yonmei

08:03 am: Movies for the weekend
I mean to go to District 9 this weekend, and I re-watched Night at the Museum last night. As I noted in comments to ruthi, it's a lovely film of the classic sub-genre Cute Daddy Becomes His Son's Best Hero, and yet we haven't had a Cute Mum Becomes Her Daughter's Best Hero since Aliens II. (And yes, I know Ripley wasn't Newt's bio-mom. And they killed Newt off for Aliens III. Bah.)

Supposing Hollywood were to suddenly have a brainstorm and start producing films that passed the Bechdel Test (Night at the Museum fails it - there's two women, one of whom is actually v. interested in the other one, yet they never get to speak to each other) who would be cast in these films? What classic two-male-roles films would we see being made with two women in the central roles, and who would they be?

(I'd love to see a sci-fi ditzy genius saves the world with the help of her daughter, who has all the academic respectability her mother lacks: Barbra Streisand as ditzy genius, Gillian Anderson as her daughter, Nichelle Nichols as the President of the United States... and if Beatrice Arthur were still alive, I'd cast her as the Chief of Staff.)

Who would you cast? What are your film ideas for these Movies Hollywood Will Never Make? Not just films that scrape a pass in the Bechdel Test, but films with two starring roles for women who talk to each other through the film, plus several major supporting actor roles, all played by women.




Tags: feminism, films

11:15 am: Late Business at the Hugo Awards
I added a longer entry with piles of data about the Joanna Russ Amendment I put forward at the Worldcon to remedy the statistical bias against women writers getting nominated: Yonmei at feministSF the blog.

Tags: feminism, worldcon

09:42 am: I know where my moral compass points
I've been having a discussion with someone over somewhere else about abortion, and we've been having the usual back-and-forth over details and such, and he (I'm fairly sure it's a he) added in passing to a much longer comment:

But I seriously and sincerely believe that you are grievously in error, and I don't find that state of affairs to be good--not only because it leads you to empower and enable the culture of death in our nation/world (and enable the toleration of mass murder on a mind-boggling scale), but because it threatens your own immortal soul... and I really don't want to see you lost.

As it happened, in 20 minutes from when I read that comment I was about to go out to my local pro-choice activist group where we were to discuss Alex Salmond's recent assertion that he's got a moral compass and he knows how to use it, and I didn't have time to follow my usual strategy of responding calmly point by point.

I wanted to assert my moral compass, so I did, writing:

I am an atheist, and normally I take "concern for my immortal soul" as a kindness - an expression of warmth, despite the fact that I don't believe in either an immortal God or immortal souls.

But in this instance, you see, you are advocating support for a mass movement to treat women as slaves, animals, or incubators - to regard human beings as creatures to be bred by force, or machines that can be used to produce babies without regard for any harm done. This "pro-life" movement that advocates dehumanising women, that murders doctors, attacks clinics and health care - I would no more support it, ever, than I would support a pro-slavery movement, or a pro-death penalty movement, or a pro-war movement.

Treating other human beings as lesser creatures, to be used and destroyed, is to me a sin. Cruelty and dehumanisation such as you advocate are, to me, the ugliest of sins - and I would fear for the best part of me, for whatever integrity and kindess I possess, if I were ever brought low enough not to opppose* such ugliness whenever I see it.

To me, your advocacy of forcing women through pregnancy and childbirth, no matter what high-sounding excuses you make to yourself, is as ugly as slavery and rape. There is no excuse for it.

I support a woman's right to safe, legal access to abortion, because I believe: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." And, so we include sisters in "brotherhood", I would never turn away from that to the horrors of the "pro-life" movement.



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*Okay, given "oppose" may include anything from going to a demo to writing a brief to just a moment of sheer rage: but I'm always in the opposition to this.

Tags: evil religious politics, feminism, i am an angry feminist

01:57 pm: I’m not sexist. Some of my best friends are non-male.
"And great-grandmother was a woman, which makes me one-eighth female!"
- Yatima, Winner of several Internets.

Please grow up before midnight, little purple dragon.

Tags: feminism, lol!

11:27 pm: Mmm, cheese bread
I found a wrapped soft cheese at the bottom of the freezer, so I cut off the crusty rind and kneaded most of the rest into the spare piece of dough (there is always a spare piece of dough: it never quite works out trying to make exactly enough for 24 rolls: the difference between flour and yeast in each baking always changes the dough, and this is why the French Revolutionary Government declared it a scientific heresy that bakers were responsible for short weight loaves, and why you can buy bread by the gramme or the kilo in France today). I formed it into four rolls, topped each with a piece of the remaining soft cheese, and baked in the oven till brown and crusty.

OMGdelicious. It was really difficult only eating one. The other three will freeze nicely, though.

I finally got to see The Devil Wears Prada. The novel was an interesting example of "fiction for women", the kind that makes you think about how this culture is for women, and how skillful writers can play on the edge of what-we-accept/what-we-resent to create the best of what we unfondly call "chicklit". I'd heard the film substantially changed the novel, and it does - I suppose they couldn't bring themselves to make Meryl Streep play a woman as dislikable as Miranda in the novel, a woman with no redeeming characteristics. There were a handful of other changes - Miranda pays much more individual attention to Andi in the film, instead of barely noticing she's there, and Meryl Streep delivers the best Miranda lines in style. It remains utterly unrealistic about the fashion industry, with much more prurient gaze at women's bodies: the best part about "chicklit" is that it is unabashedly aimed at women, which films are not.

I finally succumbed and bought the first season of Cagney and Lacey on DVD. There won't be any more after that and this makes me sad: please sign the petition, if you haven't already.

Tags: baking, bread, cagney and lacey, cheese, feminism, films

07:26 pm: My first legal possession
Sometime before I was six weeks old, my dad gave me something that is my first legal possession, and the only thing I own that even death will never take from me.

I say my dad, because when I was born I believe it was still his legal obligation, not my mum's: and what he gave, though it became mine, is also his.

( My surname. )

Tags: family stuff, feminism, name of a name

08:51 pm: On 19th century women - or how radical feminism becomes normal liberal thinking
This post was written in response to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on the feministsf blog. The comment thread there is worth reading, too. I was partially inspired to write this because Google reminded me that 28th July 1866 is the day Beatrix Potter was born - who was denied any formal education by her parents, who was rejected as a student at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, whose scientific papers were rejected by the Royal Society and ignored by the Linnean Society, who discovered the symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae in lichen, and who was expected by her parents to work for them as their unpaid housekeeper - she did not escape from them until she was 40 years old.

In 1806, the year Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell opens, it was taken for granted as a fact of nature that women were inferior to men.

The laws of the United Kingdom did not permit a wife financial independence from her husband - everything she owned was legally his property unless it was bequeathed or given to her with legal conditions that did not permit her husband the right to take and make use of it at will. (There was a distinction between "personal property" which was a husband's absolutely, and "real property", over which he had only "managerial control".) Anything she earned herself, or anything given to her without such conditions, was his absolutely. It was legal and expected for women not to be allowed to work at the same jobs as men, and for women's jobs to pay less than men's jobs. It was normal and expected for the kind of work offered women to pay them far less than a living wage. It was unheard of - and considered markedly unnatural and strange - for a woman to be educated "like a man".

In 19th-century Scotland, thanks to several Acts of Parliament in earlier centuries, it was normal for a woman to be able to read and write - all children went to local schools to learn the three Rs from the schoolmaster. Even in Scotland, though any intelligent boy could aspire to go to the nearest High School, and any boy who succeeded in going to High School could aspire to going on to university and taking a degree, no girl was expected to do more than become literate and numerate. Even that was more than most girls in England could hope for.

It was legal for a father to leave his daughter a share of the family property (her mother would most likely have nothing to leave) if and only if she married a man her brother approved of. It was also legal for a father to leave his daughter nothing at all, not on any conditions. While entails (by which a property devolved on the nearest male heir, leaving all the daughters destitute) were less common than they had been in past centuries, they still existed.

A woman couldn't divorce her husband. A woman's children belonged to her husband, and if he divorced her (in 1803, this was difficult and expensive, but if he could afford it, he could do it), he could legally prevent her from ever seeing her children again. A husband had a right to sexual use of his wife, and had the right under civil law to prosecute her if she refused him. A husband had a right to beat his wife providing he didn't permanently injure her, and had also the right under civil law to prosecute anyone who tried to stop him from beating his wife: anyone who tried to stop him would have to prove that they had cause to think he might kill his wife. If she left him because he beat her, until or unless he divorced her, he could at any time take anything from her - there are actual instances of a man abandoning his wife for decades, returning to find she'd set up a successful business to support herself (she had no right to be maintained by her husband unless she was living with him) and taking all the money for himself.

And this was all normal - as normal as black people being property. Stephen Black may have been made free by Act of Parliament in 1807, but Lady Pole would not have had the right to legal custody of her children until 1839, nor the right to keep money she earned for herself until 1870.

Maintaining that any of this was unjust or unfair was radical feminism, which was as unpopular and mockable by the mainstream as radical feminism still is today. Arguing that women were the equals of men was just acceptable as light drawing-room chat (Jane Austen touches on this in her final draft of the letter scene in Persuasion) but not as any serious argument for women's legal or human rights.

Women were considered to be the inferiors of men - neither as physically nor as mentally capable. That was normal. A man was supposed to take care of his wife and his daughters - if he didn't or couldn't, well, that was too bad for them. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennett's desperation to have at least one of her daughters marry a wealthy man was cheerfully mocked by a young Jane Austen: Mrs and Miss Bates in Emma receive more respectful treatment, but their poverty was the state to which Mrs Bennett knew she would be reduced if her husband died leaving any of her daughters unmarried.

Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Elliot, Charlotte Yonge - all of them wrote 19th-century novels in which they make clear their mental discomfort as intelligent women living in a society in which they were legally and socially discriminated against. All of them were aware that the treatment women received was unjust. But they lived in a culture in which the inferiority of women and the rightfulness of legal and social discrimination against women was taken for granted as normal. Susanna Clarke was born after a hundred and forty years of feminist activism had greatly changed what was considered "normal" for women: when she writes of that culture, she evidently realised she could not convey either a 19th-century woman's sense of injustice nor a 19th-century woman's ingrained knowledge that this injustice and inequality is normal - and so she asserted that it didn't exist.

Tags: books are what i read, feminism

11:32 am: OMG. Wolf is a sexual harasser!
I was working out that as I got Wolf on 7th August, and he was six weeks old then, that puts his birthday at about 25th June - so I can call him a midsummer cat and remember his birthday that way.

He is very nearly a year old, and he appears to be going through whatever kind of puberty a castrated cat can go through, housed with a human and a female cat who was spayed 10 years ago (Bob was 8 when I got her in December 2005: I keep not quite wanting to do the arithmetic, but that makes her 11 this year).

This morning, Bob was curled up around my hand and I was petting her lovely furry tummy and she was purring happily - and Wolf leaped up on the bed, eyed us both, did some sniffing around Bob's bum (which Bob ignored) and then he settled himself down behind her, which Bob also ignored... and then he bit her on the back of the neck and clung to her, which she growled at. Eventually he got bored and let go, and now he's sitting on the windowsill chirping at the birds, but...

Oh, Wolf.

( more seriously )

Tags: bob, cat politics, feminism, wolf

06:23 pm: Remembering Kaija Seifert
Today I went to a seminar for employers and service providers to discuss how best to oppose transphobia and anti-trans discrimination.

It was a good day, and I hope a productive one.

It ended with two people, Jo Clifford, whose name used to be John Clifford, a Scottish playwright, who got up and talked passionately about the wonderful changes since she was a 15-year-old who knew she was a boy who wanted to be a girl and didn't have a name for what that was: and Nick Laird, who works for Fair for All NHS, talking about his experience as a trans man - Nick is younger than Jo, and came out/grew up/transitioned in a more supportive environment, but still had those moments.

I was thinking, as you do, about gender identity: Nick told a story about a small boy - an utterly innocent small boy - asking him, back when he was living as an uncomfortable teenage girl who knew she wanted to transition - "Are you a boy or a girl?" and Nick not knowing what to answer, and finally answering with what his birth certificate said then, and how he was living then: "I'm a girl." And the wee boy asking, in all innocence "Are you sure?"

( Read more... )

Tags: being queer, feminism, hair hair hair, i am an angry feminist, kaija seifert

08:46 pm: Justice is not achieved with e-petitions
Hwaet! Give ear to!

This afternoon a friend sent to my work address (I think hoping I might use my work resources to publicise it) an e-petition that begins:

Outrage in South Africa

Last week a 3 year old girl in South Africa was beaten and raped. She is still alive. The man responsible was released on bail yesterday. He is walking the streets. If you are too busy to read this then just sign your name and forward this on.

The Government is planning to close the child protection unit and this is a petition against it. This is a very important petition. It is an essential part of the justice system for children. You may have already heard that there's a myth in South Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure AIDS. (Note: that part is perfectly damnably true.)

The younger the virgin, the more potent the cure. This has led to an epidemic of rapes by infected males, with the correspondent infection of innocent kids. Many have died in these cruel rapes. Recently in Cape Town , a 9-month-old baby was raped by 6 men. Please think about that for a moment. The child abuse situation is now reaching catastrophic proportions and if we don't do something, then who will? Kindly add your name to the bottom of the list and please pass this on to as many people as you know.

If you are signature no.: 1000 - please forward the mail-list to c h i l d p r o t e c t p c a @ s a p s . o r g . z a

There are 643 names on the copy that reached me, beginning with a name in Australia.

When this e-mail arrived, I glanced it over, and thought my usual think: E-petitions are no good, why do people keep forwarding them? and a less-usual think, because I was at work: I should look this up and see if I can publicise it, or if I can't, suggest better ways to the friend who sent it to me. A Facebook group, I thought. Something.

This specific kind of petition, where the author asks you to add your name and forward it to "everyone you know" is a kind of viral meme. It can be worthwhile in drawing attention to a specific issue (as with the Afghan women petition of a few years ago), but actually regarding it as a petition to be sent to an e-mail address where "someone" will do something about it is pointless: an e-mail petition of this kind is regarded about as highly as a blank sheet of paper, and the influx of e-mails to the e-mail address given will, soon or late, mean that e-mail address has to be shut down due to overload.

This, however, is a more treacherous kind of petition; it's a hoax. As I found in five minutes googling, this is a known hoax that's been circulating on the Internet for at least eighteen months. The Child Protection Unit in South Africa is not being closed down: it's being expanded, restructured, and renamed the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences Unit. (The e-mail address given is not a valid police address.)

There is a grain of awful truth in the e-mail.

The Virgin Cure belief isn't specific to South Africa - in fact, it may have come to southern Africa with European colonists in the 19th century:

The myth of the Virgin Cure has a rich and culturally diverse history stretching back to 16th century Europe, and more prominently to be found in 19th century Victorian England, where, in spite of the emphasis on morality, rectitude and family values, there existed a widespread belief, that sexual intercourse with a virgin was a cure for syphilis, gonorrhea, [and other STD's]. (HIV/AIDS, the stats, the virgin cure and infant rape)

The phenomenon of infant rape in South Africa is very real:

"In our culture, as a woman, you don't say no to a man. Sex is not open for discussion," [Rose Tamae, a survivor of gang rape] says.
"So they think they can do as they like.
"In a place like Orange Farm, where most people are unemployed, and the women have to go looking for work far away, often the children are left at home in the care of men, or strangers.
"They are vulnerable. In one case a little girl was being given food in return for sex, and she didn't want to go home empty-handed to her mother, who had Aids and was sick. " (BBC)

But though rape reporting to the police is on the rise, the actual figures of rape may not be, and may not be connected with the "Virgin Cure" phenomenon:

Dr Jewkes and two of her collaborators, Dr Lorna Martin (Department of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology, University of Cape Town) and Ms Loveday Penn-Kekana (Centre for Health Policy, University of the Witwatersrand) believe other factors are to blame for these violent acts.
"The idea that having sex with a virgin cleanses you of AIDS does exist in South Africa and there have been reported cases of this as a motivating factor for child rape, but the predominant evidence suggests that this is infrequently the case," Dr Jewkes says. She quotes Mr Luke Lamprecht, the manager of the Teddy Bear Clinic in Johannesburg, which is the referral point for all child sex abuse cases in the metropolis. According to him, he has only seen one child rape case where the perpetrator believed the myth. This happened some 4 years ago - and the child's mother agreed that the HIV-positive man could rape her 4-year-old in exchange for cash.
"According to another report on child rape which investigated injury patterns, management and outcomes, there was a 1% sero-conversion rate.* This was, for most cases, in the absence of anti-retroviral therapy and therefore suggests that this myth is not an important cause of rape. If it had been, in view of the extensive injuries common in child rape, a higher rate of sero-conversion would be expected," says Dr Jewkes. (The 'virgin myth' and child rape in South Africa)

These are horrors. There are real things people can do: get involved with your local World AIDS Day event; donate to the AIDS Foundation of South Africa; read more about AIDS in Africa; support Rape Crisis NGOs in South Africa (the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust is one of the oldest and does work around the country as well as in Cape Town); if you live in the UK, you can support Community H. E. A. R. T, a UK charity that supports "Health Education And Reconstruction Training" in South Africa: if you live elsewhere, you can find a similar charity based in your country. These are useful things to do. Forwarding an e-mail petition isn't going to do a damn thing, ever, even when it's actually factually true.

(On the other hand, I wouldn't want to discourage you from e-mailing Pope Rat at benedictxvi@vatican.va, or ringing him at the Vatican Switchboard (+39.06.6982) or even writing to him at Vatican City (you will have to address the envelope "His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, 00120 Via del Pellegrino, Citta del Vaticano": I imagine envelopes sent to Pope Rat or That Nazi Bastard just get weeded out at the sorting office): and asking him why the Catholic Church is spending more resources to oppose condoms in Africa than it is on opposing the lie of the Virgin Cure.)

Tags: evil religious politics, feminism, powerful speech vs. powerless silence, venting

08:57 am: Catholic church decides they'd rather stand on the left
Church says: don't worry, Jesus didn't mean it!:

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?'

"He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.' (Matthew 25,42-45)

Amnesty International decided in April this year to to support access to abortion for women in cases of rape, incest or violence, or where the pregnancy jeopardises a mother's life or health.

The Catholic church decided that the doctrine of forcing women through pregnancy and childbirth against their will and regardless of the damage done to a woman's life and health as a result, was more central to Christianity than providing help and support to prisoners. Catholic bishops have been running away to stand on the left since April, making pontifical noises about how their conscience as Catholics obliges them to support forced pregnancy rather than aid prisoners.

The latest news story is about Northern Ireland bishops banning schoolchildren from writing to prisoners because Amnesty International supports the right of raped women to have access to abortion, and the right of a woman to decide to protect her own life rather than die in pregnancy. The reason the Catholic church gives for believing prisoners shouldn't be written to, and women should die in pregnancy, is "The sacredness and protection of all human life."

Not that Catholics are alone in believing that women are not human, nor are they the only Christians to argue that Jesus didn't really mean it when he said that denying help to those sick or in prison was the same as denying help to him. And I don't doubt that a good many grassroots Catholics will do what they do when faced with the Church's claim that using contraception regularly is worse than having an abortion every few months: they'll shrug this idiocy off and do the right thing regardless of what the Church says.

www.amnesty.org


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Update: Zoe Williams on Why faith schools should not be tax-funded.

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, feminism

12:15 pm: Lipstick feminism
I noticed someone on facebook had joined a group for articulate women, clicked on the link, was reading down in an amused/agreeing sort of way, until I got to the last item of their "criteria for joining":

You wear lipstick

, and noted the last line of their self-description:

IF YOU DO NOT JOIN, YOUR INARTICULATE WAYS WILL BE DULY NOTED

Is there something about Facebook that leads normally sensible adult women to behave like creepy little girls at secondary school? "Ha ha, we WEAR LIPSTICK, ergo we are BETTER THAN YOU"? I mean, seriously: granted, wearing makeup is one of the ways in which women are required to conform (I've lost track of the number of times I've been seriously advised that, even though I don't normally wear makeup, I should consider doing so at a job interview) but... sheesh.

Wearing makeup is a feminist issue, not because makeup is anti-feminist and no makeup is pro-feminist, but because, for women, wearing makeup is as obligatory as shaving under your arms or shaving your legs. Granted I have been impressed in the past by the skill of women who can use cosmetics (after a sunburn, or an attack of spots) to make their face appear as if they had not used cosmetics at all (a similar skill to the use of makeup on stage, or TV, or film) but it's not a skill I've ever acquired. (If I had an infinite amount of time it would be somewhere on the list, like the ability to knit useful things like jerseys and socks while watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.)

Shaving my legs (or under my arms) is not something I've ever done. (I read in teen magazines, back when I was a teenager, "if you start you can't stop" and, being a lazy kid, decided it would be simpler not to start.)

It bores and annoys me when feminists do the "Oh, it's perfectly feminist to shave your legs/wear makeup/wear high heels/change your surname to your husband's" - no, it's not. No more than it's perfectly feminist to bottlefeed or breastfeed. The feminist angle on this is not what individual women do that conforms or does not conform to the requirements of the patriarchy: it's to acknowledge that these are requirements the patriarchy imposes on women to make them feminine. To some degree or other, all women conform because life is easier when you do and rougher when you don't. It is perfectly feminist to acknowledge that these are patriarchal requirements and that conforming to them does not make a woman less a feminist: and that trying to pick a fight over them - whether attacking women for wearing lipstick or for not wearing lipstick - benefits the patriarchy, not feminism.

Gah.

Tags: feminism

07:57 pm: According to Roy Hattersley, I'm a savage
Roy Hattersley writes:

Melissa Dear of the Family Planning Association argues that further study is not necessary because "only a small minority of women have an abortion after 20 weeks ... and for those there are good reasons". One of those reasons is, in her estimation, the fact that the prospective mothers "may not have realised that they were pregnant". How can that possibly be a justification for killing a potential, or an actual, human being?

The other day, as part of a radio discussion, a young lady raised the question of a child conceived by rape. Surely, she said, no one could argue against an abortion - no matter how late the date - in such circumstances. The logic of her argument is as disturbing as her lack of respect for life. I give her credit for not demanding the execution of the rapist. If she does not propose capital punishment for the perpetrator of the horrible crime, how can she justify the death penalty for one of its victims? The rational conclusion is desperately hard on the woman who has been violated. But unless the preservation of life comes first, we are savages. [See regendered for an alternate view.]

The reason that immediately leaps to my mind why a rape victim might not seek an abortion because she didn't realise she was pregnant until (according to Roy Hattersley's standards) it was "too late", is because she's a very young girl. A thirteen-year-old, a fourteen-year-old. Even an eleven-year-old. But, to Roy, only a savage would say a rape victim should have an abortion - savages like the people who run Human Rights Watch in Mexico, or like the Eastern Health Board in Ireland.

Tags: feminism, powerful speech vs. powerless silence