women! be afraid!

Women! Be afraid!

An email was sent to everyone at my work today warning women about car jackers and offering self defence techniques.

These included using lifts rather than stairs.
Never offering to help anyone.
Never sitting stationary in your car.

It turned out the email was a hoax and not actually offering police recommended advice, but even before I found that out I was furious.

These emails make me really angry. I had a lot of them last year when the Bristol Groper was going around Bristol. Despite his attacks happening in winter, when it is dark at 3.30pm, these emails told women not to go out alone after dark in order to keep safe.

These emails use terror tactics. They frighten, they scare, they point out where women are vulnerable. They use emotive and scary language to suggest women’s vulnerability and make women feel unsafe in places they may have previously felt safe, i.e. their car.

We all know that women get attacked on the streets by strangers. But we also know that men are more likely to be attacked on the streets by strangers than women are. I haven’t got the stats to hand, but 16-24 year old men are the most vulnerable people on the streets. A couple of weeks ago in Bristol there was a tragic stabbing of a young man by a bunch of other young men. Yet, no work place was inundated with emails telling young men to not walk alone in the dark. No police warnings go out telling young men to always be sure to stay in well lit areas.

Men are vulnerable. Yet we do not train men to be afraid. We train women to be afraid.

Although I believe strongly that men and women need to be street wise and self aware when in public spaces, I don’t think that telling women to be afraid is at all constructive. Yet we tell women to be afraid on the streets all the time. And it works. Women are afraid. We’re afraid of the dark, we’re afraid of the man on the street, the man on the train, the man on the bus. We are brought up in an atmosphere of fear. We are given rape alarms that don’t work. We keep to busy streets and don’t walk home alone. We spend money on cabs and then are told not to take cabs alone in case the cab driver is a rapist. Then, if the worst happens and we are raped, we’re not believed.

What concerns me further to this is the way women who are attacked are judged. If a woman is raped by a stranger in the night on the street, we ask why was the woman on the street alone at night? Why was she not obeying the “rules”? What was she wearing? Was she drunk? Now, I am not saying that women or men should take unnecessary risks and put themselves in dangerous situations, but I think we can all appreciate that women have a right to inhabit the streets and shouldn’t be made to feel afraid of walking along the streets, and certainly shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for having done so.

I also think it distracts from the greater issue of violence against women. 1 in 4 women will be a victim of domestic and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes. Most of these women will be attacked by someone they know. So avoiding stairwells and making sure you walk in well lit areas isn’t always going to help.

These scare tactics, these terror emails are not helping women. They are teaching them to be afraid, they are reinforcing cultural myths about rape and they are assuming that women should be the ones to stop rape. That it is a woman’s responsibility to prevent rape. It takes the onus off the attackers and on to the victim.

The first Reclaim the Night marches were born out of an anger that women were subjected to a curfew when the Yorkshire Ripper was raping and killing.

Today we still march on Reclaim the Nights because women are still metaphorically placed under a curfew when their freedoms are curtailed out of a fear of rape and violence.

When an email goes around telling women how to behave in case she gets raped, we need to be asking why an email isn’t being sent round asking why men are still getting away with rape and what can the government, communities and police do about it.

North Northumberland my heart belongs to you

I spoke to my dad and my auntie last night. my dad is on holiday at my aunt's farm in Belford, which is 5 miles inland from Bamburgh, along the A1.
And now all i want to do is pitch up in the field and stay up there too.

i spent all my summer holidays on that farm, which has sheep, horses, chickens, ducks and of course, long dead now, Abelard the peacock. altho towards my teen years the holdiays were a bit traumatic with rows, all my memories of the farm, the landscape and Northumberland itself is bathed in a hazy glow of joy.

i don;'t even have to close my eyes to picture every square inch of my aunt's land. i can walk up the drive with the fields on my left, dogs scampering around my feet, i can look for the ducks on the stream and i can feel the rough texture of the hay as i look for eggs.

it was a joke in my family that i knew exactly where i was wherever i was in northumberland. i could point in a direction and confidently say that lindisfarne was over there and happy valley was in that direction. ahh, happy valley! or north middleton. it is over ten years since i last went swimming in the river that forms a pool with the tree you can dive from, and i can still see all the lush greenery that keeps the swimming hole from sight, i can feel the water pounding on my shoulders over the rocks as i sat in the shallows.

the water is uniformly cold in northumberland, particularly in lynhope spout, the waterfall that crashed from the moors and mountains into a seemingly depthless pool that could take you to the centre of the earth. peaty and brown, but as crisp and fresh as icicles. wooler common, the pine woods with the silent floor of moss that looks as if it is a home for fairies. heather on the moors that buzzes with bee communities that makes the freshest, tangiest heather honey. the cattle at chillingham which will kill each other if touched by humans. the ford at ford and etal.

but mostly there is the sea. i think a part of me forever will live on stag rock, or crouched behind watching the crabs and shrimps wade through the rockpools. the sea of the coast of bamburgh has a wild and frightening quality that i have never seen replicated. pulled in by an army of white horses, flecked with green and blue and grey and white, swirling with a dynamism and rage that has sent it from the far north to this strange little sea side town famous for a castle and a heroine. fish and chips and picnics and digging holes and emerging from the sea covered in sea weed and dregs of sand, running from jellyfish.

different from the golden sands of embleton, and the eery green brown mudflats of budle bay.

there are more sheep than people and there is a silence, a solitariness in my memories, a feeling of peace and a sense of one-ness with the landscape. the drama of the moors and hills that fall out of sight into more land and heather, an endless parade of rugged, lonely and frightening beauty.

standing in the fields of the farm, costalot or quest or raffles nudging my hand or shoulder, sheep eying me suspiciously, a chicken exploding with eggs.

i love north northumberland with a strange passion that i don't feel for any place i have lived or holidayed in. i love bristol and paris and i have a love hate relationship with london, i adored nice and think barcelona is tops, i was crazy for rejkavik and went crazy in tokyo and i have a fond affection for plymouth and cornwall. but there is something in my very soul and heart that craves northumberland, something that makes me feel wholly home when i am there. part of me lives there. i dream about it vividly, in a way i have never dreamt of another place, and i can see it more clearly than i can even picture the streets where i live. it is my place.

Book review on the f word

I've started writing book reviews for the f word site, a great favourite of mine.

you can read my first effort here

http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/2009/09/dirt_is_an_anth

Ads

i have decided to add ads to my blog in order to raise me some pennies.

i hope this is ok with everyone

love sian xx

ps - i have NO power over which ads are shown. please remember that any ad on this blog does not reflect my personal beliefs or are products i agree with. i am at the mercy of google. and if anyone offers me a well paid job, i will be able to afford to remove the ads.

Why tampax pearl needs to change it's thinking

Since I bought my Mooncup and since I read the Cunt book that changed my life, I have been thinking a great deal about periods and my body and the way tampons and towels are advertised.
And I have come to the conclusion that the advertising is both damaging and, well, plain stupid.

My current bugbear is the advert for Tampax pearl, where a woman dressed in a green Coco Chanel suit plays Mother Nature, and interrupts a fashion shoot where a woman is dressed all in white on a white set. She informs the model that she can no longer participate in the fashion shoot because she is delivering her period. Because of course, when a woman has her period, she is completely incapacitated and should not in any circumstances participate in real life and go on with her day! (the sarcasm is heavy in my pen here). Anyway, the model tells her male model companions to stick around and finish the shoot, as she has bought tampax pearl, a product which means she can go on with her day. Oh poor women who don’t have the pearl product! cries the ad. How will you survive each month!

I am going to use this ad as my starting point for the many, many multi faceted issues I have with advertising for period products. (I refuse, point blank, to say sanitary protection. This is the only time I will say it).
Firstly, I take issue with the aforementioned point that Tampax are suggesting that without the magic of the pearl product, women can’t get on with their lives when they are on their period. This is a clever marketing ploy (“buy our product and you can live your life the way you want to!”), but also taps into a greater, historical and cultural anxiety about menstruating women. Traditionally, women on their periods were shunned, hidden away, and in their religious situations prevented from going to the place of worship. Why? Because your period was seen as something unclean, shameful, to be hidden. Ahh, patriarchal religious structures, and you ask me why you piss me right off? So, very subtly, Tampax are playing into this idea. They are saying that without the Tampax pearl, women should not be able to continue with their day, they should leave the public space, hide away until they are clean again, and they must never, ever, NEVER wear white! Unless, of course, they buy this pearl thing-a-ma-jig.
Now, the next question I have is what the fuck is this pearl thing-a-ma-jig anyway? What’s wrong with your regular old tampax? The answer of course is that tampons and towels as products are kind of a one trick pony. Women only need them once a month. They do the job whether you dress them up in a skirt, give them wings, add a “silken” layer or, make them in the shape of pearls. So all period companies have had to come up with all the aforementioned ideas to keep women buying the more expensive alternatives to their products. It’s a big con. A big, big con. And the biggest con of all is the pantyliner, doing the job that knickers have done for ages. The pantyliner is the period companies’ way of making sure that women buy their products all the time, whether they have their period or not. We then have the numerous femfresh products, the biggest sinners of all in my opinion. There is so much whatthefuckery going on with femfresh. They are products with only one goal in mind – making profit from women shaming. It’s not big and it’s not clever.

The problem I have with the way period products are advertised taps deep into the way women are taught to feel about their periods in our culture, and that is that they are something to be ashamed and embarrassed by, a “curse” that makes women become “hormonal” and “irrational”. This way of thinking is all wrong. I mean, think about it. Once a month, for between 3-7 days, for an average of 30-40 years, women have a period. That’s a hell of a lot of time to spend feeling embarrassed, ashamed and fed up. That’s a lot of time spent thinking your body has turned against you with its “curse”. It isn’t healthy to think this way!
Period advertising re-enforces these ideas.
Think about it. There’s an ad where a woman is with her boyfriend, who thinks her tampon is a sweet in her handbag. Thew! Because that could be embarrassing couldn’t it? Your boyfriend, the man you have sex with, might realise you are a woman with a womb and periods and everything! Man, I can’t imagine anything worse! (again, sarcasm). There’s an ad where blue water (blue??!!) is poured on a towel and women squeal at how absorbent it is. There are towels that are decorated in flowers and have been scented. It is all one massive WTF!
What are these ads saying to us? They are telling us that your period is something to be embarrassed about and must be kept hidden at all costs. It is saying that we must be discreet, we must be coy, we must be shy of our bodies.
And then, to top off this mouldy cake with a sour cherry, we have the famous tampax lady. The lady who Tampax, the company, send to schools to educate teen women about their periods, but most importantly, to educate young teens to buy tampax, and to feed them the message that Tampax thrives on, keep your periods hidden and feel ashamed!
When the tampax lady comes on her visit (in year 7 and year 10) she gives everyone a pack of tampax products, including a little holder so that no one will know you’re carrying a tampon in your bag.
Says it all really, doesn’t it.

This is what I would like to see. Firstly, I want period advertising that isn’t so women and body shaming that it has to use blue water to signify blood. I’m not saying we should use blood, it’s not like we use shit in loo roll ads, but something less anodyne and coy would be better. I want ads that don’t treat periods as some dirty secret that women have to keep hidden from men’s eyes. I want companies that don’t come up with endless much of the same products that are overpriced even when nearly all women from puberty to menopause need to use them.

But changing the rules of advertising these products can only go so far. Ads may shape our view of things, but ads are in turn shaped by cultural mores. What we really need is a big cultural overhaul in the way we look and think about periods.

I read about Barbara G Walker describing menarche parties, celebrations that her community would throw for a woman when she starts her period. How amazing is that? How amazing would it be that if from day one, we told women their periods weren’t bad or gross or smelly or shameful, but were a step in the road of life and part of being a woman, of becoming a woman, and our bodies way of preparing women for potential motherhood.

Instead of having the tampax woman come to schools to spout her propaganda, what if we told women all these things? What if social ed was dedicated occasionally to teach boys and girls about periods in a positive way, rather than splitting up the class so the boys don’t get embarrassed by “girl talk”.
If we talked about periods properly and didn’t see them as female shame, then this embarrassment would not be an issue in the first place. There would be no embarrassment around the subject because we would all be open about our bodies and therefore no embarrassment would exist.

When I started using my mooncup, my whole concept of my periods changed radically. I made a conscious effort to stop seeing them as this evil pain that was ruining my fun. It was hard. My periods are painful and always have been. Even now that I am on the pill (and my issues with the pill are a whole other story), they still hurt. I also had a decade or more of negative messaging around my period and my body that told me that I was right to be embarrassed and annoyed with my uterus. But I persevered because I really believed that changing my attitude towards how my body works would make my life easier. And it has. My body is no longer the enemy setting out to ruin my fun, it is no longer the “leaky vessel” that means my day is ruined. It is now my body, part of me, and part of my sense of who I am. Learning to see my periods as a positive thing has made me a much happier person. I think the mooncup helped. The mooncup means you have to get up close and personal with your periods. There’s no applicator or pearl or skirt or wings. It taught me more about how my periods work and behave far more than the tampax lady did.

I wish I could switch all the ads for woman positive messages from companies such as mooncup and lunar pads that tell women not to be ashamed about their bodies and instead to celebrate this one aspect of femaleness (disclaimer – obviously not all women have periods, this is therefore just one potential aspect of what can be seen as encompassing femaleness). Ads would not proudly disclaim how subtle and discreet their products are, they wouldn’t hand out little secret holders. They would tell women to love their bodies and to live happily in their bodies.

And they would never, ever, NEVER refer to “sanitary protection”.

Book Review - The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism

The Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism by Ellie Levenson
I've read a lot about this book, I've debated about it on blogs, I've even debated with Ellie Levenson directly on the F Word blog, but now it is time for me to review the book directly. I have been a bit reticient about writing this as I know that I am going to criticise her book and I don't want it to be taken as a personal criticism of Levenson, but rather a criticism of her book.
So – disclaimer over. It's my blog after all and I can write about whatever I like!

For those not in the know, Levenson's Noughtie Girl's Guide to Feminism is a book designed for women and men who may not already identify with feminism, but are interested in it, and want to learn more about what feminism is all about. In this respect, it is the first mainstream, non academic book that has been published in Britain on feminism since Natasha Walter's in 2000. this makes it an important book. In terms of publishing, this is the book that has been chosen by the publishing world to define what feminism means to people living in the noughties. No mean feat to try and create a book that says these things.

Levenson has therefore received a great deal of media attention, even being named by the Times as a feminist icon. But her book has courted a massive amount of controversory by the feminist community as they almost uniformly have shouted “Not in my name”. And this comes from the idea that a lot of the feminism Levenson writes about in her book doesn't represent any feminism that most feminists identify or work with. Which is a problem when her book is being publicised as the book to define the feminism of the modern woman.

First up I would like to deal with the good things about Levenson's book. Because they are there. A lot of the reviews I have read have focussed overwhelmingly on the negative elements, but it is important to recognise that some of the things Levenson says are fundamentally sensible and make sense, even if a lot of her work, in the view of myself and many other women, does not.
It seems to me that Levenson writes best about the issues she knows or cares most about. Chief amoung this is the issue around changing her name after marriage, and her decision to keep her own name. She writes about this eloquently and confidently, explaining carefully why this decision was so important to her, her frustration at people referring to her as her husband's name and the conversations she has had with other women about this issue, women who have chosen to change and keep their names. This is an important feminist issue, and needs to be discussed, and I think the way Levenson discusses it brings up a lot of the important issues.
Another area in which I think she hits the nail on the head was in her discussion of the TV show “How to look good naked”. She argues that Gok Wan's insistence on the woman he is making over being sexy at all times, including throwing away non-sexy knickers, enforces the idea that women are valued on their sexiness and need to appear sexy always, unconditionally, and that this does nothing to help women or feminism. I'm glad she brought this up, shows and shows like this really bug me, putting on the feminist mantle whilst simultaneously insisting that women are only good when they are hot.

She also explores the nature of housework and equal partnership in (straight) relationships, how it is important to be sure that we move away from seeing housework and childcare as something naturally done by the woman, and DIY and business as something naturally done by the man, and strive to encourage equality in relationships and within the domestic sphere. She also argues that the best way to achieve this is to revolutionise maternity and paternity leave so that men and women have equal maternity and paternity leave, therefore ensuring that women of childbearing age (a ridiculous phrase if ever there was one) can no longer be discriminated against at work. This is something I too passionately believe in, it would completely revolutionise the way we look at men and women and childcare and shatter a lot of the myths and stereotypes around the “family unit”.

But for all these good points, I came away from the book with a decidedly sour taste in my mouth. Firstly, throughout the book she refers to her reader as a “noughtie girl”. I read in an interview with her that this was because of the play on words. Ha ha very funny, but I do not want to be referred to as a girl for page after page after page, especially when accompanied by the word noughtie/naughty. I cannot imagine a book designed for adult men referring to the reader as boy throughout the work. It grates and grates on my nerves! Some people have mocked the feminist movement for taking things like the word girl so seriously, but it is an issue, Levenson says herself in the book that language is important. We don't criticise Civil Rights leaders for objecting to the word “boy” when referring to black men. The word “girl” has similarly been used throughout history to infantilize and patronize women. I am a woman. I stopped being a girl when I was 16. to use the word girl over and over again undermines the otherwise very pertinent points she makes about male-centric language.

A further continued irritant in the book was it's complete lack of identification of any other kind of woman who wasn't exactly like the author. That is, white, straight, middle to upper class, able bodied with disposable income. The idea that women come in all different manners simply did not get a look in in the book. In fact she writes in the introduction:

“As I have no direct experience of the issues specifically concerning lesbians I have not attempted to cover those here”.

Umm, it's called research Ms Levenson. And this is the biggest problem throughout the whole book for me. It completely lacks any sense of research. When I don't know much about something, I research it. But here Levenson illustrates the point that seems to gloss the whole book, if she doesn't know about something, she's not going to write about it. The fact is, it is quite easy to find about lesbian/minority ethinic/transgender/disabled experience, you can just ask someone or read a book or conduct a survey or have a discussion with these women to hear their views. But just as I get the feeling in the rape section that Levenson hasn't gone out of her way to ask rape survivors how they feel about rape and rape jokes, she hasn't seemed to make much effort at all to seek out any other opinion except her own. It is also a problem in that feminism is constantly criticised for being a white middle class issue which ignores the problems of the wider women community. Which it isn't, which it strives not to be. Books like this are not going to help us win that argument.

And relying entirely on your own opinion isn't a problem if you are writing a blog or an editorial. Use your own opinion, no problem. Fill the piece with anecdotes about your life and tell tales about what you got up to when you're a student. But when you are writing a book that purports to be a guide to feminism for the new generation, a definitive statement of the third or fourth wave, then surely it is at least polite to ask around and see what other women think about feminism? Surely the book should at least acknowledge different types of women and different types of feminist thought exist, rather than be the very narrow view of one particular type of woman drawing on her personal experience of her one particular type of life?

This is partly, I believe, stemming from her proudly proclaimed ignorance of feminist history. I agree with her that you DO NOT need to be able to quote the Female Eunuch to be a feminist, or to know who Camille Paglia is or to understand the ins and outs of Susan Browmiller's theories on porn. But when you are writing a book about feminism, and about what feminism means today, that is a different kettle of fish! To write a book about feminism and say proudly you don't know who Gloria Steinem is? To write a book about feminism and attribute a quote to Susan Brownmiller when it was a quote by Robin Morgan? (please refer to page 61 of feminist chauvinist pigs). That's just plain lazy! And what's more, it is disrespectful to the amazing strength and energy of the second wave.

To reiterate, I don't think you have to be an academic feminist to be a feminist. But I think if you are writing a guide to feminism then you should at the very least know what the second wave is! It isn't cool to say you don't know what that means! It isn't cool to deny any knowledge of the second wave, and then in the next chapter tell young women to listen to older women more. And you should have a bit more respect than to mock Germaine Greer's writing style! Yes, Germaine's gone a bit off these days, but ffs! She wrote the Female Eunuch! She was one of the most influential women of our time!

In her marvellous book Cunt, Inga Musico goes to great lengths to explain that she is white, gay, working to middle class, from the West Coast etc, and therefore her experiences are not every woman's experience. She interviews loads of women with different backgrounds from hers and quotes loads of books written by women with different background from hers so that even though the book is very much of her perspective, you also get to see how the things she says affect other women and how other women react to the situations discussed in the book. That, in my view, is what makes it so bloody good. It is universal, but from the heart of one woman.
In contrast, in the Noughtie Girl's Guide we just get Levenson's ideas. And as a book, that is how it feels to read, a long list of her opinions and anecdotes about her life. It doesn't read like an informed guide or important debate on the issues she raises, in fact on many occasions it becomes very boring. A lot of what she says has no relationship to my life. A lot of what she says only relates to one life – hers.

One main problem with the guide is that she raises a LOT of points that need to be raised, and that are important to feminism. But she doesn't develop these points. One stand out moment of this is the discussion of body hair. (ahh, body hair! My favourite issue!) Levenson writes how body hair is an issue for feminists and how it makes her sad that women's hair is seen as bad, but she isn't going to stop waxing. I turn the page expecting to see more, for example why is hair seen as bad, where has this cultural idea come from, why do some women shave why do some women go natural, why does she feel a societal pressure to wax, why why why and yet there is nothing. It just ends with her saying society thinks hair is bad. She doesn't address the argument. There is so much to say that she doesn't say. The same was true in an anecdote on pole dancing. She says her friend likes pole dancing and it's feminist because she likes pole dancing for herself, not to titillate men. But why does our culture see pole dancing as something empowering and sexually exciting for women? Why does our society see pole dancing as the ultimate in sexual empowerment? Why doesn't she ask these questions? It isn't enough to say it's feminist to pole dance. Why is it feminist to pole dance? The same goes for porn and a number of other issues in the book. Her continued argument is that if you choose it, it's feminist. No mention on why these choices are feminist and whether it is possible, in our media saturated culture, to really have a “free choice.”

I can't go through every issue in the book as I would be here all day. So I am just going to address abortion and rape before I sign off.

Firstly – abortion. Levenson is pro choice (but not pro abortion, she asserts, ignoring that no one is pro abortion, not really.) but believes that women can be anti abortion and still be feminist. This links to her central idea that feminism is about individual choice, and so long as the choice you make is your own, individual choice, it is feminist.

Well, I call BULLSHIT on that one.

I am vehemently pro choice. I do not believe you can be feminist and be anti abortion. I believe you can be anti abortion for yourself, but this is totally different. You can choose not to terminate your own pregnancy and not to have an abortion. But to deny other women the choice to have an abortion, to prefer to see women back in the old days of dying of backstreet abortions because your own individual choice is to be anti abortion, how the hell is that choice feminist?
Pro life that's a lie, you don't care if women die.

With respect to Levenson, her attitude I the book to abortion, the morning after pill and contraception was very positive and her argument that all three need to be made better available and we need better sex education for our young women is bang on in my view! But to say that the individual choice of a woman to be anti abortion, a choice that has devastating affects on our sisters, that is not feminist. It just cannot be considered a feminist position.
On the F Word debate Laura Woodhouse asked her to clarify this but she didn't. So I don't know what was behind her reasoning unfortunately.

Next on to rape. I have discussed this in another blog post with the issue of rape jokes, but I want to focus on another aspect of her piece on rape here:
“I think we do women an injustice when we say that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. It is, after all, just a penis.”

Now, I have never been raped and I am guessing that Levenson hasn't either. But to say this is so fucking disrespectful, so nasty and so narrow minded it makes me feel sick! And again, we come back to the research point. If Levenson had maybe asked some rape survivors about their experience, she might well have found that some women have recovered, made peace and moved on with their lives. And she would also find women who are suffering from PTSD and are struggling to overcome what was, to them, the worst thing that has happened to them.
The fact that the rape section is included in the sex chapter says it all really.
And rape is NOT always just a penis! Women are raped with fists, guns, glasses, bottles...I could go on. And anyway, it doesn't stop it from being basically a stupid thing to say.

She goes on to discuss that date rape is different to stranger rape, and that the latter is worse because of the threat of violence. The fact that feminists have been fighting for years and years to get date rape recognised as a crime doesn't seem to concern her. The fact that her definition of consent differs to the LEGAL definition doesn't seem to concern her. And that fact that rape is rape is rape, that the trauma of stranger rape is just as valid as the trauma of someone you love and trust raping you doesn't seem to concern her. To also suggest that date rape is non violent is to completely miss the point because rape is violent in it's very nature. To be penetrated without consent is A VIOLENT ACT. She argues that we see rape as bad because it defiles women's virtue but in modern, Western society that is not the full truth. We see rape as bad because of the terrific psychological damage it can inflict, because it can ruin a woman's life, because it is the grossest and most definite violation of a woman's body and self. To dismiss it as just a penis does all women, not just rape survivors, a great injustice. To say rape is just a penis contradicts her belieft that we need better conviction rates and better sentencing. If rape is “just a penis” then why bother?

The book is also incredibly sexist towards men. She claims men can't be trusted with a “male pill” as they'll either forget to take it, or use it to prevent women getting pregnant. As if we still should believe that men never want babies and women always want babies. She claims men can't organise social events and don't write Christmas cards. She says men buy dinner for women in the hope of sex. It's just down and dirty lazy sexism.

So. I have rambled on for a long time. But in short, although Levenson makes some good strong points in her book, I believe her writing really suffers from a lack of development of the arguments she raises, and a lack of research into her subject, beyond her own personal opinions and experiences. She disregards a lot of the great work feminism does, now and historically. She doesn't acknowledge what young and old women are doing today to campaign for women's rights, in the UK and around the world. She ignores women who aren't part of her lifestyle. And she makes statements in the name of feminism that many, many feminists find horrifying and untrue.

If this book was being marketed as a memoir or Levenson's wandering through the mires of culture and women's culture, then all these problems would be forgivable. But this book is being marketed as a guide to feminism, and it is for this reason I find it so difficult to accept. This book does not represent a feminism I recognise and it concerns me that women and men who read this book with no knowledge of the feminist movement will come out of it with a very warped and non representative view indeed.
Instead, I am greatly looking forward to Catherine Redfern's forthcoming book on feminism. She conducted surveys too.

this post has also appeared on www.wellDecent.blogspot.com

Why rape jokes aren't a joke

Can rape jokes ever be funny? This is what Ellie Levenson asks in the Independent today: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/ellie-levenson-where-jokes-are-concerned-context-is-all-1776800.html
This question has been asked in her book and has prompted debate across the feminist blogosphere, from the F Word in the UK to Feministing in the US. The majority of responses to this question that I have seen has been a resounding NO. And I have to agree with this stance.

Levenson proposes that rape jokes can be funny as they help us to see through the prism of humour that rape isn’t funny. I can kind of see her point here. Yes, humour helps us deal with pain and tragedy. Laughing is a method of working through a trauma, in the way we share tears and laughter by talking about funny and touching memories when someone dies. But I think that by saying rape jokes are ok because they help us work through the trauma of rape she misses one massive point, and that is often rape jokes aren’t told by rape survivors.

Levenson goes on to compare rape jokes to:
“a joke about an affectionate stereotype told by a member of that race to another member of that race?”
Firstly I am not sure I understand what an “affectionate” stereotype is but this sentence reinforces my point. When we think about rape jokes, I don’t think we picture women laughing merrily about rape and poking fun at the stereotype of rapists. I know that instead I tend to think of men on stage and on TV thinking it is ok to tell a rape joke, and thinking it is ok to make jokes about aggressive sexual behaviour (for example, Frankie Boyle informing Lucy Porter he was planning on masturbating over her when she appears on Loose Women). To say that rape jokes are the equivalent of gay people using the word queer or black people using the N word in the context of a group of people who have reclaimed such words is to completely miss the point. Because, just as in the public eye it isn’t white people who use the N word, in the public eye it generally isn’t rape victims making rape jokes.

The problem with rape jokes is that more often than not it is men who haven’t been raped making a joke about women being raped. An exception to this that I am aware of is Billy Connolly, who has made jokes about rape but is himself a survivor. It is a moment of massive privilege where a comedian takes the trauma of something that he hasn’t experienced and makes a cheap laugh out of it. It’s just stupid. It isn’t adding anything to comedy, it isn’t expanding the comedic genre. If anything, it is taking comedy back to the dull dull days of lazy sexism we associate with Benny Hill and Bernard Manning, and that comedy pariah, Jim Davidson.

Levenson goes on in her article to compare rape jokes to the jokes made in the aftermath of the tsunami:

“A couple of days after the tsunami that killed thousands of people across Asia, I went to a comedy show. The act was full of jokes about the tsunami – things such as tsunami being a high scorer on Countdown (presenter Richard Whiteley had just died) and the Tsunami (Toon Army) causing havoc across Asia. Did these jokes make me think the comedian, or the laughing audience, did not feel the horror of the natural disaster that had just happened? Of course not. We were coming to terms with tragedy through humour.”

But what is crucially missing from this example, and what is missing in the evaluation of rape jokes, is that it is (highly likely) that the majority of the audience and the comedian were in no way personally affected by the tragedy of the tsunami. These jokes weren’t being told in Sri Lanka, the audience wasn’t made up of people who had lost their homes to the sea, the comedian hadn’t watched his family swept away whilst he was helpless to save them. Far from allowing the audience to understand the horrors of the tsunami, joking and laughing about it shows how far removed from the tragedy the comedian and audience were. Personally, I don’t get how jokes about millions of people dying are funny. Similarly with rape jokes. The majority of people who tend to tell rape jokes haven’t been raped. The people who laugh often haven’t been raped. The jokes aren’t allowing the survivors of rape to work through their trauma with laughter. Why? Because most often the survivor often isn’t visible to the joker. The survivor is barely on the joker’s radar.

The other problem I have with rape jokes is the assumptions they make about the audience or the listeners of the joke. It completely ignores the fact that with 1 in 4 women being survivors of DV or sexual assault, there is probably a survivor in the audience. Now, I’m sure that some survivors may find the joke funny. But a lot of survivors won’t. And don’t they have the right to feel that? And don’t we all have the right to feel offended by some things?

I love edgy comedy and I love offensive comedy when it has a purpose, when it is satirizing corruption or greed or politics or right wing lunatics or media idiocy. But rape jokes are (often) non survivors taking the pain and horror of survivors and asking other people to laugh at it. And this is not ok.

In the rape joke that Levenson cites she says the joke is in fact about men’s egos rather than rape. If that is the case, why make the joke about rape? Why not tell a joke about male ego? She says that in the context within which he was telling the joke it wasn’t threatening or offensive. But what if the man who told it to her had then told the joke to a rape survivor? Surely this changes the context and could potentially make the joke offensive and triggering. Surely it is at the very least arrogant to tell a joke that could have that effect, and arrogant to say that the joke is ok because luckily on this occasion the joke was told in the right context.

I just don’t see the point of rape jokes. They have the potential to cause incredible damage and hurt to people, when for the teller it is a throwaway comment. And what concerns me most is that we live in a society where RAPE IS NOT TAKEN SERIOUSLY. The growing popularity of rape jokes fosters this atmosphere, it turns a devastating crime into a silly story, a one liner, and allows people to think that rape isn’t a serious problem. To draw another comparison to racist jokes – when racism was not taken seriously in our society racist jokes were considered acceptable. These days we (at least officially) take racism seriously, so racist jokes are not acceptable. We tell jokes that highlight the idiocy and ignorance of racism instead. Perhaps when rape is fully taken seriously in our society, we will tell jokes that highlight the idiocy and ignorance of those who find rape amusing.

However, I leave you with the funniest joke of the Edinburgh Festival:
Why don’t hedgehogs just share the hedge.

I think that is bloody amazing.