On friends and feminism

This blog post is brought to you by actually caring passionately about a subject, caffeine, and hyperactivity, which means that whilst it's one step up from being ill it's probably not going to be the most precisely worded blog post in the history of posts. Or maybe I just can't write for toffee. Either is equally plausible.

It was originally going to be a critique of Bodies by Susie Orbach, the book I mentioned last time. I finished it on the way home from something, which I don't remember. I just remember reading it in the car waiting for my mum to get back from Tesco's. Actually, that's a lie. I remember. It was a family day out, accompanied by parent's friends and sister's friend from uni. Off to a woodland for a walk, followed by breakfast in the cafe. Or lunch as I called it, since we'd already eaten breakfast and it was midday.

Tumblr is the most amazing place to get gifs to decorate blog posts with.

Off-topic.

Anyway, I both enjoyed the book and found it immensely irritating, and I wrote many notes down so that I could write a comprehensive blog post on the topic. I still will - that will be the next post most likely, and it probably won't be as comprehensive as I would like, more likely a deluge of random words followed by me complaining about my own illegibility.

What I want to talk about today is feminism. This may be a long one, so if you want to go and make a drink before coming back to this, I'll wait.

So, feminism.

The reason this post is coming before the book one is that I've been talking a lot about feminism to various people recently in the last few weeks, and I've come across a number of discussions in the media about it. It is one of the few topics that I stop feeling slightly apathetic about, which is probably due to something I'll expand on later.

The discussions about feminism and women in society started with a discussion several weeks ago with H regarding her dislike of Steven Moffat (of Doctor Who and Sherlock writing fame). Her main problem with Moffat had nothing to do with feminism and all to do with the plot of Doctor Who and how (apparently) obvious the build up to the finales are since he has taken over. She then moved on to discuss how Amy is probably her least favourite of all the companions, because aside from her memory problems (again, related to plot formation), she doesn't seem as able in her own right as the others do. All she does is follow the Doctor, and doesn't think much independently. Or something along those lines. We also discussed the pro-s and con-s of writing Irene Adler the way she was written in Sherlock when compared to the tiny amount she is in the book, but I'm not going in to that now. Now before anyone starts complaining about the above re: Amy, let me tell you now that I'm only on series three, so I have no idea if any of this is the case. If you want to know more about Moffat and sexism, I suggest you read this post and this post, both from the incredible blog Martin Freeman is Not a Hedgehog which is a fascinating read and you should all go there immediately (or after you've finished reading this).

A couple of years ago, I hated the word. In fact I didn't start to call myself a feminist until a few months ago, I'm ashamed to say. The reason? Well I suppose I was sort of scared off by the word. I'd heard of feminists who spend their time hating men, arguing that you're a bad woman if you wear make-up and high heels etc, and I didn't want to be a part of that. I like high heels. I've never worn them to make me attractive to the opposite sex, I've worn them because I think some of them are really pretty, and I like pretty things. I don't wear make-up because I'm lazy and don't like having to wash it off before sleeping, but I don't think anything against people who do. I sometimes think more guys should wear eye-liner. I also watched a tv show on the feminist movement, and a number of women talked about becoming lesbians not because they were attracted to other women, but to show that they didn't need men. I thought it was insane. I didn't agree with half of the things they were saying. It wasn't equality, it was pure anti-men-ism. At the same time, I didn't like saying I wasn't a feminist, because I'm aware that these are stereotypical views of feminists and not the reality, and I also firmly agree with equality for everyone. Except sometimes I don't want the vast majority of people to be able to vote, but that's more to do with how annoyed I get when reading the comments sections of news articles than actual not wanting voting equality.

So what happened a couple of months ago to change my mind?

I had one awful, awful night that left me a little like this:

No, I wasn't attacked, I wasn't abused, I wasn't shouted at, no one did anything to me personally. What I did do was spend the evening browsing the internet (as I spend most of my days), and I had the misfortune of coming across four of the most vile anti-women things I've ever come across online all in one night. Now this was several months ago, and I didn't save the posts, so I can't completely remember what they were. I remember one was a horrible sexist youtube comment, and another was a post pointing out all the flaws with women and why they're unfit to do anything other than serve men, make sandwiches and spread their legs. A woman had copied the post, written notes all over disputing everything they said, and the original poster had written comments onto the commented-on copy re-stating everything they originally said and pouring out some vile abuse. I also came across an anti-women thread on 4chan, which again showed me that I should steer clear of /b/, as if I didn't know that already.

As I said, I can't remember what it was I actually saw, but it was hurtful, and horrifying, and traumatic, and it made me want to cry. It wasn't necessarily the one-off posts - I know there are plenty of idiotic people out there. It was more to do with all the comments I saw agreeing with these threads. And then seeing minor comments, like "go make me a sandwich", after seeing those? It was very much a "I don't want to live in the world anymore" moment. I think I rang my mum up to ask how can we change a world that is so cruel and unfair, a very similar conversation to the time I found myself in tears after reading this article on homophobia and teen suicides. The worst thing anthropology has ever done for me is to make me interested in the world. Ignorance is most certainly bliss.

So screw it. I'm a feminist.

Why this has come up so much recently, I'm not sure, but I want to talk about a few conversations I've had with some of my friends recently.

Well, the first one is not so recent. When I first started university I became friends with a girl we shall call E. It was a friendship more of convenience than anything, because we lived close by and were on the same course. Once I made other friends and realised how little effort she put into ours, we sort of stopped talking. But that's besides the point. One day we were walking from one lecture to another (or to lunch, I remember we were walking and where, but possibly not the reason) and the topic turned to D/s relationships. Don't ask me how, I really have no idea. She started arguing that it is ok for a woman to be a dominant and/or a sadist in a relationship and for a man to be submissive and/or a masochist (and/or because D/s and S/M do not have to go hand in hand), but it's not ok for the relationship to work the other way around "because men dominate women physically anyway".

I took great issue with this. Yes, men have a natural tendency to be physically more powerful than women due to differences in our biology, but D/s relationships aren't about who is naturally more powerful. Each relationship is individual and is about the people involved in it and their likes, dislikes, sexual preferences, mental preferences and personality. I think it's utterly wrong to say that a couple should act a certain way because "insert gender" is always "insert statement" anyway.

As Natalie Dzerins wrote in The F Word:

"Some people like being "degraded" (OBVIOUSLY there are limitations to this which I will return to), and no more can you "pray the gay away" than can you "feminism the sub away" (I tried to make it rhyme, but nothing rhymes with "feminism"). These desires don't mean that said woman has been "coerced" or "brainwashed by the patriarchy", and to try to dismiss them in this way is removing women's sexual agency. This is A Bad Thing."

This past week I've been on holiday in Lanzarote with friends that I used to go to school with (got back in the wee hours of this morning in fact, and apparently turned Scottish during that time - since when do I say wee?). There were four boys and two girls (myself included), down from the eight boys and three girls who went on holiday last year. Whilst people have joined and left the group over the however many years we've all been friends, there has always been many, many more males than females in the group. But you know what? I've never felt there to be a male-bias in discussions that relate to gender before. Once when we were about fourteen one of the females in the group said she didn't think women were capable of leading a country, and rightly the boys stuck up for us girls. Thankfully that girl has since changed her mind and was very receptive to my pro-feminist talk when we met up for lunch the week before last, even encouraging me to tell her more next time I see her.

A comment this week though nearly had me tearing my hair out.

J, one of my closest friends, brought up over dinner a few nights ago that he'd heard of a pill in development that men could take that would act as a contraceptive. Well, not in development - he said there'd been tests done on mice and that they're wanting to develop one, and he posited the question that if one existed, how would the other guys around the table feel about taking one? (Ooh look, I found the article.) One of the guys said he probably wouldn't want to take one and pointed out all the possible side-effects for female pills and hormone-related mood swings etc, and said that didn't appeal to him. That was fine - we talked about how many women don't want to take the pill because of the same reasons, and he was fine with that. Then C (who is actually another J but I know far too many Js so we're going to expand into the rest of the alphabet) said that he wouldn't take one because he's fine using a condom but after that it's the woman's responsibility not to get pregnant.

The woman's responsibility.

B (the other girl) and myself instantly had this reaction:

It takes two to tango.

I was reminded of a conversation I had with J about six months ago when watching Dirty Dancing and he said it was the girl's fault she got pregnant because she should have known what time of the month she was fertile. I got mad. However I'm also aware that he was partly saying all of this to wind me up, one of his seemingly favourite activities, because a) he told me he was trying to wind me up, and b) he's pro- male contraceptive pill.

So yes. C was saying that as it is the woman who gets pregnant, at the end of the day it is down to her to make sure it doesn't  happen. He tried to throw a positive spin on this, possibly along the lines of it wouldn't be right for a man to stop a woman becoming pregnant if she wanted to have a child (which is another thing I take issue with, because a child doesn't just have a mother, it has two parents and both are equally as important. Although I'm taking issue with that sentence as well - it sounds overly heteronormative, and I don't mean it in that way. I mean it in a "a man is allowed to not want a sexual encounter to turn into a child" sort of way.) He might not have said that last thing - my memory is a little hazy due to it being several days ago and alcohol having been consumed. But I do know that when I was talking to J afterwards, we both thought it gave the impression that C might one day turn to a girl who accidentally got pregnant and say "it's nothing to do with me, you should have been more careful". B and I were asking why on earth should it be down to the woman to mess with her body, and argh! A long debate about male and female sexual rights followed. There was also a discussion on rape and how he'd have to believe a guy was innocent if there's one person's word against another and no physical evidence that she was tied up or hit or etc that I'm not going to go into now because it'll wind me up and the what is / what isn't rape and how can we prove it debate is much too big to fit in here.

I think one of the most annoying things was that the day previously I had been talking to C and another friend (who damnit, should be called C, but now I've used that letter. So until he is mentioned again, will remain "another friend") about sex / gender equality and the difference between feminism and anti-men-ism. C said he believed in equality, but didn't like it when things were taken too far. We talked about glass ceilings in some businesses, and he told me that I shouldn't have a go at the individual businesses (which I wasn't) because it's just how society is.

Yes. Unconscious sexism. I was so glad he agreed. Until he started saying that you can't change society and it's based in evolution.

He may be a historian, but NEVER say that to an anthropologist. Change society?

If societies never changed, we wouldn't live the way we do! Look at how women's rights have changed over the years in Afghanistan. Look at the fact that we now don't kill people for sport. That in the West we believe in education for all. That America has a black president. That WE DON'T LIVE THE SAME WAY WE DID FIVE YEARS AGO, let alone never change!

And I'm sorry, but you study history. History is fascinating, but it's usually written by the winners. And it's based on surviving sources. I'm not claiming to know more about historical events than C does, but you can't use historical evidence as the be all and end all for things. I have heard people using "universal historical morals" as an argument against gay marriage, then give Ancient Greece as an example of "universal historical morals" - usually meaning attitudes towards freedom and education etc, completely ignoring the fact that many Greek writers wrote about homosexuality and pederasty {wiki definition: socially acknowledged erotic relationship between an adult male and a younger male usually in his teens} was fairly common (and developed from a highly homosocial culture) [1] [2].

I am both going off topic and starting to ramble. I apologise. I am now rather less hyper and just generally tired.

I'm not even going to get started on the evolution argument. I could discuss it - one of my modules last year was Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, which was fascinating and looked at human behaviour (such as marriage practices) from an evolutionary point of view. I might end up with a blog post on it one day. I might not.

The point is, don't throw around words about evolution and society and culture if you've never studied it and you're talking to an anthropologist who has studied both. J tried to tell me yesterday that I'm not allowed to try to make anthropology relevant to every conversation (apparently it's less relevant to conversation about what people do than theoretical astrophysics... don't ask me how). If we're talking about what people do and why they do it, then yes, anthropology is very relevant. He can shush.

Anyway I'm going to wrap up the rest of what I was going to talk about quickly now, because this is long and I need to do other things. I wanted to mention J saying that in his ideal world the eldest son would inherit (they do now, but H told me hopefully the law will change soon and she can get her father's title rather than it going to her brother), and C saying that if he were Emperor and could pick his own heir, if his son weren't up to the task he would groom the most suitable boy for the role, rather than giving it to his daughter if she were capable.

People have been making me very angry about equality recently. That's basically the point to this entire blog post. And the fact that I've spoken to many people, including women, who say that there is no inequality nowadays is insane. And scary.

Three things I wanted to work into this article somehow but have not worked out how to do so:

1) This article and this article talking about the sort of abuse a lot of female bloggers receive. I mentioned this to C as well, and all he could say is that people write abuse on men's blogs. I agreed that people can be horrible on both, but there's definitely a different type of abuse. In the words of the second article: "While I won't deny that almost all bloggers attract some extremely inflammatory comments -- and LGBT or non-white ones have their own special fan clubs, too -- there is something distinct, identifiable and near-universal about the misogynist hate directed at women online. " If you take nothing else from this entire post, read that second article.

2) I arrived back in Liverpool last night at 1.20. For various reasons, none of my friends could house me for the night, and I live a fair distance from the airport so getting a taxi was going to be expensive. Mum and dad had already told me they couldn't pick me up because they had to go to work today, and I was fine with that. I was also fine with the idea of either sleeping in the airport until normal transport was available or getting a taxi back despite the expense. Mum didn't want me to get a taxi by myself that late at night, so dad picked me up, which he said he was happy doing. When discussing it with mum over lunch (because O took serious issue with me causing the parents to be awake so late), I pointed out that I have got a taxi by myself at night before, that a lot of people do, that C got a taxi back to his house by himself and that not all taxi drivers are like this:

If they were, it wouldn't really matter what time of day I got a taxi, but that's besides the point. She said that it was fine for C to get a taxi back by himself, because he's male.

Sigh.

I know she's only worried about my safety, and that in some ways she has a point, but in others... well this vaguely-remembered quote from a source that I annoyingly can't remember (I'm going to start noting down everything that ever interests me just in case I ever need it here) came to mind: we tell girls to be careful when they go out and beware of men, we don't tell boys to be aware that a girl on her own might feel vulnerable and so don't do anything that might make her uncomfortable. SOMETHING ALONG THOSE LINES.

Finally, I am going to take part in the women's forum this year at uni. I wanted to last year, but I was far too shy and isolated myself too much so never went. I also saw mention of a gender and feminism society, which I'd really like to join, but when I went on the union website it wasn't listed under the list of societies, so I'm not sure if it exists. If it does, I'll join it.

So that's it for now. In all likelihood I'll revisit this topic several times. Maybe part of the problem with people's dislike of "feminism" is that it's about equality (in my opinion) but the name is pro-women, which I think a lot of people take to mean anti-men. Maybe we should all just be equalists and be pro-equalism? I have no idea.

I'll leave you for today with this picture of Bill Bailey.

[1] I have to point out that all my information here is from the internet. I don't actually know to what extent homosexual relations were widespread in Ancient Greece since I didn't live there, but I do know that Plato definitely wrote about them in Symposium, one of the few ancient texts I have ever read for fun. I was thirteen. Younger me did read the most random things.

[2] I'm also aware that the short section on the phrase "universal historical morals" doesn't really have anything to do with the previous point on using historical evidence as a be all and end all, but c'est la vie.