The Many Moons of the Multiverse

The key to the message of Lady Gaga’s ‘Born This Way’ video is in the prologue. It’s all there, her intent quite clearly stated – much more so than in the actual song: it’s the introduction and the video itself that reveals the artist’s purpose and philosophy. And it’s this particular video that has made it clear to me why Lady Gaga stands for what she does within the gay community, in a deeper, more intellectual way than just her vocal public support for gay rights. 

She states her ideas fairly clearly in fact, but I’ll extrapolate, just in case…

The video opens with a female SF/cyborg/goddess image, apparently ready to give birth, along with the explanation that “This is the Manifesto of Mother Monster.” In 1991 theorist Donna Haraway wrote a document called The Cyborg Manifesto. It was headed by a not-dissimilar cyborg goddess image and the essay explained, in words, very similar ideas to those Lady Gaga explores visually in ‘Born This Way’. I would happily bet you a kilo of gourmet jellybeans that Gaga has read Haraway! (The Cyborg Manifesto is available free online and it’s great – Fact! Click on the pic below.)

So, the Mother Monster’s own manifesto goes like this: “on a Government Owned Alien Territory (GOAT) in space, a birth of magnificent and magical proportions took place.” The image changes from the goddess in labour to a series of images representing this galactic birth. These graphically abject images are accompanied by the declaration that this “birth was not finite. It was infinite.” Instead of dividing in half, “the wombs numbered, and the mitosis of the future began”.

Translating from Gaga language, I think this means: the babies of this Mother Monster would be born, not to one of two sexes – male or female – but to any number of sexes, any number of genders, and any number of sexualities. In Gaga language, a new race of mini human monsters will be born that is “a race within the race of humanity, a race which bears no prejudice, no judgment, but boundless freedom.” Conventional birth is rendered a reductive thing of the past, and sexual identification and persuasion becomes a limitless possibility, a total freedom.

But it’s not all happily-ever-after on GOAT, because “on that same day, as the eternal mother hovered in the multiverse, another more terrifying birth took place: the birth of evil.” Evil, in ‘Born This Way’, is conventional birth as we know it.  This other human newborn – ‘Evil’ – is “split in two” – into the traditionally recognisable male and female.

It’s interesting how this process is depicted in Gaga language as a violent event, the process of birth “rotating in agony between two ultimate forces.” The idea that the traditional gendering process is, at least on a symbolic level, an act of societal violence, is often raised in feminist and queer dialogue: emphasising the cataclysmic severance caused by slicing the human into two irreconcilable sexes, reduced to a sum of their biological parts, and forced towards prescriptive codes of sexual behaviour. (And I’m sure it’s no coincidence that this sequence of the video uses violent phallic machinegun images. Sub-text: the classic gendering process is a phallocentric one.)

Theory doesn’t get much more subversive than this: to challenge our traditional practice of gendering babies from birth is to challenge the very fundamental core of human identity and its identification processes. The idea that gender might be more complex than the mere division into two sexes is definitely not news to most feminists or queer-theorists, but it is an idea that has rarely made it beyond the walls of academic institutions. Although Lady Gaga is not the first artist to try these ideas out on the public imagination, she is certainly among a rare breed.

Lady Gaga is the queer-theorist’s perfect pop icon: she not only chooses queer ideas as the subject matter of her songs and videos, she presents these queer ideas to the pop mainstream: retaining the subversive nature of the message, but making the complex ideas (relatively) digestible.

That Lady Gaga is able to do this is partly due to her iconic look, and she knows it too. Pop culture has always reserved a sacred place for the classic blonde white female icon: Britney, Kylie and Madonna have all wielded similar power. By exploiting this power, Lady Gaga can reach a wider audience than a non-blonde, non-white female. For example, nothing like the same attention has gone to Janelle Monáe, who approaches her music with similar subversive intention: her video, ‘Many Moons’, explores very similar ideas and came before 'Born This Way'. And (IMHO) is much more musically interesting than Lady Gaga’s mainstream pop. But anyways, hohum… It’s only the smallest quibble, and I’m more than happy to let “the pendulum of choice begin its dance”! 

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The Father's Bones (Warning: *Spoilers*!)

Winter’s Bone is a story full of men, but no fathers. There are uncles and brothers, grandfathers and husbands, there are soldiers and boyfriends, sons and policemen. But there are no fathers.

There was a father – just the one – but he is missing – he is only ever an absence from the very beginning – a floating name without a body – and he is wanted for crimes he has not accounted for – or not to the state and the law of the state anyway. Indeed, where power is concerned, the state is far down the pecking order: its judicial system can barely touch this tribal law’s blood-enforced perimeter fences, and its army is a distant, elite entity out of the reach of these wild, savage humans.

The bone forest where this tribe live is a place where traditional patriarchy has been overthrown; The Father killed, his reign finished. Into his absence descends an unstable, unpredictable and dangerous bid for power, a fight between the brothers and the sonless grandfathers, and the boyfriends and the fatherless sons. But whatever crown the winner will take, it can never be the title of The Father – made clear when Teardrop, the uncle of the main protagonist, Ree, refuses to take up The Dead Father’s banjo when she offers it to him. The Father’s rule has been too completely undermined for it to ever again be a viable position of power.

If Winter’s Bone were a less complex tale, then the final shot of Ree on the steps, the children in her care on either side – her quest to save her home finally successful – would suggest her as an alternative Tribal Head – a queen in place of the fallen king, his own daughter no less, and so a natural successor? But her triumph, though an immeasurably huge task to achieve, was ultimately small in the context of her wider wintery world. For in fact the only power Ree ever sought was to secure a home for her family. She is not interested in the power struggle everyone around her is in engaged in, she has no desire to reign over any other part of the relentlessly hostile world she has been forced to live in. That world she has gladly left to the wilder ones to fight over its bones.


The world of Winter's Bone makes that of The Road look like a walk in the park.



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The real reason why werewolves and vampires are bad for your health:

Curiosity finally got the better of me and I gave myself a crash course in the Twilight Saga - saw all three films in the space of a fortnight.

The plus sides: it’s visually stunning. A lot of the soundtrack is pitch perfect. The overall ‘look’ of the films avoids the hackneyed imagery of emo black-obsessed goths in favour of an approach sympathetic to the native/ancient origin legends of vampire/werewolf mythology. I found this refreshing.

See, I can be nice.

…And now for the teeth:

I was never a fan, and yet throughout the Twilight saga, I was barely repressing the urge to cry, “but where is Buffy??” What has post-feminism done to girl power? Where is it? Gone is the kung-fu fighter with attitude, the quick-witted, shrewd, vamp impaler. All (lamely) hail the return of the Maid Without; the wilting rose, the shrinking violet, the limp inhaler.

Twilight’s ‘heroine’, Bella, spends her days moping, mooching, brooding, staring wistfully out of windows at autumnal trees/her naval, sleeping, fainting, getting picked up, carried around and passed about between the werewolves and vampires, put down again, and driven about in/on various vehicles: car/vampire/motorbike/wolf. She is helpless and completely in the hands of the men/monsters competing for her love.

So it’s all about Trust, is it? It would seem Trust is the Big Issue that Twilight thinks it's exploring. For despite their incomparable strength and power, and despite the potentially fatal danger they pose to her, Bella willingly hands over her feelings, her body, to Edward and Jacob, because she trusts them. She is given the opportunity to walk away, by both Edward and Jacob, but she chooses not to. The reality is, she does this not because she trusts them, but because she hates herself. Bella’s dialogue is filled with her self-derision – all that she considers her imperfections and faults. Like the budding masochist she is, she welcomes pain, she deserves it, especially if it's at the hands (or mouths) of the men she loves. Presumably also the idea is to suggest that, yes, Edward is flawed – he craves blood – but, look, Bella is flawed too: she’s an insecure teenager who feels like she doesn’t fit in. It’s almost the same thing.

Except it isn’t.

Not only because it obviously isn’t, but also because Edward isn’t really flawed at all. Only if he were human would he be flawed. But he’s not human. He’s immortal and he’s the perfect killer. The only way in which Edward and Bella are comparable is in how much they hate themselves.



Bella is a rubbish role model for teenage girls. Even putting aside her vapid flimsy character, she is espousing death for the love of a boy over the choice of life, adulthood, sex, hope and belief in her potential as a subject with agency and a future. She advocates teenage suicide. Her weapon of choice is a vampire’s teeth. In the world of Twilight – demonstrated not only by Bella, but also by Emily, the disfigured girlfriend of a werewolf – girls are shaped and defined by the boys they love and their futures are directed by their chosen partner’s needs: Bella relentlessly asks Edward to ‘change’ her (from human to vampire, since he can’t ‘change’ himself ((– how convenient!)), and Emily’s scars are as a result of her boyfriend, Sam, “imprinting on” her. (And she must continue to live with that threat of violence if she wishes to stay with him.)

This part of the film, though treated as an incidental side story, does much to reveal Twilight’s warped social coding. As a result of Sam’s inability to control his werewolf powers, Emily nearly had half her face ripped off. You’d have thought, or hoped, that these days, that would have been a pretty definitive end to that particular romance – at least in a film targeted at teenagers – or that the relationship would have been presented as untenable and without a future. There might be a court injunction, even some jail time? How about some Perpetrator Counselling? Isn’t someone at least going to get grounded?? No, no, no, quite the contrary. Emily is still living with her abuser. Yes, that’s right, Sam and Emily are still together. But this is ok, in Twilight World, because they wuv each other. Emily has stuck by her abuser, “because he didn’t mean it”, “because he promised never to do it again”, ‘because she wuvves him’!

More specific to Twilight Language, Sam has ‘imprinted on’ her. For an explanation of ‘imprinting’, (which is as sinister as it sounds), I’ll hand over to Jacob:



(It’s so complex it requires Swedish subtitles.)

But the gender portrayals in Twilight aren’t only unhealthy for girls, they don’t do boys any favours either. Because Edward and Jacob are essentially ‘good boys’. They are hardworking, courageous and when they’re not terrorising the neighbourhood they partake in otherwise perfectly wholesome extracurricular activities: Edward paints and plays baseball and Jacob fixes bikes and likes going to the cinema. But, you see, they are also at the very same time extremely dangerous predators with a carnal lust for blood/flesh, who have volatile control over their strengths and powers. The (barely) underlying message = boys might appear nice on the surface but every one of them, including the seemingly nice ones, is a potential violator/abuser/predator/killer. The power they have to protect is the same power that may inflict the violence that creates the need for protection in the first place.

Oh, and I agree with the critics who pronounced Twilight pro-chastity. The message in the films is most definitely, ‘the only safe sex is no sex.’

Perhaps in the end the thing I found most depressing about Twilight overall though, is that I just couldn’t quite buy into all the pouty over-wrought (and over-acted) teenage angst. This is probably solely down to the unsettling realisation that I am most definitely too old for these films. (And yet it feels like only yesterday I was stuck up Dawson’s Creek without a paddle.)

Choke.

Oh, and also a personal quibble: pious principals aside, why on earth does Bella choose bloodless, red-eyed, washed-out, effeminate white boy, Edward, over hot-blooded, dark, exotically sexual, warrior-like, Jacob?? Like, h-e-l-l-o-o-o?? Wolverine Jacob could so take a great big lupine bite out of Edward’s pasty vampire butt!

General Overall Conclusion: exercise extreme caution when dating werewolves and vampires. Stick to men. Or women. And preferably ones with a pulse.

The Human Race

According to Dr. Bowen-Simpkins, one in 3000 are born with an intersex disorder. I read an article once that claimed the number was much higher than this.

What is happening to Caster Semenya – the scrutiny, the violence of the exposé, the brutality of the jokes, the outrage on all sides – is what happens when society is forced to confront a truth its entire construction is based upon denying: that there are more than two genders, that humanity cannot be so simply divided, severed, in half.

Gender division gives power structures something to stand over. When someone tries to run headlong into it, or run across its tightly regulated boundaries, and then dare to celebrate their victory in doing so, they must be mercilessly exposed, revealed to the masses, denounced as an anomaly, a deviance from the norm: unverified and illegitimate. Would anyone have asked any questions, or cast any doubt over her identity, if Caster Semenya had not been winning her races?



She can run, but she mustn’t win, because the winner must be the Human and everyone knows that humans are only male or female. In the human race as we understand it, Semenya can only lose.

(All credit to South Africa for rallying to her side).

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How conflict divides gender

I receive mails from a world-wide network of activists, and I've been meaning to post an email I received from one member of the group for some time. This is it... Better late than never:

A personal commentary by a life-long women's advocate and activist.

Kathy Sloan
West Hartford, Connecticut
USA


Each new day seems to bring with it another unthinkable atrocity against the women and girls of Afghanistan. The roster of infamy reads like something out of the Nazi terror: a law passed and signed by the president sanctioning marital rape, acid thrown in the faces of girls walking to school, women forced to make themselves invisible with suffocating head to toe covering that puts the yellow stars of David Jews were forced to wear to shame. Never has misogyny been so blatant or so blatantly repellent.



This year is the 60th anniversary of the UN Declaration on Universal Human Rights. When ever-growing numbers of women in Afghanistan are literally setting themselves on fire due to the utter degradation of their very personhood while the international community allows this to go on, the Declaration is mocked and proven hollow. During the “Burning Times” of the 1400s through 1700s in Europe and the United States, when thousands of women were burned at the stake for “witchcraft,” agonizing immolation was administered by the state. In the 21st century in Afghanistan, patriarchal misogyny has regressed to the point where the state no longer needs to carry out femicide; ubiquitous and relentless terror, abuse and destruction of female lives accomplish the same goal through suicide.



Where are we as a global community when the biological existence of female identity becomes synonymous with “evil,” an essence so threatening, so repellent that it justifies exploitation, commodification, violence and the ultimate “punishment” – murder?



Nations go to war over possession of natural resources, rivalries and greed. “Wars” are declared on “terror” and “drugs” but where is the “war” on violence, abuse and degradation of women? Every country on the planet engages in human trafficking of women and girls for use as sex slaves – where is the “war” on this lethal trafficking? From the sexual commodification of females in Western culture to its ultimate expression as blatant loathing of females in Afghanistan, where is the outrage, where is the call to war? Where is the soul of humanity that demands we not allow, condone, participate in, or passively accept the abuse of females every day, every hour, every minute? The despairing women of Afghanistan demand an answer.

the baby bust

It’s about time I wrote something. Otherwise my blog is going to go mouldy…

…So I’ve dragged this article out of a remote bookmark file and dusted it off…

…It’s all about the rapidly declining birth-rate in Western Europe – how and why women are not having babies. It’s a decline so vertiginous that new terminology has had to be invented to describe it. What was previously referred to as ‘very low level’ fertility, a rate set at 1.3 children per family and which used to be the lowest recorded fertility rate, has been undermined by some places in Europe, so that now there is ‘lowest-low’ level fertility applied to places where the birth-rate has, for the first time, dropped below 1.3.

I like this article. It basically dismisses the conservative/religious “told you so” attacks on the availability of contraception, the ease of abortion and our apparently shallow, selfish, secular lifestyles and suggests instead that it is, to a large extent, conservatism that is in fact responsible for suppressing the baby numbers.

Research has revealed that within Europe there is another divide between birth-rates: a South/North divide. Apparently records reveal that more babies are being born in the north of Western Europe than in the south of Western Europe. Superficially, this shouldn’t make sense. In the southern countries of Italy, Greece and Spain, traditional family structures still endure. Despite levels of education comparing equitably with their northern sisters, women still tend to forgo careers for housewifery, while their husbands go out to work. Generally, you’d predict then that it would be in these traditional family frameworks that the most babies were being born. However, the opposite is true: far fewer babies are being born in Italy, Spain and Greece than in northern Western European countries.



In contrast, in the north, in Germany, Holland, Denmark and Sweden, the average couple both work fulltime jobs, and yet, somehow, women are finding the time to have more babies than in the south.

Social and cultural surveys have revealed that in traditional family frameworks, in Italy and Greece for example, men who work while their wives and girlfriends stay at home, are much less likely to help with the housework or assist with the practical elements of raising their children. This has had a tendency to put women off having more children once they’ve had one and then subsequently discovered they have to do everything themselves. What a surprise. This isn’t rocket science, is it!

So you can probably guess, without reading the rest of the article, why women seem keener to have babies in Denmark and Sweden where – guess what? – men are much more likely to help their wives and girlfriends, who are also holding down fulltime jobs, with domestic chores and childcare. It would seem raising a family, as a collaborative and equal partnership between two people, is a much more appealing prospect for a woman than effectively running a household and family alone.



What interests me though, and what isn’t really questioned in the article or anywhere else it seems, is what else can be read into this beyond the logistics? I’m glad that the article lays to rest the usual religious hysteria about modern attitudes to life with very practical answers to the question of our diminishing European demographic. But it doesn’t ask if there is anything else besides the practicalities. We are socialised to believe that women have a maternal instinct that kicks in at some point in life to induce the drive to reproduce. If this drive is as inherent and instinctive, as we have been socialised to believe, then logistics and practicalities should not, alone, be able to have such a widespread and devastating affect upon it.

Logistics involves processes of rationalising: the situation is evaluated and deemed unsuitable for reproduction and child-rearing. But the maternal instinct is not a rationalising negotiation… it’s an instinct… that’s the point! It’s supposed to be integral to being human. It’s supposed to be an essentially defining characteristic of being a female human. It’s this drive that’s supposed to undermine reasoning in order to ensure the survival of the species, no matter what – no matter what the economic situation, or the cultural climate, or whether your husband is helping out around the house or not – isn’t it?

If women are evaluating, reasoning, rationalising the decision to have babies or not, what has happened to the so-called maternal instinct? Is there one? Has it gone?... Did it ever really exist??

My 50p’s-worth is this: when the social, economic, cultural climate is right, or when there is no choice – when contraception is unavailable (or illegal) or cultural expectations heap value onto childbirth – then the “maternal instinct” suddenly blooms into being, masquerading as innate, internal ‘nature’. But without these expectations and pressures, without the cultural or religious pressures, when the social climate is wrong (e.g. when the father of your children chooses the pub over bedtime stories), or in an environment where there is so much else going on for women (and men) – where there is the freedom of a life that is not dependent upon supposed biological functions – then the “maternal instinct” mysteriously disappears.



I cannot believe that the maternal instinct is inherent at birth. I can only believe that it is socialised into existence – that it comes from outside and is then absorbed, and not the other way around – with the presence of certain social and cultural factors. The human drive to reproduce is less biological, more manmade. And I would argue that the survival of the species has its conditions – that perhaps it discerns between quality and quantity… The smatterings of only children playing by themselves in playgrounds will have plenty of time and space to reflect upon this…



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the bishops' tale

It amazed me how three men – one presenter, one liberal pro-female-bishops (Dean of Southwark) and one conservative anti-female-bishops (Bishop of Fulham) – could sit in the BBC Radio 4 studio (on Monday morning) and discuss the legitimacy of ordaining women as bishops and never once observe that they were discussing the lives and future prospects of a particular demographic of women, without any representative from that demographic, or indeed any woman, present at all!

In fact, the Bishop of Fulham did at one point accuse the Dean of Southwark of attempting to silence and repress the voice of the conservative traditionalists. Well what about the voices of the people this whole debate actually centres on? Where were they? If anyone is being silenced, it’s the women who want to become bishops. You can hear their debate (and not hear the prospective female bishops debate!) here, if you scroll down to 0810. (Actually, at 0709, there is a 4-minute piece from a woman dean ((as opposed to the 11 minutes given to the male bishop and dean an hour later!)))

Not that any of this surprises me. Various parties of men sit around and discuss the rights and freedoms of women all the time: in parliament, in justice systems, in brothels… in any structured social system where the hierarchy is male dominated. For the church, of course, especially the Catholic Church, this is one of their favourite pastimes!

John Bell on the radio today said something like: ‘the church has been concerned with playing catch-up with the rest of society… but if it only understood the role women play in community and society, it wouldn’t be having to catch up with society; it would be leading it’. You can hear it properly here.

I don’t want the church, or any other organised religion, leading society, but it’s staggering that any large body of people, especially in the West, can really, genuinely, still be arguing – eight years into the so-called New Millenia – that there is any doubt surrounding the equal legitimacy of women to do any humanly-constructed activity if they so want to. It’s absolutely amazing. And it was reassuring to hear at least one Christian voice of reason.

And what is equally amazing is how little notice the rest of secular society takes of the church’s internal bickering. We pass them off as obsolete, inoffensive and non-threatening. They have their own (not so) little world that they operate in and they leave the rest of us alone. Except they don’t. And they are not inoffensive. Aside from its religious significance, a Bishop position is professional, paid employment. Sexual discrimination is supposed to be illegal in this country… and yet, the Church still finds immunity.

And they are not obsolete. How do you think the 24-week abortion act suddenly got pushed into the public, and parliamentary, arena once again? Guess who the advocates for the changing of the law to a lower limit were… Catholic cabinet ministers who’d been requisitioned by conservative Christian activists with parliamentary connections.

Considering the demise of organised Christianity in this country, what remains is a fairly hardcore conservative force to be reckoned with! Fortunately, reason prevailed in both the abortion act and the Synod’s decision to ordain women bishops. It just amazes me that either should need debating in the first place.



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The beginning of an end to maternal essentialism? I sincerely hope so...

Thomas Beatie is a pregnant trans-gender man from Oregon. There's been a fair bit of media coverage: most of it skeptical, some of it downright prejudiced and inflammatory.



The Guardian remarks on how the "common reaction is to wonder how someone can identify themselves as male and yet embrace pregnancy" and suggests that this is in fact "like saying you can't be a woman and have a career". There has indeed always been this widespread social assumption that equality has only to do with women attaining the same opportunities and privileges as men, and never about men attaining the same opportunities as women. When it happens, society balks!

As the F-Word puts it so well:

"Of course, the reason that the story has gotten so much attention is because Beatie doubly upsets the expectations of a society that is still quite rigid about gender conformity. If transitioning from male to female, or female to male, is still hard for some to accept, then folks who fall somewhere in between, or, as seems to be the case here, are not threatened by forays across the gender divide, totally confound. The concept that Beatie doesn’t feel like being pregnant threatens his identity as a man seems to be difficult to understand for those who are still not entirely comfortable even with those who break down gender roles, such as a female boss, a stay at home dad, etc, let alone challenge the concept of gender as a simple binary divided by an impenetrable wall".



In any socially collective way, we rarely get beyond the quite scandalously over-simplified gender binary that exists between us. Due to its apparently intrinsic and unshakable hold on society, most ground covered on issues of equality works with this divide rather than making any attempt to subvert or transgress it.

Pregnant men do subvert and transgress it, and it's a rare and beautiful thing.

When pressed for reasons why such an occurrence is so offensive, even professionals were struggling for articulate, sensible reasons. Most medical concerns centre around the testosterone treatment taken by Beatie to become male. According to Lisa Masterson, a Los Angeles obstetrician, excessive testosterone "can cause male-type characteristics in the female baby." But this can happen anyway, quite naturally, in more 'regular' births.

And most social concerns centre around the bullying the child might face at school having been born to its father. Bullying is always a favourite tool utilised by conservatives against any moves towards more unconventional parenting: it's been used against everything from single parenting, to adoptive parenting, to gay/lesbian parenting, and even to home schooling and special needs. It is not an argument - it is a non-argument - because the sad fact of the matter is, children get bullied for everything and anything and nothing - from being overweight to wearing the wrong kind of footwear. There's no logic in bullying, and it cannot be preempted. It's just a convenient, authoritative-sounding tool that is always effective in turning public opinion in support of conservative values. Kerrick Lucker, a gay activist at the University of California, gets much closer to the point when he says that "the only unusual challenges these kids face come from members of the public who see gender ambiguity as a great wrong". The bullying, this suggests, is traceable to a very adult public.



Anything that ever suggests a transgression of the old, tired gender binaries inevitably sees a creaky wheeling-out of those hideously reductive and inherently prejudiced arguments about what is considered 'Natural'.



For some reason, regardless of their moral behaviour or lifestyles, any normatively male and female couple have more right to have a baby than a gay/lesbian/trans gender couple who have had to fight everything from social and legal convention to intrusive state surveillance, and often hefty financial pay-outs, to conceive a child or adopt one. Yet reason must surely suggest, as Lucker goes on to point out, that "generally speaking, a man whose desire for a child is strong enough to overcome the obstacles that transgender men must face in bearing one is likely to be an extremely caring father".

As Beatie so eloquently puts it himself: "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire". How long is it going to take us to realise that we are human before we are gendered?

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a sticky web

The New York Times asks why, if so few women work in the computer technology industry, do so many more teenage girls use the internet than teenage boys? They ask the question but are tentative in offering any answers. The reason for that is, as they say, because...

"Teasing out why girls are prolific Web content creators usually leads to speculation and generalization. Although girls have outperformed boys in reading and writing for years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, this does not automatically translate into a collective yen to blog or sign up for a MySpace page".



There have always been generalisations down sex and gender lines on this topic, because girls' prevalence online has been long noted, even back in the days before the giant social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Beebo: more girls had 'homepages' than boys, and a big deal was made about the name, 'homepage', and how girls' apparent 'nesting' inclinations have translated into digital homemaking. It is possible, I suppose, as female children are, generally-speaking, brought up on a diet of dolls-houses and Fisher Price kitchen sets, and so extending domestic idealisation into a digital home would be a natural extension of childhood practices. But if this is true, then it's quite disturbing.




Internet enthusiasts and propaganda espousing the possibilities of the internet have always emphasised its 'freeing' potential:- promising a place of escape, from 'reality', from routine daily life, and from virtually all conventional societal roles; including, of course, gender roles. But if what the 16-year-old website contributer interviewed in the article says about why girls are more active online is true, and “girls like to help with other people’s problems or questions, [in order to be] kind of, like, motherly, to everybody" then this vision is in trouble.

If her view is shared, then not only are all female babies born instant mothers (in other words, destined always, inevitably, without question, for motherhood, and never allowed to be anything other, even in childhood), but all online social networking does, or is for, is to perpetuate gender roles and stereotypes. We are all still men and women online - men and mothers - men and sex objects - and we have not deviated from any of the normalised models of gender. The web is a trap... its net is tightening...



I would like to believe this isn't the case. I have never believed it before. Perhaps I have what is now an old fashioned 90s view of what forms of liberation the internet could offer society: I believed identities could shift and merge and transform in cyberspace. But when I was looking for images for this post and, inspired by the title the New York Times had given its article's subjects, I googled 'cyber girl', all I was presented with was page upon page of porn. According to the majority of web content creators, 'cyber girls' are not girls who blog, or network, or write content, or create web pages, 'cyber girls' are sexualised images of women you can access digitally. And that's all. So much for gender liberation in cyberspace!


(I picked a tame one!)

Apart from the small image taken from the New York Times article itself, these are the only non-pornographic 'cyber girl' images I found:





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96% Chimp! How different can the sexes of humans really be?

It might seem a bit irrational that reports such as this should get on my nerves so much, considering how, on the surface, they appear to support gender equality (from the angle of equality through acknowledged 'differences' between the sexes) by espousing the worth of 'women's skills' and 'special talents' and their value in all aspects of society.

There seems to be a lot of this kind of so-called research and surveys about at the moment - ranging from retrograde and damaging to more encouraging and at least well-meaning. This one published yesterday does, admittedly, fall into the latter category. But I have problems with this kind of approach to gender 'difference'. First of all, the sheer amount of current material on this particular angle - especially found, it would seem, in analysis of gender in a business or corporate context - that seems to be doing the rounds of all levels of press at the moment makes me instantly suspicious! What is the agenda? Because when one angle is promoted and presented with such zeal, and to the exclusion of other arguments, there is always an agenda!

It could be that, in fact, gender equality is the agenda, but if it is, I think it's frequently misdirected, misinformed, seriously over-generalising the genders and, at times, potentially reactionary and damaging. All of these reports which divide human skills and attributes into male and female categories perpetuate the confines of these categories, refuse mobilisation between them, and continue the value systems that favour the supposedly special skills of men over the supposedly special skills of women, however well intentioned these reports and surveys are at attempting to balance those values:- intending to convince society of the equal value these attributes and skills hold in it - and how vital they all are to it.

I appreciate the intention because socialisation has meant that sensitivity/long-term planning/multi-tasking etc. have been the apparently specific skills of women, while focus/short-term goal achieving/aggression have been the specific skills of men. So, in so much as society is currently divided in this way, there is definitely a place for the raised profile and praise of 'feminine' skills. However, I absolutely do not support or feel gratitude towards 'research' and reports that bang on about how these attributes and skills are biologically pre-determined from conception.

Women and feminists have long tried to promote the value of 'feminine' traits and any progress in this direction has been painfully slow throughout history. There is nothing 'new' about trying to promote the supposedly special skills of women. Jane Austen had a go, Virginia Woolf had a go, among many many others. While we insist upon separating out human attributes between men and women, in a society where dominance (whoever embodies it) is always eventually bowed to and adhered to, the so-called traits of men will be valued over the so-called traits of women. And so both sexes will aspire to one, suppress the other, and men who show sensitivity and vulnerability will be considered weak and women who show aggression and self-confidence will be considered suspicious and 'unwomanly' (see article on Hillary Clinton 2 posts down...). This is not remotely helpful for gender equality.

When you consider that we're only 4% away from being chimpanzees you can start to understand just how grossly exaggerated studies of human biological differences really are. Humans, genetically, are 99.9% the same! So why on earth are we so obsessed with that 0.1% difference? Whatever differences there are biologically between the sexes they only become markedly different through the process of socialisation from infancy to adulthood that takes that 0.1% and inflates it beyond all reason. It is the world we live in - not the hormones we receive in the womb - that determine what characteristics, skills and traits we will display in human society. It is challenging society's understanding of what it is to be a gendered human, and not perpetuating constructed and socially manufactured models for each sex, that can bring about real gender equality.



Technorati Tags:
gender, gender equality, 96% chimp, the slippery banana skin of biological essentialism

my pinkstincts!

Waiting at King’s Cross for the train to Leeds, every single little girl I saw – not just most – not just the majority – but every single one – was dressed almost head-to-foot in pink! Complete with pink accessories, pink backpack, pink on their trainers and in their hair. I’ve had it with pink!



It was the exact same thing last weekend at the very random Weeton Show we went to. There was a Punch n Judy stall – I had thought that these glove puppets, always disturbing at the best of times, had been abolished in waves of PC hysteria, which apparently waved right over West Yorkshire… Anyway, rippling out from the garish-enough puppet box was a small pond of gory pinkness. I don’t even notice little boys any more because they pale in comparison with their luminescent female versions!



Once upon a time, I had been prepared to accept the what-was-being-voiced-as a ‘re-appropriation’ of the colour pink, as part of the whole so-called ‘post-feminist’ reclamation of what it means to be female. But enough is enough! I honestly can’t take any more. It’s beginning to hurt my eyes! What we have with this aggressive colour coding, which is thoroughly and rabidly exploited by retail corporations, is a conveyor belt effect of perpetually and unfalteringly reproducing one unchanging female model. There’s no room at all for individuality, and no room at all to not like pink!



I don’t have anything against the actual colour. It’s just a colour! It could have been red, brown, green, whatever; it would have caused the same phenomenon if used in the same way. It doesn’t celebrate femininity. It condemns the child to a life of prescriptive gender definitions, held in place by the fear of being ostracised and labelled ‘different’ should she deviate from the prescribed path. There is no possibility of gender exploration when there’s only one road. We have a production line – a conveyor belt – of two possible sexualities. One of them is pink.





gender, pink, pinkness, blinking pink, femininity, production line identity

Gay Pride Paris 2006

Gay Pride 2006 (09)
Originally uploaded by Co@Tix

For Amnesty's current (and ongoing) campaign against homophobia worldwide I'm filching from other people's fantastic flickr photos to help raise awareness... These are just some of the countries where those who practice homosexuality face the death penalty...

San Francisco Gay Pride Parade

san francisco gay pride parade
Originally uploaded by deborah lattimore

...because there are more than just two sides to gender...

Gay Pride Paris 2006

Gay Pride 2006 (03)
Originally uploaded by Co@Tix

...Pushing gender boundaries and definition in photographs... for Amnesty...

there's 0 between the 'n'-word and the 'p'-word

I don’t really want my blog to turn into a Big Brother commentary for the next 2 months, or however long it’s going to be on for, but it’s no good; I just can’t ignore what Laura said to Gerry about Liam on Wednesday night’s episode!! In reference to the gimp outfit BB made him wear for this week’s task, Laura told Gerry that Liam looked like a p**f. Now, admittedly BB called Laura into the diary room for a reprimand. And she apologised… to BB, not to Liam or to Gerry. But last month Emily was unceremoniously thrown out of Big Brother for calling Charley the ‘n’-word.



I’m not going to start a debate about whether this was the right course of action in the first place – since I’m divided on it. But what frustrates me more than anything is the double standards, and the inequality and inconsistency within semantic laws and social rules. Why is it considered so much worse to be attacked on the basis of your race or colour than on the basis of your sexuality or gender? If BB is going to be consistently politically correct then they should have also thrown out Laura for using a derogatory and disrespectful term for homosexuals.



In fact, by the same token, derogatory terminology about women should also be outlawed. Yes, that would make general conversation a linguistic minefield, because – would you believe it?? – there is a seemingly endless stream of potentially abusive language about women. Racism in language is perhaps easier to recognise and police because the words stand out, but words like c**t, t**t, w***e, s**t and s**g pass through conversation as if they were nothing more than a bit of verbal punctuation. I am, of course, in complete support of any anti-racism measures, but I am fed up with its unequal position as the ‘favourite’ social injustice. No one should ever face abuse directed at any aspect of an identity that they have no control over. We have no control over our race or colour. But we also have no control over our biological sex, or our sexuality and sexual preferences. So there is no justification for condemning one, whilst merely mildly frowning at the other.



If BB can kick Emily out for making a racist comment to Charley, then BB should show some consistency in Big Brother Land’s Judicial Legislation and kick Laura out for making a homophobic comment to Gerry.

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big brother, homophobia is no less offensive than racism, political correctness, sexism, racism, homophobia, big brother state rule

iPod+iTunes=equality@our/capitalist.society



So, I know, they’re becoming another giant, another god – the Coca-Cola and McDonalds of digital technology – or are they? Maybe they are, but they’re being much smarter, much shrewder, and more fiercely contemporary, as well as unapologetically and aggressively subversive with their marketing. Or maybe they’re not, and they are in fact either showing us a mirror of the changed culture we are part of, or a window into the not-too-distant future of hugely diverse forms of representation that we are (hopefully) heading for…



I’m talking about iPod+iTunes and their slick and exuberant TV ad campaigns.



The thing is, we’ve seen loads and loads of them by now, which is why I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to notice what I think they're doing… Perhaps because they were more tentative at the beginning with the characters used to promote iPod, or perhaps because – and I think this is more likely – society has changed enough that we don’t question what we are seeing – and we don’t question it because no image is presented which doubts or questions our individual inclusion. I’m talking about the fact that in every iPod+iTunes ad I’ve seen, not just many, but the majority, of the figures dancing away to the songs are the silhouettes of characters from pretty much every ethnic and racial group, apart from white, western and obviously middle-class.



When those concerned with gender, race, class and sexuality try to attack western marketing for only representing, and thus targeting, white middle-class male consumers, or white middle-class female consumers, the response is usually that these are the ones who will most likely be buying the product, and so these are the ones who must see themselves with the product in advertising. It is, of course, a circular argument because advertising in this way is self-perpetuating: the consumer will only ever be white, male and middle-class because it is only ever a white, middle-class male who is represented using the product.



I think iPod+iTunes significantly undermines this argument. I have seen myself represented in the iPod+iTunes ads through the music, the art, and the general feel of each ad and have never felt excluded from the product just because my particular raced or sexed body is not represented. Now this could initially seem to support the old archaic argument about representation in advertising, by suggesting that showing an ad that presents only a white middle-class male, or even a female, with a product does not automatically exclude other bodies of other classes, races and sexes from feeling in a position to purchase that product.



But really the angle should be: if it makes little difference what colour, class or gender the person presented with the product is, why has advertising been dominated by such immovable (usually white, male and middle-class) stereotypes for so long? Why has it been deemed such a risk to express the diversity of British culture through advertising? iPod+iTunes has clearly shown that capitalist societal processes and racial diversity are not mutually exclusive of one another!



In addition to this (as far as I’m concerned) pretty major explosion in western advertising, is the significance of what this particular product being advertised in this disruptive way actually is. It is a piece of sophisticated, contemporary, ‘hi-tech’ digital technology: until now the almost sole domain of white, male, middle-class technocrats and computer-exec elites. But here it is being thrown around and swung about on tranced-out, psychedelic streets. Physical narratives - the music of connectivity buzzing from machine to human - are being ecstatically performed by bodies embodying and celebrating difference, very far from slick offices and executive suites.

Our technological and digital culture is often accused of being exclusionary – that it forgets, not just poverty, but the colour and gender of poverty – that it exacerbates class divisions and indulges further the fantasies of the few who have the privilege of access. I have often argued that, though there is this side to it, which does need addressing, it is not the only story.



I believe the internet, especially, has the potential, if not to erase class, racial and sexual differences, then to connect and instigate conversation, communication and greater understanding between all these differences. And I believe it can be a useful tool in the global campaign to eradicate poverty. I have seen for myself that, where there is a will for it, class and financial status are not insurmountable obstacles in gaining access to technology and the internet. Though their agenda is clearly a capitalist one, I believe the iPod+iTunes ads show us that current western culture accepts and wants a world where access to technology, either as free users or consumers, is not determined or defined by our race or class.



Technorati Tags:
ipod, itunes, god, mcdonalds, coca cola, race, class, gender, representation, ads

testosterone is the real terrorist:

It's been two weeks since I blogged: too much going on, and I've been lacking in motivation... Until I saw this:



"If terrorism was not racialised, but gendered..." This is a very strong question, and it applies to war and violent crime as well. Race has always been the convenient scapegoat, because it is 'the difference' - it's always 'the other' - to blame masculinity implicates too many people: it's too close to home, too close to incriminating the perceived 'Norm': because those within 'the Norm', those who make up 'the Same' and 'the Self' are highly skilled in the art of shirking their responsibilities and looking for somebodies other to blame.

The Politics of a Veil

Ok, I know I said I was only going to write about Angola from now until we leave, but I can’t help it, I have to talk about this: because I’ve been having nightmares, ever since seeing Leading Seaman Faye Turney veiled on Iranian TV.


This is no small thing: this is not about having to adhere to ‘cultural sensitivity’ (whatever that is!). This is a symbolically loaded statement-of-intent on a much wider scale than a navy capture, disguised as a banal ‘necessity’ to cultural adherence.

There’s a visual incongruity about seeing a non-Asian western woman in a veil – and that’s no coincidence: the Iranian contrivers of this whole façade know damn well what a visual statement this is – and weight is added to this statement because of her isolated positioning as the only female in a team of male sailors – as well as the fact that she is a sailor at all: only very, very recently is the west beginning to open up its definition of the armed forces to include women into what has always been defined as a masculine sphere. Any such progress within Iranian armed forces was halted long ago: by veiling LS Turney on (what has now become) international television is to say: this is not a man – this is not a sailor – this is a woman – and she cannot be a sailor because a sailor is a man, and she is not a man – indeed she is nothing like a man, nothing close to being a man – they have nothing in common – and you, the West, have clearly forgotten that, so we are going to remind you… with a veil.

For women to integrate into the armed forces there has been a process of gender-blurring: a necessary critique of what is masculinity and how much (if at all) masculinity depends upon an anatomically male body. There has also been serious consideration for what attributes traditionally recognised as ‘feminine’ can contribute to the armed forces. By drawing deliberate attention to LS Turney, using her as the bartering tool, setting her aside, standing her apart, photographing her alone, these Iranians are saying: she is not one of the men, she is different – she is not a Man, she is Other. And she must be marked as Other – her Otherness must be signified and marked… with a veil.

I am appalled and angry. The sight of a non-Asian western woman in a veil might currently be an anomaly, but don’t feel so assured of its distance – of its rarity. Extremist-Muslims want a Britain under Shariah law: this is what Britain will look like under such a regime. The threat of Extreme-Islam is, above all its threats, a gender threat.

Before I post this, I want to make something clear. This is not a post about whether Muslim women should veil or not. Forced unveiling is absolutely no better than forced veiling: it smacks of violent coercion – it smacks of violence full stop – and it smacks of arrogance and western illusions of supremacy. The point here is the insistence upon a very physical, intimate, personal measure being enforced, as a deliberate, political, act of gendering, upon a sailor, who’s normal priorities would be towards her duties as a sailor, and not her sex.

Handmaid's Tale anyone??



For a veiling woman's take on the apparent prejudices of western feminism about the veil, click on the pic below:



shariah
navy
faye turney
veil
extreme islam
LS turney
Turbo Tagger

Regeneration

It sometimes takes me a while to get round to reading stuff – in this case it took me 15 years!! But I couldn’t just put it back on the shelf without a mention…



The psychologist WHR Rivers, in Pat Barker’s novel about the patients Rivers treats during World War I, explains what are the most likely triggers for ‘shell-shock’ during war and conflict:

“…It was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neurosis and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace” (p222).

How refreshing it is to read something that not only treats so-called 'female neuroses' and ‘hysteria’ with a seriousness and thought that is frequently missing in literature, science and psychology, but also reveals how supposedly ‘gendered’ psychological conditions are not gendered at all. According to this analysis, biological or mental difference has nothing to do with hysteria, neurosis, breakdown and depression, and everything to do with lifestyle, environmental and circumstantial conditions, and opportunities for self-expression – afforded to anyone, regardless of sex. What this also implies – and is crucial in my opinion – is the way in which the problems associated with, in this case, ‘shell-shock’, affected women in such a wide spread way – since ‘female hysteria’ is such an historically well-recognised phenomena. Could it possibly be that, outside of war, a woman’s life was (is?) significantly more traumatic than a man’s?

It’s interesting that one of the two main works Barker cites in her Author’s Note is The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter: an important text for feminism. What I think comes across loud and clear in Regeneration, is something feminism has been struggling to get out into wider consciousness for a long time: the ways in which Patriarchal conventions, expectations, attitudes, and behavioural practices are damaging to men. Feminism is not a women’s only zone – it’s neither selfish nor sexist – feminism wants a better world – a healthier society – for everybody. War is abusive: to the bodies it enlists for its services, and to the bodies it commits its atrocities against (and the difference between these is far from clear). I’ve had enough of paranoia and prejudice against feminism: feminism hates Patriarchy; it hates war; it does not hate men!

Technorati Tags:
regeneration, pat barker, war, war neurosis, psychology, shell shock, hysteria, female malady, feminism, gender, elaine showalter

A Few More Options



There’s always been something which felt very restrictive about the two boxes – Male – or – Female – on every questionnaire, survey, census, any form in fact – it’s not an obvious choice, not to me anyway – slipping around inside (and outside) our unstable and fluid identities – and yet there it is – the unchanging choice (which is not one) on our passports, birth certificates, and driving licences.



Having spent much of the last three years on planes, filling endless immigration forms, I’m frankly sick of the sight of these two boxes. Western culture – supposedly a culture of excess and unlimited consumerism – boasts unreservedly of choice…

…Except when it comes to the factor that, if real choice were offered, would demonstrate a genuine freedom within our society (instead of the false ones we buy - or buy into). But no, on the whole we must still decide upon which side of the dividing line we fall: we must still choose whether we are with or without, standing or sitting, on top or underneath.



Could it be that this is what our ‘progressive’ culture relies upon? That there must be some things kept ‘sacred’, ancient repressions preserved, some reactionary constant, from which the world can safely reel around wildly and flamboyantly, beneath a hedonistic guise it flaunts, but doesn’t really mean… not by the end of the day, when you get back on the plane, and are presented once again with two boxes.

Cynics might suggest that the multiple choices that we are offered in the west are thrust before us in hyped and exaggerated explosions of noise and colour in order to deliberately distract us from the choices that really matter – the ones which can really make a difference.

But I think these writers (and I’m not sure they merit that title!) of forms (another misnomer!), in their offices, cordoned in by their screened-off corners, and sitting behind their own anonymity – these Men and Women – are just lazy, and lacking in imagination. They have not questioned their own box. They themselves have been presented with two boxes into which they have made everything fit, and what they think – these 1D designers, these flat-lining dividers of peoples – is that the world is the same for all of us.



If you’d like more than two boxes, if you like your questionnaires to offer more than an Either/Or choice, then try this one by March 19th, and maybe it will set a precedent for the shapes bureaucracy could be taking.

Technorati Tags:
gender, transgender, transexual, bbc, bbc questionnaire, identities