Pants off to impropriety!

After yet another week in which women's bodies have been used as bargaining chips to trade liberal reforms with the American centre-right, our choices denigrated and our self-expression questioned, politicised and ridiculed, I want to shout out for an unsung hero of improper, joyful, self-actualising women everywhere: Knickers Girl.

When a Sun photographer snapped Knickers Girl - aka 20 year old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons -cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, she instantly became the face of female reprobation up and down the country. Never mind that she wasn't exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren't the ones she'd been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhof knickers a mate had picked up in a bar. Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and hence was actually stone-cold sober at the time: the new postergirl of binge-drinking ladettes everywhere has been suspended from her job pending a disciplinary inquiry, for the dubious crime of having fun in public. And they say sexism in the workplace is dead.

A reminder: this is The Sun we're talking about. The Sun, whose page three 'news in briefs' section features topless glamour models every single day. The Sun, whose problem with women dancing in their pants in public only extends to those of us who aren't getting paid to perform for the male gaze like good little tarts.

Knickers girl also has a starring role to play in the latest rotten misogynist egg Quentin Letts has laid in the Mail, although Letts has to satisfy himself with a slavering description of the picture, as the Sun is damned if it's going to share the rights to such a juicy piece of moral propaganda. In his article, Letts blames feminism - and Germaine Greer in particular - for spawning 'an entire generation of loose-knickered lady louts'.

"British girls have become fat-faced 'ladettes', goose pimples rising on the skin of their exposed thighs as they clack-clack-clack along the pavement en route to the weekend disco, destination bonk...Older generations would call these women 'slappers' - and they would be right."

Not satisfied with fat-shaming, mocking women's bodies and clothes and branding us slags for any attempt to own our own sexual desire, Quentin goes on to tell eager readers that today's ladettes "have lost the centuries-old idea of being demure in public. The sort of slender-lipped, self-questioning, hesitant lover played by Celia Johnson in David Lean's 1945 film Brief Encounter is now found only in recently arrived immigrant families."

Yes, this is the same Quentin Letts, writing for the same newspaper that regularly shames Muslim women for choosing to wear the veil. Clearly, signifiers of female modesty and social repression are fine and dandy as long as they're not foreign.

Letts goes on to declare feminism the source of all social ills, and taking detour after spluttering, purple-faced detour through teenage pregnancy, the decline of traditional marriage, drugs, free love, immigrants and, for some reason, the Mitchell Brothers' haircuts, in 2,547 words of the runniest excrement I have ever read in the Mail. It's not hard to call out the Mail group for misogyny and double standards, but, sadly for us, todays free-for-all on young women doesn't stop at the tabloids.

Every major news outlet in the UK has recently run stories on this supposed pandemic of female degeneracy. It doesn't matter that most single mothers are in their thirties and have previously been relationships with their children's fathers, to the extent that the Mail had to use a photo posed by models to illustrate its latest spittle-flecked rant about Benefit Scrounging Bitches. It doesn't matter that the hordes of drooling young amazons apparently roaming the streets of our glorious nation in a savage rut of bleary, boozy, bottle-brandishing dick-frenzy aren't, actually, bothering anyone much: although offences by young women are rising, this is partly due to the changing nature of police prosecutions, and women still commit only 14% of violent crime, which is steadily decreasing in city centres. It doesn't matter one bit: we're still blamed for social unrest, blamed for violence done to us, shamed if we cover up, shamed if we bare our skin, shamed if we have sex, shamed if we don't, shamed if we excercise contraceptive choice, shamed if we carry pregnancies to term, shamed if we know about our own bodies, shamed if we don't, shamed if we look good, shamed if we don't, shamed if we choose to work and have children, shamed if we don't, shamed if we're old, shamed if we're young. It seems that, as far as the press is concerned, the only choice that women can legitimately make is the choice to shut up, slim down and strip off for money.

As a feminist, I think the right to dance around in one's pants in public should be sacrosanct, as should the right not to do so if we like to get our kicks in the variety of other exciting ways available to the young ladies of today. In tribute to this noble cause, and in solidarity with the unfairly dismissed Sarah Lyons, I have taken a picture of my own pants and put it on the internet. I hereby encourage all readers - boys, girls and everyone else at the party - to do the same. Young women and the choices we make are not to blame for the hurts of a society at war with itself. It is deeply insulting to suggest that by growing up, having fun, exploring our boundaries and taking risks we are somehow engendering social breakdown, when all we ever wanted to break down were the walls of judgement and repression. Pants off to you, Knickers Girl.

Have you no shame?

I was struck by this article, in which American journalist Penelope Trunk defends her decision, despite an unanticipated global barrage of hate mail, to post the following to her Twitter feed:

"I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin."

That right there, in >140 characters, is possibly the most succinct and effective piece of feminist gonzo journalism I have ever read. Personal, factual, shoving the meaty political details of women's everyday life right up in your face. Plus, it quite delightfully manages to combine in 32 words most of the big taboos of modern misogynist thought: women bleeding in the boardroom. Women being candid about the parts of our physical lives which aren't to do with fucking but also matter to us. Women's bodies being, in fact, more than just tools for baby-making and delivering sexual pleasure to men. Women being outspoken and proud about reproductive self-determination. Women reacting to the termi,nation of unwanted pregnancy not with horrific, life-stomping mental breakdown but with what most of us actually feel: relief. The radical truths that women, with their bleeding, messy cunts, can hold high-powered jobs, make decisions about our own bodies, own our own moral compasses and face pain and humiliation with our heads held high.

Still, Ms Trunk was somewhat surprised at the vehemence of the uproar that followed. "Television, blogs and newspapers around the world reported what I had written. People posted critcisms on my blog. My boyfriend's extended family called to make sure he was dumping me... I was even interviewed on CNN where the news anchor asked me, "Young lady, do you have no shame?""

To which the obvious retort is: why, was she expected to? Was she expected to be ashamed? Of what? Of suffering through a miscarriage? Of not wanting a third child? Of doing both of these things whilst having the temerity to have, gods forbid, a job?

Shame about our bodies and our choices is inculcated in women from birth. We like to think that, because you can turn on MTV or open a newspaper on any given day and look at scantily-clad ladies gyrating appealingly for the camera, we live in a sexually open society. We do not. And there are certain aspects of bio-female experience - miscarriage, for example - which are still horrendously taboo, about which we are still expected to feel shame - moral shame, physical shame, political shame. We are expected to shut up about it, get on with it in private, clear up our own mess and not ask for any help or understanding, because we are women, and shame is our birthright.

Well, fuck that, and fuck the thousands of busybodies who saw fit to try and foist upon Penelope Trunk the shame that she so bravely and publicly refused to own. This is not about privacy, or modesty, but about shame, and what we are and aren't expected to feel shameful about.

Hundreds of thousands of women use the internet to discuss their sexual exploits in detail and are not condemned. Belle De Jour talks about her experiences as a middle-class sex worker, and there has been no witch-hunt over her lack of 'shame' - indeed, books and a TV series have been made about her life. Penelope Trunk posted about experiencing the pain of miscarriage at work and the emotions that that stirred in her in the same way that she posts about her life on a farm in Winsconsin, her upcoming marriage, her work as a journalist and mother. All of these things are part of her life; why should she feel shameful about them?

Down with shame. Down with ignorance, secrecy and silence, down with female experience being lived in fear and embarrassment, and down with shame. Penelope Trunk should be considered a feminist hero for her contribution to telling women's truths without apology or embarrassment, as John Stuart Mill advocated in The Subjection of Women:

"The knowledge which men can acquire of women ...is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
"And that time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them may tell anything whic men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear".

For anyone who still thinks that Penelope Trunk is unfittingly 'shameless', immoral or simply self-promoting, I'd ask you to consider that George Orwell was talking about women as well as men when he said that "if liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Hemlines and hypocrisy: fourth column for Morning Star

This season's key hemlines, like the those of last season and the season before that, are short - joyfully short, shockingly short.

Shirts are see-through and short, jackets are spangly and short, and mini-dresses - the staple for all those Christmas parties we're doubtless going to be invited to - are sequinned. And yes, extremely short.

Fashion loves barely-there hemlines. They fulfil almost none of the basic functions of clothing and only look entirely good on skinny teenagers. But there's a downside to short skirts, too.

This season's key hemlines are, according to almost a third of the population, an invitation to rape.

Some 34 per cent of respondents to a recent Amnesty survey believed that if a woman is attacked while wearing "revealing" clothing, she is at very least "partially responsible."

So in a world where rape is often the fault of the victim, in a world where only 6 per cent of reported rapes end in conviction and prominent celebrities can step forward to say that a man who drugged and anally and vaginally penetrated a 13-year-old did not commit "rape-rape," what's a fashion-forward feminist to do?

When we discuss rape, we almost never discuss the men who rape - as if rape were not a real crime but a force of nature, a facet of male biology that can only be avoided, not punished or eradicated.

Our dialectic of rape and consent is embedded in the weasel words and outright denial of patriarchal apologists.

If a woman is raped, she invariably "asked for it," despite the fact that provocation has been shown to be a factor in under 5 per cent of rapes, as compared with 22 per cent of murders.

If a woman reports her rapist, British tabloids would have us believe that she is part of an epidemic of women making false rape charges, despite the fact that no more false charges are filed for rape than for any other crime.

And if she happened, at the time, to be drunk, to be behaving in - heaven forbid - a sexually forthright manner or to be wearing a gorgeously on-trend sequinned micro-mini dress as pioneered by Balmain at London Fashion Week, well, what on Earth did she expect?

In this patriarchal consumer culture, the messages that women receive about sex and shopping are intertwined.

The media we absorb instruct us that in order to be beautiful and admirable we should to buy whatever's in fashion and wear it with just the right note of quiet, demure sexiness.

Our sexuality and our consumption, still women's most bankable talents, should be both conspicious and submissive.

And yet when for whatever reason we choose to play along, we are immediately told that it's our fault if we're not taken seriously, that we are fair game to be mocked and dehumanised and underpaid and underpromoted and objectified and harassed and assaulted and raped...[read the rest of this article at Morning Star online.]

Day of the Dead

[written on the tube home from the Trafalgar Square vigil. Photos from BLTPicons are here - let me know if you'd like me to link to your photos of the event!]

Tonight was the second vigil I have attended in six months for a man murdered on the streets of London. The first, Ian Tomlinson, was a victim of police brutality at the G20 protests - an innocent bystander and family man who did nothing to provoke the violence he met at the hands and batons of those who were meant to protect and serve him. The second, Ian Baynham, 62, died in hospital on October the 13th after homophobes attacked him in Trafalgar square. Ordinary citizens, out walking in the heart of their own city, minding their own business; blameless men brutalised by a thuggish state and a society simmering with repressed rage and unthinking prejudice against anyone a little different.

Tonight, thousands of us have gathered in Trafalgar square, the site of the attack, for a candlelit vigil against hate crime. When I arrive, the square is packed, humming, glowing with little lights; St Martin in the Field Church has donated hundreds of candles, and organisers with great hair and horrible hi-vis tshirts are handing them out. The atmosphere is somewhere between a riot and a state funeral, an undercurrent of anger punctuating the speakers' every sentence with low howls of protest. This should not still be happening.

"We're here to stop violent hate-crime," says one teenager, his arm around his girlfriend. "I've been bullied in the street, and so have my friends," cuts in a lady with an orange crew-cut and fiery eyes. "It seems to be getting worse". She is right: in the past few years, homophobic hate-crime in the UK has risen by almost 20%.

Suddenly, a hush gathers in the flickering half-light. A list of names is read out: all the victims of homophobic hate crime in the past ten years, predominantly in London. On the steps a choir begins to sing, something soaring low and beautiful with a deep beat that might be drums, or clapping hands, or centuries of frustration and forgiveness. Looking around me I see people with their eyes closed, soaking in the music and the sense of sacredness, people embracing; a man with his arm around his wife, the light from their candles deepening the lines in their faces. Two middle-aged women are kissing softly; a boy of about twenty holds hands with another boy, quiet, listening. A teenage couple dangle their feet in the fountain, holding each other.

The year is turning. Today is Samhain; Hallowe'en parties are going on across the capital. For countless centuries, people in Britain have gathered at this time of year to burn offerings for dead friends and relatives. Tonight we're lighting candles of protest for those who were taken from us because of ignorance, violence and prejudice. Tonight we are here to make a reckoning; to celebrate our solidarity and diversity and stand together in the face of fear.

Outside the square, police cars drone away across London, but the choir's song rises above the idiot howling of the sirens. Noone can quite make out the words, but it's something about love.

Nelson's column burns like a pagan pyre with three thousand little lights of protest. London mourns its dead.

Painful Privilege

I have never done this before, and will certainly not be making a habit of it, but I'm going to repost something I wrote back in June, partly for new readers and partly because certain things that have happened this week reminded me that some concepts need reiterating. I'm going to be working on other 101s, but this is about owning privilege, and why it hurts, rewritten a little for clarity and progression of thought.

******

Dear whitepeople, straightpeople, cispeople, men: it's not about you. The work that anti-racists, feminists, queer activists and other equality agitators do to combat privilege and prejudice actually has nothing to do with you. No really, listen up.

Does the suggestion that white, heterosexual males might still be enjoying unfair advantages in today’s society give you the strange sensation that a tight knot of anger is squeezing your normally normal-sized brain into a smaller, gassier space? Does the idea that white males might be a minority panic you, and the notion that they might still be an advantaged minority panic you even more? Do you think all these crazy feminazis and liberals are whinging about nothing? Do you worry that you’ll be the victim of ‘reverse discrimination’ at work, at school or in any other arena of power?

Then I have a message for you: your privilege is showing.

Take it from a lilywhite daughter of the Sussex middle classes: it is a great horror to discover that you yourself are part of the overclass and yet to feel that you are not enjoying any special privileges because of it. The nature of privilege, of course, is that it is taken for granted: whoever you are, whatever race, class, gender, you, like me, do not notice your own privilege 99% of the time you spend enjoying it. But actually yes, it does hurt. It hurts, in this culture, to feel powerless, and with the current cornucopia of crises most of us are feeling pretty powerless right now; it hurts even more to be powerless and at the same time be told that you are lucky, yes, lucky, to have the privilege of being white, male, straight, able-bodied and/or middle class. What’s felt but too often unsaid is: how can you call white males be privileged when we don’t feel very privileged?

To which the only decent answer is: did you expect to?

There is a difference between being privileged and being powerful. That, in fact, is why we have two different words for the concepts. Not everyone who is privileged is powerful, and certainly not everyone who is powerful is in every way privileged - look at the most powerful family in the world, who can’t even take their dog for a walk in the garden without an op-ed in the New York Times. Just because privilege is often a precursor to power does not mean that all privilege engenders power. This is where the politics of white male resentment begin: with white men complaining that they feel underprivileged, like a marginalised group, when what they actually mean is that they feel powerless.

Well, guess what. So do I. So does your Asian-British neighbor. Most of us feel pretty damn powerless. Things are bad. There’s a recession, kids are killing each other in the streets, nobody’s certain of having enough money to put food on the table tomorrow. It may surprise you to know that the rest of us aren’t sitting here imagining that white heterosexual males are living in some kind of utopia. We know you aren’t. We’ve met you. It may also surprise you to know that we don’t want to strip this mythical dominion from you and leave you naked: we just want to be where you are, with the same opportunities, the same freedom from fear, the same right to be judged as a person and not a demographic, however limited those freedoms, opportunities and rights currently are. Make sense?

We also understand that just because you're privileged in some ways doesn't mean you're not underprivileged in others - many people who enjoy male privilege or white privilege do not, for example, benefit from class privilege. But privilege is not a numbers game. Please try, if you can, to understand that different types of privilege do not cancel each other out. Men do not stop having male privilege just because they happen to be poor, just as whitepeople do not stop having white privilege simply because they happen to be women. There is no cumulative tally of privilege here. It's not, for god's sake, a competition.

Ceasing to see the equality agenda as a race to be least inherently privileged allows us to understand why feelings of powerlessness are distinct from lack of privilege. You may feel powerless, but equality agitators aren’t the reason for your lack of power. We aren’t the problem here. We took nothing from you – well, actually, we took one thing, and one thing only, and we're still in the process of taking it: the right of people who are white, or male, or rich, or straight, in any combination, to gain preferment and to expect to enjoy a better and safer life than people who are not. And yes, the fact that we stepped up and demanded that right back slightly decreases the average white man's chance at a top job, decreases the average white man’s automatic right to status and power and respect, if suddenly he is competing against not only his own race, class and gender but all the others as well in a capitalist world where status and respect are finite. In short, we’ve taken nothing you actually needed.

Now, you may think that you needed those things, those free passes to the top, that unspoken advantage over women and minorities, to get the good things in life. But trust me, you didn’t. I have met a great deal of white men and loved some of them very deeply: white men have the same potential as everyone else to prove themselves without the advantage of unfair selection which currently – still! – is weighted in their favour in almost every sector of work and citizenship. Trust me. You don’t need your privilege. Not half as much as we all need a fairer world.

Reducing unfair advantage is not the same as prejudice. Just because something inconveniences you doesn't mean it's about you. Look at strikes by workers on public transport or - this week - workers at the Royal Mail. These people do not strike because they want to make everyone else's lives harder. Their reasons for striking have almost nothing to do with the minor inconveniences caused to our routine and everything to do with the real and imminent circumstances of the strikers' own lives. It might feel like it's about us, but it's not. And exactly the same thing applies when people call us on privilege, or work to combat the effects of privilege that we have and they don't. It might feel like a targeted attack on us, the privileged party - but it's got almost nothing to do with us at all.

And that’s the problem, really. We are so desperate, so very, very desperate to be noticed, to contextualise ourselves at the centre of any story. Actually, what's most frustrating about the tube strike is that it was totally out of our control, manifestly messed things up just a little bit for everyone, and was – to add insult to injury! – almost certainly also the right thing to do.

It hurts. I know, I know it hurts, it hurts to realise that you have privilege and you never even realised it; it hurts to know that you are privileged and to still feel powerless; it hurts even more to realise that there’s no easy minority to turn and blame for all your problems. How do you think it feels, as a lady and a lifelong feminist, to realise that actually the individual blokes in the street and in my kitchen are not the source of all my problems, that if they went away I’d still be earning too little to pay my rent? I get it. Really, I get it. But getting it doesn’t mean I can excuse it in myself or in others. Because it’s not enough not to be stupid. Unless we actively and at every turn avoid turning on each other, avoid condemning the struggles of minority groups for equal rights to work and citizenship and quality of life, unless we stop whining that it’s not fair and then actively join that struggle as allies – unless we do that, we become part of the problem.

No, really. You might not think that you personally, sitting behind your computer, reading this rant and getting pissy, are part of the problem -but you are. The people who attack feminist and anti-racist writers with such bile and vitriol are part of the problem, even though many of those are the very same hands-up-harries who were the first to condemn the far right.

Because there is a heartbeat’s space between the blind stupid rage of otherwise sensible people who felt hard done by reading that article and the creeping influence of right-wing policymakers in parliament. There is a heartbeat’s space between the growing tide of otherwise non-idiotic white male resentment in this country and the breathtakingly idiotic racist, homophobic and misogynistic logic with which we have just sent two far-right representatives to the European Parliament. And if you are not prepared to step up, own your privilege and be part of the solution, then, my darlings, you are part of the problem.

Can't Stop the Blog

This article was published on the Huffington Post on Tuesday; I wanted to leave a few days before cross-posting to keep the previous post at the top of this blog. Hope you enjoy it!

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The people of Britain understand the political potential of the internet like nobody else in the West. We have a ferocious craving for democratic involvement, in part because we have been denied it for so long within our democracy, and electronic engagement offers us a voice where our own government does not.

The unique circumstances in which the United States was created has led to the overwhelming impression that the North American government, whatever its flaws, is of the people and by the people. In Britain, by contrast, government is still an arm of the elite, operating by mandate of the crown. Last week, 'The Unspoken Constitution', a document drawn up by Westminster insiders and journalists to expose our country's painful lack of a just and concrete political settlement, was published and disseminated online - just like nearly every dissenting element of British political thought. It is because we do not feel that we own a stake in our own democracy that the internet holds an unique fascination for the British as a nation.

This week, the power of the internet over the British political imagination spread its infectious energy to the world. First, there was Trafigura. When the London law firm Carter-Ruck obtained an order to ban the Guardian newspaper from reporting on Trafigura's dumping of toxic waste , millions of internet users fought to keep the information public - and won.*Trafigura and *Carterruck became trending topics on the social networking site Twitter, bloggers across the world published their own research into the cover-up, and Carter-Ruck found itself unable to contain the spread of information. The firm has withdrawn the gagging order, and international attention has been drawn to social and environmental abuses which might otherwise have slipped under the radar.

Then on Thursday Jan Moir, a columnist for ultra right-wing newspaper The Daily Mail, published an hatefully homophobic article claiming that popstar Stephen Gateley's sudden death from a congenital heart condition could not have been "natural", despite the coroner's ruling - because Gateley was civilly partnered to another man. The tweetosphere and blogosphere mobilised in disgust at Moir's column, again forcing a reaction from both the media elite and the international community, with retailers such as Nestle and Marks and Spencer withdrawing their advertising from the newspaper to distance themselves from Moir's intolerance. The Press Complaints Commission received 21,000 complaints about the article in a single weekend - more than it usually receives in five years. As blogger Iain Dale tweeted on Thursday: "Jan Moir's career has died of perfectly natural causes."

The latest instalment of the Welsh-American webcomic 'bunny', entitled 'Can't Stop the Blog', sums up the situation perfectly, with two suited figures under attack by giant blue birds that resemble the Twitter logo. For British users of the incongruously named site, the sudden sense of power in a progressive online consensus is thrilling.

Despite or, perhaps, because of our lust for freedom of collective expression, Britain boasts some of the strictest libel laws in the world. Trafigura was not the first international company to attempt to exploit this fact to its advantage, nor will it be the last. The state has good reason to tremble at the possibility of its populace being allowed to share opinions at speed. When the last earth-shattering communications revolution, the printing press, finally achieved widespread uptake in the 17th century, the explosion of handbills, newsheets, satire and subversive literature helped to catalyse a decade of bloody civil war. In a very real sense, moveable type set in motion the dire and righteous machinery whose trajectory ended, on a cold January morning in 1649, with the killing of a king.

The American abolitionist Wendell Phillips once said that '“What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.” The internet has had the equivalent impact of the advent of atomic warfare on the world of ideas, making individual thinkers part of a chain reaction whose power can be immediate and devastating. Marshall McLuhan observed in ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy that "societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication". The British are desperate to see our creakily ancient institutions – newspapers and political parties dominated by wealthy Oxbridge graduates and a parliamentary system where official communication between the two houses is still overseen by the hereditary figure of Black Rod – reshaped by the internet.

Slowly, that reshaping is beginning to happen. Last year, Britain watched in awe as Barack Obama’s presidential campaign demonstrated the power of the internet to effect change, and activists of all stripes have determined to learn from the campaign: advisers on internet strategy for Obama/Biden ’08 are still swamped by requests to speak at seminars and conferences in the UK. Moreover, the boldness of online commentators and independent auditors this year has inspired British media institutions, particularly the Guardian group and the Daily Telegraph, to embrace for the first time in decades the duty of keeping the government and law enforcement honest.

The process is achingly slow. Twitter user Leon Green commented that “When Twitter campaigns lead to people voting 1 way or another then I'll be excited. It's just off starting blocks till then.” But a groundswell of online grumblers is gradually changing the shape of British politics.

We have always been a nation of grumblers, gossipers and whiners. Thirty centuries of being invaded by nearly everyone, ruled over by bloodthirsty fops in stupid tights and incessantly rained on will do that to you. Now that Britain has the highest percentage of internet users in the world, with 79.8% of the country's population connected, we finally have a chance to turn our national pastime of whinging into a focused endeavour. October 2009 may well go down in history as the month when Whitehall and the world learned not to underestimate the power of several million Brits grumbling as one.

Angry feminist Tuesday

I get angry when debates are skewed by lies and weasel words on both sides, as is happening right now with the debate around prostitution, trafficking and the Policing and Crime Bill currently going through the House of Lords. I get angry when the people whose side I'm nominally on, the people out to protect women first and foremost, the good guys goddamnit, make up, distort and exaggerate statistics. And I get angry when media outlets use that exaggeration to dismiss the whole debate - in this case, to claim that there are almost no trafficked sex-slaves working in Britain today , a claim which has led other commentators to alledge that trafficked women are not worth public funds and anyone suggesting otherwise is -and I quote - 'hysterical'.

I get angry when punters, bystanders and sex worker organisations claim that it's not okay to criminalise men who rape sex slaves, because that might make it a little harder for non-coerced prostitutes to earn their money, or even - shock, horror! - make it harder for yr average punter to get his no-strings fuck.

I get angry when groups that pretend to be supporting women try to push through illiberal clutches of contradictory laws based on bad statistics. And I get angry when I see clusters of people tearing each other apart over laws that, even if they are put into place, will leave us with exactly the same situation: namely that prostitution, an industry in which the overwhelming majority of sellers are women and nearly all buyers are men, will not actually be legal or illegal - it'll be just about illegal enough and just about stigmatised enough that those who sell sex get almost no protection or support from the law or their local communities, whilst still just about legal enough that 10-15% of men are free to pay for sex without having to consider the humanity of their partner whenever they so choose.

I get angry, too, when I make the mistake of reading my words twisted by idiots online, my feminism rubbished, my ideals mocked. I get angry when I hear, time and time again as my profile as a feminist writer grows, that I'm a prude, a frigid bitch, that I hate sex, that I believe in a sterile female supremacist state, that my sisters and I believe all heterosexual sex is rape. I get angry when I am lied about. No other kind of political writer gets their very selfhood, the deepest most intimate parts of themselves, trampled in the most malicious of ways by total strangers - only the few bloggers, journalists and authors who are brave enough to tackle feminist issues in the public sphere.

I get angry when I'm told that I am not allowed to take offence when women are objectified and served up as pieces of meat by the media, when I'm called a prude for hating the prevalence of lap-dancing clubs and wanting those clubs to be properly designated and licensed, when I'm called a crazy, bitter bitch for hating the fact that I can't leave my fucking house or even open a goddamn webpage without seeing pictures of unreal female bodies served up as the ultimate ideal that I should aspire to, when I hate being told to buy more things so that I can look perpetually young, odourless, hairless, shaved, de-sexed and dehumanised. I get angry when I'm ridiculed for wanting to own my sexuality, and wanting others to be allowed to own theirs.

I am a feminist. I am pro sex-worker, morally indifferent to the notion of a sex trade, fantastically opposed to the sex trade as it operates in Britain today - full of rape, abuse, sexual slavery, grooming, coercion and objectification. The voices of prostituted women who aren't having a good time are the only ones we don't hear - plenty of rape apologists, plenty of feminists getting it wrong, and plenty of people responding by telling us that those feminists are hysterical bitches who hate all men and all sex. A few brave people are trying to redress this balance: Rebecca is one of them. Go and read her blog before you read anything else.

All this anger makes me horny.

And when I'm horny and angry I need to get off if I'm to be any use to myself or anyone, not that masturbation is ever that much of a chore. So I go hunting online for a quick pornographic fix. But yknow what? All the porn I can find online involves raping, hurting, punishing and shaming women, endless thumping shots of cocks going into holes that just leave me cold and upset. I click on one that looks like it might be alright, only to watch thirty seconds of a young woman actually crying and screaming 'ow, ow, ow' whilst a disembodied cock fucks her in the anus. I hate it. It makes me want to throw up. Does that mean I'm a frigid bitch who hates sex? Apparently, yes.

The truth is that we have not even begun to tackle the sexual objectification of women in our culture. Slapping a ban on lapdancing clubs or fiddling around with the laws on prostitution will achieve sweet nothing unless it's backed up by cultural change - although it's always our right, as feminists and advocates of free speech, to object to the treatment of women in the sex industry or anywhere else, if we so choose. We are trying to hold back the sea, when instead we need to be building armoured submarines and diving into the water all guns blazing.

I am personally, right here and now, sick of being objectified by this culture, sick of denying my selfhood and performing for others and apologising for my wants and needs and desires. I'm only 23, and already I have starved my body into nothingness, I've nearly died from hunger and come out the other side, I've stripped on stage and felt no joy, I've experienced date rape and had sexual partners tell me I'm dirty and women tell me I'm a slut to my face, and every day I am forced to see thousands of pictures of how my body should look - plucked, shaved, starved, limp, white, pre-pubescent, drained, dead - and encouraged to beat myself into that mold - and yet people tell me that my experience is invalid, that my feminism is anathema, that I am 'bitter'. As a woman in my 20s I am told that I should constantly aspire to look sexy - but I shouldn't sleep with too many people, I shouldn't sleep with anyone on the first date, I shouldn't appear too keen, I shouldn't be 'slutty'. I am an object; I should aspire to be the best possible object I can be.

THAT is what objectification means. It's a denial of selfhood and sexuality and identity so absolute and all-encompassing that most of us don't even notice anymore that we've been duped.

Well, I'm sick of being an object. I'm sick of apologising for my 'frigidity', for my feminism, for my rage at not being allowed to express myself sexually and yet being expected to perform and bullied if I object to men, strangers or otherwise, treating me like chattel. There's something thundering inside me about to be unleashed, hemmed in by anger and the bawling of stupid, ignorant misogynists. I feel like my anger could howl away inside me and consume me if I don't let it out. I want to scream. I want to hit things. I want to climb on some high roof and yell that I'm a person, that all women are real people who deserve to be treated like human beings, until they come and drag me off for being 'hysterical'.

But don't mind me, I'm just your crazy neighborhood feminazi. Take me away before I upset somebody.

Daily Mail says Stephen Gateley's lifestyle was "unnatural".

The death of gay popstar Stephen Gately from pulmonary oedema this week was "unnatural", not by virtue of foul play but because of his sexuality, according to frothing baghack Jan Moir of the Daily Mail today:

" Gately's death...strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships. As a gay rights champion, I am sure he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine. For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see. "

In what may plausibly be the worst article ever written, Moir says that there was "nothing natural" about Gateley's tragic death in Majorca this week, because "the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy." Meaning that he was on holiday with his civil partner, another man, which of course is unnatural, do you see?

Unnatural. Right.

More unnatural than the death of 38-year old Siobhan Kearney, whose former husband this week lost his appeal to be acquitted of her murder. The judge confirmed that in 2006, Brian Kearney strangled Siobhan in her room then used a Dyson Vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature before trying to hoist her over the en-suite door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. He then left the house, leaving their three-year-old son alone downstairs whilst his mother's body slowly cooled.

More unnatural than the death of Kate Ellerbeck, who rowed with her mutually unfaithful husband and asked for a divorce, attacking him in a rage when he refused. HSBC investment banker Neil Ellerbeck, who was this week convicted of manslaughter, told police that restrained his wife "forcefully", pinning her to the ground with his entire 15stone bulk until she stopped “wriggling and kicking”, and left her corpse in the hallway. He then texted his lover, bought a lottery ticket, and went to pick up the couple's ten-year-old daughter from school, telling her "Mummy's not here because she's gone shopping".

And definitely more unnatural than the death of Sally Sinclair, 40, a top business executive at Vodafone. A jury heard this week that when Sally confessed her affair to her husband Alaisdair Sinclair, he attacked her with a kitchen knife, stabbing her more than thirty times as she fell to the ground and sawing at her with a serrated breadknife as their children stood by, screaming. Alaisdair denies murder: the trial continues.

The Heil has not neglected to report all these stories, bundling them all up together in an article whose main thrust is how 'a worrying proportion of violence within relationships is perpetrated by women'. The article veers away from discussing the actual trials taking place this week (including one in which a woman is accused of murdering her husband, to which the bulk of the article is devoted) to remind us that some serial killers, such as Mary Cotton in the 1860s, have been female; that Vanessa George is a paedophile; and that up to 10% of violent crime is committed by women: "in contrast to the traditional gentle female image, the figures who lurk in these pages are savage matriarchs or brutal mothers, their menace all the more terrifying because of their gender." The fact that two women a week are murdered by their partners or former partners, the fact that three men were in front of judges this week in the UK alone for the savage slaughter of their wives, does not pass muster.

Should all this "strike another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of" heterosexual marriage? Oh no, no no. The history of heterosexual marriage, for a decent proportion of its male and female adherents, is a history of violence, of sexual, emotional and physical abuse, of enforced monogamy, shame, repression and desperate unhappiness - but it's "natural", you see, so that makes it all alright. Never mind that people have been living in homosexual partnerships for longer than heterosexual mariage has existed in its current format. Never mind truth, fairness or justice. The right-wing consensus backs "traditional families", and that's all that matters.

At the Labour Party Conference I watched Tim Montgomerie of Conservative home tell delegates that "studies show that there is something very, very special about marriage". Tell that to Sally Sinclair, Kate Ellerbeck and Siobhan Kearney. No wait, you can't! This "specialness" was given as justification for tax breaks for married couples after the encroaching Torygeddon and cementing of public prejudice against queer couples, unmarried partners and single parents.

I suggest that before we start signing up to the drooling Tory family fetish, we all have a good, hard think about what a 'traditional, stable' family really looks like - and interrogate just what we mean by "natural".

ETA: A deliciously complete deconstruction of Jan Moir is up now at Enemies of Reason.

The Incredible Shrinking Spice: third style column for Morning Star

I'm working on a few posts right now, but in the meantime, here's the third instalment of my style column for Morning Star. Hope you enjoy it. x (picture above is Victoria Beckham, or at least her legs, in the Marc Jacobs campaign)

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Feminism and fashion have one thing in common these days - it's not done to criticise another woman, or at least, not to her face.

You can see the logic. After all, feminists and fashionistas alike come in for enough criticism without having our own tribes turn and skewer us with a sharp stiletto. So I want to make it absolutely clear that I have very deep-seated political reasons for being angry with Victoria Beckham, nee Victoria Adams, aka Posh Spice.

Posh was my hero. I was nine years old when the Spice Girls arrived in 1995. The first single I ever bought was the cassette tape of Wannabe. Suddenly, it was all right for girls to be powerful, to be spicy, to be fearless, to tell the whole world what they really, really wanted - even if, as it turned out, all they really wanted was to "zig-a-zig-ah." Nobody knew what that meant, but we were sure it was something rude.

For me, Posh Spice was where it was at - ladylike and assertive and reeking of "girl power." I wanted to grow up to be just like her but, by the time I did, the girl power-style brand had become weak, washed-out and ghostly - just like Posh herself.

Over the years, as Beckham has reinvented herself as a celebrity wife, mother and fashion icon, her image has changed beyond recognition. Now the former singer appears on billboards and magazine covers across the world looking pinched, sad and harassed.

Her most recent reincarnation as a designer encapsulates the difference between the Posh of yesteryear - the gutsy, grumpy, go-getting girl who couldn't sing and didn't care, her pale curves poured into shiny black frocks that hinted at sadism and sedition - and the Posh of today.

The dresses are constricting, dull and unforgiving, all muted greys and pastels. Despite their waist-sucking inbuilt corsets they can only be worn by the very, very thin. This might explain why Beckham's creations have been such a hit with a fashion press that values sickness and self-denial as the ultimate expression of a woman's success and marketability.

The news that Beckham is looking a bit thin these days is hardly likely to hold tomorrow's front page. Nor is the revelation that thousands of young girls across the world are developing eating disorders and citing Beckham's surprisingly visible bone structure as their "thinspiration."

If the fashion industry genuinely cared about women more than it cared about making money by making them miserable it would recycle these stories with significantly less morbid glee.

In fact, women in the public eye responding to pressure to starve themselves is nothing new [read the rest at Morning Star online].

Me, the Patriarchy and my Big Red Pen.

I'm back from the Feminism in London conference, where there were tears, standing ovations, rants, arguments (one between me and a nutty racist apologist in front of about a hundred bloody people) and where, in Bea Campbell's words, 'a good old think' was had by all. My brain is buzzing far too much to give the event the full write-up it deserves, so that'll have to wait. Meanwhile, here's what I did on the way home.

Defacing sexist tube adverts is something that's been pioneered by the Feminist groups I'm involved with in London over the past couple of years, but somehow I never seem to have had a pen, or a sticker, or the nerve, at the right time. At the conference they were giving out free permanent markers, so I shoved a couple in my pockets. The last session on prostitution, rape and objectification made me chokingly angry, and as I walked back to the station the anger was still there. Anger on behalf of the women I spoke to who have been raped, abused and silenced, anger that my sisters and I still have to live in a world where rape goes unpunished and child abuse goes unspoken and women starve themselves to death in their thousands in order to take up less space, where girls are brought up to hate their bodies and service men and be quiet and say sorry and fuck when we're asked to and shut up when we're told to unless we want to be thought of as crazy fucking bitches stupid cunts whores slags, certainly not fit enough for Rod Liddle to shag after a few drinks ha fucking ha ha.

And on this journey home, with all this rage and frustration boiling in my head, it just so happened that I saw one too many adverts trying to sell me painful, expensive surgery to increase my 'confidence'. 'All it needs is a little nip-tuck', the advert promised, next to a photograph of a woman with unreal breasts bulging out of a skimpy top and her head thrown back in a gormless grin like someone had shot her with a tranquilizer dart.

And I thought, hey, screw you. I've got a big red pen.

So I took my big red pen, apologising to the people I stepped past like the ridiculously English person I am, crossed out the slogan, and wrote 'This is not normal - fight sexism!' in big red capitals across the advert.

God, it felt good. It felt good, and it felt naughty - naughtier than shoplifting did as a kid, and the rush was bigger and better and braver. It felt so transgressive. Everyone was staring at me. I was invading sacred advertising space! I was breaking two of our biggest taboos - one, you NEVER mention that there might be something more important to a woman than looking whatever is currently considered 'sexy'; two, you NEVER talk back to the adverts. Never. Not allowed.

Thrilled, I got off the tube carriage and climbed onto the next one along, where I did exactly the same thing on two more adverts. I continued in this manner, with commuters muttering and tutting and one elderly lady giving me a big thumbs-up, until a bloke in his thirties sitting opposite me beckoned me over - crooked his finger and beckoned - and said - 'Come on, what's the problem, isn't it the woman's free choice? Can't she do what she wants with her money?'

I said: 'Of course she can. Just as I can do what I want with my big red pen. She's free to pay people to mutilate her and I'm free to attack people for trying to persuade me that I should do the same, or that my baby sisters should, or my friends. That is MY free choice, and MY free speech. And by the way, the woman in the picture doesn't really look like that, see that little halo around her boobs? Photoshop.'

We screeched into the station, and I jumped off and onto the next carriage with a rush of blood and bile to my head, feeling suddenly powerful.

Because today I know something for sure about the free choice of the theoretical woman the apologists talk about, that theoretical woman who's glad she spent her money on cosmetic surgery rather than education or her financial future, that theoretical woman who just looooves to look good more than anything, that theoretical happy hooker without a care in the world, I know something about the theoretical choices of those theoretical women conveniently put forward by every patriarchal apologist I meet - I know that my choices are just as important as theirs. I know that the choices of the former prostitutes with PTSD who I met today and the choices of the thousands of feminists I know and the choices of the millions of women who would really like to feel safer and stronger in their bodies and lives, that those choices are just as important as any choice we might make to cut ourselves up to look sexy. And you know, I can live with challenging that choice.

By putting up adverts telling me that to feel confident I must look a certain way, for the purposes of which I must have surgery, the owners of these adverts are taking away MY choice to feel good about my body. But with my red pen and a little courage, today I took that choice back. And I feel more powerful, and more confident, than I have in a long time.