Mind the Gap

Plenty of people are uncomfortable with the idea of feminism. Obviously, I’m not –I adhere to most of it. Nothing makes me uncomfortable about the idea of feminism, and I’m completely unapologetic about my opinions.

I also think that we should be unapologetic about feminist ideas, completely clear as to their history and where they come from, and that they are feminist ideas. But I sometimes feel uncomfortable about self-applying the feminist label, because I don’t want it to define everything I do –I should remain in control at all times, and not submit to whatever I’m calling myself at that time.

Let me explain – in university, I used to know these missionary kids. I went to stay with them at their house over the half-term holidays once (and thank Christ it wasn’t Easter!), and everything they did was defined by their faith. They prayed before doing absolutely everything: eating, going to the shops, chaining up their bikes, showering, going to bed at night. There were Bible verses in the toilet. If I’d been aware of his work at the time, I would have expected Louis Theroux to pop up at any minute and be disarmingly nice to them. They had Christian alternatives to everything: Christian music, Christian friends, a Christian approach to health-care and cooking. They classified their books as Christian and non-Christian (like, with actual labels on the shelves), and no non-Christian music was allowed in the house. What Christian music was there was often alternatives to specific heathen bands –like Christian rap, Christian death metal, Christian alt rock… In other words, a subculture.

I think I have a problem with the idea of difference and alternatives. Whenever I hear someone talking about a friend who’s “not a feminist, but I’m working on her” I can hear the Missionary Kids discussing a friend or relative they were currently trying to win over to the fold, or saying how they didn’t trust someone because he wasn’t “saved”. And also, how much better their lives got after they were saved, and they made a whole bunch of other Christian friends. I’ve even caught myself using the term “non-feminist” before.

“I was all dressed up in black she was all dressed up in black too
I was looking like an erotic vulture
Subbacultcha!”
-The Pixies

The idea of a subculture is that it offers a haven for people who feel different (often inferior / superior to most people) to shelter from “the drones” or “the randoms” and partake in an alternative lifestyle, dressing in a certain way and doing certain things, and more importantly maybe, deciding against doing certain other things.

The trouble with treating feminism that way is that it deals with something fairly universal: the idea that there is a feminine (socially imposed or otherwise) which negatively impacts on the lives of women, and that we don’t think it should. If you treat that as a subculture the effects are disastrous: what applies to those who don’t belong doesn’t apply to those within the circle, and vice-versa. It also causes feminists to adopt with pride the stereotypes that are applied to them, leading to endless discussions of haircuts, clothes and leg-shavery. In the end, it’s just another bumper sticker, even if you actually tattoo it to your arse-cheek and wear only trousers with holes in the right place (which, by the way, would be considered very radical-chic).

In any case, this climate is not conducive to the cross-fertilisation of ideas: that doesn’t happen too much in a closed environment where intruders are swatted like flies. I’m going to get biblical again (ill-advised, I know, as I’m a relatively Bible-ignorant ignostic): an old Evangelist in the street once told me that a Christian should be in the world but not of the world. Now, I have some fundamental objections to distinguishing between “the world” and feminism, which is hugely artificial and implies that we’re separate from the rest of the world. But that would be as detrimental to feminist ideas as it has been to religions which have taken that attitude: in effect, it would completely empty them of all purpose.

And of course, most feminists I know completely agree and don’t treat feminism as a subculture. We don’t spend 1% of the time daring to go out without shaving our legs / whiskers / hairy palms and then spend the other 99% shouting “Wooooooe is me I’m not allowed to be who I am!!!”. That’s because conflict and disagreement are fuel to feminism, and personally, I welcome them.

Feminism is supposed to be against orthodoxy and conservatism: we want to change things for women. This is why we shouldn’t be reactionary. Ideas don’t bite, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Getting back to Louis Theroux, he gets amazing results from the subjects of his documentaries, because he doesn’t go in there all confrontational and treat them like the enemy, he’s polite and inquisitive and generally they like him. Maybe there’s something to learn from that.

As for that labels stuff, well, I guess it’s a quirk of the English language that you can’t describe your ideas without damning the other 90% of your life.

Fron the Guardian.

Ethnic minorities suffer from economic “apartheid” in Britain, race watchdogs have claimed after a study found that two-thirds of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children are living in poverty.

The study, by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, reveals that ethnic minorities suffer twice the level of poverty of white Britons, as discrimination and disadvantage blight their life chances.

Analysing official figures, the foundation found vast differences in child poverty among different groups. One in four white children live in poverty, compared with 74% of Bangladeshi children, 60% of Pakistani children, and 56% of black African children. Even for children of Indian parents, a group thought to be doing well economically, the rate was higher than for whites, with one in three growing up in households with incomes below the government’s definition of poverty.

Kay Hampton, who chairs the Commission for Racial Equality, said: “This research tells us a shocking story, an invisible apartheid separating modern Britain. It is a sad truth that a baby born today will have their future dictated by their race, not their abilities or efforts.”

Don’t forget, Tuesday 1st May is the day to blog against disablism hosted by Goldfish.

A lot of feminists have a slightly conflicted relationship with their kitchens. Possibly this is because a lot of women have a conflicted relationship with their kitchens, having to produce titillating meals day after day for their husbands (“Pasta again, my gentle honey-dove? You’re trying to make me shit my soul out through my very bowels!”) and hordes of broccoli-dodging kids. Generally, cooking is an activity associated with the traditional housewife, spending all day by the cooker with a ball and chain around her ankle, barricaded behind stacks of Cordon Bleu magazine.

So naturally, a lot of feminists have been concerned with getting women out of that hellhole, and into the boardroom. Thanks to these go-getting hellhounds, we eat only astronaut food, our insides are entirely constructed out of pot-noodles, our stomach bacteria have been replaced with microscopic replicas of Snap, Crackle and Pop chanting “Freemasons run the country!”, and our children glow in the dark. Yet other feminists have been concerned with reclaiming traditional female activities such as cooking and sewing for women, arguing that most ready-meals are designed by men (although, how is this possible if boardrooms have been overrun by average working mothers, as we are often told?), plus some stuff about Earth Mothers.

Now, feeding yourself is a pretty basic activity, and there really isn’t any need for it to be gendered at all. Two people or more share a house, you all do your share of the cooking and cleaning, get on with it. There’s no shame in scrubbing a toilet or peeling a potato, in fact it’s a much more laudable activity than sitting up in a boardroom wondering how little you can possibly pay your employees, at the end of the day. At least if you’re cooking a meal, you’re making something and not just shifting capital around. There’s not much wrong with Cordon Bleu magazine either: it’s mostly formidable-looking women in twin sets and pearls teaching you cooking techniques.

I also have some fundamental objections to the idea of women in the boardroom being the ultimate feminist achievement. For me, that’s the same kind of logic that gauges the level of freedom in a country by how many miniskirts and lipsticks its women consume: if their middle classes are buying nylons and hair conditioner, they must be liberated. You’d imagine that, by that logic, shifting around huge amounts of capital would be the ultimate in empowerment.

But then again, the image of the housewife is largely a capitalist construct too: we mainly get it from advertising and magazines, just like the idea of the domestic goddess creating these miraculous dishes in her kitchen. Roland Barthes has an essay in Mythologies (and I don’t have the book to hand so can’t quote) about the cookery pages in women’s magazines, where he remarks that the ones aimed a lower-class women are always considerably more lavish than the others, because they can’t afford most food anyway, so it’s just for them to look at, whereas the more middle-class magazines will offer more accessible dishes. This was back in 1957, but it’s still largely true today, which is why we have big glossy cookbooks and celebrity chefs.

But it’s interesting to note that, as soon as cooking starts to look like walking into a museum and nibbling bits of the Mona Lisa, women are considered incapable of it: TV chefs are a good example. On the one hand we have aloof, businesslike Delia Smith telling us how to cook a good souffle, and on the other, these testosterone-driven geniuses, swearing enough to make Shaun Ryder blush, who treat their underlings much like Beethoven treated his maid (apparently he liked to throw eggs at her). That’s right: Mozarts of the kitchen, heroes of the war against poor-quality food, for whom cooking up a roast is, much like battling a horde of hairy barbarians, a physical and mental ordeal.

So really, by shying away from the kitchen and defending our right to ready meals, we’re defining ourselves as a negative image of that whole mythology. And that’s not terribly feminist: Good Housekeeping does it. They have this binary going on where the domestic goddess cares about nothing but her furniture and clothes, whereas the more intellectual woman lives in sloth surrounded by mounds of dirty cups and empty pizza boxes. Really, what’s wrong with keeping a tight ship, being hygienic, knowing how to feed yourself, and reading books? There’s no glory in ignorance of any kind, that’s for sure: in fact, it’s a very middle-class trait to define yourself by what you don’t do, to distinguish yourself from the unenlightened.

We see most work as liberating, from reading and writing to cabinet-making and treating patients. What makes cooking so different? What we need to do is prevent it from being devalued. Nothing is ever innately women’s work: it’s just the fact that women do it that turns it into some kind of lowlife drudgery.

I’ll leave you now with this quote from Ray Smuckles of Achewood:

“Nothing is more old-school than baking your own damn staff of life! A man who can walk into any kitchen in the world and make bread is completely raw!”

There is going to be a speech by one of the Pankhursts in tomorrow’s Guardian. They don’t say which Pankhurst, but then again there’s probably a really famous one that I don’t know because I’m an ignoramus. It certainly beats wallcharts, although a wallchart of suffragettes across the globe would be the ideal “I’m not a feminist in any way whatsoever, also all bears are Catholic and the Pope shits in the woods” interior decoration item.

While we’re at it, marxists.org have a page on Sylvia Pankhurst, including a piece on the force feeding the suffragettes often had to undergo in jail.

They also have an extensive page on Emma Goldman, including her views on women’s suffrage.

While we’re on links, some kind people at a site called History Is A Weapon (haven’t browsed the site, since it doesn’t look too workplace friendly) have uploaded the entirity of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. I had the volume on the 20th century from the library once and it’s a great read, so I highly recommend it. He also has a chapter called The Intimately Oppressed on the condition of women during colonial times, including some interesting comments on the status of women in pre-colonial America.

Happy reading!

Via Black Information Link, a UK petition to get more black history into the educational curriculum.

“ALL children need to learn BLACK HISTORY. We are forced to learn everyone else’s, why not our own … and not the emphasis on the last 500 years of enslavement. Black History did not start with slavery, in fact it ended there. We have thousands of years pre (slavery) history- great civilizations etc, that could and should be taught in schools.”
Kat – Parent and Activist

Please do not waste time, sign the petition today and circulate to your friends so that they too can sign.The NIEC will forward the petition to the DFES on 30th April 2007 along with a formal response on how this could be implemented.

The NIEC represents parents, students, teachers, educationalists and consultants united on the concern of African and Caribbean underachievement in the UK. We would like to see more cultural diversity included in the Curriculum. This should include Black History, which has contributed significantly to world history and its development, not just slavery, but inventions, scientists and literature. We would like to see such cultural diversity embedded in the English, Mathematics and Science curriculums. We think this will have a positive impact on all children’s learning and development in school and give a better understanding and accuracy to the history of the world and its development to date.

More information here.

You can sign the petition here.

Via Blackamazon a must read article from Manal Omar in The Guardian.

Manal Omar had used her five-piece ‘Islamic-style’ swimsuit for years - in Rio, Washington and Kuala Lumpur - and it had never brought her more than a curious glance. Then she went for a dip in Oxford …

And what follows is a very good example of how the media misappropriates feminist rhetoric to other political agendas and uses it against women.

I never know quite what I think of Germaine Greer. In a couple of weeks I’ll probably be shaking my fist at something she’s written, and all signs indicate that she likes people to feel that way. But sometimes, she’s just completely awesome, as in today’s Guardian article on Menopause: The Musical.

She makes a lot of great points which I won’t attempt to paraphrase, even though it’s about time someone mentioned the huge number of older female voluntary workers working in places like arts centres, since they’re so ubiquitous and yet so invisible and taken for granted. But lots of things stood out in the article, such as this little quote:

“We get a version of Rod Stewart’s Hot Legs called - you guessed it - Hot Flush; versions of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive as Stayin’ Awake and Night Fever as Night Sweating; and Aretha Franklin’s Chain of Fools turned into Change of Life, and so on, revealing a creativity level just about where misogynists would expect.”

So often a cultural event comes along that feminists are meant to be applauding and embracing, and in fact it’s so busy trying to make women feel empowered that it’s just complete bullshit otherwise; I feel that way about Peaches for instance, not to single her out or anything but she’s an example that comes to mind.

But the point in the article that stood out was the way we’re supposed to be united in empowerment by our physical symptoms of being female: such as hot flushes for older women, being a total bitch for a week every month, lusting uncontrollably after chocolate… how are these things empowering? It would be understandable if they were taboo. But all of the older women I’ve ever worked with have discussed them completely freely, tropical moments, monthlies, the lot, and most of them were emphatically not feminist in any shape or form.

Now, men have hormonal cycles that affect their moods too, and no one tells them to feel empowered by them. There are shows that could be construed as being about men obsessing metaphorically over their cocks, such as car shows and the like, but never literally, a man fingering his cock and balls and wittering on about it, applying a load of botanical metaphors. Men would generally not have to put up with this kind of thing, and if they did they would not be made to thank the perpetrators, as Ms Greer concludes by suggesting an alternative musical:

“I’m thinking of a moneyspinner called Prostate Pandemonium, starring Michael Parkinson and Peter Stringfellow. Wouldn’t it be empowering to see ageing men living their urinary chaos out loud, being upfront and honest about their humiliations, dressing in purple, high-kicking and wetting themselves? “

Now, I’m thrilled to be equipped with a full complement of female organs, don’t get me wrong. I just don’t see what’s so empowering about letting our organs control us and being proud of it. I’m empowered by things like reading, writing, playing music, socialising, and generally making sure I’m not wasting the few precious years I get to be alive. I notice vague symptoms of my menstrual cycle for about two weeks every month, none of which, by the way, include eating vast amounts of chocolate or being in a strop for no reason, but some of them are mildly annoying. But do I feel a primal urge to sit stark naked under the full moon smearing myself with my bodily secretions, between dashes to the supermarket to stock up on Galaxy bars? Fuck no. I’ll worry about my hormones when I get hairy palms. Until then, I’ll get on with doing stuff, and reading books, and making things.

Oh and by the way, I suggest we track down the perpetrators of such slogans as : “It’s all about me!” and “If you ask me what I came to do in this world I will answer you, I came here to live out loud!”, and inflict severe wedgies upon them.

Via Feminist Nation I find that the excellent anti-racist feminist blogger Devious Diva is being seriously harassed by racists who are trying to intimidate her by revealing her real-life name and identity online.

Show her some support.

Jessica Valenti has an article in the Guardian today, outlining her six-point feminist manifesto.

Although I don’t disagree with anything she said, and in fact applaud all six points, some things are bothering me about the article.

For one thing, there’s the way she treats feminism as primarily a way to have better sex, better friendships, and party a lot, and do a lot of fun activism on the side. Maybe it’s just the way her article’s structured, but she feels the need to mention these things first. Also, she mentions that her friends can fight sexism all day and go clubbing at night, as a way to show that feminists do like fun, honest. Well, I hate clubbing, but I guess it pans out because I shave my legs –I have to, because sometimes I have to wear skirts to work.

I do think that feminism will make things better for all women, in the long run. But in the short term, for a lot of women, calling themselves feminists would actually make things much harder for them. For one thing, Ms Valenti is lucky that writing for feministing.com is her job. That option is not open to the vast majority of women – and the equivalent option would not be available to their male partners either. If you live in a council estate, you can get things chucked at you in the street just for wearing the wrong kind of tracksuit, or for talking with the wrong accent. So calling yourself a feminist is probably a ticket to getting shit in your letterbox, and harrassment whenever you go out to buy milk.

Most employers will not tolerate it either. Try showing up for your job as a sales assistant or receptionist, consistently hairy-legged and not made up, not smiling all the time, and when your boss asks you for coffee, tell him “if you want coffee, find yourself a waiter”. You will probably be sacked within the week.

You will also be ostracised by your co-workers. I recall showing up for a temporary assignment at a dairy, and the first thing I heard was a co-worker talking about how it was fine not to hire women or “pakis”, because the ones have Ramadan which makes them incapable of work because they don’t eat for a month, whereas the others get pregnant and have periods, which makes them unreliable. This was a young man of about nineteen, and all the women in the room were heartily agreeing with him, the older women from the fruit room and the young HR manager. I couldn’t get into an argument with them, because I would have been sent home and it would have jeopardised my ability to cover the rent and bills. Now imagine if I had three kids and was responsible for them too. The issue of women at work is a post to itself really, and certainly goes far beyond equal pay or even maternity issues.

I don’t see why “especially younger women” are concerned by feminism either, I know plenty of older ones who need it equally, and are even less likely to get it (if you can get feminism like you’d get religion or a haircut). The body image stuff is probably even more oppressive once you’re over 35, it’s just less glamorous to talk about, because it involves slightly more wrinkly women, who don’t love their bodies because they have started to develop diabetes and varicose veins, and who largely probably don’t have very groovy opinions.

Also, getting botox is far from being as easy as going down the Spar to buy milk, some people need it medically and can’t get it, it’s only easy if you can pay to get it privately. For the majority of women it’s much easier to buy cigarettes or go to one of the dodgy tanning parlours that seem to have sprung up in most underprivileged parts of cities: it might be interesting to have a look at skin and lung cancer statistics among young women in those areas.

Finally, how can you mention rape without mentioning trafficking and prostitution?

But I don’t want to be ragging on Jessica Valenti too much, as she obviously cares about her work, or she wouldn’t put in the effort to write a book. As I said, I heartily agreed with all six points.

I just think the fact that she doesn’t address any issues that don’t affect middle-class women –although the ones she mentions do affect everyone- will drive away some of the audience she is looking for, because the majority of women will have more immediate concerns, which are also feminist issues.

I can also see that she’s trying hard to make feminism appealing to more women, but I think she’s going about it in the wrong way: she’s taking a defensive stance, despite her allegedly loud, opinionated behaviour, and diluting her ideas by doing that, which means she might as well be jumping up and down madly in the bottom of a well. Yet she’s in a unique position to talk. If she puts the ideas out there undiluted, there are plenty of women who feel that something’s not quite right with their lives who will welcome them. You don’t even need to stick the “feminist” label on them, they stand on their own –and frankly, I’m more interested in seeing women liberated than seeing them call themselves feminists.