Mind the Gap

Our feminist friend Sal is setting up a discussion group in Bristol.

There is no official description yet as the aims and objectives will be decided collectively at the first meeting. However, the initial idea behind the group is to create a safe and open space for feminists to discuss what they feel is important. The group is open to men and women. Members do not have to define themsleves as feminist, but should have an interest in feminist issues/gender politics. Hopefully once the group is up and running it will also include activism as one of its main principles.

The first meeting will be held next week on Thursday 4th October from 7-9pm at Cafe Kino on Nine Tree Hill, Stokes Croft, Bristol. Please spread the word

Email: bristolfeministgroup(AT)hotmail(DOT)co(DOT)uk

I was going to do a news roundup, but I figured this deserved its own post. (Besides. I’m sure all you good, fervent feminists have already found your way to today’s G2 women’s section with a lot of prominent feminist books being discussed by a lot of slightly less prominent feminists).

Anyway, getting back to Priyamvada Gopal’s article, it’s hard to know what to quote, because it’s all so right on. But I’d still like to pick out this bit:

The talismanic invocation of women’s equality as the key difference between “us” and “them” is worrying. Apart from the simple hypocrisy of people whose own societies have yet to fully address gender, race and class inequalities, there is a long, dismal history of using the subjection of women to justify cultural condescension and colonial occupation.

Gender inequality is no more inherent to non-western cultures than to European cultures, notwithstanding scriptures and clerics. Like all cultural practices, it is a historical phenomenon subject to human intervention and transformation. Western cultures do not have a monopoly on change. Suggesting that other cultures are inherently and immutably sexist on the basis of select practices and ideologies is no different from claiming that western culture or Christianity is inherently racist because of colonialism or apartheid. Oddly, the same people who defensively insist that racism must be understood in its historical context cannot extend that analysis to gender inequality elsewhere.

This takes me back to my liberal, centrist days, where I was just maybe considering self-applying the S-word but shying away from such a daring, radically political move. Besides, extremist ideas are dangerous, and communism and fascism are actually placed on a circle so they meet and end up being the same thing, and so on. Yet, at the same time, I was really pissed off that my university, the same one May 68 firebrand Daniel Cohn-Bendit had attended, was full of career-oriented drones (as I thought at the time). So I was starting to show an interest in politically radical movements, preferably ones I didn’t have to have an opinion on, and saving newspaper cuttings about the Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi, plus anything to do with feminism, rock’n roll, or modestly-dressed Egyptian Barbie doll alternatives. And yes, I did think Western values like freedom and free-thinking should be spread throughout the world.

I remember thinking even back then – when I thought the current system was all fine and Capitalism was probably best for everyone – that it was odd the way the degree of liberation of women in Muslim countries was measured in how many pairs of nylons they wore, how short their skirts were, whether they wore lipstick, and how many Armani outlets there were in Cairo. Really, was it any surprise that this approach pissed lots of people off? And why was the degree of liberation of these countries measured in terms of how much of their culture they’d thrown away? Wasn’t there a way to liberate the women and not have total theocratic oppression while not necessarily measuring this lack of oppression in Coca Cola and Levi’s sales? Why did women’s liberation entail burning bras and rejecting miniskirts in the West, yet encouraging Egyptian women to wear them? Why was Turkey adopting the Western alphabet and throwing a woman out of parliament for wearing a headscarf considered a good thing?

And now, I still have to wonder, as I did back then: why is “but they mistreat their women terribly” used as an excuse for everything from allowing people to live in poverty, to forbidding your children to associate with them at school (“don’t have an Arab boyfriend because you don’t want your brother to get knifed”), to bombing their home countries into smithereens? Isn’t is quite sobering that a lot of feminist discourse uses the same language for everything from responding to the plight of women in poorer countries (who, you know, are always passive victims, almost as innately as their men are inclined to be patriarchal bastards), to analysing popular culture.

We’ve all grown up with deep-seated prejudices. I know I still have lots of racist reactions, a lot that I grew up with, some due to colonial prejudices that have been going on for generations – only one generation ago, in the 50s and 60s, some of my family lived in Kenya and had a house boy - and some that are due to being worried about appearing racist, which is probably worst of all. Recognising them and admitting them doesn’t make you a racist. Trying to bury them and ignore them might, on the other hand. Why is it that we can reject one prejudice (the assumption that we can’t do maths or fix cars), but often don’t question any of the others? Yes, they’re uncomfortable, but the fact is, we can’t afford to ignore them, especially within feminism, where there are still such deep racial divisions.

This post on body hair is based on one I wrote last year and posted on my personal blog. Since Laura Woodhouse and Zenobia are talking about the subject, I thought I’d repost an updated, expanded version here as a contribution to the general discussion. I agree with both that there are lots of good things to be said for bra burning and hairiness and even more good things to be said for not allowing stupid sterotypes to define your feminism, but I want to say something more on body hair. This is done with the proviso that I don’t think this issue is exactly high on the list of planetary feminist priorities and I doubt the world really needs another body hair post. Having said that, the issue obviously does matter to a lot of woman and keeps returning in certain feminist circles, so I think it’s worth talking a little about why it matters.

Last year I made the decision to stop shaving under my arms. Until that point I’d been one of those women who removes the hair when it’s likely to be visible and doesn’t bother much the rest of the time. But while I see Laura as doing something challenging in the context of her life, in the context of my life, I don’t see myself as doing anything radical for the following reasons.

First, I spent my childhood in a white, middle-class bohemian hippy community where a woman who removed her body hair would have been an anomaly. My hippy mother never encouraged me to remove body hair and I only started shaving in my teens after encountering heavy peer pressure at school. When I was a child I regarded female hairiness as completely normal and even idealised as “natural.” Of course, I now know it had nothing to do with “natural” (a word I’ve come to deeply distrust) and everything to do with “political.” Even less acknowledged was the fact that it had a great deal to do with economic and class privilege. Ok, so my childhood probably made it easier for me to reject certain beauty practices than it is for a lot of young women, but did the women’s hairiness really indicate more than usual freedom from patriarchy? No, I don’t think it did because the hairness was the patriarchal beauty standard in that community and men expected their women to be natural. In the context in which they lived, those women were just as “patriarchally approved” as (some people might argue) are women who wear lipstick to make themselves more attractive to men. After a few years, most of the families found they couldn’t make a living off the land, so the men drifted back into paid employment while the women often ended up at home manning the small holdings and adding unpaid farm labour to their load of unpaid domestic labour in the home. If they did paid employment, though, they usually had educational advantages that enabled them to choose alternative jobs where kaftans and hairy legs wouldn’t result in harassment. I suppose the point I’m making here is that I don’t think any self-presentation is inherently feminist, or radical, or free from the possibility of patriarchal co-option.

Second, I’ve now reached a stage in my life at which I’m privileged enough to be able to choose employment where my appearance is not much of an issue; I’m safe to be out at work and not under pressure to conform to feminine beauty practices. This is an enormous priveilege and I don’t take it for granted. There are many working-class and middle-class jobs in which female self-presentation is very much an issue and women are not at all free to dress how they please, or display body hair. This is why I find the feminist debate about whether or not women should remove body hair in order to be “good” feminsts extremely problematic. It’s one of those debates (is it just me, or are there ever more of them these days?) that seems dangerously cut off from the lived reality of most women. I mean, tell a woman who works as a receptionist for a smart hotel, or a female flight attendant, that she should stop wearing makeup and grow her underarm hair so that it sprouts out of her short sleeved blouse and see what she says. I doubt it would be an option.

Third, because I mostly socialise with other feminists and lesbians, being hairy is unlikely to have dire social consequences for me. In fact, I’m more likely to receive admiration than censure and I don’t have to deal with certain social pressures experienced by feminine heterosexual women. When I stopped shaving I was aware that although the decision rendered me a nonconformist on one level, at the same time, I was simply conforming to norms and ideals I find preferable. I’m not using “conformity” as a pejorative here; we all conform to the norms of the groups we identify with, but I do think it’s important to be aware that what we do is done within a specific context and never only for ourselves. Sure, lesbian attitudes to depilation do vary, but it’s generally viewed as a question for consideration rather than a given. Some lesbians wear their refusal to remove body hair as a badge of pride and sexiness, although not always for the same reasons — there is a difference between not shaving because you are a feminist and not shaving because you are butch, for instance. As Zenobia noted in her post, in some groups, it really isn’t the thing to do and if you do remove body hair you may find yourself being interrogated and disciplined for doing so: “Are you sure you’re a lesbian/feminist?”

This might all seem like a very long roundabout way of saying “context matters,” but I’m bothered by feminist debates on beauty practices in general because I think the incitement to women to police and discipline each others’ gender performance is so deeply embedded that it rarely vanishes from feminist spaces; it is more likely to take on another face and may even become constructed as feminist behaviour. If the end result is simply to install a new set of feminist anti-beauty standards to which we expect women to conform, then we won’t have made any progress. We’ll just have inverted the system and set up a new hierarchy in which some women are viewed as “better” than others.

*Have changed the title because the other one was crap. Not sure this is much better but hey.

I don’t generally blog on week ends, but Laura Woodhouse has a cool post on body hair over at The F-Word, and I just have to applaud the following quote:

All I would perhaps ask is that those who seek so desperately to separate themselves - and the movement - from the hairy feminist stereotype consider why some of us do see being hairy as an important act, both personal and political, and, rather than rushing to condemn those crazy second wave man-haters, refuse to allow patriarchal mocking of feminism to be used as a basis for feminist identity, because trying to distance ourselves from the sneering that underlies that stereotype gives it as much credence as my hairy legs supposedly do.

I couldn’t agree more. I don’t understand why, exactly, we’re always desperate to distance ourselves from those parts of second-wave feminism. Why reject the hairy legs, practical clothes and bra-burning? What’s so wrong about burning bras that we want to pretend it never happened? Seriously, I never got that.

One of my first exposures to feminism was the BBC’s People’s Century documentary, where they interviewed various women who’d belonged to women’s movements at the time. I particularly remember this Dutch woman who clearly hadn’t seen a bra for about thirty years, and I thought that was really cool. I also think it’s cool when people decide not to shave, as well. I think you should be allowed to do whatever the hell you want with what little body hair you have.

What does strike me, though, is that in some circles it’s considered extremely correct for a woman not to shave her legs. How hirsute you are is often a measure of how committed a feminist you are, and possibly how much you are able to accept your natural female body, or whether you still have “patriarchal” hang-ups. Obviously, I have a bit of a problem with that.

On a general level, I have a problem with rejecting beauty practices on the grounds that they’re not natural. I can agree with it to a certain extent when it’s about rejecting gender conventions. But in that case, how come women have to reject a whole bunch of stuff, while men get to wear make-up, wear smart clothes, and carve their facial hair into strange and unusual patterns, and that’s a political gesture too? Why would I be obliged to give up, in effect, having a sense of style, while men making the same political statement about gender get to swipe my jewellery and make-up, and get some kind of political cred for it?

Besides, the choices we make regarding our physical appearance are always cultural, even the choice not to shave, particularly if they’re a fuck you to something called “patriarchal beauty standards“. Presumably you still cut your hair and wear clothes. Actually, I recently shocked a hairdressing salon sales rep in the town centre with the information that I hadn’t had a haircut in over a year. They have a fiendish ploy for stopping people in the streets: no clipboard! So you think they’re asking for directions! Anyway, she was shocked, shocked! Although I think she was trying to shock me all the way to the hairdressing salon she was advertising, by making me feel extraterrestrial, for a/ not cutting my hair and b/ not unequivocally enjoying being pampered. The thing is, my long, flowing locks, gnarly and split-ended though they may be, are supposed to be “patriarchy-pleasing”, particularly as I wear them down most of the time. Evidently, the beauty industry would beg to differ.

On the whole though, I do applaud the decision not to shave as a fuck-you to the beauty industry, or as a way of coming to terms with the fact that, yes, it’s okay that stuff sprouts out of your body. But it’s a gesture that’s only really available to those who don’t need to have jobs, for whatever reason. But I think there’s a lot more to gender performance than that. There’s a whole set of body language, there’s the way you talk, even what you might choose to order in a restaurant… a bit of red stuff smeared on your lips isn’t going to make much difference to that, in the long run.

I’d also like to say that I always find the stereotype about French women not shaving particularly hilarious. When I was in high school, it was frowned upon to shave, but that’s because most people waxed, or used hair-removing cream, or these machines that pluck the hair out of your legs. If you admitted to shaving, you’d get horrified cries of “What??! But the hair will grown back all thick and gnarly, and you will look like a lady-baboon!“ Seriously, do you think a woman could keep a job showing visitors round Le Salon de l’Automobile for more than ten minutes if her sheer stockings were doubling as hair nets? And even outside of the hostess business, seriously, French women de-hair just as much as British ones. Don’t believe anything Richard Littlejohn would tell you on the subject.

And finally, to end this rather meandering post, a little reminder about such expressions as “patriarchy-pleasing“ and “patriarchal beauty standards“:

PATRIARCHY DON’T WORK THAT WAY

There are a couple of Guardian articles I’d like to discuss, that appeared yesterday and today. They’re actually helping me see exactly the problem I’m having with a lot of vaguely feminist discourse on sexuality lately.

I’m saying “vaguely”, because the first article concerns a new ITV2 drama (ITV don’t go in for feminism much) based on the blog of a high-class sex worker. The article is actually pretty well-done, in that it contains lots of different points of view, ranging from Professor Liz Kelly (who seems kind of discouraged that anyone would find the drama feminist, and makes an interesting comparison with the 1969 Catherine Deneuve movie of the same name) to Martin Daubney, editor of Loaded, who seems to think it’s a very feminist “women on top” type fantasy that has no bearing on reality. Contributors are also eager to point out that this film doesn’t reflect the reality of life for most sex workers. I have a huge problem with this debate in general. It’s something that’s been bothering me about a number of stories lately actually, from that one about the Muslim woman in the five-piece swimsuit (online debate assumed she was an uneducated third-world woman and didn’t realise she was a highly-qualified professional), the diplomat who got chucked out of a hotel because they thought she was a pauper, and now this debate with the sex workers. There’s a palpable sense of offended pride (from the authors of articles rather than the subjects themselves), and it’s not clear sometimes whether it’s righteous indignation over the stereotypes, or just indignation that a middle-class person was mistaken for a pauper. But that’s a whole other post. In the context of this post, I think the media and feminists alike are placing so much importance on the question of whether selling your body to men or posing for nudie pics marketed to men can be empowering for women, it’s starting to get silly. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be addressed, but it’s getting to the point where the sheer amount of time devoted to the question is more revealing than anything anyone has to say about it.

Now let’s move on to today’s article, which, contrary to the previous one, is about abstinence movements – i.e. the desire not to have sex with men, sell your body to men, or possibly even pose for nudie pics to be sold to men. It sums up the various religious abstinence movements like the Silver Ring Thing and True Love Waits – which are far from new, by the way, I had a friend in uni whose parents worked for an American missionary organisation and she had True Love Waits posters on her walls back in 1995. The idea that abstinence can be cool and hip is nothing new to Christian organisations either – my friend’s brother had this pair of flared jeans with the words “NO SEX” printed in big white letters on the cuffs, neatly channelling the cool coefficient of the word “sex” while promoting abstinence. If you want to read incredibly degrading stories about sex and pregnancy, head over to Christian teen girls’ magazine Brio magazine and go to the “fiction fix” section (in passing, note the cool, funky, hip image – not that George Clinton would be down with it, but you get my point).

In this article, however, the author has found a secular group of abstinent women, who have either left abusive relationships, or just got bored of promiscuity. Well, this being the Guardian, they’ve found this incredibly cutting-edge, underground group of youths, who are apparently highly rock’n roll (they do alcohol and drugs), and membership is invitation only. There is talk of becoming independent from your sexual urges, and no longer addicted to male bodies (because depending on men is what sex is all about).

I don’t know if the Guardian meant to run those two articles one after the other because they explore opposite facets of the same question, or if they genuinely think this is the crux of feminism and women’s sexuality in general. If the latter, they are presenting a depressingly narrow version of women’s sexuality. So now to roll my sleeves up and examine this closely.

First of all, both of these articles basically focus on heterosexual relationships as something essentially exploitative, whether it’s a business transaction or a physical addiction. Both are actually about women distancing themselves from sex, as a way to break off their dependence on men. Men themselves are largely disembodied wallets with cheekbones in the first article, and in the second, just headless bodies with possibly a faint whiff of aftershave and a gelled hairstyle hovering somewhere above them, surrounded with a vague cloud of oppression.

This goes beyond mere heterocentrism, representing sex as nothing but an oppressive power relation between men and women, usually with the men in the role of the oppressor. While that probably happens (although often it’s not that simple), the only alternative, presented as a kind of feminist resistance, is to distance yourself from men altogether, and be either a virgin or a whore (phooey, where have I heard that one before?). Even Hannah in the first article is only in control of the situation by distancing herself from men and treating them as business transactions and a possible source of physical pleasure. Sure, those are possibilities. But what about all the others? And where’s the effort to build better relationships between men and women, and maybe a more open discussion of gender and sexuality? Because that’s the other problem – by treating these choices as merely political gestures of defiance, there’s a huge risk of ignoring the more complex issues at their heart, and of inhibiting open dialogue on these subjects even further.

Besides, both views of sexuality are insultingly oversimplified. Personally, I’ve never been wined and dined by a man, or fucked impersonally for my own gratification (or business gain), or been celibate for political reasons. I’ve also never felt 100% heterosexual, or 100% lesbian, or precisely 50% of both, or completely masculine or feminine. It’s good to discuss those possibilities, but could it please not be at the exclusion of everything else?

I meant to post this a bit earlier, in case someone wants to go to the actual workshop – check the link at the bottom if you’re interested. Anyway, the text provides an interesting insight into the discussion of migration, trafficking, domestic work, sex work, and so on, and into the kind of methods we might possibly want to avoid when tackling the problem.

>Moving gender @ No Border Camp - Gatwick 2007

What kind of alliances do we need to create in order
to shift the terms of this debate, in particular in feminist politics and in the left, and in order to fight the stigmatisation we experience in the wider society?

More information at No Borders

The 45th Carnival of Feminists is up at Feminist Philosophers.

Enjoy!

I’ve got a question about an idea I’ve been seeing around a lot of feminist blogs lately. Well, slightly more than a question: a peeve. Nothing huge, mind you, and I’m mainly curious as to why it happens.

Specifically, why do we still consider celebrities to be objectively more beautiful than the rest of us? Why is it, in the wake of the earth-shatteringly important Britney-bashing that has been wearing holes in the planetary ozone layer recently, that people leap to her defence by saying “She’s still more beautiful than 99% of us”? Actually, scratch blogs, I’ve noticed that in real life too, when someone’s being criticised by the press for being ugly, the defence is always “she’s still more beautiful than most of us”?

I’m going to be hideously objectifying for a minute here, just in the interests of empirical observation. I seriously hardly ever think “nice specimen” when I’m looking through celebrity mags, and I’m talking about the glossy pictures here, not the ones with evil red rings around the hideous cellulite growths (which, to be honest, tend not to be the most arousing photographic material).Whereas walking around the streets, it’s a different matter.

The mystifying thing is, there is no way to tell what famous people really look like, unless you happen to be anywhere near a red carpet. Or rather, let’s say it’s comparatively incredibly rare to catch a glimpse of a celebrity. We mainly see them in the form of the aforementioned glossy shots, or on film, or else on the aforementioned “candid” shots with evil red rings round their various flaws. Even if there was such a thing as objective beauty, it would be impossible to tell whether they conformed or not.

Annoyingly, physical appearance is pretty much all we have to go by in terms of celebrities. You’re not going to defend Britney by saying she’s got a lovely personality – who could possibly know? You couldn’t say her looks don’t matter and it’s the inside that counts, because actually in her line of work the opposite is true. And anyway, those are both widely accepted euphemisms for “She’s hideous”, and would be taken as such. No, the thing to defuse here is the importance of whether Britney Spears is beautiful or not, in the wider scheme of things.

After all, celebrities largely don’t exist. Obviously, there’s a person out there somewhere who gets up in the morning, cleans her teeth, looks in the mirror, and goes “fuck, I’m Britney Spears”. But the Britney Spears who’s floating around the ether and who we’re actually conscious of isn’t so much a person as a set of pictures, narratives, and fantasies. And that’s largely what celebrities are – fantasies. So no, they aren’t automatically more beautiful than 99% of us.

In a way, it just shows how deeply-rooted celebrity culture is. I’ve never actually heard someone say “oh, she’s more beautiful than the rest of us anyway” as a thought-out argument. It mostly just comes out. It’s worrying, because celebrity culture is very divisive – I know (or rather, “know”) stuff about Brad and Angelina that I don’t know about my next door neighbours. At a time when celebrity culture is actually beginning to adopt feminism as a kind of fashion accessory and selling point, it’s more important than ever not to let any divisive factors come between us. And is it really solidarity we feel towards Britney when people call her fat? I’m not really sure about my own feelings here. I don’t see why I should feel solidarity towards her because she’s a woman. Or rather, I don’t know why I should feel more solidarity towards her than anyone else. In fact, when I look at Britney, I don’t feel anything like that, if I’m honest, I feel a little contempt, a lot of pity, and the familiar sting of the “yakking about opinions” part of my brain saying “Oi! Blog about this!”.

In fact, the thing that often prevents feminists from working together, more often than not, isn’t differences of opinion, it’s the other, more deep-seated stuff that traditionally keeps women separate, that has been causing tiffs among housewives and gossip in the staff canteen. Residual celebrity-worship disguised as feminism is definitely not going to help this.

…heute auf Deutsch? Das ist ein ziemlich ungewöhnliches Phänomen.

Anyone else getting snippets of German in Blogger today?

Just me? Oh well. Must be the Haribo.