No Feminism Without Trans Feminism: for The F Word

This article will shortly be appearing at The F Word, but I've published it here in response to several hatefully transphobic posts by other cis feminists. It's a direct retort to Julie Bindel's latest piece in Standpoint magazine, and focuses primarily on the experiences of trans women, as these experiences have been the main focus of controversy over the past three decades of feminist thought –the intention is not to erase the experiences of trans men and boys. This article is best enjoyed whilst listening to the music of Athens Boys Choir.

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For decades, the feminist movement has been split over the status of trans people, and of trans women in particular. Feminist heavyweights like Germaine Greer, Jan Raymond and Julie Bindel have spoken out against what Greer terms “people who think they are women, have women's names, and feminine clothes and lots of eyeshadow, who seem to us to be some kind of ghastly parody." Some prominent radical feminists have publicly declared that trans women are misogynist, "mutilated men"; trans people have responded to this harassment by vigorously defending themselves, demanding that anti-trans feminists are denied platforms to speak on other issues and, in some cases, by renouncing feminism altogether. The deep personal and ideological wounds suffered by women and men on both sides of the argument are reopened with new vigour every time the mainstream press gives space to an anti-trans article by a cis feminist.

Many otherwise decent and sensible cis feminists have fallen prey to lazy transphobic thinking. In the vast majority of cases, cis feminist transphobia does not stem from deep, personal hatred of trans people, but from drastic, tragic misapprehension of the issues at stake. Last week, outspoken feminist Julie Bindel declared in an article for Standpoint magazine: "Recent legislation (the Gender Recognition Act, which allows people to change sex and be issued with a new birth certificate) will have a profoundly negative effect on the human rights of women and children." Her views are founded on the assumption that “transsexualism, by its nature, promotes the idea that it is 'natural' for boys to play with guns and girls to play with Barbie dolls… the idea that gender roles are biologically determined rather than socially constructed is the antithesis of feminism.”

Bindel and others have, initially with the best of intentions, misunderstood not only the nature of transsexualism but also the radical possibilities for gender revolution that real, sisterly alliance between cis feminists and the trans movement could entail.

Femininity is a social construct, and Bindel is right to identify it as such. She is utterly wrong, however, to claim that transsexuals are any guiltier than cis men and women of re-enforcing damaging stereotypes. In fact, the misogyny and sexist stereotyping that Bindel identifies as associated with trans identities are entirely imposed on the trans community by external forces. Sally Outen, a trans rights campaigner, explains that “It is only natural for a person who strongly wishes to be identified according to her or his felt gender to attempt to provide cues to make the process easy for those who interact with her or him. That person cannot be blamed for the stereotypical nature of the cues that society uses, or if they can be blamed, then every cisgendered person who uses such cues is equally to blame.”

Even a casual assessment of the situation indicates that the problem lies not with transsexual people, but with our entire precarious construction of what is 'male' and what 'female', 'masculine' and 'feminine'. Bindel's description of trans women in “fuck-me-boots and birds-nest hair” are no different from today's bewildered 12-, 13- and 14-year-old cissexual girls struggling to make the transition from deeply felt, little-understood womanhood to socially dictated, artificial 'femininity'. Like teenage girls stuffing their bras with loo-roll and smearing on garish lipstick, the trans women for whom Bindel, Greer and their ilk reserve special disdain are simply craving what all growing girls crave: social acceptance.

Amy, a 41-year-old trans woman, says that “transition in later life is a really weird experience, in that you're suddenly and unexpectedly plunged into being teenage, plus you have teenage levels of female hormones coursing through your veins. You haven't grown up through the sidling-toward-teenagerhood that girls get, the socialisation and the immersion in society's expectations and realities. Trans women get to learn those, just a quarter of a century late, in my case. The results tend to be a bit wild.” Or, as one cis friend of mine put it: “If I’d had the income that some trans people do when I was a teenager, I’d have owned a cupboard full of fuck-me-boots.”

Indeed, the fact that socially accepted female identity is something that must be purchased is something that trans women understand better than anyone else. For socialist feminists like myself, who locate patriarchal oppression within the mechanisms of global capitalism, the experience of trans women, who can find themselves pressured to spend large amounts of money in order to 'pass' as female, is a more urgent and distressing version of the experience of cis women under patriarchal capitalism. In a society where shopping for clothes and makeup is a key coming-of-age ritual for cis women, all Western people wishing to express a female identity must grapple with the brutal dictats of the beauty, diet, advertising and fashion industries in order to 'pass' as female.

Not a single person on this planet is born a woman. Becoming a woman, for those who willingly or unwillingly undertake the process, is torturous, magical, bewildering – and intensely political. In his essay 'Mama Cash: Buying and Selling Genders', transvestite Charles Anders explains that: "Transgender people... understand more than anyone the high cost of gender, having adopted identities as adult neophytes. People often work harder than they think to maintain the boy/girl behaviours expected of them. You may have learned through painful trial-and-error not to use certain phrases, or to walk a certain way. After a while, learned gender behaviour becomes almost second nature, like trying to compensate for a weak eye. Again, transgender people are just experiencing what everyone goes through.”

Feminism under the knife

The concept and practice of sex reassignment surgery is the territory over which radical feminists and trans activists traditionally clash most painfully. Julie Bindel, along with others, believes that the fact that SRS is carried out at all means that "we've given up on the distress felt by people who identify as gender dysphoric, and turned to surgery instead of trying to find ways to make people feel good in the bodies they have." Bindel makes the case that the SRS 'industry' is part of a social discourse in which homosexual and gender-non-conforming men and women are brought back into line by "nutty bloody psychiatrists who think that carving people's bodies up can somehow make them 'normal'". Were SRS an accepted way of policing the boundaries of gender non-conformity in any half-sane nation state, Bindel's equation of the surgery with "mutilation" would be more than valid - it would be urgent. However, SRS is nothing of the sort.

In face, sex reassignment surgery is carried out only very rarely, and only on a small proportion of trans people, for whom the surgery is not a strategy for bringing their body in line with their gender performativity but a way of healing a distressing physical dissonance that Outen vividly describes as "a feeling like I was being raped by my own unwanted anatomy". Surgery is normally a late stage of the transitioning process and falls within a spectrum of lifestyle choices - for those who opt for it at all. Trans activist Christine Burns points out: "Julie Bindel is quite right that we ought to be able to build a society where people can express the nuances of their gender far more freely, without feeling any compulsion to have to change their bodies more than they really want to.

“However, that is precisely what many trans people really do. Only one in five of the people who go to gender clinics have reassignment surgery - the other four in five find accommodations with what they've got. Bindel's thinking cannot admit that, far from emphasising the binary, 80% of trans people are doing far more to disrupt gender stereotypes than she imagines. With or without surgery, trans people are living examples of the fact that gender is variable and fluid."

Of course, like any other surgery, SRS has its risks, and a minority of patients will regret the procedure. But for most of the trans people who decide to pursue gender reassignment surgery, the operation allows for potentially live-saving progression beyond the debilitating effects of gender dysphoria. Moreover, many post-operative trans people have found that the operation actually lessens their overall distress around binary gender identity: Amy explains: "'Being female is an important part of my identity, but it's not an all-consuming part any more. Until I transitioned and completed surgery, it was much more so. I woke up from surgery, and the burning dissonance, the feeling of everything being wrong, wasn't there any more. These days, I realise that I don't actually have that strong a sense of gender any more. Isn't that strange, given all I went through to get here?''

The radical gender fluidity within the trans movement is exactly what Bindel, when I spoke to her in the process of writing this article, emphasised above everything else: "Normality is horrific. Normality is what I, as a political activist, am trying to turn around. Gender bending, people living outside their prescribed gender roles, is fantastic - and I should know. I've never felt like a woman, or like a man for that matter - I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I live outside of my prescribed gender roles, I'm not skinny and presentable, I don't wear makeup, I'm bolshie, I don't behave like a ‘real woman’, and like anyone who lives outside their prescribed gender roles, I get stick for it."

What Bindel has failed to grasp is a truth that could re-unite the feminist movement - that trans people too, far from "seeking to become stereotypical", are often eager to live outside their prescribed gender roles and frustrated by the conformity that a misogynist society demands from those who wish to 'pass'. Marja Erwin told me that "gender identity and gender roles are not the same. I am trans, and I am not the hyperfeminine stereotype. I am a tweener dyke, and more butch than femme. I know other trans womyn who are solidly butch, and others who are totally femme, and, of course, the equivalents among straight and bi womyn."

Much of the stereotyping imposed upon trans women is enforced by sexist medical establishments - a phenomenon which radical feminists and trans activists are unanimous in decrying. Bindel, like many trans feminists, objects to the fact that psychiatrists are “allowed to define the issue of gender deviance”, giving medical professionals social and ideological influence beyond their professional remit. Clinics in the UK require trans people to fulfil a rigid set of box-ticking gender-performance criteria before they will offer treatment and SRS demands this conformity with special rigour. To receive gender reassignment surgery, m-t-f patients will normally be expected to have 'lived as a woman' for two years or more - but individual psychiatrists and doctors will get to decide what 'living as a woman' entails. A UK psychiatrist is known to have refused treatment because an m-t-f trans patient turned up to an appointment wearing trousers, whilst Kasper, a trans man who was treated in Norway, was pressured to stop dating men by surgery gatekeepers:

"I had to answer a lot of invasive questions about my sexuality and my sex life, and one of the doctors I had to see lectured me about how transitioning physically might make me stop being attracted to boys".

All this is a far cry from some feminists’ fear that surgery is prescribed to ‘transform’ cissexual gay men and lesbians into transsexual heterosexuals.

The demand that trans people conform to gender stereotypes in order to be considered 'healthy' or 'a good treatment prospect' is something that cis women also experience in their dealings with the psychiatric profession. It is standard practice for women in some inpatient treatment facilities to be pressured to wear makeup and dresses as a sign of 'psychological improvement'. The institutional misogyny of the global psychiatric establishment is something that radical feminists and trans activists can usefully oppose together.

Defying gender binaries

Feminists - even prominent ones with big platforms to shout from - do not get to be the gatekeepers of what is and is not female, what is and is not feminine, any more than patriarchal apologists do. Intrinsic to feminism is the notion that such gatekeeping is sexist, recalcitrant and damaging. If feminists like Greer, Bindel and Jan Raymond truly believe that having a vagina, breasts, curves, a uterus, being fertile or sporting several billion XX chromosomes is what makes a person a woman, it clearly sucks to be one of the significant proportion of women have none of these things.

Excluding the trans population for a moment, there are women all over the world who lack breasts after mastectomy or a quirk of biology; women who are born without vaginas, or who are victims of FGM; women who are androgynously skinny, naturally or because of illness; women who are infertile or post-menopausal; or, significantly, the 0.2% of women who are intersex. Is the female identity of these women under question too? If it is, feminism has a long way to go.

Greer and her followers seem singularly uninterested in the science behind their binary thinking, which establishes that prescribed gender roles still fall largely into the binary categories of 'man' and 'woman', but human bodies do no such thing. The spectrum of human physicality belies gender essentialism - as must feminism, if it is ever to be the revolutionary movement our culture so desperately needs.

Trans activism is not merely a valid part of the feminist movement: it is a vital one. The notion that one's biological sex does not have to dictate anything about one's behaviour, appearance or the eventual layout of one's genitals and secondary sex organs, now that we live in a glittering future where such things are possible, is the radical heart of feminist thought. It is essential for cis as well as trans feminists to oppose transphobia and transmisogyny.

At the very heart of sexist thought is the assumption that the bodies we are born with ought to dictate our character, our behaviour, our appearance, our choices, the nature of our relationships and the work of our lives. At the very heart of feminism is the still-radical notion that this is not the case. Feminism holds that gender identity, rather than being written in our genes, is an emotional, personal and sexual state of being that can be expressed in myriad different ways that encompass and extend beyond the binary categories of 'man' and woman'. Feminism holds that prescribed gender roles are a tyranny that no-one - whether trans, cis, male, female or intersex - should be forced to conform to in order to prove their identity, their validity or their human worth.

Feminism calls for gender revolution, and gender revolution needs the trans movement. We must put aside the hurts of the past and look towards a future of radical solidarity between all those who are troubled by gender in the modern world. Whatever our differences, until contemporary feminism fully and finally accepts trans people as ideological allies, it will never achieve what Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Christine Burns, Sally Outen and every feminist who has ever longed for a better world are all working towards: an end to the damaging and demeaning tyranny of gender stereotypes. Whatever our differences, only with trans people on side can feminism hope to work towards the type of equality our foremothers dared to dream of.

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Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I will be attending the demonstration in Trafalgar Square tonight. This piece is offered in recognition of the ideological and (sometimes) physical violence that has been done to trans people by cis feminists, in hope that all feminists can one day stand together to resist violence against women, and in memory of the hundreds of trans women who have been murdered at the hands of misogynists over the past decade, in particular the latest UK victims, Andrea Waddell and Destiny Lauren.

Update on Reclaim The Night Faff

It was worse than we imagined. Members of the IUSW, X-talk and Feminist Fightback faced verbal abuse and bloody police intimidation, the latter apparently at the instigation of Reclaim The Night stewards. That's not how feminism works, not in any shape or form.

I could cry, I really could, if it weren't for this bit at the end of Feminist Fightback's statement, written yesterday:

"At a time when we face the prospect of a Tory government, threatening to roll out all sorts of further attacks that will have disproportionate effects on women, through public spending cuts and the repressive rhetoric of ‘family values’, it is even more important that we build a movement that can work together on all the issues upon which we agree, and allow room for difference and debate upon those we don’t. We should not be afraid that differences of opinion will block unity in action. In fact it is only by allowing space for diversity of opinion and embracing discussion that our movement will grow."

*grins* NOW we're getting somewhere.

Pre-protest faff-laden filk-off-athon of doom (or: why the London feminist scene is quite depressing at the moment)

The only people we hate more than the patriarchy are the London Feminist Network!!!

No, really. This week, in between typing until my posh pansy fingers bleed for fun and profit, I have been watching in awe as one of the most serious feminist issues of our time has unfolded online. I speak, of course, of the great London Protest Chant Row of 2009.

It's the annual Reclaim The Night march tomorrow, which means that up and down the country, earnest sisters are getting ready to have a massive shout at each other. What'll it be this year, ladies? Trans people insulted in the street? Screaming matches outside Spearmint Rhino? Punches thrown over podium space (no, really) ?

Apparently, this year, it's protest songs. We're not content anymore with trusty old numbers like the women! -united! - will never be defeated! - direct, idiot-proof, and easily slurrable for those discerning gentlewomen who like to take a hipflask or two to such events, naming no names. This year the various feminist factions who've come to (literal) blows in the past over issues like prostitution, lapdancing clubs and transmisogyny are actually literally writing actual protest chants to piss one another off. Bad ones. Here's this, from Object, to the tune, and I'm deadly serious, of John Brown's Body:

The women who’ve been bought and sold

They need to have a voice,

If you’ve been pimped or trafficked

Then you haven’t had a choice.

It’s time to tackle punters,

And to show them what we mean,

Begin with Clause 14!

Women’s bodies not for sale (x 3)

And we won’t be for sale no more!

Look, I'm a fan of Clause 14, and I'm glad it wasn't thrown out when it went through the Lords last week. With proper sanctions it sends the right message - that people who use prostitutes have a responsibility not to fucking rape them. Right. Good. But whatever you think about the scansion of this verse, written after the event, it is no more or less than a massive, throbbing screw-you-in-the-eyes to the sex workers' rights groups that fought long and hard to make their voices heard over this Bill.

Yes, these shitty lyrics are right: sex workers need a voice. Unfortunately, both factions in this debate are prone to make the claim that the other faction denies sex workers a voice. What actually happens is that both groups, in the events they organise and the propaganda they put out, select a few speakers that they deem to be the 'authentic' voices of prostitution, wind them up and point them at each other rather than at the forces of patriarchy. On hearing about the proposed - for want of a better word - song, one member of the socio-feminist workers' forum Feminist Fightback said:

"Looks like we need to get on it with our own chants. Does anyone have a megaphone we can take?"

One of the proposed retort-songs is:

I sell sex/ Get over it.
I have a Brain/Get over it
I will win/ Get over it

And this time Feminist Fightback are actually looking like the mature ones. I'd join in, but, yknow, I don't ....actually sell ....sex.

Not to sound crass, but come on, sisters. We can do better than this. We need to do much better than this. We're meant to be symbolically reclaiming the night from enforced fear of sexual and physical violence, not taking cheap shots at each other. There is goddamn work to do. Right now, today, we live in a goddamn rape culture (hat-tip to Shakesville; trigger warning). Women and girls are abused, beaten, raped and murdered every day by violent partners. Women all over the world are still second-class citizens. Another generation of women in this country is growing up cowed, objectified, pressured to perfect themselves, to erase themselves, to starve themselves. We should be worrying about the pay gap, not the megaphone gap.

There is work to do. And if there are things we can't agree on, then we need to bloody well sort out what we can agree on and learn ways to work with each other, otherwise we're going to get laughed off the ideological playing field, and we stand to seriously let down those thousands of women in this country alone who really don't have a voice. I'm laughing right now, but not in fun. Come on, guys. Get it together.

A 'Straight, White Men's' officer for SOAS?

I was kindly invited to speak at a very interesting SOAS debate today. I can't make it, because I have a Secret Family Engagement; but here's my remote contribution :)

White, straight men are on the back foot on campus. London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was established in 1916 as the School of Oriental Studies, with the specific remit of training future colonial administrators in the language and culture of the people they were destined to rule.

Nearly a century later, at this institution founded on racist, patriarchal principles, straight white males account for less than 20 percent of the SOAS student body – a fact that has prompted calls for them to be recognised as a minority group by the students’ union, and granted their own exclusive welfare strategy. Today, as part of their Diversity Week, SOAS will debate whether or not to appoint a ‘Straight White Men's Officer’.

University life often comes as a shock to the privileged sons of this country. Higher education is the time in their lives when young men are most likely to experience minority status: white men may dominate in the world of work, in top-level management, in politics, in administration, in the arts, in culture, in the military and in the media, but as undergraduates they make up only 36% percent of the student population. White males are also have less chance ofless likely to graduateing with a first or upper second class degree and of finding immediate employment than their female classmates, where by contrast, less than thirty years ago, white males appeared to dominate every mixed-gender campus. At university, unlike in other environments, straight, white young men cannot pretend that they represent the standard for normal humanity – instead, they are required to confront their roles as members of a privileged minority interest-group on the world stage. Nowhere is this sea-change more evident than at SOAS.

Many have opposed the motion to appoint a ‘Straight White Men’s Officer,’ pointing out that white, straight males do not face discrimination on the grounds of race, sex sexuality or gender – and that to suggest that they do marginalises the experiences of oppressed groups.

SOAS students’ union women’s officer Elly Badcock comments saidthat: “Women have a women's officer because we're fundamentally disadvantaged in society, and liberation campaigns exist for those who have been systematically and structurally discriminated against, specifically because of their sexuality, gender or race.

“ Straight white men have never been discriminated against on these fronts, so claiming that they are an opressed group smacks of whingeing.”

Indeed, whilst white, straight males are now in the minority at SOAS, no evidence has yet come to light of such students facing racist, sexist or heterophobic discrimination on campus. James, 25, who studied Arabic at SOAS, told me that "as a white male in an aggressively diverse environment, I never felt anything other than welcome, really."

Like other white, male students, however, James sees saw the need for a white men's officer to address issues other than discrimination: "Iit'd be useful, if only so that so that we can identify as a minority group alongside other minority groups, and if and when we need slapping down, it can be done by one of our own.

“ That, and they could organise Bruce Springsteen appreciation nights."

At SOAS, straight, white young men are confronted with the truth of their status as a minority group, albeit a privileged one, in every classroom and hallway. That white, straight males are finally recognising themselves as the minority group they have always been is a positive development, and the appointment of officers to oversee this difficult process of recognition could well help the white, straight young men of today identify and position themselves in solidarity with women, queer people and other minorities.

The needs of straight, white males are different to the needs of other minority groups, and should be treated as such. But being born a privileged son does not mean that one deserves to be denied support in the process of finding and exploring one's identity, especially as growing up as a white, straight and male in Britain today is so often a confusing and painful experience.

Today’s white, straight men too often mistake the work that equality activists do to oppose the worst consequences of white, male, heteronormative privilege as active discrimination against themselves as individuals. Attacks on unearned privilege are not the same as discrimination, nor are they something with which any ‘Straight White Men’s Officer’ should waste his time opposing. Instead, such an officer would best serve his community by helping students explore positive ways of expressing a straight, white, masculine identity in a society thoroughly sick of being dominated by straight, white males.

Gay, female and non-white people, at SOAS and elsewhere, have every reason to be wary about allowing straight, white males any more exclusive identity clubs: historically, there are have been few models for such spaces that dido not define themselves violently against everyone who is 'different'. Having fought to create spaces in which our own identities as women, homosexual people and/or BME people are celebrated rather than attacked, it seems disingenuous to suggest that white, straight men might make positive use of such safe spaces.

But in a diverse community like SOAS, where white, straight men are already compelled to recognise and adapt to their minority status, a 'Straight White Maen's Officer' with an agenda to support students in avoiding the pitfalls of prejudice and negotiating their own identities might well be a positive appointment.

The gradual movement of today's young, white, straight men towards a positive identity model deserves all the support it can garner. This Last week, Courtney Martin reported in The American Prospect on a recent conference, led by men, on the fight to build a new 'feminist masculinity': " There are legions of progressive men ... who are struggling to redefine masculinity and live that redefinition every day. They have the opportunity to shed their socialized skin and all the anxiety that comes with trying to be a ‘"tough guy’" and make a happy life defined, not by their paycheck or their size, but by their humanity. Fighting against the world that we don't want is a critical first step, but fighting for the world that we do want is where liberation truly begins."

SOAS was established a century ago to train young white, straight young men in the arts of domination and subjection. With a little imagination, it could well end up training the next generation of white, straight young men - struggling to find their place in a world that orders them to dominate and then blames them for doing so - in the arts of listening, sharing and solidarity.

Don't blame Belle De Jour for glamorising prostitution.

Oh, Tanya Gold, how I do want to bash you over the head with a wet fish. You have great intentions, and genuine feminist credentials, but you say such silly things so disarmingly well. In today's piece on Belle De Jour, who has this week been outed as Dr Brooke Magnanti, research scientist and former impoverished PhD-student-come-high-rent-hooker, Gold appears to fall back on the old staple of laying the hate on other women for negotiating patriarchal capitalist society in the best way they see fit.

That the Belle De Jour industry glamorises and misrepresents prostitution is obvious. Very few sex workers are blessed with the options, education, support network,health, security and financial backing that the eponymous blogger enjoyed. In fact, the Belle De Jour industry is one of the first topics I ever had an article published about, back in 2007. In the piece, I argued that the corporate media machine has done a great disservice to the woman we now know to be Dr Brooke Magnanti:

Every feature that lifted Belle De Jour’s writing from the merely sordid and sensational has been edited out of Secret Diary of a Call Girl. Neither the show itself nor the ubiquitous advertising campaign manage to convey the brooding, self-assured, intelligent sexuality that infuses the blog and tie-in book with a compelling and challenging energy.

On billboards and bus-stops across the country, an eight feet-high Piper in, alternately, a rubber mini-dress or a matching thong and push-up bra, is draped across the frame, lazy as a Playboy-bunny: the apotheosis of unchallenging, accommodating sexuality. The caption declares: ’My body is a big deal.’ What is that even supposed to mean? Clearly, that Belle’s body is important because it is on sale. Hardly a mantra to inspire the teenage girls who will be watching this show in their droves and thinking, ’I could do that’.

Both Piper and the show’s producers are adamant that they are not trying to represent an industry – merely ’telling one woman’s story.’ I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t cut it: as any fule kno, a show with a publicity campaign of this magnitude, with prostitution as its main theme and a sex worker as its eponymous central character, does represent the sex industry – period – whether or not its producers acknowledge the fact.

Significant points of contention from the book have also been smoothed over for television, such as the fact that Belle has a boyfriend who’s privy to her secrets. In Secret Diary of a Call Girl there is an ex who has no idea of her profession – implying that the idea of a sex worker with a fucntional romantic partnership would be just too unorthodox for the popular imagination to handle.

Similarly, the opening plot-arc of The Secret Diary of A Call Girl could hardly be more disheartening. Belle falls for a client, good grief! While it is conceivable that ITV may indeed have the balls to opt out of the inevitable, popularist, cliched Cinderella-story that follows, the seeds of anticipation have already been sown for the handsome prince (in the guise of a city banker paying for sex) rescuing the girl with the mysterious and sinful double life from her wicked ways.

The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is, in fact, uncomplicatedly irresponsible. Producers and commentators who make claims for it as cutting-edge have clearly never watched such genuinely groundbreaking works of cinema as Narizzano’s Georgy Girl (1966) or Lucas Moodysson’s harrowing Lilya 4 Ever (2002). Belle De Jour is a blogger and, ultimately, an autobiographer: she is not writing popular entertainment. ITV2 is, and it does not have the luxury of evading the responsibility that comes with its programming decisions.

The show is over-hyped, plays into worn-out misogynist cliches and unequivocally glamourises and misrepresents the dangerous world of prostitution. That it is ’one girl’s story’ will probably have little effect on the many vulnerable young women – young women without Belle’s maturity, university education, support network, self-posession and financial safety net – who will, however briefly, watch the show and consider prostitution as a viable career prospect.

In the two years since I wrote those words, ITV has capitalised with increasingly drooling excitement on hamming up its version of Belle De Jour as an uncomplicated stereotype - something the real Dr Brooke Magnanti manifestly is not. Tanya Gold is wrong to suggest that Magnanti herself is irresponsible. She has every right to discuss her often problematic and complex experiences as a woman in this society, whatever her life choices.

Don't blame Dr Magnanti, Tanya. Blame the patriarchal media machine which has delighted in erasing her experiences, denying her ownership of her own sexuality and portraying her as a bland, grinning salesperson rather than a real, complicated human being with sexual agency and emotional turmoil eking out her own niche in the modern economy. Blame a society which loves the idea of a happy hooker, but hates the notion of prostitutes as real people with emotions, agency, scruples, connections and relationships.

Shut up, little girl, don't you know grown-ups are talking?

I apologise in advance, guys. I don't normally like to blog about the blogosphere, and I try to ignore what the blogosphere says about me, but this just takes the entire gluten-free cake.

Alright, so last week, I wrote an article about sectarianism in the liberal blogosphere for The Samosa. I was writing to brief, but it was a brief I thoroughly agreed with. In the piece I criticised, amongst other sites, anti-Islamist forum Harry's Place for slipping far too often into immature and unhelpful bullying, witch-huntery and ad hominem attacks.

Yesterday, Harry's place helpfully responded with a bullying ad hominem attack, on myself this time. Rather than actually addressing my points, the article and long comment thread consist almost wholly of a rant about how posh, rich, stupid, spoilt, young (and therefore ignorant) and female (and therefore silly and irrelevant) I am. It's worth reading in full, but if you can't be bothered, here are some choice exerpts:

From the article:

'People like Ms Penny - home counties raised and not long out of university - simply haven’t had that much time to reflect on matters beyond their own limited life experience and can’t therefore recognise political reaction if it comes with more melanin than she herself inherited'

'another member of the expensively-educated bien pensant community again...logically challenged and hopelessly muddled'

'since when did Socialism mean the rest of us had to be rearranged to suit the whims of a self-obsessed privately-educated, Oxbridge-cocooned twenty-three year old?'


From the comments:

'Silly cow'

'A stupid spoilt little girl'

'I feel sorry for her. She has no defences, no survival skills, nor any real moral framework that that would allow her to negotiate the world in an autonomous and secure way. She’s stuck in adolescence, is very weak and vulnerable.'

'a very silly, preening, posturing, vain, pretend revolutionary.

'I will criticise this spoilt little girl in any way I want'

And, most succinctly: 'Would she, please, just shut the fuck up?'

All this carries on for over 170 comments, Gosh, 170 comments, just for lil'ol me! I haven't been so thrilled since daddy bought me my third polo-pony :D

It includes a lot more invective, some speculation about my accent, and a few brave people jumping in to point out that responding to a piece about bullying and witch-huntery with a bullying witch-hunt might not be the smartest of ideas. As one commenter put it:

'The point of Laurie Penny’s article is - HP Sauce engages in smears and witch-hunts of anyone who dares dissent from its idea of what constitues ‘civilised debate’. So it responds by… smearing her, launching ad hominem personal attacks, and patronising her. The response has done her work for her. '

I'm flattered to note that a couple of knights in shining HTML have already ridden to my defence at Bleeding Heart Show and Pickled Politics. This is the point at which, for the good of my own mental health, I should probably just step away. But instead, I'd like to actually respond to the charges for once.

I'm pretty well used, by now, to being attacked on the basis of my age, my gender, my class, my background and my education, especially when people can't find much to criticise in my actual writing. It may come as a shock to some, but I’m aware that I write from a position of extreme privilege, despite having lived a lot more in my 23 years than some people at HP sauce give me credit for. I’m afraid that pointing that out isn’t going to shock me, or anyone who knows me, very terribly, although the news that I'm apparently both a Labour Party member and from the Home Counties did come as a surprise. (I was born in North London, grew up in Brighton, and have never been a party member in my life).

I’m quite open, on this blog and elsewhere, about the fact that I’m hugely lucky to have had the education and life chances I’ve been blessed with - my parents aren't peers of the realm, but we have always been reasonably comfortably off, and with my 80% scholarship they were able to afford to send me to a local independent school. I know I’m still very young and have lots to learn, but I see it as my duty to use those chances to contribute to a debate about meaningful social issues, and not just run off and make lots of money in PR or investment banking.

Tom Miller (who should know, because I've come begging to him for work more than once) pointed out on the thread that I'm actually not personally very wealthy, and am perpetually struggling to cover my rent and bills. Others have pointed out that I've had my fair share of tough life experiences, some of which I've discussed on here, some of which I haven't and shan't. These things are true enough - but they don't mean that I'm somehow exempt from class privilege. However hungry I get, I know that if I swallowed my pride, called my dad and told him I had nothing to eat, well...*sings* he would stop it all. And when I had my breakdown at 17 and was carted off to the loony bin for a year, I had my parents' private healthcare insurance making sure that I wouldn't be kicked out of hospital when the NHS cover ran out, as it did for many of the young people I shared the ward with. There's every chance that private health insurance saved my life.

It's not that I haven't fought, struggled and worked extremely fucking hard every day for the past five years just to survive. It's not that the struggle to stay well and stay productive and work for a secure future doesn't take everything I have, every day. It's that I'm privileged to have had the opportunity to work that hard at all. I know that. In fact, it's that knowledge that gets me out of bed on mornings like this one, when I'm convinced that I actually am the spoilt, selfish, weak, pathetic person that the haters like to tell me I am.

On the other points...yes, I'm young. Yes, I'm female. Yes, I am, in fact, 'little' -5 feet nothing in socks and a hefty 9 stone of ladyflesh. Tell me something I don't know. I've spent a long time being told that I'm too mouthy and opinionated for a girl, that however many books I read and measured debates I engage in, my gender and appearance mean I'm just a jumped-up, silly cow, no more. I've spent years being told to shut up and sit down and let the grown ups talk. I've spent 3 years of a neonate journalistic career being told that I'm simultaneously 'pretentious' (because I went to Oxbridge and know some long words) and 'stupid' (because...well...because I'm a girl, maybe?). And that's okay. I knew, when I decided to give journalism and writing a shot rather than go straight into teaching, that I was laying myself open to exactly the kind of bullying that nearly destroyed me when I was a weepy teenager. I'm stronger now. I know, and people who know me know, that I'm not some sort of spoilt, silly upper-middle-class princess who's never visited the real world, airlifted into a cushy media job by daddums. I've met those people, and I'm 100% convinced that I'm not one of them. If I were, I'm pretty sure I'd have a full-time paying job by now.

Criticise my writing, my ideas, my politics. Tell me I'm wrong, that I haven't read enough, that I need to educate myself more. Criticise my over-use of the semi-colon and inability to spell the word 'acheive'. Criticise my Marshall McLuhan fetish, my weakness for overblown feminist polemic, my frantic desire to find and create bridges between parts of a British left so divided that the effort itself may very well be useless. But don't call me a silly little girl. Don't tell me I'm unaware of my own privilege. If you do, don't expect me to run off crying. Don't expect me to sit down and shut up when the grown ups are talking. I am opinionated, articulate and unapologetic, and I am far fucking stronger than a lot of people would like to believe.

The only other thing I'd like to point out that I offered HP the chance to contribute to my article and put their point of view across - and they turned it down. Had they offered a retort, I'd have included it in the piece to make it more balanced. Instead, they refused to engage and devoted an entire article to a lazy ad-hominem attack. Not the first I've dealt with, nor the last. So it goes. Right, enough whinging from me, I've got work to do.

Pants off to impropriety!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you no shame?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hemlines and hypocrisy: fourth column for Morning Star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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