Considering Amy Chua

If the name 'Amy Chua' doesn't resonate at all, then hopefully the words 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' will.

For anyone still scratching their head, Amy Chua is a Harvard law professor who has written a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It's caused a fair amount of controversy because, as this Guardian piece notes, it 'makes case [sic] for ultra-strict Chinese parenting':

The Tiger, Chua explains, is "the living symbol of strength and power", inspiring fear and respect. And as a "Tiger mother" herself, she assumed the absolute right to dictate her children's activities and demand rigorous academic standards of them at all times, ridiculing them if necessary to spur them on to greater efforts.

Except - as was quickly pointed out, but perhaps not quickly enough - the book is not actually a parenting guide, but a memoir. Even the article cited describes it as 'an autobiographical study of the failings of western parenting by Yale law professor Amy Chua'. Which is pretty objectionable since, as this interview with Chua and her family (three days after that article above) shows, the book could more accurately be described as being about the failure of Tiger parenting:

The book bares all about how the parenting model worked for her older daughter Sophia, now 17 and heading off to an Ivy League college, but backfired dramatically for her younger girl, Louisa, or Lulu, who is now 14.

Besides offering some important clarification, the interview also threw up some interesting points for consideration. Obviously, since the book hasn't even been published yet, I haven't read it - but on the basis of what I know so far, I'm-a get my lit-crit on. First off, QUOTES! We are told that:

At its heart, Battle Hymn is an account of the psychological warfare between a "Chinese" mother and her "western" daughter

Is it really that simple though? I'm going to follow the Golden Notebook method: mention a few other striking details, and then elaborate (super-striking bits in bold, of course):

"My husband kept warning me and my sisters kept warning me. But I guess it's part of my personality. A little bit rash. For me, so much of my book is making fun of myself through the words of my children. And some people get that. Other people read it straight. My older daughter said, 'Mummy, you put only the most extreme stories in. People don't realise how much fun we had'."

What Chua didn't put in the memoir, she says with a hint of regret, is all the good times. "All the way through, Jed was bringing balance to the family, insisting that we were going to go on family bike rides and to Yankees games and apple-picking and water slides and bowling and mini-golfing, so we socialised a lot actually …" ("My mum has a touch of the dramatic, and she's much nicer in real life," Sophia says to me later by email. "She lets me go to rap concerts with my friends and do archaeological digs in our backyard – not very 'Chinese' activities!")

Chua's description of her intentions certainly sounds more in keeping with the mode of writing a memoir - and acceptable - than what most people initially assumed. From the first article I linked to:

Chua argues that western parents. with their emphasis on nurturing their children's self-esteem and allowing free expression, have set their children up to accept mediocrity. "Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently," she says.

You might say 'On what basis do they assume strength? On the basis of projection?' This certainly seems supported by the claim that: 'The Tiger [...] is "the living symbol of strength and power", inspiring fear and respect. The 'Tiger mother' is strong, ergo their offspring must also be strong. All of which begs the question: why would a parent project? With due reference to the character of Erica Sayers - aka Natalie Portman's character's mum - in the just-released film Black Swan - parents often project because they see their child as an opportunity:

the heroine's mother (Barbara Hershey) is an ex-dancer who gave up a career to raise a daughter in whom all her hopes are invested.

Indeed, Chua describes childhood as "a training period, a time to build character and invest in the future." However, I couldn't help wondering if the culture clash with Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is less to do with the cultural clash between Chua and her younger daughter, and more to do with the cultural clash within Chua herself. As Chua remarks in the interview: "When I show this book to immigrants and immigrants' kids, they were like, exactly, this is how it is. It's funny, they relate, it's not controversial for them." Indeed, I was alerted to the existence of a Tiger Mother meme generator via a Facebook link, which included comments from people on their 'Tiger' parenting experiences. I was also put in mind of how I related to my black and Asian secondary-school friends more than a white friend who complained about her parents setting a curfew for her to return from going out with her boyfriend - I wasn't allowed to date, let alone go out on my own after 8.30! There are groups on Facebook making fun of Punjabi, Nigerian and all number of strict (generally ethnic-minority) upbringings - but I would hesitate to describe such groups and their members as celebratory. Perhaps for some people there is a celebratory element, but I can't help thinking the key is in Chua's remark that 'it's funny, they relate'. We often need to relate, and to laugh about, certain experiences in order to create distance from them, and reassurance, for ourselves.

Indeed Chua talks of her own Chinese parenting:

"For my senior prom, my father finally said I could go – as long as I was home by 9pm! That was around the time that most people were heading out [...] When I was little I was so mad at them all the time. Why can't I do this? Why are there so many rules?"

It's worth noting also that Chua's husband, Jed Rubenfeld, is Jewish-American and that she 'grew up with her two sisters in the midwest, the daughter of first-generation immigrants from the Philippines.'

Now, only anyone who's from a diasporan background can really understand this - but first-generation immigrants (as I know all too well), classically, become stuck in the mindset of the country they left when they move. They will often see themselves as representative of that national community - e.g. 'We are Indian... This is how Indians behave' - when in actual fact they are simply representative of how that country was when they left it. The country itself will change - in the cases of India and China, that has been incredibly rapid, massive change - in their absence and if they are not aware of how time-specific their vision of it is, fail disastrously to live up to their expectations of it when/if they try to return. This 'dislocation' is a well-mined theme in literature (just consider Chanu in Brick Lane, who, once his ambitions fail to be realised, begins to retreat into and promulgate the superiority of Bengali culture to his family before actually 'going home' near the novel's end). How exactly diasporans come to be that way I can't say, but disappointment, disillusionment, racism, segregation and isolation are pretty big factors. All too often, feeling themselves cut off, immigrants want to create a 'home away from home' and the weight of representation of a distant, land, people, language and tradition is inevitably offloaded onto their children's shoulders.

I wonder if this is the hidden story in BHotTM. The point I was trying to make earlier (rather clumsily) is that Chua's book reaches for what is essentially a stereotype - both in the 'Tiger mother' symbolism, a stereotype of 'Chineseness' which sounds like it comes straight out of the corniest martial-arts flick and the stereotypical figure of the Strict, Non-white Immigrant Parent that is familiar to so many. In her own words, the book is a parody of herself, but it also seems to be a parody - and an interrogation - of what it means to be second-generation Chinese-American. Pressure is often piled on diasporan ethnic-minority women to be 'mothers of the nation' (i.e. marry within our own communities) because whilst the patriarchal beliefs that reduce a woman to being worth less than a man are still present in the US etc., the social structures are not in place for controlling women's access to men who value them differently (not necessarily always higher, unfortunately). You can't use shame, guilt and fear in the same way to police people's behaviour. Indian society, in contrast, is still effectively self-segregating on a gender basis in many areas and generally a man and woman are only seen together in public if they are married or related. Maybe Amy Chua's parents were didn't-bat-an-eyelid-fine with her marrying a Jewish whiteboy, but I would be very shocked if they were. 'Marrying out' as the very term itself implies, suggests an attempt to escape, or reject, the culture/community/whatever of the parents - whether that's actually intended or not.

Besides this, there is the interesting fact that Chua's parents are Chinese - but they moved to the US from the Philippines. Given that Chinese =/= Filipino, this means that they had either moved to the Philippines before Chua was born, or were themselves the children of Chinese immigrants to the Philippines. This would potentially put Chua not one, but two, removes from her 'Chinese heritage'. Those of us who are second-gens know personally how bizarrely the relation to the 'motherland' can impact our lives, and as I've said earlier, it's been a frequent theme in literature. The question of 'what it means to be Chinese/Indian/African/whatever' often creates a great deal of expectation and fear since we are expected to simultaneously perform the identity and make sense of it. Goodness Gracious Me offers a sublime (and hilarious) example of what I mean. I wonder if Chua's monstrous, ridiculous 'Chineseness' is the product of a double displacement - the further you are from the 'motherland', the more you must 'represent' so as not to lose your sense of self, which is often traumatised by the act of submerging oneself within a new, frequently hostile space - 'Chineseness'-as-parody. I would speculate that because the self is more 'socially formed' in India and China (many tend to grow up without the kind of time or space for introspection, which is essential for self-awareness, due to tradition and poverty among other things), immigrating to Western Europe or America is that much more traumatic than it would be for, say, an Australian making the same move. The conditions under which the self develops are no longer there, and so for identity to be maintained, you have to work that much harder - and thus you can become a parody. Hence the phenomenon of children of immigrants who are more conservative/bigoted than their parents - something I have personally experienced and is also apparently a factor in the emergence of 'home-grown terrorists'... This also used to be observable on a class scale in the UK and arguably still is, to some extent, though much less so.

The final point, which is both separate and related, is to do with birth order. A recent study, splashed all over the papers, added to a growing body of research on the effect of birth order on personality in finding that second-born children are more rebellious and adventurous than their older siblings:

"These findings are consistent with the idea that firstborns conform more, while second-borns are more likely to rebel."

It was Chua's second daughter who broke her Tiger resolve. In the interview, it is her eldest daughter who defends her, and who makes this comment:

"When we were younger, I thought my mum favoured Lulu, but as I've got older, we've become so close. It's not really the focus of the book, but my mum and I are incredibly similar. She understands me and always knows what I'm thinking."

The patient, obedient first-born, unable to rebel against the authoritarian parent due to having been made an example for the younger sibling... harbouring her own resentment about her mother, but wanting overwhelmingly to have her conformance to the established order rewarded, before finally having her conformance approved and rewarded... Funnily enough, this sounds not unlike what Chua said about her childhood:

"When I was little I was so mad at them all the time. Why can't I do this? Why are there so many rules? But looking back now, my parents gave me the foundation to have so many choices in life. After I left home I had a choice of who I could be, a choice of careers, a choice of schools, so I deeply believe in the model."

Chua, too, was an older sibling - she mentions a younger sister with Down's syndrome. She would therefore have been under the pressure to 'represent' that is unique for first-born children and her belief in the 'Tiger' parenting method (she is rather aptly described as having a 'missionary zeal' for it) comes quite naturally, as a result of her having accordingly been 'rewarded' as a dutiful oldest child with more intimacy and attention from her parents. I don't know if her younger sister is married, but assuming she's not - it's worth wondering what kind of pressure that might have created on Chua as a potential 'mother of the nation.' It seems as though the 'Tiger parenting' offered her a ready access of Chineseness - it must be mentioned also that in many Asian cultures (and I'm sure this is to some extent true for the Chinese) - motherhood is the only real source of power a woman has - which is why this kind of parenting may take on a certain glamour. It becomes a perversely macho act, because it enables a woman to stray from the path of pleasing femininity and be angry, vicious, violent and resentful - i.e. have the freedom to be a real, fallible person like a man - but directs all that energy towards a socially-sanctioned purpose and cages her in a domestic setting. There is also an oddly macho note to those who talk about 'surviving' upbringings like Chua's and the frequent one-upmanship as people compare stories.

Chua got to experience both the macho pleasure of enduring such a childhood - and the macho pleasure of being the matriarch - and what's truly significant is not her belief in the Tiger method, but the fact that it failed. I can't help being put in mind somewhat of the trend among young, predominantly white middle-class women for 1950s-style retro domesticity - but of course, often when they are actually living it, they get real quick. As Chua herself acknowledged, she was only really able to do the 'Tiger mother' thing because her husband acted as a balance, and then it became exhausting and alienating and she gave it up. If you aren't from a massively poor background, and you're not in an unequal relationship, being raised within a society that is relatively open, free and accepting... in short, if you're not particularly frustrated or thwarted in any way, the usual drivers for the Tiger model aren't really there. So why else might it appeal to somebody? One reason would be paying homage to one's own parents, acknowledging their sacrifices and honouring your relationship with them - which I think is what Chua, in dutiful-firstborn mode - was trying to do. When you strip away the motivating factors I've mentioned, it makes it hard for Tiger parenting to work - but it also exposes what I feel is the key reason that it is felt to work, which is devoted, full-on love and attention. First-borns, and only children, generally get that love and attention full-on, and so it's no wonder that Chua would turn to the way of the Tiger - but equally, love and attention don't need to be, and generally aren't expressed, brutally. As Chua herself says: "I have many regrets … I have a head full of regrets. I worry that by losing my temper so much and being so harsh and yelling so much that, by example, I will have taught my daughters to be that way, and I'm now constantly telling them not to do that." The interview describes the book as her 'atonement' and breaking the rule of silence that's all too common in Asian families to atone publicly is pretty significant. She describes the writing of the book as being like 'family therapy', but I wonder if it doesn't also serve as a sort of cathartic therapy for herself, allowing her to both pay tribute to her parents and assert herself as separate from them at last?

So there you go - discipline, sustained love and attention, good; pseudo-spiritual authoritarianism and all that that entails, not so good. There is a real, ambivalent person at the heart of the Tiger Mother after all - and that's enough Amy Chua!

Me and Charlotte Hatherley

I've had a bloody busy summer, as is amply evidenced by the glaring lack of posts here. At times I would have what seemed like a worthwhile idea, then either change my mind or forget what I was thinking of blogging. After the intensity of my Master's dissertation, which I submitted in late August, I kept myself busy with a plentiful supply of temporary work right up until the 25th of September. Since then, due to our lack of a kitchen and my desperate need for a break from EVERYTHING, I put job-hunting on the back-burner for a little while to rest and (this second part was not intentional, but I've found myself having little choice in the matter) face up to various personal issues that the imminent onset of Full-On Adulthood has re-woken. My deep rooted sense of insecurity and absolute worthlessness has re-emerged with a vengeance in the last few days, likely due to several factors (facing the void of the future, not getting a job I was led to believe I had a really good chance of getting, no temporary jobs and the lack of kitchen, which looks set to extend beyond the initial week to two whole weeks). Some of my closest friends have also had major emotional dramas of their own to contend with recently, which isn't particularly good; the impact of such things always reverberates across all of a person's relationships to some extent.

To summarise: EMO! I am more than a wee touch emo at the moment. As I have come to realise though, emo cannot be resolved, only managed. So how the hell to do that? What could I use to leach the figurative impurities from my system? Music was an obvious, but welcome, possibility. Yet there's something about music which many have remarked before - it really escapes our control and might not have the effect it's supposed to have, or that you want. For example, as a teenager, I was always under the impression that listening to critically-acclaimed, stereotypically-angsty music such as Radiohead, or the Smiths, or the Cure or whatever else, whilst upset, was some kind of a therapeutic process. The music would draw out one's emotions in a manner both healing and culturally elegant, surely? The fact that my ex-boyfriend really went in for critically-acclaimed music (of the above list, Radiohead in particular), made me certain that the use of miserabilist music to treat sadness was an experience that I absolutely had to try at some point.

Unfortunately, as my ex went through his lengthy periods of misery, gorging himself on Ryan Adams in particular, my theory fell apart. From what I could see, the music provided him with a sort of reflection of his depression to wallow in. There was nothing therapeutic about the experience of listening to it - and indeed, I began to wonder what listening to a record apparently rejected as 'too depressing' by Adams's record company was doing to my then-boyfriend. Was it a way of validating his unhappiness, measuring it against a greater one (apparently Adams's girlfriend had died of cancer)? Or was it only making things worse, making him feel like his wasn't a real sadness, against the artist's? Whatever the point, it was a self-indulgent experience which didn't really help my ex to overcome his issues. Being young and foolish, I was the lifebuoy, pouring all my energies into keeping him 'on the surface' as it were. I tried the misery-music route, and it only made me feel frustrated and irritated.

Just yesterday, sadness and music and how they fit together came up with a male friend who is sometimes prone to serious depression and had been feeling quasi-suicidal. Like my ex, this friend likes to wallow in what I see as depressing music rather a lot. He used to be obsessed with Elliott Smith - who committed suicide. Currently, he loves Sparklehorse - whose singer, Mark Linkous survived an OD in 1996 (while on tour with Radiohead!) only to commit suicide earlier this year. I'm sure that some of my statements so far will have got some bristling, but I'm no musical authoritarian - I never stopped my ex listening to whatever, nor my friend, and I'm perfectly aware of the incredible power of sad music. What really intrigued me was why the use of it to manage my sadness doesn't work for me - I've tried it a few times, but it just makes me feel sort of blank. Part of the answer may lie in my pragmatism - writing this has made me realise that my notion of music as a 'cure' may seem almost clinical, compared to the romantic tendencies of some. However, I realised that there may also be a gender element to things.

Now, this will involve some avowed generalisations, but nonetheless - I've noticed that a lot of miserabilist music, and the majority of its consumers, is overwhelmingly male (and white). Think about it - all the bands/artists I mentioned above, for example, are male (and white). As I considered it further, I realised that works by these and related artists have also been established as 'authentic' emotion by mostly-male, mostly-white critics. Yet none of them did anything for me when I was sad. I would often turn to Hindi music, largely sung by women; sometimes I turn to Bat For Lashes, KT Tunstall, Etta James - it varies greatly. One artist has become my go-to: Charlotte Hatherley. The release of her second album was a pleasant shock to my system, compared to her more teenage, straightforwardly pop debut. The third album, wildly inventive, and retaining much of the emotional feel of the second album, has become an obsessive favourite. In short, it seems that feminism was at work in my mind without my even realising.

How so? Well, the fact is that pretty much all the bands that I've listed, and so many others, being male and white, project an image of sadness that is actually quite unique. This isn't any sadness, this is privileged sadness. This is sadness as coming from a person who is nonetheless lucky enough to have the time/money/support to express that sadness in recorded form, and have it given out to effectively the whole world, whether for love or money. It's 'real' sadness, 'noble' sadness, the mythical sadness of the tortured artist that everyone loves to look for and believe in, especially critics. The predecessors of these men in history were also, as far as we can see, white and male (consider that the modern-day 'tortured music artist' stereotype has been lifted from the 'tortured poet/artist' one) and therefore it is almost as if there is an expectation, a God-given right that they should be whiny or mopey over the length of a whole record (or several) and praised for it, to boot. Perhaps because it's seen as relatively abnormal for men to express emotion in our culture, when they do it in record form, other men are all over it like a rash because it's a 'safe' way for them to express their own feelings, as if by proxy. The whole 'tortured sadness' thing is also (mistakenly, in my view) associated with gravitas, creating the impression that there is something honourable about men feeling sorry for themselves, which is of course great for getting the ladies... Being overwhelmingly white and male, many critics can relate to such expressions of sadness more than I can, and thus trumpet such work as important, whilst unwittingly exposing the artificiality or 'temperedness' of it by highlighting the carefully-worked, re-edited and intricate musicianship of it.

While I don't doubt that the emotions inspiring the work are genuine (especially in the case of those who committed suicide), the fact is that it doesn't chime with my experience. As an Asian woman, the world doesn't have much time for my grief. Within Indian culture, persistent ignorance about mental illness means that depression is something that is often seen as just temporary, or even laziness, and the individual is supposed to 'get over it' without expecting too much sympathy or help from relatives. As a woman, open expression of sadness is not sexy and can lead to being viewed as tragic; there is also the fear of confirming the long-standing association of women and mental illness. Perhaps part of the reason why male brooding is so praised is precisely because, deep down, men aren't really expected to be mentally ill and/or expressive, and so when they are, it comes across as somehow revolutionary. Whereas women expressing grief is almost pedestrian; hell, the media will even play up apparent mental illness as if female grief on its own isn't enough: think of Amy Winehouse, for example, or Britney Spears. Besides all this, there is the fear of reinforcing racial stereotypes of Asian women as downtrodden, abused victims - Cinderella-types. When I am upset, I know that generally only my non-white friends will really be able to understand certain things, and even if I blog my feelings or write a poem, it's not going to receive critical appreciation and be held up as The Authentic Expression of Heartbreak, or whatever (not that I want that).

As an Asian woman, I am expected to be at the disposal of family members and doing the household chores all the time; as a partner and friend, I am often relied upon whilst knowing that I cannot similarly rely on others - or at least, not as regularly. The simple inconvenience of two people having massive issues at the same time aside, I've found that often if you're in a 'senior' position to others emotionally - giving them advice and holding them together in tough times - it's often too much of a shock for them when you fall apart, for them to really help you. Almost like seeing your dad cry, or something. In our success- and work-obsessed culture, depression is an inconvenience. Therefore, I don't have the luxury of working my grief into a potentially best-selling record - I have to find a way to manage it quick whenever it pops up again, whether it's by running from it, purging myself or even a mixture of both. I find that Radiohead, etc., don't really do sadness justice. It was funny, because my male friend defended his love of downbeat music by saying that he finds sadness to be the most beautiful and complex of emotions. You wouldn't know that from a lot of acclaimed white male artists, though. They often cover subjects that women and non-white men cover too - whether in pop, hip-hop or other musical forms - such as failed relationships, existential angst and bereavement. They just do it less directly, and with more artistry and elaboration. Considering something from a distance does not necessarily render it automatically more complex.

Which brings me back to Charlotte Hatherley. Describing her music to my friend, I explained that, even though she doesn't try to churn out indie-band pointed witticisms, or create complicated narratives or 'concept' albums, there is an overriding, unmistakable mood to her last two albums which utterly envelops me (I'm going to go on to mention tracks mostly from her second and current albums, The Deep Blue and New Worlds). She is white, and yes, hers is guitar music, but otherwise I feel like she doesn't kowtow to racially-influenced expectations of music (i.e. 'urban' music must always be by black people, whilst everything guitar-based is for white people). I mean, how many white female solo artists do you know whose key instrument is a guitar?! Pitchfork, in the first review really worthy of her work that I've ever seen, called her 'refreshingly out of step with most of her contemporaries.' Discussing her current album, New Worlds, the reviewer perceptively observes:

Hatherley is [...] a deceptively clever guitarist [...] Rather than attempt to evoke a state of synesthesia in the listener, Hatherley articulates a synesthetic point of view in her lyrics. The tell-don't-show approach is typically a misstep, but it makes perfect sense here, as the album's most thrilling bits come when she's excitedly explaining sensations and epiphanies that don't fully translate outside the boundaries of her imaginative mind. The point is not to totally grasp her crackpot color-coded cosmology, but instead to relate to the feeling of rediscovering the world and opening up to new possibilities.

The primary tension, both musically and lyrically, on New Worlds is between disciplined focus and wild hair intuition. It's not a binary opposition, though, but instead a cycle that enables an artist to effectively communicate their ideas.

The first thing to note about Charlotte Hatherley is that compared to, say, Radiohead, her music is distinctly poppy. This, I suspect, is partly why she's not taken as seriously as male artists of similar talent; her songs are infectious and you often enjoy them on first listen. You don't have to give her albums several spins before having an epiphany; the music approaches you on friendly terms. Secondly, her lyrics don't, as I said, tell fancy stories or try to reinvent the love-song wheel. On the single I Want You To Know, she sings: 'Oh baby, are you sad and lonely? Well, I'm just doing fine/I want you to know.' The shudders that such a line sends down assorted music snobs' backs! Yet - and this is the principal reason I love her - there is more to her than meets the ear. The term 'deceptively clever', as employed above, is spot on. Listening to songs such as Love's Young Dream again, you notice new sounds that didn't emerge before (such as the man's whisper in the chorus, slightly unnerving); the true complexity of the music starts to become more apparent. There is a remarkable consistency of quality on the albums which means that once you exhaust the pleasure of listening to each as a whole, individual songs start to assert themselves further. And that's another reason why I love her; unlike massively-hyped bands such as, say, the XX, she doesn't do hit and miss. There's generally only one or two 'dud' tracks at most, and even then, they're not necessarily even duds but just ones that might not fit your mood at a particular time. I don't find myself bored with her. I often skip 'Siberia,' for example, but there's no denying that it's a good song.

On to the main reason why I love her so fricking much, though: she does sadness justice. If male artists make sadness boring, one-dimensional and self-indulgent, she brings it to life. Sadness in her music is multifaceted. She expresses certain elements of sadness - nostalgia, wistfulness and fear - which seem to me to be under-explored by a lot of straightforwardly miserable music and does so with subtlety that makes it feel stunningly genuine. Crucial to this is the interplay of lyrics and music - my harping on about her obviously can't do that justice. On Dawn Treader, for example, she juxtaposes fear about the future with grief for her lost childhood; the song expresses her fears about her relationship, but this is done with reference to The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third novel in C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series:

(First verse)
In the night, I dream that it's over
On thin ice and tipping the balance, oh no...
Oh, not again...

From afar, the Dawn Treader has come
Here to save us, all into the shredder...
Oh, once again...

(Chorus)
Our one and only life
Put underneath the knife
Oh, what will happen to
The me and you I love?

One of the most painful and traumatic experiences of our lives is saying goodbye to childhood and forcing ourselves to grow up. This is pretty neatly demonstrated by much of the reaction (critical and public) to Toy Story 3. The past often hurts, and Charlotte Hatherley acknowledges this repeatedly in her work. She - and we think - that the Dawn Treader will come and save us, like the heroic fantasies of our childhood. However, in a Freudian twist, it is the familiar become unfamiliar - actually a 'bad ship' and a harbinger of doom. This revives the pain of lost childhood; as adults, no fantasy figures are going to come and rescue us, yet we often don't feel much more in control than we did as children. The song thus subtly but effectively communicates those pre-emptive feelings of terrible fear and loss we get when we don't know where a relationship is going, but suspect it might end badly.

Yet acknowledging the pain of the loss of childhood does not necessarily mean that CH wallows in sentimentality. In Love's Young Dream, she asks her mother frankly about the relationship between her parents before she was born:

(First verse)
When you were younger
Precious lover
What did he look like
Was he as beautiful as you?
How did it feel when you were together?
Did you surrender?
I can't imagine it at all -

And oh I wonder how you were

And I really wanna know about your love
Your love
Do you remember?

(Chorus)
(Love's young dream)
Back when you were -
When you really were -
Do you remember?
(Love's young dream)
Back when you were -
When you really were -

Can you understand?

(Second verse)
I don't remember a single moment
When you were happy
I can't remember it all (don't remember it at all)...
You only told me how it unfolded
All of the stories, oh many, many many, I know -

Oh, but what I really wanna know about is your love
Your love
Do you remember?

etc.


This song gets me excited as I've realised that it is actually quite feminist - instead of trying to whitewash her parents' relationship for the sake of her own peace of mind, Hatherley tries to engage with and imagine her mother beyond her role as her mother, as a person in her own right.


I've just realised that the sense of loss in her songs is often extremely apparent, which is why I find them so visceral. Wrong Notes, the final track of New Worlds, is in some ways similar to Dawn Treader in linking the loss of the past with the uncertainty of the future. I think it is about her desire to be loved for who she is, 'warts and all' and simultaneously, her acceptance of herself as a flawed and full being:

(First verse):
Running hands over keys
Up and down all the strings
Give me immediate
Sensations, waking everything -

Run your hands over me
Up and down all the strings
Give me immediate
Sensations, waking everything -

(Chorus)
But not so nice, not so nice now -
The wrong notes, are all right
And part of me, part of me, yeah
Will you stay by my side,
By my side?

I cried to this song without fully understanding why. The distinct mix of defiance and fear palpable even in the lyrics cited above, and notable in a lot of her music, is part of it, I think. As a woman, I relate to the overriding sense of hope greatly - many women have to 'feel the fear and do it anyway' as that famous self-help book is called; we don't have the option of shutting down with sadness as men often do, because women do most of the crucial but unpaid/underpaid and undervalued work in the world, like caring for elderly relatives! There's a bit which repeats and extends the lyrics of the second verse, which made me bawl even harder:

Hey you, yellow and powder blue
Plum brandy by the sea
Gold, red and ruby shoes
I'd like you to come with me -

Hey you, holding me up to the light
Where all the notes are bright
And there's a part of me
My darling -

The images here are so strongly evocative of childhood, it's unbelievable. I never went to the seaside as a child, but even just from reading stuff like Enid Blyton, I hear the mentions of plum brandy and the sea and bright colours and think of childhood. When she talks of being held up to the light, I think of that idyllic happiness when you're a very young child, and you remember being held, talked to, loved... my stomach is getting tight even now! The song seems weird because, if you pay attention all the way through, it seems like she could be simultaneously addressing a lover and a parent, but what she's actually doing is capturing the bittersweetness of the past and the future. She hopes, as an adult, that her lover will love her honestly and fully, unconditionally as that past parent who held her on the beach as a child. (Or so I think). She asserts, almost with pride, that the wrong notes 'are part of me' and then asks, uncertainly, 'will you stay by my side?' Rather than answer this question, the song segues into an invitation: 'I'd like you to come with me -' before effectively fading to flashback, and then ends abruptly. We never know what happened next, and that only hooks me in deeper.

No version of Wrong Notes that I've found ends any differently. It's a mystery, and I would say that that neatly sums up Charlotte Hatherley's music - conveniently reflecting some well-known stereotypes of women, it seems mysterious and enigmatic/childlike and instinctive/poppy and superficial (delete as appropriate), but as in The Yellow Wallpaper (written by her namesake, a considerably more famous Charlotte!), seek and ye shall find. I certainly feel that beneath all the music, you can discern the traces of a real woman - frightened, hopeful, defiant, anxious, sexual, childlike, courageous, cautious and imaginative. It resounds with shapes and colours, she talks about a firebird, a komodo dragon, a ship, a garden... I don't know if she's a self-professed feminist, but she's said this:

I've got a wicked band assembled, I've got two girls in it which is good because that's one thing which I've realised - I don't have to do things I don't want to anymore, I'm never going to tour without having another girl so it's cool.

How awesome is that? Instead of engaging in 'exceptional woman syndrome'-type behaviour, after having been the only woman in an otherwise all-male band for about 10 years, she's actually supporting other women. 'Exceptional woman syndrome' is where women think that they don't need other women because (in the words of Shakesville), they buy into the contradictory BS that 'it’s a meritocracy, that the quality of our work will carry us to success. Because we are different. Better.' EWS leads to women who have made it through seriously toxic environments - whether the workplace or the family - attributing it to their own super-specialness and refusing to acknowledge their debt to their female predecessors, and/or, all too often, screwing over other women who follow in their footsteps. It's the basis of marriage in India even to this day (not just India), allowing mothers-in-law to make life hell for their daughters-in-law in the guise of teaching them how to behave. In its most toxic form, EWS provides the basis for 'exceptional' women to serve as patriarchal patsies, delighting sexist men and decrying egalitarian measures by effectively going 'Sexism? What sexism? I never experienced any in _______ (insert male-dominated field)' thus making life harder for women who have experienced sexism and are seeking some female solidarity. Sarah Palin's a good example of an Exceptional Woman, but you find them everywhere - the worst kinds of hypocrites.

While the press has no right to hound women like Amy Winehouse and Britney as it does (and I'm NOT implying that they deserve it in any way), CH is on the whole very un-celeb as she generally keeps attention off herself and entirely on the music, which I love. It's way more interesting. I have to say that AW's behaviour does annoy me a bit - I want her to start channelling her talent back into music, but unfortunately given that her music and it would seem, her sense of self revolves a great deal around her relationships with men, that's not likely to happen any time soon. By contrast, CH provides several examples of strong womanhood - in the video for I Want You To Know, she's a boxer and in Behave, a space pilot, whilst she's penned an ode to Kim Wilde and the song Paragon is about idolising a dynamic girl called Caroline. Grey Will Fade, the title track of the first album, is about GIRL LOVE - her comforting her beloved friend Fay - I mean, maybe she is supposed to be singing with a male voice, but from the tone of the lyrics, I don't see any evidence of it. Turns out she also said this:

"I want people to come to this tour and see me Jen and Charley playing guitar really fucking well and see that there are lots of girls out there who can do it. I really hope people and even girls in the audience can get inspired by that."

Do you love her yet? I'm falling in love all over again.

BNP in sexism shocker!

I'm sorry. I have just come across this, and I think it MUST - absolutely MUST - be highlighted.

The BNP's abhorrent positions on race and gender in modern Britain have been highlighted many a time, by the dedicated folks at Hope Not Hate, as well as on the F-Word and Pickled Politics. There are of course many other blogs and sites keeping up the good work.

To repeat the words of a former BNP member, Nicholas Eriksen:

"Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible ordeal.

"To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force-feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence.

"A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched."

That's right, kids. When a man forces himself on a woman despite her NOT WANTING to have sex with him, it's sex. Y'know, SEX, the intimate physical act which two people CHOOSE to do together. CHOOSE. Rape = sex, because, y'know, if a woman's chosen not to have sex with a man, it's the same as saying yes! There's just NO inherent logical contradiction there for wannabe rapist fuckface Nicholas Eriksen!

So, yeah, the BNP doesn't like feminism or think that treating women as equals really fits in with their worldview (Why am I not surprised?). So, without further ado, I bring you:

Babes of the BNP.

... Doing absolutely nothing to bolster their delusion that they constitute the 'master race,' the interviews with the women are a particularly painful reminder of what happens when people aren't made to learn the history of their own country properly. The irony - and hypocrisy - of allying oneself to a rabidly anti-immigrant party, whilst hoping to become an immigrant oneself, is particularly rich. It's hard not to feel really quite sorry for these women. I would mock them, but they seem genuinely deluded, and not quite as self-important as, say, the largely male BNP trolls now popping up like Whac-a-Moles on PP.

Given that women's bodies have been used to sell just about everything, even fucking MOUTHWASH and 'good' causes like militant vegetarianism (I'm looking at you, PETA!), surely it was just a matter of time until the BNP leapt aboard that bandwagon too? Good grief.

Relevant recommended reading.

Putting Sex In Its Rightful Place

Sound the klaxons! I am about to go on to write a non-watertight post which will include some assertions and much musing. WHAT IT WILL BE: a reflection and an invitation to debate, discuss and ponder (I know, I know, call the ponce police NOW!). WHAT IT WON'T BE: sociological treatise supported by pages upon pages of peer-reviewed science.

Sex is overrated.

Yeah, I said it. That's right. You read me right. SEX IS OVERRATED!

Now that I've grabbed your attention with my controversial soundbite, sit still and bear with me. I don't think ALL sexual activity is overrated...

but when I said 'sex,' you thought of penetrative intercourse, didn't you? Go on, it's the right answer! It's the answer I want you to give!

I've always been a bit dubious about penetration. When I was younger, it was the idea that something being inserted up you could be fun. If you think about it, that brings to mind injections. Injections are not very fun, now, are they?

(Incidentally, I've only just now made that link, so don't go crediting my teenage self with scope I didn't actually have...).

As an Asian woman though, the prospect of it absolutely fucking terrified me. Ideally, I would be imagined - and expected - to be a virgin, a sexual ingénue, whilst my husband could have had numerous sexual encounters, and we would not discuss it because you Do Not Go There. Why would you want to broach a topic that would only lead to strife? Wondering how many previous lovers he might have had, if he's being honest about that number, how you compare, why it's OK for him and not for you...

Not all Asian men are hypocrites. Some of the genuinely devout ones aren't. However, depressingly enough, it is the religion-following (rather than any sort of internal reflection and self-awareness) that makes them so, for a lot of the men I know of. Sikh men. Let it be said though, that the power structures are partly responsible. Even though men benefit much more than women in Asian culture, they're by NO MEANS free of baggage.

So yeah, I would wonder why the hell the whole world was so goddamn obsessed with sex anyway. From the age of eleven, I made a resolution, and this was my only life's resolution. Now it may sound sad to some, and maybe some sort of betrayal to others (OMG, WHY DIDN'T YOU LIKE, AIM TO BE AN ASTRONAUT OR SOMETHING?!), it was important to me. It still is - important and necessary, and I feel that I was very lucky to find it.

I vowed that I wanted to love and be loved. Note: I didn't say 'wanted to be married,' or that I 'wanted to be in love.' No, I wanted to be loved. Not drama and not tears. Not the sort of relationship where his basic acknowledging of me as a fellow human was a source of happiness. Not the sort of marriage where his leaving me to get on with the housework, rather than criticising me for not doing it the way his mum did, was considered desirable. A partner who could understand that, was THE benchmark by which I would set my standards, thank you very much.

Sex has always been important, but many would argue that it has become more recent in modern times. I would be inclined to agree, especially when you think of changing attitudes to pornography, the arrival of the Internet and a general liberalising of society. That's not to say we're all fine with talking about sex now, but you know, you have things like Anne Summers shops and mainstream papers such as The Independent running lists of 'The Ten Best Sex Toys.' Hard to imagine in the 1950s, eh?

However, the way we think about sex has often been problematic. For a long time, you had a love/sex dichotomy, and it still persists. The idea that love and sex could be separate (especially for women) began to develop towards the end of the nineteenth century. I'm thinking specifically of Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899), which tentatively broaches a subject all too familiar to modern readers: the notion that you can love somebody - while simultaneously being attracted to someone else. No doubt it was there before, but it was very likely taboo, especially for women. Fancy someone other than your husband? You strumpet!

For some people, I don't doubt that love and sex is often - maybe even always - separate. That may even work for them. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for a lot of people. Read any number of letters to any number of agony aunts, and you see the same ol' time-weathered issues recurring: I love a married man, but he won't leave his wife for me, blah blah blah. Or I'm unsatisfied and I'm having an affair, blah blah blah. Alongside this kind of thing, you get celebratory articles about women finding sexual satisfaction in their 40s by having affairs, and stuff like that.

What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that - perhaps because of an increase in sexual freedoms for women - it became more acceptable for women to 'do as men do' sexually. Unfortunately, however, that increase in freedom didn't necessarily coincide with a weakening of certain ideas about sex and gender. Hence, many women had more sex, but the old idea that women wanted love and men wanted sex still held firm in the minds of many. So, you got this stupid and painful situation where women could have sex with whoever, but for many, love and sex were intrinsically bound in their subconscious.

There's also the fact that sex leads to the release of oxytocin, which:

has various functions in the body, such as inducing labor contractions and milk ejection, but from evolutionary biology’s perspective, its main evolutionary function is to bond us to our children for life. It also serves to bond us to our mate…at least long enough to produce a child and (if we're lucky) get it on its feet.

We are not programmed for monogamy, nor our own sexual satisfaction, it would seem. I DO NOT mean by this to say that women should stop exercising sexual freedom like men. Evolutionary science has been conveniently used in the past to enforce gender stereotypes and permit men to 'sow their wild oats' while denying women the same freedom. That's what you'd call 'bad science,' though. Proper science shows itself to be egalitarian in showing that actually, we're all set up for the same goal: to further the species. If males will 'sow their wild oats,' then females will replace flagging partners.

This is where I come back in. Yuman beans are, of course, brain-equipped creatures and not just bags of hormones, correct? We realised the dangers of blindly following our instincts since very, very long ago (see: Greek tragedy), in the form of overpopulation, if nothing else. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Either we have long-term stable relationships, or we have incredible sexual peaks and troughs. The time-honoured way to have both is to fake replacing your partner, by means of sexual exploration. You may notice how people always use terms like 'reinvent' or 'rediscover.' It's change, but you're tricking your brain - instead of a new partner, you're simply using new techniques to keep dopamine levels consistent.

Another possibility, to be used alongside, is to reassess the importance of sex. To put sex back in its rightful place (AT LAST! I hear you cry). No sex vs love. No more of this 'I love my husband, but I have great sex with the plumber.' No more of this 'I love my wife, but my secretary is so naughty and dirty.' Actions have repercussions. That's the shittest and most important bit of being an adult. Especially when there's children or friends involved, and Lord knows, there so often are. It's almost embarrassing.

Be slow. Be messy. Be fumbling. Learn, gradually and carefully, how to turn each other on. Think of your sex life as a book, which you chop into bits and put back together again. Does the end HAVE to be the end? How final was the end, anyway? In so many cases, you probably read to the end and then thoughts lingered in your head. You thought 'I wonder what happened next to so-and-so?' Even if there was a sequel, the likelihood of it carrying on right where the last left off was unlikely. In cases where that DOES happen, the first media I can think of are soap operas and comic-book series - and what are they? Long-running.

Penetration is not the end, nor should it be. It's been established that many women don't come through penetration alone; evidently it's not the key to orgasm in itself. Yet we persist in elevating it to such ridiculous levels of importance. Teens are all so interested in 'going all the way' and 'doing it.' Very few people's first time is about learning how to enjoy sex; it seems more to be about 'getting it out of the way.' How depressing! That's life, though. Social conformity exerts such horrible, crushing pressure on us that people have sex - or pretend to have - before they're even really ready for it.

I think the common attitude of 'lose virginity drunkenly, so as to ease fear, then have sex whenever I feel like' is fair enough, but watch out, people. If that's how you want to do, then you have to do it right. Go all the way. Don't think about love. Where sex leads, love does not necessarily follow - and you know what? That's not because men want sex and women want love. It's not because love and sex are opposed. It's because reproduction and monogamy are opposed. Yeah, that's right! How hilarious it feels to read that, when religion has been advocating socially/religiously/legally-enforced monogamy as the prerequisite for reproduction for years.

Sex needs to be rethought, and not just by feminists. Enough of the turgid meatstick in the quivering lower-lips. Enough of tits, asses and cock. Have you ever found somebody's eyelashes sexy? No? I sure as hell have (The Libertarian's thick, charcoal-dusting caught my eye even before his green-and-gold eyes). I like lips, in a man. The Libertarian has very rosy cheeks and lips, a freckled nose and unexpectedly dark, thick upper lashes. Half the time, I don't know whether to frame-and-display him, or kiss as usual.

I think I'm lucky, because I grew up with an awareness of classic Bollywood cinema, where filmi courtesans redefined the markers of sexuality. Between the sashaying of hips and the thrusting of abdominal muscles that we know so well, alongside wet saris, there was something new. I'm thinking of Madhuri Dixit as the courtesan Chandramukhi in Devdas, of the song 'Kaahe Chhed Chhed Mohe.' One of her most fervent admirers sings (roughly translated from memory):

'Jasmine makes fragrant her lovely dark tresses... Radha's face is aglow, electric... Her gait, seductive.'

In Sanskrit poetry, as well as old Bollywood, eyes, eyelashes, hair and faces are most often described as alluring. The face and hands are most often employed by filmi courtesans to seduce. It's still objectification, you might argue - but at least it's not quite as violent a form of objectification. It's not the same as when: 'you talk about getting laid, you never say a woman, you say a broad, a lay, a baby, a doll, a bird, you talk about butts and boobs, every time you mention a woman I see her either as a sort of window-dresser’s dummy or as a heap of dismembered parts, breasts, or legs or buttocks.’

There is some sense that a woman has some power, something concealed which is hers and which she can choose to give. Granted, this is somewhat illusory with a courtesan (a bought woman) - but I'm not telling anyone to be a courtesan! Nor am I saying 'cover up' or 'behave like a man/lady.' Sexual problems in a relationship are so often merely the most visible element of a larger underlying problem. Fluffy handcuffs, toys and dressing up are all very well. Just make sure it's not all one-way - and just make sure you're realistic about the relationship of sex to love for you. Does sex really = love? For a lot of us middle-class kudia, raised as respectably as we are, I don't really think so. Intercourse - especially penetrative - is not the apogee of desire. Standing close to someone, denying yourself, a loaded glance, a telling kiss - give it a try sometime if you haven't already, o no-doubt-horrified readers...

Feminism Wept...

Oh my God.

Let me announce this, here and now. I meant to earlier, but it just kept getting lost in the tiny cracks of exhaustion emerging between exams and school, travel and revision.

Whilst preparing an oral presentation in French ('How to reconcile feminism and Islam in France?' Only, in French, naturellement.), it hit me that feminists, like Muslims, have to keep putting up with vicious and untrue attacks on our public image. Like Muslims, we face constant attack by unimaginative and self-serving opponents who would like to blame us for everything-they-possibly-can that is wrong with society today. EXAMPLE. All the different strands of feminism are handily grouped and dismissed, which allows for a very effective form of 'divide and conquer,' whereby feminists such as myself have to say that we're not in agreement with those who really do seem to hate men, and assumptions are made about our sexuality.

A lot of modern feminists find themselves in the position of having to distance themselves from second-wave feminism, because of the prominence and influence of lesbian feminism within it. Feminist-haters continually highlight the misandry that SOME (SOME, not ALL) lesbian and/or radical feminists have shown, using it as a way to shout down the many valid criticisms they make. In fact, they use that as a way to shout down almost any form of feminist critique that doesn't bend over backwards to please them (see most articles even vaguely pertaining to feminism on Cif...). Divide and conquer. It is divide and conquer. They turn on individuals en masse, conveniently displaying the very mob mentality that they ascribe to those same individuals. Those individuals find themselves stuck, or should I say: WE are stuck. We can't acknowledge the huge ideological debt that we owe to second-wave feminism. Like Muslims constantly being harassed as terrorists, we must distance ourselves and say 'Not in our name,' as if it is completely removed from us.

Yet as any fule kno, radical voices are useful and important (as long as they're not generating immediate danger, of course). They stand to inform us both of what we could have, and in the case of more conservative voices, what we could lose, if we remain idle. Let me just say that I am not trying to establish some sort of suffering equivalence with Muslims here. I am so NOT A FAN of the Oppression Olympics. All I am doing is drawing a parallel, one which is in some ways heavily ironic.

It must be said that the public image of feminism certainly isn't done any favours when people who claim to strongly identify with it promote exactly the kind of cartoonish stereotypes that fem-haters love and lap up. Here I must cease, and present you with this. Julie Bindel and Julie Burchill interviewing each other.

It is ghastly. It is so, utterly, ghastly. Yet it's also very clever, because ultimately neither of them gives away anything new in the least about themselves. Burchill's reputation as a giggling, bandwagon-jumping delusionary is confirmed, and Bindel once again comes across as the stereotypical lesbo-misandrist automaton.

Feminism wept. Feminism wept. There is a certain hollowly-humorous irony in Bindel saying:

I much prefer women to men. A lot of them are emotional cripples. Have you not found that? Are we such different feminists do you think?

after Burchill saying:

But part of what makes a man a man is that he never takes offence! When you see sad-sacks like, what was his name, Neil something [Lyndon, author of No More Sex War: the Failures of Feminism]. "Men's Lib" - that's the opposite of a man, to me. Just shut up and take your lumps. And then we can all have a laugh.

It's so lovely that even in prison, men who aren't touchy-feely have to be stopped from beating up rapists - not just child molesters, but rapists of grown women.

This too after Burchill cheerfully hypocritises (neologism alert!) her self-ascribed epithet of 'militant feminist' by saying:

I like men and get on much better with them one to one than I do women, who can be a bit emotional.

and

I don't want to hear about every last thing someone is feeling. I think most men have it about right. All men should be like my dad!

I'm sorry. What the FUUUUUUUCK are you talking about, you stupid bitch? She basically DID just confirm what Bindel said - that men are 'emotional cripples,' because they don't overshare like those annoying women - and then implied that that is how men should be.

Great, Burchill, you stupid fucking bitch. So, a kid who is being bullied should just 'take his lumps,' should he? The likes of you should be spared 'every last thing someone is feeling,' until they walk into a school and massacre a load of people in one go?

As for the men beating up rapists comment - I must reiterate my expletive-garnished question above. The justice system is supposed to deal with individuals, Burch. It's not the job of mobs, or single persons to decide what happens to criminals. Jesus wept, this time.

It is ironic though, this woman is a shamelessly Freudian stereotype herself. 'All men should be like my dad'? Bet you wish you could've married him!

I have revised my opinion on the Grauniad's decision here. I now think it was absolute genius. You have *ahem* an intelligent and dedicated campaigner who generally poses as 'professional lesbian' (I hope she's not really as virulently anti-men as she makes out...) alongside a showy and inexplicably well-paid professional contrarian (not a very good one, either). The latter indulges in a frankly breathtaking display of female misogyny, showing the very real need for conventional assumptions of gender ('masculinity' and 'femininity') to be challenged. The former, perhaps because of her own transphobia and misandry, smiles and lets it pass. Oh, the female friendship! Oh, the uniting nature of the sisterhood!

Truly, feminism wept. I leave you with this thread I found, discussing Bindel's transphobia, which is really interesting. Look out for the post by 'Forced Buy' - in fact, if you ignore all the rest, at the very least read that. It's really insightful, and Burchill enters the equation once again!
This interview with Susie Orbach, feminist author and Dolly Draper's mentor, is also good reading. Also: a thread about whether make-up is acceptable or not. P.S.: My heart bleeds for Kater Andron. It really does, but... I just can't force those tears out. It's sort of like when you want to take a shit, but you can't.

(Given that the 'article' is called 'Julie Bindel talks to fellow feminist Julie Burchill,' I'm starting to wonder if the Guardian, a paper that SHOULD be feminists' friend, doesn't have it in for us too...)

Man, FUCK the Catholic Church

Seriously, when you think of all the people the Vatican has fucked over and wants to continue fucking over? Totally fair and just course of action. If the Vatican had a basketball team or a barbershop quartet of its own (who knows, maybe they do!), they really should be called the Woman-Hating Wonders (replace final word with Wanderers for the basketball team...).

It's tried to avoid the allegations of child sex abuse victims for years, and as I pointed out in my post on abstinence, they haven't even got rid of some offenders, just transferred them! Classic evasion tactics, vah vah. In further evidence to prove that they will very resolutely do nothing, or at the very least, the minimum possible, the Pope called for 'continuous prayer' to deal with the problem of paedophile priests. Gee Benedict, I don't know... couldn't you ease off on priests a bit so that they don't have to be celibate? That way they might not turn to preying on whoever they can get their hands on (children aren't the only ones... if you've read Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate or watched The Magdalene Sisters, you'll know that women were/are also, unsurprisingly, victims of sexual abuse by priests). Alternatively, if a priest has had accusations levelled at him - FIRE THE FUCKER. Better safe than sorry, and what with the Catholic Church's antediluvian attitude and image, it might provide some much-needed positive PR.

Child sex abuse aside, let's not forget that the Catholic Church don't believe in contraception (just GREAT for all those male Catholics in poor countries who can keep on knocking up their poor wives, whether they like it or not!) and are rabidly anti-choice (ditto). Let's now look at two very recent cases where the Catholics continue to prove that they should really not have the privileged legal and political status they have. Sarah Palin was roundly and rightly condemned by many for her views, but she was one individual. This is a whole fucking group of patriarchal nutters - AND they have special observer status within the UN, meaning they can stick their oar in on things which don't have anything to do with them, like human rights.

Firstly, the frankly disgusting and horrifying case of Eluana Englaro. The Guardian ran a very thorough article on this which I can't recommend enough. Eluana had been in a vegetative state for 17 years, and her father wanted the tubes to be removed, in accordance with her wishes. The poor man is currently caring for his wife, Eluana's mother, who has cancer. So what did the Vatican - working through Berlusconi, of course - do? Kick up a fuss about it, declaring it 'a crime against humanity' (what about your paedophile priests, eh?! Surely that's 'a crime against humanity'?) and according to this Times article, describing it as a 'monstrous and inhumane murder.'

This is a woman who has been vegetative for 17 years and whose brain is so severely damaged that doctors have stressed that she will never 'come round', as the Guardian article states. That charmer Berlusconi justified his decision by saying: 'I would be failing to rescue her. I'm not a Pontius Pilate' (Clearly he thinks he's Jesus...) and - get this - saying that she couldn't be allowed to die because she is still 'in the condition to have babies.'

Wow. Just wow. I think that's the only appropriate reaction here, don't you? Thankfully, with the quietly diligent work of the doctors, Eluana died before any more meddling could take place, and Italy's own President refused to side with Berlusconi. It is gobsmacking though. I remember reading an aghast comment somewhere about this, saying something along the lines of: 'So who would they get to impregnate her, then? Rapists?' Well, quite. Clearly the Vatican does not have the FIRST FUCKING CLUE about what constitutes 'human behaviour'; they are masters of misogyny (and I believe that the Vatican should be renamed 'The Ministry of Misogyny' or 'Misogyny Capital of Italy'...). Perhaps Berlusconi would perform the deed and then claim it was immaculate conception. Or a virgin birth, seeing as how he thinks he's Jesus.

The latest story to raise my hackles is this, on the rape of a nine-year-old girl. Nine-year-old girl gets raped, most likely by her stepfather who has now been arrested, and becomes pregnant with twins. Her mother takes her to have an abortion, which y'know, makes sense because she's just a nine-year-old child who has suffered sexual abuse. There is absolutely no way she can be made to take responsiblity for this happening to her.

Abortion is only permitted in Brazil in cases of rape and where the mother's life is at risk...

So, clearly one-nil to the Catholic Church in Brazil - their political stranglehold is making life hell for every woman in the country who wasn't raped/in danger of death and wants to make the decision to have a baby or not for herself.

and doctors say the girl's case met both these conditions... The Catholic Church tried to intervene to prevent the abortion going ahead but the procedure was carried out on Wednesday.

So... more of the same humanity, compassion and understanding from our frock-wearing friends! The fun doesn't stop there though, oh no:

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.

Jesus wept. If I was that girl's mother, I'd be glad my daughter still had a life ahead of her, not bothered about whether some religious nut had excommunicated me or not.

The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.

He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

Oh, how generous of you. Who knows, maybe in a few thousand millenia, you won't be forcing women and girls to bear the brunt of male-inflicted rape and abuse! Then again... I won't hold my breath.

However, doctors at the hospital said they had to take account of the welfare of the girl, and that she was so small that her uterus did not have the ability to contain one child let alone two.

Bastards, bastards, absolutefuckingBASTARDS. This bit actually made me want to cry and/or be sick. That poor, poor little girl.

As with the case of Eluana Englaro, I'm absolutely delighted that the Catholic Church hasn't claimed any victory, but really, the Italians must do better. Peter Tatchell's Cif piece was very good, measured and so forth, but really, considering that the Italian taxpayers fund the Vatican's ongoing existence, it's time for a change. It's time the Italians got all 'what the fuck? You're not the boss of us, or anyone else worldwide for that matter, biatch. God's representative, my ass. Oh wait, I think my ass would in fact be a fairer and more reasonable representative of tha Lord than Benny-dick and his befrocked flock.'

To finish, a little game:

A Brazilian archbishop says all those who helped a child rape victim secure an abortion are to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church.

Replace 'all those' etc. with 'all those who damn child rape and sex abuse victims.' Then, take 'from the Catholic Church' and put it after 'all those who'. Replace 'secure' with 'by preventing'. Lose 'an' and put an s on 'abortion.' Finally, lose the whole first part of the sentence up to 'all', and replace 'excommunicated' with 'assassinated.' What do you get? Answers in the comment-box please!


Disclaimer: if you honestly think I am advocating the murder of anyone, then please read my previous post for clarification and get a grip, ferChrissakes.

Rihanna, Chris Brown & Gossip Folks

Let me just begin by saying that one thing I really hate in modern society is the continually schizophrenic attitude we have towards celebrities. Overtly, people will bitch about how they're not as glamorous as they used to be (cue misogyny - frequently in gossip magazines - which involves slagging off female celebrities for having the temerity to um, go to the gym in their gym-clothes and the like, while sanctimonious twats reminisce about Marilyn Monroe and 'old Hollywood' actresses, and how 'women were so much more glamorous then') while secretly feeding greedily on every make-up free picture, every wardrobe malfunction and every failure to conform to a pre-ordained fashion trend or rule.

It's not in the least logical. Anyone who thinks about it - just think of Marilyn Monroe, if nothing else comes - can see that women weren't necessarily more beautiful or glamorous 'back then.' It's just that there was more privacy for, and respect of, celebrities in general - and then there's the issue of technology. HOO BOY. I daresay that the only reason celebrities from 'back then' had the privacy they did is because there wasn't computer software sophisticated enough to be uploading pictures of them all day long. Nor were there the kind of super-advanced cameras we have now that mercilessly and minutely capture a person's flaws. When you think of movie posters, for example, a lot of the 'old Hollywood' movie posters were painted - a lot easier to prettify someone that way. Photos of them are also frequently in black and white, which as any fule kno, is one of the easiest ways to make a picture look more flattering. Not to mention that there wasn't a 'gossip industry' quite as unscrupulous as today's.

(It is ironic, actually, because MM was never completely OK with being a 'sex symbol' and wasn't a natural blonde either... I've also read that she cut the tip off one of her heels to emphasise the wiggle in her walk, but I don't remember where I read that... Still, at least she had, by today's standards, quite a hand in controlling her public image).

Aaanyway, the worst thing about all this - gossip magazines, gossip sites, celebrity gossip in papers, etc. - is that it only encourages and reinforces the worst of human tendencies - that of leaping to judge people as if it is some divine right of ours. Now, judging others is a tendency of ours which isn't going to go anytime soon, and to some extent it's of course necessary, but snap judgements - fuelled ably by our obsession with celebrity-gossip culture - are just another way for us to pander to that which is lowest in us.

You surely will have encountered somebody in your life who tried to pass these snap judgements off as having some sort of intrinsic, instinctive 'truth-value', because they are instantaneous. BOLLOCKS. I would say that they're actually much more of a Pavlovian thing, the result of elaborate social conditioning. For example, if I were not a follower of gossip at all, and happened to observe that a female celebrity had gained weight considerably, I might see her and think 'Oh, she's gained weight. I wonder why?' in a surprised/semi-curious way. That in itself, is not bad. What is bad is when an elaborate chain of associations make themselves instantly known in my head, leading to the triggering of a negative 'snap judgement.' Anyone who doubts the truth of this may want to experiment with the scenario I've just described, using a fairly young and 'unsocialised' child. Show them two pictures of a celebrity and see what happens. I doubt they'll associate shame and disdain with the celebrity in the way that gossipers - older, more socially-conditioned beings - would: 'Oh my God, that fat cow! She's obviously let herself go since so-and-so dumped her' or similar.

Note that - despite it being a 'snap judgement', it's anything but simple. That's because humans, despite what reactionaries and pseudoscientists of all stripes would like to have us believe, are NOT SIMPLE. In that negative response, which is posited as a 'natural' occurrence, we have: disgust/disdain at the person's lack of shame in refusing to conform to a particular expectation, dehumanisation, instantaneous removal of their agency (she's 'let herself go', that is, given up instead of controlling and policing herself like she should) and extrapolation on a situation on which the commenter knows fuck-all based on a hamfisted appropriation of biographical detail.

Sorry to get so long in trying to make my point, but I'm trying hard to convince here! The patriarchy (I hate saying that sometimes, because it makes it sound more big, powerful and shadowy than I'd like to accept) has socialised us to react in ways which are posited as 'plain-speaking', 'straight-up' or 'natural,' when they're anything but. This is why the case of Rihanna and Chris Brown is so distressing (if you're not following, please follow the link for a speedy update, I'm not going into any more detail!).

By chance I came upon this response to the whole affair, which I found extremely heartening. Pricks on the Internet just LOVE trying to shout down feminists when they comment on things like this. One of the most frequent and infuriating techniques - no matter WHAT the issue - is to indulge in whataboutery by crying 'What about TEH MENZ??!!1!!1' Hence - naive that I am - I always like to see feminist-friendly articles written by men. It's still all too rare, which I can't help thinking fuels these idiots further. So I read it, thinking: 'Hmm, a black man commenting incisively and eloquently on the issue. Hopefully this won't be besieged by trollery, seeing as how it's a man...'

Alas, I was hoping in vain. I had reckoned without the power of the modern-celebrity-gossip-strengthened snap judgement. A quick scroll through the comments, and - hello! The whataboutery begins with the very first fucking comment. I'm not going to try and chronicle just how many people indulged in this type of comment, because I want to sleep sometime this night, but there were many, and not just here but on other posts about this which criticised the 'Blame the Victim' culture. The classic tactic is to respond (imagine someone saying this as if thinking causes them great difficulty, while their knuckles rub lightly against the floor): 'Well he shouldn't have hit her, but a woman shouldn't hit a man either, innit, and if she does, then it's SELF-DEFENSE!!1!!1!'.

The worst thing about these snap judgements is that they breed, and perpetuate more of the same, keeping the hateful misogynistic rumours in steady circulation. The above type of comment, while missing the point of the post entirely, also manages to distort the seemingly simple message that 'Violence is not OK. Ever.' By doing so, it generates a whole noxious narrative from where there previously was none. It is immediately implied that Rihanna must have hit Chris Brown which was why he hit her back, of course - it was self-defense, right?!

Er... well, actually, no. Nobody but Rihanna and Chris Brown actually knows what happened between them. Furthermore, if scum like the above really believed the crap they spouted, then they wouldn't say what they said. If they really believed that violence is always unacceptable, they would've said something more like this:

'Now, I don't know about this matter, but Chris Brown seems to me like a good fellow. Maybe Rihanna struck him first. Even if she did, though, he should not have retaliated - he should have walked away, because that is the mark of a mature and sensible adult. Violence only begets violence.'

Still, that's not going to happen because many of these male-privilege flaunting desperadoes are hypocrites. They don't care about violence being wrong, they just want to disseminate the 'crazy bitch' meme at all costs. They're basically trying to encourage more attitudes like Chris Rock's, as cited at the start of the post. I do believe in innocent until proven guilty, but if we're going to play the gossip-extrapolation game, let's look at the facts: just by looking at Chris Brown, and knowing that he's had extensive martial arts training, one can comprehend that he's far more capable of doing damage to Rihanna than the other way round. Again, violence must be used responsibly and carefully - especially against a weaker opponent! Black mark. Also, as anyone with a shred of brain activity knows, people who are abused tend to become abusers themselves, and Brown has previously spoken out about his abusive stepfather. Again, this would imply that HE was in the wrong, HE behaved in a way unacceptable by the rules of martial arts and human respect in general - but let's not let that get in the way of a good round of misogynistic Blame-the-Victim.

Finally - if you were actually pushed to the point of 'self-defense' by someone smaller and weaker than you - as the morons are trying to suggest - that suggests that the situation would be so extreme that you would lash out simply to protect yourself. Either it would be a blind strike, or you'd try to knock out/immobilise your attacker, right? Especially if you'd had martial arts training. Rihanna had 'deep bruises on either side of her forehead, blackened areas around her eyes and what appears to be blood at the corners of her mouth' in the photo leaked online, which seems - gee, I dunno - more like domestic violence.

Especially now that Rihanna has apparently reunited with him and has declined to press charges, I can only see the victim-blame escalating. Cynical as it will sound, the way these male-privilege assholes are ('Of course he can bruise her whole face in self-defence, she obviously struck first and/or was a crazy high-maintenance bitch, while he's just a poor little R'n'B crooner, which obviously goes to show how much he loves ladies, yes, even though I know neither of them'), I suspect it's going to reach farcical levels. I tell you, the trolls are probably going to love the latest developments and say something like 'Well, he didn't kill her, did he? And she went back to him. So what's your problem, femonazis? Move along, there's no victim here, you're just trying to hate on men again and stop a brother from having a chance'. Sigh!

Misogyny To The Fore!

Oh, readers. It's not been a good week. Not in the usual emo-meltdown fashion (though there was a little of that), but in a deeper, more depressing way.

A certain listlessness, a fear about the future and increasing consciousness of the speeding-by of Time have set in. Lack of sleep, a lunatic sleep-schedule, awareness of the fact that I am going to effectively FINISH MY DEGREE in about two months' time commenced the deluge. Then, there was guilt over my responsibilities to others. I have been regularly cheering up my friend Colin with long phone chats, and trying to be a source of occasional support to my oft-insomniac friend Trish. (She has huge blue eyes which seem to get even larger as she gets worked up, and make you want, as The Libertarian said, to pat her and tell her to calm down). These moments were rare, though.

I tried to intervene between my sister and parents every now and again, including this evening. Her idiot husband wants to reconcile - so he sent her a 3-page list of her flaws, and then when she replied that she did not want to meet with him, responded with: 'I'm amazed by your reply.' Even now, some days later, he remains 'amazed.' I remain amazed that I have not *headdesk*ed yet. Or *facepalm*ed. I never realised that trying to reconcile with somebody involved systematic and repeated attempts to blame them for your relationship's failings, while also refusing to take any responsibility for anything yourself. Nor did I comprehend that, in essence, it involves behaving in exactly the same way that brought the relationship to a screeching halt. More fool me!

(Somehow, I have graciously restrained my urges to email him abuse, despite even being encouraged to do so by my mother *twitches with this saintly effort* Though if I did, I would say, quite simply: 'FUCK OFF OUT OF MY SISTER'S LIFE, YOU CHILDISH TWIT'. I might also add 'SHE MIGHT GIVE A SHIT, BUT NONE OF US DO, IF YOU NEVER MARRY AGAIN' (As he said to her). Oh Lord, that felt good).

So yeah, I'm antsy like I've bathed in chilli-powder, and have found it really bloody hard to motivate myself to work this week. It doesn't help that misogyny seems to be bearing down on me from all sides. Not just me, of course - laydeez in general, but that doesn't make it any easier to stand.

Let me just link you good people to this and this. The author of both these posts is one Chris Dillow, who I've seen showered with praise, particularly by sites I read like Liberal Conspiracy, presumably for the fact that he is a liberal/left-leaning economist who seems to know his stuff and provides good analyses of stuff. Now, I've no problem with that. What I do have a problem with is the explicitly misogynistic tone of those two posts, ESPECIALLY the latter.

I left an infuriated comment on the LibCon article, which got ignored (unsurprisingly). The thing that really depressed me was that five women disagreed strongly with the bullshit on it, whereas only three men did the same. On t'other post, about 10 people said things which were supportive of women against Dillow's bullshit generalisations; there were other comments that sort of challenged him, but rather weakly. The rest of the comments included such gems as:

Sexist weekend should be a cultural institution:

What do you do if your dishwasher breaks down?

Slap her.

You've got 7 points about women here and sex doesn't appear in any of them: there's something far wrong with you, m'boy.

While I'm a roll here I'd just like to point out that political correctness was invented so that all women could nag all men, not just the ones they are married to.

and finally:

If your basic statement is "There;s nothing less attarctive than a middle class career girl who takes a perverse pride in her inability to cook and considers friday night a good time to stay in and talk about the realtionship" then I'm in full agreement. If women concentrated on buying and wearing attractive underwear the world would be a much happier place.

Only half of the non-misogynistic comments stuck up directly for women. There were quite a few mocking ones from women (not just from women), but I thought the fact that nobody just called 'misogynist' was rather depressing. The best comment came from one James Hamilton:

My experience of people possessed by one form of prejudice, such as yours against people you perceive as posh or public school, is that there's always another form of the same thing in them somewhere. So I've been expecting this. I'm surprised by what it is,though. I expect you'll get off in the same way you usually do - enough people prepared to believe that you don't mean it. I'll give you this much: I do think you're open about these things, and that you do mean it, although I think you lace them with humour. But you're not being ironic, in that crude and misconstrued blogosphere sense. Good luck.

Wherever you are, James - we love you! How accurate your predictions were, with so many people actually engaging with this kind of thing in some form or another in the comments. A poster called Katie (apparently female, then?) posted the following:

In terms of an intellectual exercise, I am not sure this is a success. Some of your points are opinions, while few are supported by evidence. It would be good to see an evidenced four way comparison: boys good, boys bad, girls good, girls bad, with every point evidence to compare for each points.

I felt like saying No, no, NO, Katie! Don't fall into the fucking trap! You should not have to engage with this, and this bullshit disguising of misogyny as intellectual ranting!

It is so shocking, as a feminist, to see this kind of thing in the so-called liberal blogosphere, just as it is in the mainstream media. It makes you feel like a real tool, because you can be quite sure that if a conservative/right-wing blogger had expressed similar sentiments, they would be roundly insulted and criticised. However, when someone like Chris Dillow does it (that post is from last year, by the way, I only became aware of it through the Valentine's post), people will look the other way as much as they can. I never saw any condemnations of that post of his on any blogs I read at the time. So, did most people just conveniently ignore it? It would seem so!

Feminists occupy a particularly ugly position, given that there's nothing that crosses boundaries quite so effectively as miosgyny. Muslims, Christians and Jews can argue about the likes of I/P forever, but many of them will find themselves in sudden agreement on the subject of how to treat women. I would argue that we're perhaps easier to demonise than any other group. There's always a particular minority group that will receive its undue share of media attention, as is happening to Muslims these days, but men of all stripes - gay and straight, black and white, atheist and religious - will come together under the banner of misogyny. It's so depressing.

Comment Is Free, for example, is a platform for Guardian writers to air their views. The Guardian is supposed to be liberal-left. Yet feminist writers are assured of being roundly shouted down when they post on there. Sometimes, as in the case of Julie Bindel and occasionally, Bidisha, this is somewhat warranted. However, even on more moderately-expressed opinions, you'll get loons going 'BUT WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ'. They also routinely try to use the argument that 'feminism is itself sexist because it's feminism.' As Lily Allen once sang, please fuck off. On an article by Zoe Williams about rape, ferinstance, in which she argued that the fact of having consumed alcohol should not have led to a rape victim's compensation being cut, the first comment was by 'thetrashheap' who lived up to his name by saying:

Better than the editorial yesterday but why just rape?

How can being drunk mean you deserve to get assaulted in any manner [Isn't that the point of the whole fucking article, you numbskull?]. Rape can be less harmfull than a serious assult. I know a man who was much more damaged by nearly being beaten to death than a women I know who was raped ['It is true because I know it to be so, based on 1 or 2 personal experiences']. Yet with the indignation over rape the guardian can say in one of its editorials

"Cuts may be justified when a victim's drinking precipitates certain violent attacks "

[Did you ever consider that maybe they were just reporting something as they were told it, and that's all there is to it?] How does being drunk percipitate a violent attack? [Gee, that's exactly what Zoe Williams is saying right here!] If somebody does an action that makes them partly reponsible for violence then so be it but being drunk isn't a reason.

So why concentrate on Rape and demean assault? Why try and lift rape as a crime above all else? Murder is worse, being left as a cripple can be worse? Being left too scared to leave the house after a serious assault can be worse on a person than a date rape.

The law needs changed but it doesn't need such righteous indignation over one particular type of assault. How many drunk men a year get less compensation for being assaulted? The problem is the law regards alcohol and culpability. Women aren't the only ones who get screwed over by this.

Can you hear the cries of 'WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ'?! I don't even have any energy left to continue ripping this shit to shreds. This is the worst kind of comment in some ways, where a small grain of truth buried amongst astounding ignorance is inflated into hand-wringing self-righteousness.

Then you have the fucking Mail website, where the most poisonously vicious articles are written by women and published alongside conveniently half- (or, as was in the case of Peaches Geldof, fully) naked pictures of younger female celebrities, so that the women can tut and feel good about themselves, and the men can do the same while having a surreptitious wank. I patently refuse to link to the pictures of PG. I don't like her, but she doesn't deserve to appear naked in the Mail in an article which slags her off for having tattoos. One of the top-rated comments when I saw it was 'What the hell does she think she looks like?'

What the fuck is it to you, eh, armchair-moralist? And what the fuck is it to the Mail? It's supposed to be an outraged comment, but it turns out to be unwittingly insightful, because of course it doesn't matter what she thinks she looks like. Evidently, she likes the tattoos. What MATTERS is that the Mail are on hand 'to do the proper thing' and trash her for them.

To top all of this off, I'm taking a course on 'British Culture In the 1950s' which has all the fun you'd expect - a surge in evangelical Christianity, colonialism, racism... but, reassuringly enough, the thing that seems to unite all the writers so far is misogyny. Don't worry fellas, when you feel that Africans and Englishmen are irreconcilably different, you can always unite in your disdain for women! I've just read City of Spades by Colin MacInnes. MacInnes was openly gay and had a major sexual obsession with black men, especially Africans.

Now, you would hope that a gay man, as a fellow sufferer of persecution, would try to avoid the rampant stereotyping and mistreatment of women that liberally (haha) garnishes 1950s novels (let's not forget, it was the era of James Bond). I got really excited when I 'met' an independent and capable female character early on, who held a senior position in the BBC. I was optimistic about a girl who was quite shy and meek, but by no means a pushover, and her sister who had apparently chosen to live with a Gambian man.

Alas, it was not to be, my friends! The BBC woman turned out to be a frigid bitch who 'discovered' her femininity upon falling in love with one of narrating characters, and then got punished for this by losing her job when she revealed she was pregnant by him in court, as well as losing the baby. Of course, she'd learnt her lesson by this point: 'All I deeply regret... is losing my child.' Yes, because you've seen the light now, and you realise that other than as a mother, you don't really matter. Without your 'fragment of him' that you loved, your life is meaningless.

The shy girl got knocked up and abandoned by the same character - after he had lived off her and perpetually left her by herself at home - just as his father had done to her mother. Her sister turned out to be a prostitute, pimped out by her own husband and last appearing in the novel in hospital because her husband had cut her face up after getting out of jail.

Of Colin MacInnes:

'I didn't like him at all,' says Diana Melly, who was a showgirl at the Cabaret Club in Soho along with Christine Keeler. 'His idea of me was just the wife with young children who cooked lunch all the time. I don't know what gave him the idea that he could get so drunk and be so rude after having his lunch made.'

This peculiarly male-homosexual disdain for women is nothing new to me, it's just really depressing. MacInnes is another one who was 'liberal' by the standards of his time. Why is it impossible for people, if they can stand other races, religions, etc., to not be the same about women?

As a socially-liberal feminist, it feels like the worst kind of betrayal when men who claim to be liberal/left-wing suddenly reveal themselves to be misogynists, or unfurl the handy caveat of saying 'I'm not a feminist.' You feel very alone, all of a sudden. If feminism doesn't have a home within the liberal-left community, then where is there a safe space for feminists? Liberal Conspiracy held a BlogNation event some time back (which I didn't attend, because I didn't 'matter' enough, and I doubt I do even now!), and the subject of trying to engage with the feminist blogosphere was raised by Sunny.

Let me offer a much-belated tip to you, Sunny: why don't you call bullshit on your ilk who profess misogynistic views? That would be certainly preferable to the following dubious comment you left on the Valentine's thread, in response to Jennie Rigg:

You see, the thing is women, rather like men, ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS. We don’t all think the same, and there is no sure fire way to please us.

Well, yes and no. Everyone’s an individual… as everyone likes to think. But people also behave in remarkably predictable ways.

Excuse me? The Libertarian, a white, middle-class man (probably the sort who Chris Dillow would loathe) who initially identified as right-wing (now, he's not so sure, because he's actually socially-liberal on the whole - what do you think I am, insane?!) has proven to be much more a feminist than some people *coughs and glances upwards* who claim to be, even though he didn't initially consider himself one.

So yes, you can bet that I've been disillusioned this week. Though it's been an accumulation of things, not just current affairs. The stuff about 'men are responsible for the banking crisis, bring in more women!' was another stab in the weeping lesion. BRING PEOPLE IN ON MERIT, and yes, we need more females in that atmosphere, but merit needs to come into the equation and we need to start challenging society's assumptions. Banking is a deeply sexist sector from what I've (repeatedly) read, it doesn't surprise me. Women within that field need to be able to know that they won't be forced to go to strip clubs and act like 'one of the boys' just to retain their jobs. I really think that bosses, the people in charge of recruitment and management decisions, should be made to show proof of feminist credentials. Male OR female. It doesn't have to be anything major - just interview the women they've worked with previously, if need be.

Anyway, I'm hauling my tired ass off to bed. I was feeling very low, but then I remembered - hey, I'm seeing The Libertarian tomorrow! How childishly excited I got! I actually wanted to send my friend a text about it as if it were news. I fought the urge to mention it in in my Facebook status. He smiles with his whole face (eyes AND mouth), and what a smile it is. Good God. I'd take his over those of cherubs or female figures in classic art anyday. The Mona Lisa? You are the weakest link, goodbye. Next to green/hazel eyes, rosy cheeks, a freckled nose and the most effortlessly alluring pair of lips I have ever known, the Italian broad can just go hang (oh wait, she is already - in the Louvre *drumroll and crash*). Admittedly, I can't help noticing his lips because the top of my head only comes up to his chin. Still, why quibble? I'm getting feminist-kissed!

Recommended Reading:

Another bigot emerges, seemingly from nowhere.

Intelligence in women - still a topic for debate in the 21st century...

Two really good pieces on women and cinema.

Upskirting - warn all the women you know.

Another woman comes along to tell us that in fact, if we willingly prop up the patriarchy, it can only be good for us. Cheezus.