There's nothing edgy about violence against women.

Popular culture fosters the delusion that violence against women is edgy art rather than daily reality. This week, as the bodies of murder victims in Bradford and Brighton are picked over by the courts, cinemas, magazines and catwalks are teeming with glossy images of the rape, battery and dismemberment of pretty young ladies who appear artfully complicit in their abuse.

Michael Winterbottom's new two-hour murder-porn epic, The Killer Inside Me, hits cinemas next week, and advance reviews have already carried gushing descriptions of its graphic denoument, in which Casey Affleck's sheriff Lou Ford (pictured above) beats his lover to death with his bare fists, whispering how sorry he is over the sound of crunching facial bones. How terribly edgy.

Apologists for this type of thoughtless sexualised violence have described The Killer Inside Me as iconoclastic and challenging.

The photographer Tyler Shields responded with similar righteous indignation to criticisms of his latest series of stills, which feature a bestockinged Lindsay Lohan covered in blood and flashing bedroom eyes at the muzzle of a gun. Shields and Lohan defended the shots as art, but they look suspiciously like bland, mass-market, coffee-table misogyny of the type you can buy at Urban Outfitters for a fiver.

Art can shock in all sorts of valuable ways, sometimes by reflecting real life and sometimes by conjuring uncomfortable fantasy. But art that tries to get a reaction by dressing everyday misogynist brutality in a lacy thong and sexy lighting has lost its utility as social commentary.

The whole discourse is a lazy fallback, a stand-in for authentic subversion when creatives can't be bothered to do anything new.

After even the screechy million-dollar engineered catfight America's Next Top Model has featured a high-profile fashion shoot of young girls posing as murder victims, representations of violence against women can no longer be considered iconoclastic. They are consummately mainstream.

The relentlessness of these images normalises sexual violence, fashioning kinky little set pieces out of the abuse of women on an industrial scale.

Also in cinemas this week is Robert Cavanah's Pimp, a juddering fairground ride of beatings and buggery whose sharp-suited, snarling hero deals out disciplinary rapes and executions with a flick of a prop-box cane. The protagonist is played without a shred of irony by Danny Dyer, in whose name a column appeared in last month's Zoo blithely advising a reader to cut his ex-girlfriend's face "so no one will want her".

Meanwhile, yesterday's Telegraph carried the following headlines: "Woman and son murdered in Derbyshire village"; "Remains of second prostitute found"; "Spanish imam's 'prostitute jihad' ". The paper couldn't even find space to mention the ongoing trial of the man accused of killing Andrea Waddell, who was found strangled and burned in her Brighton flat last year. [read the rest at New Statesman]

Thinly Veiled Misogyny

...written for The Samosa, 08.01.2010

The Islamic veil is the most symbolically loaded item of clothing in the world. In the nine years of war that have followed the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, the various forms of Islamic female head-covering - hijab, niqab and full-body burqa - have been condemned as oppressive, celebrated or shunned as representations of cultural difference, denounced by those who claim to defend women's rights and defended by those who advocate religious tolerance.

The veil has been used to justify cultural conflict, to explain state attacks on civil liberties, to placate opponents of America’s war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, just recently, as a basis for cultural persecution of French citizens by their own government.

President Nicolas Sarkozy joins a litany of male world leaders with a strong opinion on the veil. His version of a solution is to attempt to force through a partial ban on the full veil, currently worn by an estimated 1,000 French women. For Sarkozy, like many world leaders and commentators, asserting symbolic state control over the way in which women dress is more important than, for example, pursuing a comprehensive strategy to support the tens of thousands of French women from every cultural background who are victims of domestic violence.

That doesn’t matter to Sarkozy, who is more concerned with “sending a message” to “extremists” – most of whom, one suspects, will be other men. Nor did it matter to David Aaronovich, who in an article for the Guardian in 2003 expressed his confusion over how to “understand” the dress code of some Islamic women: “Take the hijab – now ubiquitous in many British cities ... I really do not know what is being demanded of me. Is it saying, ‘Don’t look at me’, or ‘Look at me’?”

Aaronovich may not have considered the possibility that the hijab isn’t trying to ‘say’ anything to him at all – the possibility, upsetting to many men, that what women wear and how they behave is not necessarily to do with him. In her recent polemic One Dimensional Woman, feminist academic Dr Nina Power hypothesises that the veil, for Western men, represents an attack on the internalised ideology of misogynist capitalism. “Aaronovich's confusion is interpretable in terms of a generalized imperative that all femininity be translatable into the logic of the market,” explains Power.

It may come as a shock, but for individual women across the world, the way in which we dress is rarely the defining quality of our human experience. The fact that our clothing choices and the ways in which we present ourselves are understood by society as the sum total of our personhood is a difficult and dispiriting reality for women today.

Anyone who has had the traumatic experience of growing up female in a culture that diminishes the personhood of women understands that the way in which they choose to dress is compromised by cultural mores, and will inevitably affect how they are judged as human beings. Context is everything, as Tehmina Kazi, the director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD), explains:

“As well as it being a religious choice, many women find the veil really liberating, in that they feel it allows them to be judged and spoken to as a person first, especially in a culture that over-sexualises women. I do not wear hijab myself, but I respect those women who choose to do so, and who knows, I may make that choice myself someday, if I become more devout.

“But of course, in places where women are forced to wear hijab or burqa, the garment is no longer liberating. Forcing women to go veiled destroys the real purpose of wearing hijab. It destroys the beauty of a woman reading the texts for herself and making an informed spiritual choice.”

For many women living in Islamic cultures, whether in Europe or in Asia, an independent, informed choice is difficult to come by. Maryam Namazie, spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, questions the assumption that all women who wear the veil outside Sharia countries do so out of choice: “Australia’s senior Islamic cleric recently compared unveiled women to ‘uncovered meat’ implying that they invite rape and sexual assault. Whilst misogynist sermons are the norm in mosques across the world … a climate of intimidation and fear makes many a woman ‘choose’ the veil even in places where veiling is not compulsory.”

For every woman wearing hijab because of personal religious conviction or comfort, there is another going veiled because of social or state pressure – and this is where feminist and liberal thought often fails to make a subtle enough case for personal freedom. In the course of writing this piece, I spoke to many white Western women who questioned the difference between women wearing the Islamic veil and women going out ‘bundled up in a hat, scarf and long coat’. The answer, of course, is that there is every difference.

For secularist activists like Namazie, the veil is more than just a piece of clothing – it has become a symbol of women’s oppression under Islam, and deserves to be treated as such: “The veil, more than anything else, symbolises the bleak reality [of life for women in strictly Islamic countries]: hidden from view, bound, gagged, mutilated, murdered, without rights, and threatened and intimidated day in and day out for transgressing Islamic mores. And this is why the veil is the first thing that Islamists impose when they have any access to power.”

British columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown agrees, citing Rahila Gupta's assertion that “we cannot debate the burkha or the hijab without reference to women in Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia where the wearing of it are heavily policed and any slippages are met with violence ... This is a cloth that comes soaked in blood."

The politics of symbolism are precarious, even if one’s eventual goal is liberation. Ariel Levy’s recent essay in the New Yorker decries the exchange of symbolic for systemic identity politics – a perennially tempting strategy for anyone working to enfranchise women or ethnic, cultural or sexual minorities. Feminism in particular is prey to the same confusion of the symbols and substance of oppression expressed by the French premier, which is why bra-burning - although the practice never actually occurred - has become such a tenacious image. In the same piece, Namazie advocates veil-burning as a symbolic gesture of resistance, but pro-woman activists cannot be satisfied with symbolic resistance if we want to change the world.

If a real strategy of global resistance to the oppression of women is to be built, it is profoundly anodyne to question whether the Islamic veil is a symbol of religious choice and cultural pride or an emblem of the second-class status of women in Islamist cultures. The veil is consummately both of these things, and the liberation of women across the world will not begin with veil-burning any more than the long march to freedom in the West really began with bra-burning.

In fact, the closer one looks at the extreme arguments both for and against the veil, the more one suspects that this issue isn’t really about concern for women at all. Footage recorded in 2008 of a speech by a representative of the fascist British National Party articulates this attitude perfectly. In it, the young BNP speaker expounds upon the right of average working men in Leeds to “look at women wearing low-cut tops in the street”; he declares that the right of men to objectify and consume the female body, is “part of British history - and more important than human rights”, and laments that “they” - variously, Muslims, foreigners and feminists - want to “take it away from us”.

Never mind the rights of the women in question to wear what they want or, for that matter, to walk down that Leeds street without fear of the entitled harassment made extremely explicit in this speech. This is not about women. This is about men, and how men define themselves against other men. Even Alibhai-Brown agrees that part of the problem with the veil in the West is that it has come to represent “a slur on decent Muslim men, portrayed as sexual predators who cannot look upon a woman without wanting her.”

In the dialect of male-coded cultural violence, whether it takes place on a street in Leeds, in a Middle Eastern valley, or in the minds of a generation raised on sectarian squabbling and distrust, women are valuable only and always as a cultural symbol. The furore over the veil dehumanises Islamic women, turning them into symbolic territory over which men can thrash out their cultural differences. And this is a strategy that goes right back to the playground; there are suggestions that in one school in North West England, male students from Islamic backgrounds have been bullying female Muslim pupils regarding dress codes and segregation.

Shocking as this might sound to non-Islamic sensibilities, it is just one more iteration of the everyday terrorisation of female students into following a dress-code – the pulling up of skirts, pulling down of tops and snatching away of cultural signifiers that goes on in every playground across Britain.

Competing male ideals of femininity have long been used as an ideological basis for militarism, colonialism and social control, and powerful men have long mouthed the noises of feminism to justify their militarism. George W Bush has never been a friend to the women of the world, having used his first days in office to establish his anti-abortion agenda as a condition of American aid to the world’s neediest people. Journalist Katharine Viner noted in the Guardian in 2002 that, just as President Bush used the premise of liberating the “women of cover” from their men in the days leading up to the bombing of Afghanistan, Lord Cromer, who was British consul general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, declared that the veiling and seclusion of Islamic women was the “fatal obstacle” to the Egyptians’ “attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilisation.”

Cromer expounded on the notion that Egyptians should be “persuaded or forced” to become “civilised” by disposing of the veil. But on his return to England, the “civilising”, veil-burning Cromer saw no contradiction in founding the Men’s League for Opposing Women's Suffrage – a group which tried by any means possible to prevent the women of Britain from gaining the right to vote.

Wars have always been fought by men over the bodies of women. Today, Islamic women in particular find themselves in the unenviable position of understanding their bodies as an ideological battleground, whether they live in Southend or Saudi Arabia. Hawkish leaders have long approached the Islamic veil as a tool in the symbolic politics of colonialism and repression; feminists and pacifists must not fall into the same trap. If we want to win the argument for the emancipation of women across the world, we need to counter the savage politics of symbolism with a mature politics of liberation – because wherever we live and whatever we wear, women are more than pawns in a cultural war between violent, intolerant men. We are fully human beings, with battles of our own to fight for the future of humankind.

Seriously, what the fuck?

I'm sure by now most of you will have picked up Dr Kealey of Buckingham University's disgusting piece in the Times Higher Education supplement this week, in which he advises university lecturers to treat their female students as 'perks', and enjoy watching the little hussies 'flaunt their curves'. (KJB has a brilliant satire on the whole fiasco over at Get There Steppin'). Addressing his article to the only members of the academic profession who really count - straight, male ones - Kealey advises his chums to have fun flirting, because everyone knows that 'normal' young women are more interested in men than in their education:

"Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

"Enjoy her! She's a perk.

"She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife...as in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch."

Kealey has expressed his irritation that women have failed to 'get' the article, which was intended to be humorous, or semiotically playful, or both, or something:

"Because transgressional sex is inappropriate, the piece uses inappropriate and transgressional language to underscore the point - a conventional literary device. At a couple of places, the piece confounds expectations, another conventional literary device, by employing the good ol’ boy language of middle aged male collusion."

Anyway, the T.H.E editor says that it's the humourless feminists are to blame for denying Dr Kealey (with, Laura Woodhouse points out, his 45 peer-reviewed papers, 35 scientific articles and two books) his right to free speech. Of course, feminists haven't called for Kealey to have his tongue cut out of his fatuous head or, indeed, even asked for a retraction, they've merely called him out on his pathetic sexist jerkery,but even so:

"If we cannot have freedom of speech and robust debate in the academy where can we have it?"

...yep, that would be the same 'academy' which is still cutting funding from women's studies courses all over the country. Clearly some speech is freer than others.

This pile of festering bollocks has not deterred feminists across the country from taking a stand, with Feminist Fightback offering to treat Dr Kealey to a seminar on respect for women in education and the NUS leading a campaign against misogyny in higher education, with Women's Officer Olivia Bailey collecting stories of personal experience of sexism at university which will be published anonymously over the next few days (send yours to olivia.bailey[at]nus.org.uk).

But wait, there's more! Today, another male academic has been enjoying having a great big media-sponsored male privilege soapbox to shout from exercising his free speech over the evils of contraception in the Torygraph:

"The idea of fertility as a medicable condition, requiring powerful drugs or even surgical interventions to prevent a woman’s body from doing exactly what it does naturally, is basically and ultimately the idea that femaleness itself is such a condition. [The institutionalised sexism of the Saudi government]is arguably as bad, but I don’t see how they are actually worse than saying that a woman’s reproductive organs cannot feel pain, as must be the case if the preborn child is simultaneously a part of those organs and unable to feel pain. In fact, if such is held to be the case, that at the physical core of her femininity a woman is insentient, then it strikes me as no wonder that there is wife-beating, with stoning not far behind.

"No one did more work than the then Cardinal Ratzinger on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which magnificently presents the inseparability of the sanctity of life, sexual morality, social justice, and the pursuit of peace. When he comes here as Pope, let that be his theme.

"Today, condoms are practically thrown at children...and women must poison themselves in order to be available at all times for the sexual gratification of men."

This, from a commentator who claims to be a liberal voice, tiptoes merrily down misogyny lane into the steaming ditch of the completely sodding bonkers, but there it is, prominently placed in a national broadsheet. A woman's pure untainted fertile reproductive system is not only the core of her personhood, it is sentient, yes, sentient of its own accord, able to independently process subjective perceptual experiences. Well, I for one can't remember the last time I had a conversation with my uterus. It strikes me that David Lindsay, who is in his own special, mad Catholic way actually trying to speak on behalf of women, may have heard of the core feminist text 'The Vagina Monologues' and made some misplaced assumptions about the content.

Oh, and also, the contraceptive pill is a horrible poison that prevents women from doing 'what comes naturally', and the Pope should make it stop, because women don't enjoy sex anyway, they only use contraceptives to satisfy male desire like the manipulative little SLUTS they are. Jesus saves!

This matters. It matters that high-profile academics and commentators, who hold the keys to learning, to advancement and to power, hold these views and see it as their god-given right to express them no matter who they hurt. It matters, because these words do hurt. They hurt more than these men, who clearly find it exceptionally difficult to understand that women are people just like them, can possibly understand. It hurts, as a person who loves books and science and learning with a bone-crunchingly hard passion, to be told that my brain is merely incidental to my body, that what my teachers and superiors, most of whom are male, obviously, are interested in are my curves, my tits and my arse and my magical sentient uterus.

And they wonder why women fail to put themselves forward for top jobs after university. They wonder why only 30% of women science graduates, compared to 95% of men, go on to do research or get jobs in their field. They ask why so many women in higher education and beyond feel like frauds in academia, in business, in the arts, in science, why women lack confidence, why we fail to put ourselves forward for promotions and pay rises. This sort of thing is fucking why. And you may like to think it's all in good fun, but I'm not laughing. I'm not laughing at all.