Mind the Gap

Clothes are a bit of a contentious issue among feminists, potentially embodying the feminine ideals we’d mostly like to avoid. They’re also supposed to cause us, as women, to behave like ravenous beasts. And they’re the main form of retail therapy.

But all that’s doing them an injustice. Personally, I quite like clothes. They’re not a means of expression on a par with music or writing, but contrary to appearances, I like to look stylish.

But I really hate clothes shopping, for various reasons. For one, shopping for pleasure embodies everything I’m against. I’m usually thinking of all the people I admire for their approach to style and presentation. Patti Smith does not get those amazing scruffy jackets in Top Shop. Katrin from The Ex, as a liberal socialist, certainly wouldn’t go there, and Lorax from the Melvins would never find her tights, baggy shorts and upside-down cat combo there either. What Would Crass Do (WWCD)? Indisputably, the answer is “not shop at H&M”. I shouldn’t either, and mostly I don’t, but occasionally I need a couple of non-second-hand things, and I’m not even getting the illusion of a choice, between a bunch of virtually identical shops, all belonging to two or three people who have monopolised the market. Dorothy Perkins has the advantage of offering generic clothes in petite, medium and tall, which is positively Maoist in the world of high street retail. But everything’s, like, £30, which is about six times my budget.

So necessity dictates a trip to H&M. Once I get inside, of course, there are other problems, and sizeable ones too. For one, my DNA starts to morph and I can feel myself being forced to turn into this sort of pink, fluffy creature that’s little more than a set of curves with an inane, slightly anxious smile. The voice of Devo’s Boogie Boy goes through my head: that’s right, we’re all de-evolved. We’re pinheads now, we’re pinheads all.

As I drag my hideously mutated form over to the sale racks (can’t possibly afford anything else, even if I wanted to spend my hard-earned cash on something that’s a compromise between Kate Moss’s take on femininity and something cool I saw on a Smiths album sleeve), it comes to my attention that I have the shape and appearance of the hairy potatoes sprouting at the back of my cupboard, a feeling that is compounded by trying on a couple of size 12 shirts and finding that I would need to dislocate both my shoulders to fit inside them properly. I browse through the equally hideously mutated offerings in the shop: sack-like shiny things, something that was once a purple T-shirt, trousers with hideous disfigurations on the cuffs, shirts that are all transparent and have huge, inexplicable flaps over the bum area (for jumping safely out of planes?). Nothing looks like it would survive more than one or two washes. The speakers blast hymns to post-feminist empowerment: “Come on everybody look at me, me!”. Everything is about £8.99 more than I want to spend on such rubbish, even when it’s only £4.99.

I’ve strayed into a parallel dimension, where Marc Jacobs invented grunge, nothing existed before Sir Philip Green or his friends discovered it (or Coco Chanel created it in seven days), and what price you pay for clothes, and how ethically they’re made, is purely a matter of consumer choice –go elsewhere if you want ethical, because everything in H&M is made in countries with virtually no labour rights. All the shop assistants would fit inside one of Victoria Beckham’s handbags, and have been chosen for their tiny bone structure. It’s like their job interviews took place in a gingerbread house made out of handbags and belts, and a warty-nosed HR harridan walked up to them, felt the tops of their arms, and said “yes, you’ll do, into the pot with you”, and they woke up behind the till in H&M.

Even if I wanted to feel at home in one of these shops, which I don’t because they kill off all the small business in town and are equally unscrupulous about the rights of their employees, everything about them is designed to make you uncomfortable. To feel comfortable in there, you would have to be some kind of fembot, possibly shooting deadly “sassy” missiles from your jutting hip bones. If you can afford to shop at Topshop or M&S, you’re presumed to care about ethics and there are some fair-trade products available, albeit as a consumer choice. If you’re one of the lowly mass of potato-mutants who can’t, you don’t even have that choice: you have to shop at Hades, also known as Primark, along with Tesco one of the most famously unethical shops in the country.

So basically, I mostly shop at charity shops: the money goes to Oxfam rather than towards Philip Green’s next yacht or set of golden toothpicks, I get fabulous designer tunics and coats from Warehouse for £3.50. So everyone’s happy, right? But where’s the craftsmanship? Most stuff in there is still from George at Asda or New Look. Clothing is a fairly basic necessity, so why is it treated as a consumer choice? And when I buy a pair of trousers, why does it come with its own disembodied personality that latches onto mine like a parasite? A more immediate question that springs to mind is: how can I put these bastards out of business?

As recently posted at The F-Word, there has been a study carried out in Sweden, the results of which suggest that gender equality puts you at greater risk of getting all kinds of nasties such as cancer, chronic getting-raped syndrome, bees in the rectum, and weird growths shaped like cows.

Zoe Williams has tackled the issue in today’s Guardian.

She makes the point that the study, and a lot of other anti-feminist rhetoric doesn’t seem to portray men in a very good light either: childish, needing to be praised, constantly in danger of emasculation. This is interesting because women are often portrayed as man-hating, but I have often noticed myself that it’s in the least equal relationships that women constantly belittle their men and vice-versa, you get inane “girlpower vs boypower” debates. I’ve noticed this especially in born-again Christian households, where the women actually believe they have to obey their men the way the Church obeys God. The men may be all powerful and strong and wise, but they’re also just little boys at heart that practically need spoon-feeding and their nappies changing.

Whereas, as Zoe Williams puts it:

“As a feminist, might I say that we don’t hate men. We believe all humanity to be as capable of greatness as the generosity of its nature and scope of its imagination will allow; this is why we don’t pretend to be scared of spiders and/or in the throes of an orgasm, unless we are, genuinely, scared of spiders and/or in the throes of an orgasm.”

This also highlights the lack of self-respect and basic fear at the heart of most forms of oppression.

Anyway, I thought it deserved a mention, as I don’t often agree with the Guardian or Zoe Williams on these things.

We’re still feeling the affects and modern day slavery is thriving.

Actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armach has a good piece in the Guardian online: From Ian to Kwame - Why Slavery Made me Change my Name.

Lots of tea required for this one.

We agreed that these magazines are all about fantasy and the fantasies promoted and endorsed as mainstream and acceptable tell us a lot about where we’re at in terms of attitudes to women in British society. In the case of Nuts and Loaded, the fantasy reiterates a vision of perpetual willing female availability to men. The women are represented as non-threatening, largely unambitious (unless it’s an ambition which involves pleasing men, ie. becoming a glamour model) and aspiring to the same narrow feminine ideal. They are generally implied to be “gagging for it” and eternally delighted to strip off for male pleasure. The poses are repetitive, drawn from harder core pornography, but largely dumbed down to breasts, bums and girl on girl stuff. All the women are represented as having basically the same personality, even down to a limited range of facial expressions: “They’re all the same woman!” cried someone about halfway through the meeting. As sexual fantasy goes, it’s narrow, unimaginative and dull. We soon found ourselves bored by the endless smiling and pouting women with their breasts. “But who are these women?” someone said in frustration. Obviously these women are complex individuals in real life, but in the fantasy world of happy, sexually available, young white women, the lads mags seem to present a general flight from “reality” and the actuality of women and female sexuality on all sorts of levels.

The construction of female reality is interesting because Nuts, Zoo and Loaded repeatedly claim to be offering images of “real girls” as a marketing ploy — that is women who aren’t professional models or celebrities. I guess presenting some women as “real” creates a fantasy of attainability for male readers, but it’s interesting to think about what this narrative is doing. All women are real. A glamour model is as real as a woman taking a digital picture of herself in her bedroom and a lot of the women sending in their images seem to be aspiring glamour models anyway. The few who are picked out for a centerfold in the magazine then have their digitally enhanced images lauded as “real.” Women putting themselves up for male judgement and approval is an important part of the narrative: they are asked to send in their pictures from which the “best” will be selected for rewards (more pictures in the magazine and a possible career break).

We agreed that the prevalence of girl on girl imagery is really about defusing the threat of lesbianism. When you take a couple of heterosexual women and get them to dally in a little performance of lesbianism while inviting men to join in, lesbian sexuality is represented as unreal and therefore not a threat to men; it’s nothing, it’s just a performance.

Ok, so while there’s plenty to get angry about in terms of the narrative, there’s nothing new to see here. It’s old and very conservative. In fact it was the conservatism of the narrative that struck us most strongly. The women may not be wearing many clothes and may be represented as sexually active, but what we really seem to have is the old narrative that says:

Women should please men;
Women are sexually available to men;
Sexy women should really be white women;
Women have certain roles; men have certain roles;
Women are not at all complex or scary;

Of course it’s framed with a rhetoric of female empowerment, but that’s not really new either. Women have long been told that pleasing men is good for them too, from middle-class women in the 1950s told that being a good housewife was the best thing for them, to the young women being told it’s empowering to get up on a bed in a nightclub and do “sex moves” for the Nuts photographer. I’m sure a lot of the women who send in their pictures do experience a sense of empowerment and they may reap certain rewards if chosen, but as ever, we need to look at the way in which female empowerment is being constructed, for what reasons, and for whose ultimate benefit. Where the lads’ mags phenomenon has been most devious is perhaps in the appropriation of women’s liberation rhetoric to present a conservative and old fashioned narrative about sexuality and gender as a sort of feminism.

Loaded takes it up a notch with the inclusion of a 3D breast extravaganza. Strangely the packet included two pars of 3D specs. Hmmm.

Resistance?

It’s easy to discuss the problems; it’s not so easy to come up with feasible solutions. Here we entered the most fraught part of the meeting as the group divided into those who thought some kind of regulation and censorship was in order and those who were against censorship and thought other kinds of resistance should be explored. This division was also between people who see the magazines as largely symptomatic of a misogynistic society, in which case it’s the deeper issue of misogyny that needs to be prioritized, and those who see them as causing immediate problems, in which case something should be done about them now. As you can imagine, this resulted in a bit of a circular going nowhere kind of argument.

We did agree that engaging in moralistic arguments is to be avoided at all costs. It’s very easy to slip into “think of the children” rhetoric, but we felt this to be a bad move for various reasons. On a simple level, we’re not objecting to nudity or the representation of sexuality in itself, we’re objecting to the specifically sexist and objectifying narrative constructed in the this media and, as such, this is a political argument.

Some people thought the best form of resistance would be the perpetuation of alternative narratives and images because the problem is that the lads’ mags are currently dictating without any serious alternatives being offered anywhere. Perhaps the crux of the problem is the failure of feminism (a failure that has occurred for all sorts of reasons) to offer the mainstream any widely available alternative images and narratives. I’m hoping we might come up with some ideas for resistance at the next meeting when everyone’s had a chance to think it over.

People laugh when I arrive with my trusty role of flip chart paper, but they don’t laugh for long.

If you were at the meeting and I’ve left anything out, please put it in the comments.

Priyamvada Gopal has a really good article in the Guardian looking at the issue of race and the concept of “reasonable force” in relation to the recent footage of a Yorkshire Policeman beating a young black woman who was resisting arrest, while being backed up by 3 other officers and a Police dog. No one wants to talk about race in this case although, as Gopal observes, it’s difficult to imagine a petite middle-class white woman being beaten up like this.

Much to my frustration, I cannot get the UTube post to your blog thing to work, so I’ll have to give you the link if you want to watch the video here.

Sixteen years after an amateur video of a black man being beaten by cops in Los Angeles flickered across our television screens and triggered terrible riots, we recalled the images vividly as we saw CCTV footage last week of a slight black woman surrounded by four burly men and a police dog straining at its leash, being hammered into the ground by blow after blow.

This time the story - featured mainly in this newspaper and in a BBC Newsnight report - was studiously cold-shouldered by most of the mainstream media. Petty crime or terrorism, went the consensus, the police had to get on with the job. Only sensationalists would compare this beating to the infamous Rodney King episode or the 1997 California shooting of Tyisha Miller, a black woman sitting unconscious in her car. A swift burial of the story took place, although the incident itself has gone on to the Independent Police Complaints Commission for investigation.

We can agree that behind each image lies a unique story, and that Rodney King in 1991 and Toni Comer in 2006 should not be folded into the same narrative. We can acknowledge that police officers work in a dangerous job in difficult times and must be in a position to ensure their own safety and that of others. Not every picture of a white police officer forcefully apprehending a black suspect, even one as fragile as Comer, is an iconic image of racism. Indeed, Comer, who was 19 at the time of the incident last July, has herself steadfastly refused to play the so-called race card, and her complaint to the IPCC is of excessive force, not racism. She is not speaking as a “black woman”.

Still, it remains difficult to imagine a petite middle-class white woman being beaten like this, or that so shocking an image would be played down by the media. Iconic pictures of white women tend to tell stories of victimisation by vicious crime (Abigail Witchalls) or capture-and-rescue (the photogenic Jessica Lynch, not Shoshana Johnson, the black woman soldier also taken captive in Iraq). When the pictures from Abu Ghraib emerged, the shock of seeing a white woman engaged in torture was diffused by a spurious class logic that dismissed Lynndie England as “white trash”.

Ms Comer was drunk, disorderly and culpable of criminal damage. She was also committing that unpardonable female offence, “ball-busting”, as she resisted arrest. Perhaps a guy, whether rapist or policeman, has gotta do what a guy’s gotta do, including dragging this young woman to the police van with her trousers around her knees, while she, an epilepsy sufferer, flails and foams at the mouth. It is entirely possible, meanwhile, that PC Anthony Mulhall was, in fact, using “approved techniques” and “reasonable force”.

It’s important stuff. Read the rest: What’s horrific about the use of force is how it’s accepted as reasonable

From the BBC:

Sex slavery widespread in England.

Young women tricked into coming to England, often by boyfriends, are being sold off in auctions at airport coffee shops as soon as they arrive.

They are among the thousands of women brought into the UK to be sex slaves, usually with no idea of their fate.

The trade was one of the findings of a BBC News website investigation into slavery in 21st Century England. As the UK marks 200 years since the Parliamentary Act to abolish the slave trade, slavery goes on in another form.

There are some things I find it incredibly difficult to write about because there don’t seem to be adaquate words available.

The F-Word has a good roundup of articles including some women’s stories which you should read if you can.

If you have any spare cash think about making a donation to the Poppy Project.

The 19th Carnival Against Sexual Violence is up at Abyss2Hope.

From the Guardian:

Black and Asian women are facing significantly greater employment barriers than white women and are “missing” from almost one third of workplaces even in areas with high ethnic minority populations, according to a new report.

A study published today by the Equal Opportunities Commission finds that Pakistani, Bangladeshi and black Caribbean women find it harder than white counterparts to get a job or win promotion, and are more likely to be segregated in certain types of work despite having good qualifications. Such barriers are to blame rather than family or cultural resistance to women working, the report says.

Never mind getting onto the board of directors, women from black, minority and ethnic communities may not even be able to get a job in the first place. Looking back at my own employment history, I’ve worked in 3 all white offices. My current employer does employ quite a lot of black women, but that’s really because black women are one of our client groups, so again the black women workers are relegated to certain areas. The only employer I’ve worked for that did employ a lot of BME women was the retailer Marks & Spencer. Telling, no? I think that last point about culture and family is important because if you raise this issue, you often get responses along the lines of “Well, their families don’t let them work” or “In their culture women probably just get married and stay at home.” I’ve had a white man tell me that asian women hardly ever go out; they just stay at home being oppressed by their men. This is a marvellous excuse for not challenging the racist oppression that keeps BME women out of the workplace, or segregated in certain kinds of work.

Marcella Chester at Abyss2Hope will be hosting the second day to blog against sexual Violence on 5th April.

Do try and take part.

From the BBC, An independent inquiry is to be launched after a charity highlighted six deaths of people with learning disabilities in NHS care.

Mencap’s report says there is widespread ignorance in the NHS which has resulted in “institutional abuse”.

Mencap also says:

the NHS staff who were looking after the six cases may not have consciously discriminated against the patients, but that there is a lack of training and understanding of how to care for people with learning disabilities.

In that case, my first question would be, why are people without appropriate training taking care of people with learning disabilities, when surely it should be taken as read that this job always requires a very high level of training?

The cases look appalling:

• Martin Ryan, 43, who went without food for 26 days while in hospital following a stroke leaving him too weak to undergo surgery. He died in 2005

• Warren Cox, 30, died in 2004 following perforation of the appendix. His parents were told he had a virus

How much training do you need in order to realise that a man with broken leg needs immediate pain relief?

My own feeling is that this neglect, including the neglect of proper training for staff, really reflects cultural attitudes towards people with learning disabilities and mental illness.

Their care is just not a priority.