Friday webcomic

Art by Withiel. Storyboard by Penny Red. Lettering by Twitch.

Reconstructed males

There have recently been some fantastic investigative features in the print and electric press on the touchy subject of female surgical circumcision, also called cosmetic labiaplasty. One of the best, curiously enough, appeared in this month’s DIVA. This is a topic that needs airing and re-airing, but I’m going to take this space to tentatively suggest that there is also room in the feminist movement for a discussion of that curiously taboo subject: male genital mutilation.

In a culture of commodified testosterone, growing numbers of boys and men, some as young as three or four, some as old as eighty, are turning to genital mutilation as a form of self-harm. This in itself is not a new phenomenon, but as the culture of shame, anger and idolisation around the male sexual organ continues to increase, the phenomenon of boys and men damaging their own genitals, sometimes with extreme violence, is gathering pace. There are myriad individual reasons for this phenomenon, many of which are exacerbated by mental illnesses such as depression and paranoid schizophrenia, but the baseline reasons are fairly simple to grasp: a lot of boys have no frame of reference for what their penis should look like. Men are taught to see the appendage as a source of unimaginable sexual shame and embarrassment, or as a symbol of a sick, overzealous , hypermasculised culture in which they did not ask to be included, or, more frequently, both.

It’s not only the mentally ill who mutilate their genitals in private: you can pay a surgeon to inflict far more radical damage, a snip (literally) at £3-12,000. I’m talking, of course, about the booming industry of surgical penis ‘enlargement’, the nearest male equivalent to labiaplasty. We’ve all had versions of those relentless spam emails, offering in poor English to furnish us with a magnificent schlong for the price of a university education. Well, they keep coming because some people keep clicking – millions of anxious men and boys, in fact, all over the world, every day.

Yes, it’s fucking political. Male sexual neurosis is massively damaging, to feminism, to society, and to men themselves. This is not male apologism, or backsliding, it’s one feminist’s request for more discussion of a damaging socio-sexual taboo, in the context of a blog post in which I get to shout ‘COCK!’ a lot.

There, I’m glad I got that out of my system.

Gruesome butchery as labiaplasty undoubtedly is, the butchery involved boils down to a fairly straightforward amputation. Not so with penis ‘extension': I’ll spare you details of just what can go wrong, because Penny Red is a welcoming family blog, but suffice it to say: lots. And often. If you enjoy Bizarre magazine, you may click here now.

Thanks to the stalwart work of feminist writers and bloggers, there are now a lot of good, informative sites out there setting the record straight on what real female genitals look like. Sites that reassure women of all ages that they, too, are far less abnormal than they might have feared. Sisters working tirelessly and for free to undo the visceral harm done by the iconography of pornography and the language of fiction, erotica and women’s magazines in persuading girls that their vulvae should present as neat, hairless, odourless, tight pink slits with the sole purpose of funnelling equally tight, odourless, virginal vaginas, where all sexual sensation occurs. This is an ugly and damaging lie.

So where is the equivalent iconoclasm working to tear down the damaging fictions that young men internalise about their gender and physical sex?

The rhetoric of dickhood is entirely misleading, with emphasis on stiffness, straightness, rigidity, awesomeness, bestiality and hard, raging, pole-like qualities. The myriad of slang terms for the appendage range from the sublime – schlong, manhood, prick, dick – to the ridiculous – one-eyed trouser snake, luncheon meat truncheon! In fact, as most people are secretly aware, even the most impressive penis is no fearsome beast. They are extremely fragile things, normally soft, squishable and defenceless, generally flaccid, delicate , painful when struck, sensitive to touch and temperature. Freud was wrong. It’s not women who ‘envy’ the fiction of the perpetually hard, straining, bestial cartoon-penis – it’s other men,. That envy can largely be blamed on the shocking lie culturally perpetrated to convince young boys that their genitals are supposed to symbolise their masculinity and accordingly be other than the sweet, small, defenceless things they are.

If you’re laughing, stop. Now. I don’t believe it’s possible to call oneself a progressive feminist whilst taking the piss out of the sexual organs of just under one half of the human race. When it comes down to it, everyone’s genitals are ridiculous: messy, demanding, confusing and difficult to manage, with no instruction booklet and contents that generally differ wildly from the serving suggestion on the box. This does not mean that they are abnormal, inadequate or worthy of the childlike awe, tentative mockery, anger and aggrandisement that by turns characterise the treatment of the human prick in contemporary culture.

It is not surprising, then, that so many men and boys turn to surgery to change what they see as defective or abnormal, or to self-harm when they see a part of themselves as shameful and socially loaded in ways they reject. We just do not know how many men go through these experiences, how many operations are botched or how many wounds inflicted in private, because the subject matter is so sensitive that there simply isn’t enough data, and no comprehensive study has yet been done. All that we know is that it’s happening, and that it’s happening more and more.

The cultural markers of femininity are worn like a cloak and meticulously judged – from breasts to width of the waist and hips to degree of ‘curviness’ to hairstyle to set of the face and features. For men, only one specific part of the body is sexualised, and it’s kept under wraps, endlessly mythologised and certainly not featured in any fashion spreads. Feminists might argue that because women’s whole bodies are inevitably sexualised, men have it easier. Those feminists are right: men do have it easier. But that doesn’t mean that men don’t get a raw deal too – where little girls grow up seeing examples of perfect sexual bodies plastered everywhere they look, little boys experience the opposite – the cock is spoken of in hushed tones and never revealed, fictionalised, aggrandised, reduced to a few furtive glances in locker-rooms and arcane priapic symbols scrawled on playground walls and toilet cubicles.

In a perfect world, school PHSE lessons would include mandatory classes on sex and gender, in which children would be shown lots of photographs – not crude and misleading technicolour ink-drawings – of what real genitals look like. During these ideal lessons there would be open discussion of gender roles, physical sex, sexuality, feminism and gender egalitarianism. It won’t happen on these prudish little islands any day soon, not here where so recently we had laws banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools, but it’s nice to dream. Some girls dream of ponies. Today I'm dreaming of full-frontal PHSE photography with explanatory notes. It’s a vision thing.

The movement to reclaim the female body as a self-defined space is still a vitally important one, and it is perhaps just as vital to complement that discussion by extending its rhetoric to the male form. Talking about the realities of the female body in its many forms is a starting point for massive amounts of crucial feminist discussion of physical femaleness, of personal femininity, and of the difference and interaction between the two and the socio-political realities they produce. Talking about the male body in a similar way, and specifically about the cock – unlike for women, the only explicitly sexualised part of a man’s body – might just promote similar much-needed debate about physical maleness, personal masculinity and the difference between the two. Or at very least, it might make a few more people hesitate before doing inadvisable violence to the most sensitive parts of their body and paying for the privilege.

I am quasi-orgasmically pleased to announce that Penny Red is branching out. Along with the glorified textual rants you’ve come to know and tolerate, you will now be treated to a weekly webcomic, brought to you by the graphic wizardry of Withiel Black (links to the rest of whose work will follow shortly) and scripted by myself.

Raising Our Game

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Who's your daddy?

In the news this week, British jockism scored a smackdown at international sports day in China, with tellies across the country sagging under a brief and terrible invasion of those kids who were popular at school. Oh, and Peaches Geldof got married to her boyfriend of one month. Hold the front page.

Can anybody tell me the point of Peaches Geldof? What is she for, exactly? She seems to dabble in all sorts of things – music, modelling, journalism, presenting – as mere facets of an amorphous party-going social entitlement born of pop-heredity. It troubles me, because I know so many brilliant, truly talented aspiring musicians and artists and writers and models who aren’t making it, who may never make it, not because they aren’t good enough but because they don’t get the breaks, because their daddy isn’t anybody important. Meanwhile, Peaches could fart and SoHo would applaud.

See also, Daisy Lowe. See also, Pixie Geldof. See also, Mark Ronson, Alice Dellal and Alfie Allen. See also, Jaimie Winstone, noted daughter of Ray, who’s currently starring in the 3rd-wave feminist retrospective,‘Donkey Punch’. See also, Coco Sumner, she of the broad shoulders, glossy tawny locks and distracting tartan mini-skirts, noted daughter of Sting. See also, every damn member of the gurning post-adolescent Hanoverian clan, grown up soured by grovelling, fawning, belly-exposing media worship. What the hell happened to meritocracy in this country?

At a recent debate at Portcullis House, David Lammy MP, Minister for Skills, noted the stalling in social mobility that has dogged the UK for the past decade and more. “Class is still very firmly on the agenda,” he said, “and we need to start thinking about what stories we can tell about class, education and social mobility.

“I think it is legitimate for the Labour party to have something to say about excess in the upper eschelons of society. It’s not the politics of envy – it’s the politics of humanity.”

Every morning, I drag myself onto the bus to work or school or my other work and am assaulted by lazy press adoration of a clutch of young people the same age as me and my mates, purely on the basis of their wealth and heredity. Was it really ever thus? The truly fascinating thing about the Geldof, Lowe, Allen and their ilk is that their parents’ generation really were, in many ways, self-made. They came from an era where celebrity actually meant something because it demonstrated that, for example, four young kids from lower-middle-class Liverpool could take on the world and win if they tried. An era where talent and ambition and charisma could win you success no matter who your daddy was. Where you could go to university and work hard and make something of yourself. But a generation later, the snivelling, forelock-tugging British obsession with lineage seems to have reverted to type, and with it, a new acceptance of social class as a measure of worth and entitlement.

Heredity is the rotten trench running through this society, and after barely two generations of social progress we are reverting to type. The sons and daughters of artists, musicians and politicians who made their names the hard way are raised for a life of privilege in which the cringing British press supports them from the moment they’re old enough to be papped. Celebrity used to be aspirational; it used to mean more than who your daddy was. We used to be better than this. Let’s hope we remember it before too long.

Welfare reform: what's the deal now?

Ooh, James Purnell. Those kindly eyes, that roguish smile, that cheeky little pro-war voting record. He can call me any time, but meanwhile, guys and gals, let's satisfy our post-adolescent political lust by calling the Secretary on welfare reform.

The national drive towards reform of the benefits system has been gathering momentum over the past 18 months, with the pace stepping up from January when the Conservative party released 'Work for Welfare', a short proposal for some pretty draconian reforms to the current welfare state where all 'able bodied' men and women would be expected to work (the fact that one in four claimants of incapacity benefit are severely mentally ill clearly does not register with tory stiff-upper-lippers). Hot on the heels of this report came Purnell's green paper, the rather more progressively titled 'No One Written Off: Reforming Welfare to Reward Responsibility.' Cue a tiresome little inter-party squabble with a lot of bitchy back-handing to the BBC over just whose idea it was to bring the British welfare system into the 21st century.

On first reading, both reports advocate a greater emphasis on individuals taking responsibility for and 'earning' their own benefits; both want to encourage more people into work and provide better checks to do so; both want a clearer distinction between the genuinely needy and those relatively able to work, those whom a medieval government might have called 'sturdy beggars'. The net effect of the reforms is that in October 2008 a new Employment and Support Allowance will be introduced for new claimants of Incapacity Benefit and other benefits before being rolled out to all recipients.

There, the similarity between the proposals ends. It must be made absolutely clear that Purnell's green paper treads an extremely fine line between positive reforms that empower people to work and victimisation and further isolation of already poor and vulnerable sections of society. For now, in the months pre-instigation, the proposals come through relatively successfully, with welcome additions such as a long-overdue simplification of the benefits claiming system, making it easier for genuinely needy claimants to access vital support. Until you've sat up with a severely physically and emotionally disable friend and watched them crying in frustration as they try to fill out the forms, you may not understand quite how vital this particular change is. The old system was designed to be complex in order to discourage fraudsters from bothering; the new system will build in more proactive checks. And about bloody time too.

The tory proposals, on the other hand, are replete with the rhetoric of disdain for the poor and needy. In the conservative worldview, people need to be stopped at all costs from 'playing the system'; the government has a 'moral right' to 'protect families', the practical upshot of which is tax benefits for married couples, as if a silver ring ever solved anything. Quite apart from the fact that Labour's report is massively longer and more in-depth, quite apart from the fact that it answers the conservative challenge with the diligence of a progressive government purposefully handling the difficulties of practical power, we cannot - simply cannot - have tory hardliners like Chris Grayling in charge of this delicate transitional period in the benefits system.

This welfare reform package is one that can only be successfully implemented by a socially aware, self-policing socialist party of the type that, at its best, Labour tries to be. Conservatives such as Grayling have claimed that Purnell's proposals are a 'straight lift' from tory plans; they are not. If anything, the latest proposals represent a visionary re-working of a policy which, under the Tories, would further criminalise the working classes and drive hundreds of thousands into poverty, debt, addiction and despair.

Because the tories have far less idea even than the incumbent government of what real poverty really means. You can't say 'credit crunch' with out baring your teeth into a snarl, and it's going for the throat of benefit recipients trying to live on £40 per week. MPs demonstrating 'belt-tightening' by not demanding increases on their sixty grand salaries live in an entirely different world from people on JSA and Incapacity Benefit. The welfare state was never designed, as the tories claim, to allow 'a young man to grow up' knowing that 'the state will support him' whatever choices he makes: if you live on benefits, you are poor. Very poor, and you'll stay poor unless your circumstances change. A life lived on benefits is a life on the breadline, a life replete with stress and starved of reward and acheivement, a life in many respects half-lived. The vast majority of people on state benefits are keen to return to work - the problem, is that many face tremendous obstacles in obtaining and retaining employment.

The conservatives' mantra of small government, of decreasing state support in every arena in favour of 'the family,' will be massively detrimental to the real good that has been done in moving millions of people off benefits and over the poverty line in the past decade. David Cameron believes that:

'The primary institution in our lives is the family. It looks after the sick, cares for children and the elderly, supports working people and the unemployed' -

Woah there. Reading between the lines, doesn't that mean that families should be doing the work of the state, just like they did in the pre-industrial era? Well, presumably they're planning to reward domestic work financially, then, aren't they, and take massive social steps to encourage social cohesiveness within all family structures, and provide equal benefits for civilly-partnered homosexual couples and married straight couples alike? No? Or, just for instance here, could it be another strategy to shove vital care structures such as 'caring for children and the elderly, supporting working people and the unemployed' out into the streets in order to save money? We've heard this one before. It was called 'Care in the Community.'

Oh, yes. And tucked away in the pages of 'Work for Welfare' are some really juicy howlers, such as:

'Equal pay audits will apply only to those firms which lose pay discrimination cases'.

Which is a logical and VITAL part of making the welfare state work for everyone, clearly. Only a progressive socialist government has the tenacity and social responsibility to make welfare reform work: we must work now to avoid handing a fledgling system based on 'rights and responsibilities' over to the tories, who will never understand in our lifetimes what it really means to be poor, sick and desperate.

And the beat goes on.....

This week, on Hiroshima day, I went to Somerset House to sit in on a debate, and during the evening I found myself sitting within three feet of a former defense secretary refusing to offer any sort of apology for his involvement in British nuclear proliferation in the 1970s.

After the talk, I walked out onto Waterloo bridge in the sticky evening mist. With my new eyes I can see all the way to Wharf Tower in the east and down to the crennelations of Parliament Square. I smoked a cigarette, and another, tossing the butts into the rolling, muddy river
underneath, like sins. Like prayers.

Unlike in poems, the river doesn't really wash away sins. It washes them together, all the swelling, teeming crimes of this city carried away until they're someone else's fault, a fairy story.

That's what nuclear weapons are, three generations on from the war crimes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A fairy story. Think about it. 25,000 nuclear warheads exist on the planet right now, most of them 8 times the power of the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Someone can decide that pride is more important than sense, someone could make a bad decision, someone could make a mistake, and that would be it. All human life, at the touch of a button or the clatter of a key-code. The enormity of this has become one of the salient facts of contemporary culture, a reality so huge and fucked-up that it doesn't even register anymore, and nor does the sheer criminality of the fact that eight or nine countries possess nuclear weapons. (Yes, not everyone has nuclear weapons. Eight or nine countries still do, and many, like South Africa, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, have dispensed with the technology.)

Media silence on the matter may give the impression that nuclear politics are a hangover from the 1980s. Nothing could be further from the truth. The UK's current project to replace the Trident missile system is going to cost upwards of £30 billion. Enough to provide free public transport for generations, enough to train and employ hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses and teachers. The decision to carry out this pre-emptive replacement was taken unilaterally, with very little media fuss, around the same time that states began discussing 'pre-emptive strike action' as a possibile tactic in their war on terror (please don't ever dignify that phrase with capitals around me, ever.)

There needs to be greater media acknowledgement of the inherent criminality of nuclear proliferation and of the feasibility of global disarmament within our lifetimes. Kate Hudson, Chair of CND, who spoke at Somerset House, spoke of a 'drumbeat' of anti-nuclear sentiment being heard around the world. John Pilger also acknowledged that British steps towards disarmament 'would also be heard around the world.'

What we can do, very practically, is make a conscious effort to sound back the drumbeat - as thinkers, as writers, and as voters. If no newspaper will put nuclear proliferation developments before Madeleine McCann in their line-up, let's talk about it online. Let's talk about it in the citizen media. Because one thing's for sure - in the latter part of this decade as much as ever, nuclear politics is something that this generation needs to take very, very seriously indeed.


****************


A full write-up of the debate will be live at Red Pepper soon. Meanwhile, a far superior analysis than any I could hope to bash out is up at Comment is Free now, by John Pilger. Who, incidentally and exclusively for Pennyred readers, I did manage to snatch a little one-on-one time with. A transcript of the conversation follows:

JP: Oh, dear, am I in the ladies?
PR: (washing hands) Yes, Mr Pilger. You are in the ladies.
JP: Ah! Well, er...never mind, eh?

I blame the meeja.

Wives and fathers, please stand up.

Disclaimer: nowhere in this post do I claim that fathers are irrelevant. What I'm standing up (well, sitting on a pile of blankets with my laptop) to say is that there are some pretty damn outdated notions of what fatherhood means out there. Male parents? Bring it on.

You bloody traitor, Kathleen Parker. You weak-willed, belly-showing traitor. Maybe you’ve the luxury of a man to help take care of your two sons, but, please, know for sure that that’s what it is – a luxury. Women have been raising children alone for centuries untold, and, since feminist liberation, we have been enabled to provide for ourselves and our children on a more basic level. If that alienates men from their traditional roles of breadwinner and head of the table then too bad. I was raised by a single mother who was also a part-time lawyer; it did me no harm whatsoever, and I fully intend to be one myself one day.
Michael Gove and his ilk can rant about absent fathers until they’re blue in the balls, but if what we really want is for men to return, of their own accord, to the home, then we’d better do something about how domestic work and childcare are seen in this country. House-work and the raising of children are not seen as noble occupations, worthy of respect; if they were, I’d venture that fewer women would be so desperate to throw themselves into the non-domestic world of work, still so fundamentally a man’s world. Since the opening up of legal gender emancipation in the 1960s-70s, women won the right to enter into work organized for men, on men’s terms. Nobody told men that they now had the right to stay at home with the children: the idea would be laughable. That’s women’s work. And, partly because it’s women’s work, child-rearing is still one of the least respected professions on the planet. No wonder the men aren’t lining up to take their turn with the late nights, dirty nappies and parents’ evenings.
So, precisely in what way do children ‘need’ fathers - or is it, in fact, fathers who need children? Traditionally, the role of the head of the household was to provide for his wife and kids on a material basis. Now that that financial role is being adequately filled by many women all on their own, if men want to be more involved in the lives of their children, there will have to be a genuine sharing of domestic roles on a more sustained level, along with policies to back that up from the highest levels of government. The plain fact is that now that women are allowed to financially provide for themselves, we no longer need husbands to raise children effectively, if, indeed, we ever did. What women could do with, fundamentally, are wives –other people, male or female, to share the load of domestic work and money-earning in a spirit of genuine support and partnership. When more men can stomach seeing themselves in the role of 'wife and father', then we’ll have a basis for negotiation. Parker goes on to claim that contemporary reproductive freedoms have emasculated men:

‘Legally, women hold the cards. If a woman gets pregnant, she can abort – even without her husband’s consent. If she chooses to have the child, she gets a baby and the man gets an invoice. Unarguably, a man should support his offspring, but by that same logic shouldn’t he have a say in whether his child is born or aborted?
Granted, many men are all too grateful for women to handle the collateral damage of poorly planned romantic interludes, but that doesn’t negate the fact that many men are hurt by the presumption that their vote is irrelevant in childbearing decisions.’

Why is it unarguable that a man should support his offspring? With state help, most women are perfectly capable of doing so on their own, in a pinch. I’m fervently pro-choice, pro-choice to the wire, and part of that passionate belief that women deserve no less than absolute control over their reproductive capacity entails a certainty that with full reproductive control should come full reproductive responsibility. When a women has made a choice to carry a child to term, unless she has chosen to put it up for adoption, she then has full financial as well as emotional responsibility over that child until it can support itself (and often long afterwards – thanks mum!). I know I’m not the only feminist and progressive who finds she can’t support mandatory child support payments from genetic fathers. The trouble with this position is that it’s an outright statement of what men have feared for decades – that their sacred role as breadwinner is no longer relevant, and that in order to have a say over the upbringing of their genetic offspring, the terms of fatherhood will need to be re-negotiated on a deep and radical level.
I love my partner deeply and would be thrilled to bear a child who carried half of his genetic material. If we are still together at the time my child is born I will be only too happy for him to help me raise it, for him to share legal guardianship and for my child to call him ‘dad’. And this is not because it’s his moral or genetic right, but because I’m lucky enough to have met an emotionally and domestically literate man who I think would make a wonderful parent. But I want him around because he's a fantastic person, not because my kids need a male parent. And if he doesn't want to be involved, I'll manage. Before they are their own, my kids will be just that - mine - and my money will pay for the nappies and school shoes.

So sorry about your balls, guys, but before they are their own these babies are ours, and they will remain ours whilst they are born from our bodies. We would be only too delighted for you to help us – genuinely help us – with the work of raising the next generation, but fatherhood is a privilege, not a right. If you’re truly man enough to be a wife and father, bring that to the table and we'll talk.

On Gaze

The point of being a woman who writes online is that nobody has to engage with you as a physical being. The point of having a blog is that it's a sphere of self-expression where your looks, whatever they are, don't come into it. You're not ogled as a pretty woman or dismissed as an unattractive one, you are free to be fully yourself, to have your ideas judged and digested on their own merit, whatever that merit may be. But today I've a visceral urge to talk about female beauty, and what it signifies, and I hope that in doing so I won't be betraying a sacred anti-physicality of feminist hyperspace by bringing my own experiences of beauty and lack of beauty into the picture.

A few months ago, I was discussing the layout of the next article animatedly with my editor. He seemed unusually friendly and kept looking away from my face. When he turned away, I realised that I'd been leaning over the desk, pushing my breasts together, and had a lot of cleavage showing. Although I wasn't being terribly indecent, I was crashingly ashamed and humiliated. Suddenly, I wasn't a journalist with good ideas for the headline feature, I was an intern with a killer cleavage. I never asked for this. I despise the fact that I can't avoid presenting as sexual if I take any care over my appearance.

A recent study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that 18% of women would rather give up 10 years of their lives than be obese, and up to 30% would rather be severely depressed and slender than fat and happy. The majority of women will clock up countless hours and sometimes spend money they can't afford in the name of 'grooming', and however many useless hours we put in, we already know we’ll never be good enough, not compared to the perfect airbrushed creatures gurning at us from a thousand posters, tv adverts, movies and magazine racks every day. We’re clever enough to have worked that one out for ourselves, but we do it anyway, because we’ve been raised in the certain knowledge that if we’re not pretty, we’re not worth anything.

Facebook, the cussing blind oracle of the modern world, informs me that I'm statistically not unattractive, and we all know that facebook cannot lie. I was never one of those girls at school. In fact, I was the sort of teenager who sat up late popping her whiteheads and weeping whilst listening to Janis Ian on repeat . But suddenly I’m twenty-one, my skin has cleared up (thank you, the combined pill) and I find myself worthy of a certain amount of hassle on public transport. Lucky, lucky me. Suddenly instead of invisible, 'pretty' is what I am, before I'm a journalist or a reader or a sister or a lover or a friend.

And this is something that men can be forgiven for not understanding. Men have the option of not presenting as sexual, but women don't - particularly not conventionally attractive women, and particularly not in a professional environment. Whatever I'm wearing, wherever I'm going, I'm now a sexual being whether I want to be or not. Because of my curves, my tits, the body I was born in, people stare at me on the underground to and from work, and I can't do anything about it, even though it's an erasure of personhood that prickles on the skin. A close friend, who happens to be extremely empirically and personally beautiful, recently confided in me that

'Since I started having it horribly brought to my attention that I fit one of the standard images [of female beauty], and since I started to get really creeped out and threatened by it rather than just irritated, I've hard to work very hard at being comfortable with my own sexuality. I feel that those strangers' eyes steal it from me.'

There is no freedom, for the young women of my generation, to define beauty in the way we want it, particularly not in the working world where a reasonable level of conventional dressing is expected. This is a sexuality that's imposed rather than joyfully accepted. A sexuality that any ogling guy is implicitly invited to participate in, with no assumption that we enjoy being stared at. That's not the point. Living in a body that's conventionally sexy means that you are there for others' enjoyment, not your own edification and certainly not for your own pleasure. And the more I feel lightly, ocularly raped every time I get on public transport, the less I feel I want to engage with my own sexuality in private. When you're a pretty woman, it's easy to feel like your sexuality is not your own, like your body is not your own. It's taken from you, and then sold back to you, every day, by the eyes of a thousand strangers. It makes you feel alien within your own skin. It makes you dissasociate from what you're told is your own sexuality. Since I sharpened up for work and learned to walk in high heels, I don't 'feel' sexy. I just feel angry.

In addition to the objectification of women, the media commits another assault on the dignity of women. This assault is the dismemberment of women, and it has not received the attention it deserves. - Kaycey D. Greening, Capital University.

Don't, don't for one second give me that crap about men having it just as bad. Men have no idea how bad it gets. The worn old argument that society has standards for everyone, not just women, and gosh, it sucks for straight white men too is universally the first part of a syllogism used by bigots, misogynists and defenders of the status quo. Men do not have to make the same power choices that women have to make when they are young. Men do not find themselves defined by how perky their tits and ass are, how bright their eyes, how high their heels, how bouncy their hair, how small their waist. Men do not struggle to remember what their own sexuality actually is under all the viral marketing. Little boys know that they are more than a set of numbers. Little girls learn to forget it.

And don't, don't for a second hit me with well, women judge other women far more harshly than men, so it must all be fine - because there is such a thing as the morality of slaves. Yes, women also judge other women, and no, that doesn't make those judgements okay, but hell, if we're going to be slaves then at least we can be the best slaves, and maybe one day they'll be grateful, and talk to us like human beings, and maybe some day we or our daughters will be free. For examples of strong, powerful young women being reduced to physical, sexual beings, I need point no further than the Jessica Valenti Breast Controversy (say it ten times fast).

Why don't we change? Because we're persuaded that we have so much to lose. So we continue to pluck, shave, starve, bleach, shop, polish, powder and wax until we can feel the weariness in our bones and the more we lay them down for approval, the less we own our bodies, sexually and otherwise.

A smackdown for feminism in the courts.

Nice one, Mrs Harman. With her Equalities Officer hat on, the Leader of the House has championed one of the most innovative changes to UK murder law in the past century: it is now slightly less legal for men to kill their partners in anger.

More specifically, a new proposal from Minijust the Ministry of Justice is calling for an end to the hopelessly misogynist provocation defence. This is a defence dating back to the 17th century that can reduce a murder charge to manslaughter if a defendant can claim that he or, in rare cases, she, 'saw red' or was cajoled or insulted into lashing out at zir partner. It's used in cases of infidelity where a partner might be induced to murder an adulterous spouse in a fit of jealousy. It's used by husbands who claim to have been asked to take the bins out so many times that they somehow found their fingers around their partner's throat.

Although the provocation defence is not gendered, Harman was amongst those who bravely acknowledged that it is 'overwhelmingly' used by men. Yes, women too are capable of bullying, assaulting and even murdering their partners, but in 86% of all domestic murders the victim is a the wife or female partner of the male killer.

Quoted in the Guardian today, Vera Baird QC, the solicitor general, said that "The days of sexual jealousy as a defence are over. Exceptionally, someone who loses control and kills from a justifiable sense of being seriously wronged by the victim's conduct will ... have a partial defence. However, unlike the current defence of provocation, this can't be used when ordinary domestic conflicts cause friction and emphatically will not be available as a reaction to sexual infidelity."

Women have historically found themselves treated in a desperately unequal fashion by the British justice system in domestic violence cases, being labelled cold-blooded killers when they murder an abusive partner in fear of their own lives, as in the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, who suffered years of torture at the hands of her husband, including having a hot iron held to her face, before finally turning on her abuser in his sleep.

In another welcome move, the same proposal will outline plans for a new partial defence when men or women kill 'in response to a fear of serious violence', without the current requirement for the crime to have been spontaneous. Finally, a recognition that women and men who are seriously abused by their partners turn to murder out of fear, not anger. That spontaneous crimes are committed in fits of rage, but crimes of fear are often premeditated, simply because they have to be. Finally, some acknowledgement that 'just losing it' isn't an excuse for murder, but that years of sustained violence and abuse just might be a bit of one.

Noone is born a cold-blooded killer. I'm certainly not of the school which believes that if you marry a man you'll one day wake up with a knife at your throat or a fist in your stomach. But, just maybe, once we've seen the back of sexist laws from a less civilised age, it'll make it easier for my sisters' generation to enter relationships and friendships with men without fear. These legal amendments are a targeted part of a broader goal to eliminate systems which facilitate domestic violence. It is never okay to lash out at a partner because they're nagging you or shagging another bloke. Violence is not an appropriate reaction to frustration with a partner, let alone murder, and in the society we want to build 'provocation' has no place as a legal excuse. This isn't about misandry. It's not about victimising men. It's about justice.

Comic-book politicians and the Goddamned Batman

Why is it that the big, important superhero films always hit us in times of political unease? Since the planes hit the towers we’ve sat through remake after Marvel remake, each with its own special ideology ticketed along with the tie-in merchandise.

So, it’s mid-June and the sun is fizzing in the sky like a malignant bath bomb. Crazy news season is dragging itself to a crazy zenith and everywhere we turn there’s a slick new politician who wants to be our summer fling, and batman’s in the cinemas again, and the British are in the mood for a spot of king-killing. On this inauspicious Sunday, I ask you: outside certain specialised industries, is a kinky black rubber bat-suit the workwear of a sane man?

Give Christopher Nolan his due, nobody does a better goddamned Batman. But it’s what Batman represents that fascinates me, why we come back to these particular lonesome superhero myths, and why it’s Batman in particular in Summer 2008. I wanted to see nuance, I really did. I’ve tried very hard to find the subversive gay elements in Dark Knight, for example. Yes, batman has been a camp icon and, yes, the chemistry fizzes between Christian Bale’s batman and Heath Ledger’s beautiful, doomed Joker, violent, kinky and thoroughly self-torturing. But the villain-as-warped-sexual-flipside-of-the-hero is hardly original, and Ledger’s maniacal screaming – hit me again! I like pain! – only makes this tired trope the more upsetting, a weary rehashing of a self-involved male sexual paradigm which can only ever be played out in violence.

We’re about ready to be rid of the prime minister now, it seems. In fact, we’re baying for his blood from Glasgow to Henley-on-Thames. But what has he done, precisely, to offend us so? He’s failed to be the Batman for us. We believed we were safe somewhere between neurotic mother Blair and daddy Brown, dour and puritan and firmly in charge of the purse-strings. But now mum and dad have proved themselves petty, human and fallible, what are the kids of 1997 going to do? Who can we turn to? We need a hero!

We seem to want a more charismatic, US-style politician in British tweeds. Someone with prestige. Someone like Mr Johnson, who knows he is entitled to power, who has the confidence to remake the law to suit his own ends. Someone dynamic, with heritage and perhaps a volcano lair and a butler or two around the place.
And all Labour seem to be doing about this is squealing faintly about toffs, forgetting, of course, that in times of economic instability a lot of the British fundamentally like toffs. Toffs make us feel safe.


Deep down, maybe we actually want uncomplicated, comic-book leaders, leaders who throw around words like good and bad, right and wrong. We fetishise them, quite literally. They are fictional characters given life and purpose. Batman is a fictional character; Boris Johnson is a fictional character, but with a real wanker behind the photoshoots. Batman is the living image of this, a specific entitled attitude to the world psychotically embodied in the shiny inherited keds of a millionaire playboy. Bruce Wayne has no higher mission except personal revenge wrung from a spoilt, traumatised, isolated childhood. Bruce Wayne has his privilege, which at the end of the day is all he wields in the face of forces he calls evil. Bruce Wayne wants nothing apart from his own sick, slick satisfaction, which for someone who already has their own butler and a trust fund which knows no credit crunch, means power. Sound familiar?

Why can’t progressive politicians stand up for once and say that this isn’t right? Where are the heroes on the left? We’d better come up with some of them pretty damn quickly if we don’t want another four years as henchmen to a comic-book Tory toff. Well, you know what they say. Some days you just can’t get rid of a blonde.

*grin*

Bipolitics and the fourth wave

I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion. -Margaret Mead

It has taken me a long time to identify as bisexual. And before I go any further, I'm defining that as an attraction to self-defined men, women, transsexuals and the ambi-gendered, excluding noone apart from wankers, pro-life campaigners and people I just don't fancy. Or, as Stonewall puts it:

“Many members of bisexual communities tend to prefer the definition: 'a changeable sexual and emotional attraction to people, where gender may not be a defining factor'.” Stonewall, 2008

Part of the reason I rarely write or talk about my own sexuality is the suspicion that, as a bisexual woman who has had a string of male relationships and only a handful of experiences with women, I don’t have the authority to speak about it: I’m not a real queer. I am accustomed to defining my femininity however the hell I want – yes, I can wear biker boots and a short skirt and lipstick and shave my head, and my god I’m a feminist! – but I’ve been far more comfortable with letting others tell me what’s gay, what’s straight and what’s just plain perverted.

Growing up in Brighton had something to do with it. I’ve a vivid memory of standing below the stage at Brighton Pride, 2003, my fingers sticky with pink ice-cream, and hearing the DJ yell: ‘Let’s have a shout out from the gays!’ (there followed a suitably practiced mass squeal). ‘And let’s have a shout out from all the lesbians!’ (and a booming war-cry echoed across Preston Park). ‘And finally, let’s hear it from the straight people out there – yeah, we love you too!’ As the cacophonous cheer of support and solidarity went up, I stayed silent. Despite the free Haagen-Dasz, I felt cheated. I felt that there was more to my sexuality than the gimmicks, glittery costumes and sparkly dildos on show at the festival. I went home, and I haven’t been back to my home Pride since.
Brighton is unusual in that, in some parts of the city at least, queerness is entirely a mainstream trope. As the pink pound exploded under New Labour, the arduous process of self-definition that many queer adolescents go through became simultaneously far easier and far more rigid: you didn’t need to discover for yourself what ‘queer’ meant (just as in mainstream culture you aren’t encouraged to try to understand what ‘straight’ means) because there were already systems in place to tell you, and then to sell you stuff based on that definition. It’s taken me over a decade to conclusively reach the idea that there might be more to it than that, and oh, god, the winceably terrible clittease I’ve been in the process.

'I must confess that Garber's very multiplication of examples browbeat me into wondering whether I myself might not have been bisexual had I lived in another era. When I was a young man, in the sixties, before the beginning of gay liberation, I was always in therapy trying to go straight. I was in love with three different women over a ten-year period, and even imagined marrying two often. But after the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 . . . I revised my thinking entirely: I decided I was completely gay and was only making the women in my life miserable. Following a tendency that Garber rightly criticizes, I denied the authenticity of my earlier heterosexual feelings in the light of my later homosexual identity. After reading Vice Versa, I find myself willing to reinterpret the narrative of my own personal history.' - Edmund White, "Gender Uncertainties: Marjorie Garber Looks at Bisexuality", from The New Yorker, July 17, 1995, p. 81

The noted philosopher and queen in shiny leathers, Foucault, argued that the category values of homosexuality and heterosexuality are relatively recent creations, with the language of monosexuality being used initially as a changing society accustomed itself to the fact of queerness as a legitimate social sub-group. Monosexuality was a useful generational rhetoric for similar reasons to those which made political lesbianism a fantastically useful concept for second-wave feminism – but the rigidity of such categories is no longer useful to contemporary gender politics.

Monosexuality as a linguistic phenomenon has influenced monosexuality as a dominant mode of thought in western discourse – leading to blanket bisexual invisibility. Stonewall, which has often been criticised for its neglect of the bisexual community, has a passably good digest on the facets of bisexual invisibility.

Bisexuality is not greed, or opportunism, or sexual posturing. It’s not a phase young men go through before settling gently into bourgeois monosexuality, and it’s not a trick that women play to turn men on. Bisexuality is what even that fucker Freud identified as a pre-social ground state of being for both and, indeed, all genders. Kinsey points out that human beings

“do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex." Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

Now that I’m older and arguably wiser, I’ve come to see desiring men, women and others as a choice as well as a compulsion. It’s about challenging the rotten trench of binary thinking that runs through contemporary thought, and it’s about accepting ambivalence as something I can work with, and it's about cherishing a little world in which women are definitively sexually autonomous. And, of course, it's about thinking tits are bloody fantastic.

Bisexuality is important as a way of thinking as well as a fun way of getting your rocks off, and as its language becomes more widely used it will be increasingly useful to contemporary feminism. Fourth-wave feminism encompasses a gender egalitarianism which rejects the notion of antagonistic binaries. Fourth wave feminism is, of course, many other things, and will become still more as it develops. But increasing bisexual visibility will have to be a part of it. So accordingly I'm opening a closet door on this blog. Hello, I'm Pennyred. I identify as bisexual, and it's a part of my life and a part of my feminism.

Misandry and miscommunication....

I am having, how do you say, a stomp.

Last week my little sister suffered exactly the same indignity I went through at fifteen: having a painstakingly thought-out and researched feminist debate beaten in the school debating competition by a dim boy with a grin and a guitar. In the questions round, a gang of energetic adolescents asked the same question: Do you blame men?

After years of reading and thinking and writing and talking about feminism in the nominally adult world, I face the same question time after weary time: why do you hate us so? Why is it all our fault? Why must you blame us?

And no matter how often and how exhaustively I explain that we don’t, that feminism and misandry aren’t the same thing, no matter how careful I am to distinguish between ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘male people’, the same frantic, antic, aggressive-defensiveness persists. The same terror from men across the political spectrum that feminism means sanctioned man-bashing and, worse still, that it might have a point. An inverted delusion that any feminist statement is automatically an attack on all men, everywhere.

Feminism isn’t, in fact, all about men and the terrible things they do. Feminism isn’t even all about women. Feminism is about categories, and assumptions, and prejudices, and how they work us all over at base level. The necessity of explaining this to supportive readers and wannabe trolls alike is a central dilemma for feminist bloggers. Do you take on people's assumptions and try to explain? Do you engage?

Well, of course you do. Cath Elliott at Cif and Liberal Conspiracy is a tireless and inspiring example of the practice. You engage, and you engage again, even when you find yourself attacked and wilfully misunderstood on all sides. Because the internet is a safe space, but it's also a hypertextual space - and the right of reply, the right to ask questions and pose challenges is a central part of that discourse. Yes, it makes the whole process a lot more tiring. But in the end, you step up or you step the hell away from the keyboard.

Get me a hot towel, a silly costume and some pointy shoes and I'll dance all night....

Buckingham Palace and Number 10 yesterday gave assent for Margaret Thatcher to be given a state funeral. The Graun reports:

The first since Sir Winston Churchill's in 1965, the funeral would acknowledge the exceptional impact of her 11-year premiership in reversing the decline in Britain's postwar fortunes.
As such, it would be certain to prove controversial among the many people who lost their jobs during the "Thatcher revolution" which reintroduced market forces into many fields of activity and for which she has not been forgiven by some.

So, a state funeral for Maggie? Why the hell not. Let's do it.

And whilst we're at it, let's have a frantic choir of badly-dressed midgets singing the ding-dong song. Hell, I'm only 5ft tall myself, I'll lead the chorus. Let's have a party. Let's have a gigantic piss-up to see the old girl off, and with her what remained of industrial Britain: its hatred.

Because once the witch is dead, maybe the progressive left can finally move on.

We lost, back in the mid-80s. Well, in fact, I was watching The Poddington Peas and eating a rusk on a sofa in Islington at the time, officer - but, vicariously, I lost too. We all lost. We need to face that, forgive ourselves and move on.

Thatcher killed British industry, warped it forever. We can never go back. We've watched our children drink and smoke and fuck in the ruins for a generation now, and it's time to give up the ghost, stop bleating and build something better. We've got reforms to make, bills to fight, protests to organise. We've got at least two years left with a nominally liberal party in power and we need to use them, to their fullest.

Let's have a party. Let's have a great, big doomsday party and, in the morning, knock back a tumbler of Resolve and start planning the next battle. We aren't beaten yet. We just lost. I see red in every possible sense when my elders and betters on the left confuse the two. There are issues still to promote and everything to win in this new post-Industrial Britain for the cause of social equality, workers' rights and reformist socialism.

'Socialists cry "Power to the people", and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean—power over people, power to the State.'
Thatcher, Speech to the Conservative Council, March 15 1986

It is, of course, deeply disrespectful to speculate about someone's timely death before it happens. Which is why my comrades and I have quietly had a party-kitty going since 2003. A source said that one advantage of a state funeral would be to augment the public debate about the Thatcherite legacy. 'Doubtless there will be some people who will throw water bombs, and they will probably make themselves look very stupid in the process,' he said.

There is still a flourishing liberal conscience in Britain, and we need to deport ourselves with dignity, as more than the slathering, drooling proto-fascist reds that Maggie dismissed us as. We believe in hard work, civil rights, social responsibility and the freedom of the individual. We believe in justice and in leaving noone behind. When the Iron Lady finally goes, it'll be a moment for reflection for every young punk who promised to dance on her grave back in the 1980s. So let's send her out in style, and when the dancing's done, let's plan for what comes next.


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And by the way: Commie Girl is now up at Red Pepper. Enjoy. :)

Fucking hell.

Anti-racism and feminism are on the same stakeout in the 21st Century. And this is why.

This horrendous image is a still from the winning photoshoot on the show Britain's Next Top Model. Hundreds of people must have been involved in its vetting and dissemination. This means that, by the time the photo was aired, hundreds of people had failed to notice the gag-making racism and sexism implicit in its careful organisation, or had failed to speak out.

Images of unnaturally thin, groomed, flawless, poreless, white western women dominate the cultural exchange of the 21st century. As Naomi Wolf put it:


“'Beauty' is a currency system, like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West is is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.”

Add to that 'white hegemony' and 'consumer-capitalist oligarchy' and we're just about cooking, Naomi.

The timeless white silk dress and focus on the unearthly paleness of model Alex (19)'s legs and body is a tacit reference to L.R Haggard's 1887 novel, She. This does not make the image or its semiotics one jot more acceptable - She is also a staggeringly racist tract and has been read as such by generations of literature faculties. The eponymous heroine is the immortal white witch-queen of a tribe of cannabalistic Africans, destructively beautiful and utterly evil, portrayed as a sexually monstrous being -i.e, she is a woman who expresses sexual desire. The image is here updated for the 21st century beauty industry, in that rather than expressing sexual desire the model in the photograph is stretched out provocatively, smugly entitled and entirely unchallenging.

And if that makes you spit, imagine how you'd feel if you were one of the guys in the bottom of the photo, snatched from central casting and shoved into a ridiculous leopard-print strappy-top and woolly hat in order to make you look 'tribal'.

Fucking, fucking hell.

Boris, Blake and the Chartered Streets....

Tonight, hopelessly lost in North London in the rain and twenty minutes' squelch in the wrong direction from where I needed to be, I found myself at a place called Bunhill Fields.
This blowsy little cemetery claimed in mossy mock-gold lettering to be the last resting place of William Blake. Without really knowing why, I went inside, and it didn't take me long to find the grave.
I lit a cigarette and, leaning against the rain-rilled headstone and feeling wildly adolescent, thought about the city, the old poem running in my head -

I wander though each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe...

In every cry of every man
In every infant's cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban
The mind-forged manacles I hear...

I thought about the city. Three years ago we were reeling from a terrorist attack which killed fifty innocent commuters and wounded hundreds more. The young men with their mind-forged manacles who blew themselves up on the underground weren't the first desperate killers to target London, and they probably won't be the last. We survived. We said we weren't afraid, even if we were, and got back on the chartered streets with comparatively little fuss. One of those moments that makes a Maltese-Irish-Lithuanian kid like me proud to be a Londoner.

Chartered. A reference (possibly) to the Royal Charters of the late 1700s, put in place to control trade and slated by Thomas Paine as a manifestation of class opression. Chartered. Bought and sold, mapped and marked. The word was ringing in my head as I elbowed my way along the Jubilee line to work this morning.

He's a card, isn't he, that new mayor? Less than two months in office and already cocking up in good old Bullingdon style. Such a funny, funny guy. Well, I'm not laughing. This is my not-getting-the-joke face. Three years ago we held our heads high in the face of a senseless and apalling tragedy. We are better than this. I'm sick to the stomach that this city gave executive power to such an appalling, incompetent bigot, that we voted in the clunking fist of aristocratic patriarchy. And I'm terrified that another two years of this might not be enough to show the dissenting home counties just what happens when you vote for the Tory old boys' club.

As I finished my cigarette, the rain let up in a rather kitsch display of pathetic fallacy. I thought about Blake, and the city he loved. Let's have some hope, then, you mad old pagan you. We're better than this. Let's hope we realise it before too long.

Tube strikers and feminist socialism

What stories can we tell about poverty in the UK? As prices rise and wages stagnate, a new era of industrial action may turn up some new ones. The second Tube Cleaners' Strike this week is a flashpoint for a city and a country sick to its stomach of scraping by or stumbling over whilst the rich get richer under New Labour.

We are sick of market-licking policy promising us jam tomorrow; for a generation, now, we've been waiting for Thatcher's economic reforms to trickle down and lift the rest of us out of squalor, as we were promised they would.

But now the bubble has burst, and it's the poor who are taking the fall for the City. The recipients of Income Support in London who rode in with their discounted travel cards to vote Ken Livingstone out of City Hall are now feeling the pinch after Johnson cut that benefit, in one of his first acts as Mayor. The slashing of the 10p tax bracket will leave 5.3 million households worse off even after new tax credits have been accounted for. And with wages across the board failing to rise in line with inflation, Alasdair Darling's plea that we all 'tighten our belts' rings hollowly in the ears of those not earning an MP's salary of £62,000 plus expenses.

And when we're talking about poverty, we are often talking about women. The Tube Cleaners have brought home the fact that a large majority of those in low-paid, undervalued work are women and immigrants, and that a staggering 22% of women live on persistent low incomes as opposed to 14% of men; as such, feminism and neo-socialism go hand in hand in the 21st century, as the struggles of women and workers for equal rights cross the no-man's-land of cultural apartheid Saint Polly's column this week gets to the heart of the issue:

'Society can't do without cleaners, carers, caterers and classroom assistants. These are not "starter jobs", nor can they be filled for ever by migrants. Is it OK to pay below what Rowntree shows is minimum decency, so long as they are all proven to lack potential? Those jobs are fair only if people who do them have a respectfully decent salary that puts them at the heart and not the margins of society - and if the social ladder is short enough for children to move with ease. Consider this as low-paid public-sector workers strike against below-inflation rises, while prices surge. '

So I spent Saturday morning watching the sun rise over North London, sharing damp cigarettes and talking cunt and suffering with some astounding women. One of us, who had been a socialist-feminist activist in the 1980s, turned to me with tears in her eyes and said, ‘but we lost. Your lot have to carry the torch, now, because we lost under Thatcher and now we’ve lost under Labour.’ When everyone else had finally gone to bed, I found myself lapping at a cold instant coffee and thinking: was that really what happened? Did we lose? Or is it just that we haven’t won yet?

This is an exciting time in UK politics. As America ostensibly swings to the left, we’re careering to the right at breakneck speed with no thought for the handful of massive achievements we can chalk up even to this disappointing Labour stewardship. Education and healthcare spending have soared. We’re just about to feel the real benefits of SureStart. But in 2008, we still live in a world where boys from the City win million-pound bonuses streets away from some of the poorest and most deprived children in Europe; where women’s struggles and workers struggles run against brick walls of political intransigence as the boomtimes fizzle out. It should be hard, but it shouldn't have to be this hard.


**************************************

In response to all the uproar around BlogNation and various debates on the future of blogging on the left: yes. Leftist blogs are increasingly important. We're important for women, and we're important for the liberal agenda, and we need to get a lot better at coalition-building very quickly, and a spell in opposition may well send us back to Politics 2.0 school. A lot of very good people are working hard to make sure we hit the ground running. Now, can we please rein in the meta-analysis and get back to the agenda?

Blog Nation and men in feminist cyberspace....

Fashionably late to the party, this week I went to a massively interesting liberal bloggers' event at the Guardian. It was fantastic to finally meet people I've spent so long sparring with online; that awkward shuffling when a roomful of geeky people who know each other well but haven't actually met and are trying, shyly, to match faces to cyberspace handles felt pleasingly zeitgeist as always. It was the second part of the evening, the panel on women's blogs, feminist blogs and their interaction with the rest of the blogsphere, that really got my hackles raised.

With a room full of big name bloggers from across the country, it's hardly surprising that the debate has already been written up all over the left blogsphere (jeez, but I utterly loathe that term). One particularly striking question, raised by a confused young man in the audience, was: what do you want from us? How are we supposed to respond when you're complaining both that more mainstream blogs ignore your comments and posts and that you're routinely taken advantage of online? How can you ask to be taken more seriously and not want to be pushed around or bullied? Or, as the clit-itchingly unreconstructed Mr Lee Griffin put it:

'I think it's an amazing feat to both be ignored and abused at the same time but even more complicated became the idea that feminists wanted more credit, and to be leaders of feminist issues...but while men were there to support the arguments in a debate where everyone is equal.'

I rarely indulge in the turf wars over topics like this, partly because Pennyred isn't solely a feminist blog but, rather, a plain old leftist blog, highly informed, as all liberal politics should be, by feminism. But the reactions of the men in the audience both at the event and after they'd got home, had their coffee and calmed down enough to type, were astounding. Let me make one thing clear:

In meatspace or in cyberspace, women should not have to choose between being ignored and being abused. Both are problems faced by women in online communities. The hypertextual, interactive nature of the internet, along with the anonymity afforded by avatars and handles, is just one reason that flourishing women's communities have sprung up across cyberspace, groundbreaking grass-roots activism and sisterly solidarity of a species never seen before - but the hostility feminist bloggers meet with outside dedicated feminist communities has to be encountered to be believed.

As a woman writing online, you come to expect a given amount of crass, rude, misogynist abuse in comments; you come to expect a certain amount of pointless lewdness and sexual bullying from posters using the anonymity of the internet as a chance to indulge their more tiresome and vindictive politics. You expect to be called a bitch and a slut, you expect to receive sexual threats and inappropriate propositions when you write about women's issues. I've had it, we've all had it. At the same time, Kate Belgrave and others expressed dismay that some of the key online feminist campaigns in recent months have been attributed to male bloggers, when females have put in much of the leg work. Whilst understanding that male feminists have an important contribution to make, this position is a far cry from table-thumping feminazism. Let me explain:

We need men in the feminist movement. We welcome their presence, and we value their contribution. What irks us is when men come into the movement and immediately expect to lead. We do not need leaders - what we need are allies. What we need are men who will listen to our experiences without presuming to tell us, first, what those experiences are. Anne Onne has a fantastic piece up at TheFWord this month:

'...The problem is, as a privileged group which isn’t used to hostility, it feels as if any criticism is personal. That anything directed at men means that we are criticising all men, no matter how wonderful they are. We are not, and every time you think this is the case, check yourself. Feminists have brothers, fathers, boyfriends and male friends and are sometimes even men. We know perfectly well that not all men are responsible for a problem. But we also know that if men don’t own their role in this, things won’t get better. In order to unravel privilege, you have to admit you have it, and admit that people may have a very real reason to fear people like you. Yes, it sucks that if you walk up to a strange woman in a deserted street, or are stuck in an empty lift with her, she will be nervous. But imagine what it’s like for her. Far worse.'

We need men who want to educate themselves in women's issues (for a crash-course you can do no better than a visit to Feminism101). We need men to support us and afford us the respect that we deserve. And we need men who are prepared to drop their weapons and come off the defensive, who understand that feminism and misandry aren't synonymous, that a rant against patriarchy does not constitute an personal attack on every Y-chromosomed individual out there in cyberspace. We need male feminists who will listen without wanting to lead. To call the feminist movement an unequal one because its women are anxious not to be drowned out is a feat of point-missage second only to the UK's Eurovision record.

And, guys? There will be times when you will get it wrong. You will make mistakes. You, too, are human. Don't mire yourselves in defensiveness for fear of making a mistake. We will make mistakes too, time and time again - we'll call you 'typically male' when we're tired and angry, we will even refer to you, when you've put in the effort to be kind and considerate at home, as 'well trained.' And when we display disgusting dregs of prejudice like this, we expect, respectfully, to be challenged. As we, in turn, will challenge you.

Set down this: the way that men, and male bloggers in particular, feel when trying to participate in the feminist movement is not dissimilar to the way that women feel when trying to participate in life. That cold tug on the solar plexus when you realise you're in a world that wasn't arranged for your benefit, where you didn't make the rules and where your voice might be less important purely because of your genital arrangement? Remember that feeling. Remember that feeling and imagine it applied to the rest of your life. Imagine not being able to shut down the computer and walk away.

After generations of struggle, we are still trying to build a better world, one where gender does not dictate behaviour and assumptions and opportunities. We would like you to share it with us. Online communities are one area where we're laying the foundations, and we would be immensely glad of your support, your energy and your ideas. We don't need your leadership and we don't want your bullying vendettas; all you need to do is bite down and try to understand and own your own privilege. It can be hard to swallow. But it's got to be done.

Monday night riot...

In the Metro today, a cheery little feature about a middle-aged woman coming to terms with her body-image by - shocker! - stripping off for the cameras. On the next page, an advert for this.

I'm bored of this. So sodding bored of this I could cry and kick things. I'm tired of reading endless hashes of this same sick social obsession, fat girls, thin girls, calories, body image, size zero. The eroticisation of the gruelling size-zero lifestyle, life as non-life, the nothing woman as pop idol. Taking a pair of calipers to the female sex and demanding less, less, less.

After so many miserable years of starving and vomiting and weighing and hating myself, I'm angry. Cheated, driven almost to total destruction, years of my youth for an adult world that wanted perfection at the same time as it demanded less.

You want less of me, mister? Let me shove these five extra pounds of human meat in your face. I'll smother you with it. You want less of me? Tough. Because everywhere you turn you're going to see more and more of me, more of us, unstoppable bitches, coming for your jobs and your sexual freedoms and everything stripped from us for so long. Like it or not, you're going to meet us. In the flesh.

Kill Patriarchy 3: Cleaners' strike

Whilst the Tories squeal and bicker over one working woman's pay-packet, let's talk about some practical feminism happening in London right now.

The cleaners of the London underground work through the night to keep the city's vascular system pumping and sanitary. Most of them are women with families. Many of them face abuse and sexual harassment every day from loutish travellers as a part of their work. On top of wiping up our vomit and newspapers and taking crap from our scum, they have to struggle with shockingly low pay, on-the-spot third party sackings, little to no sick pay and a measly 12 days' annual leave. And they've had enough.

RMT, the tube workers' union, will be striking on the 26th-27th July, and again on the 1st-2nd July 2008.
'The tube cleaners are an inspiring example of women fighting for their rights,' said Laura Schwartz, a representative of Feminist Fightback. 'London Transport must stop under-valuing so-called women's work such as cleaning and recognise that it is crucial to the smooth running of the Underground.'

These people are us. These are the people who clean up our muck. They have feelings, and they have families, and they have a level of baseline leverage that the Old Firm trembles to contemplate, and they're sick of being fucked with. This is feminism.

Let's make one thing crystal clear right now: we're not talking about the caring face of service privatisation here. Much of the abuse faced by these workers, most of whom are migrant women, does not just come from commuters. Clara Osagiede, a representative of the tube workers' union RMT, told me that it is extremely common for women to come to her complaining about serious sexual harasment from their male bosses- agency supervisors- but too afraid to make formal complaints. Male bosses take advantage of immigrant workers by threatening to expose them if they don't keep their mouths shut. This is the type of insidious patriarchal fist squeezing the breath out of the vulnerable women of this country every day.

Because, for the benefit of the uninitiated, London isn't all fashion and finance, Kate Moss and cocaine. There are millions of people here living on the poverty line, doing hard, thankless jobs that they hate just to keep themselves and their families together. Most of those people are women. Feminism happens on the ground, it's not traded in bitumen between snarling academics, and it's a central and inextricable part of anti-capitalism.

Eat the rich. Demand decent pay and support those working to do so. We are entering a new strike economy and you, too, are likely to be inconvenienced in your daily habits at some point over the next few months. But not half as inconvenienced as we'll all be if we allow the Old Firm to kick workers' rights and women's rights to the bottom of the agenda.