothers use it, you would think there was a hoard of two-headed, fanged feminist beasts roaming the land in search of blood and socialism.

We wish!