Boys Don't Cry and Wyrmeweald: Returners Wealth

A couple of books I have read recently.

Boys Don't Cry by Malorie Blackman
This was a good story about a 17 year old suddenly having fatherhood thrust upon him.  There were some inaccuracies about baby feeding which annoyed me. Fair enough to have them in the book but please please include a footnote giving correct information.

There was a coming out subplot which I take umbrage at. The character concerned gets beaten nearly to death by his closeted boyfriend. Coming out stories are important and they do have a place, but I am sick of reading ones that portray being queer as danferous, depressing, miserable, full of struggles and fighting the system/your parents/your peers. I would like to read ones written as a coming of age story like straight people get. Being queer isn't always horrible, and it won't get less horrible if people only read stories that paint queerness as difficult.

I think Blackman is straight and I imagine she thought she was being really sensitive and writing a thoughtful book. It's just that as a queer teen in the 90s all we bloody had were painful coming out stories. That's all anyone ever knew. I'd hope we had moved on by now.

Wrymeweald by Stewart and Riddle
This was better.  It's frontier fantasy woth dragons but the dragons come in all shapes and sizes and comprise most of the fauna in the area where the story is based.  They are hunted for pelts and meat and only one type bonds with humans. It was a different sort of fantasy read and I'm glad i read it but I'm not too fussed about reading anymore.

I am currently in the middle of reading Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu. An American high school girl gets really pissed off with the sexist shit at her school and anonymously starts a zine called Moxie. She is inspired by the Riot Grrl movement. It's pretty good so far.

Riots not Diets folks. 

Legally Blonde, Teen Titans Go, Rebirth

Legally Blonde is a great film.

I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed it and on a recent re-watch I worked out why.  It's all about female friendship and solidarity.  Elle is a rich sorority chick who appears shallow and mostly interested in getting married to her love, Warner.  Usually in films rich, blonde, popular, shallow, marriage chasing women are bitches.  Not so Elle.  She is friends with everyone in her sorority house (is that the right term?) and she expects other women to be friends too.

When she starts at Harvard and a lecturer asks Vivian for her opinion on Elle's behaviour, Elle is genuinely shocked that Viv goes against her.  When Elle needs a pick me up and goes to a nail salon she takes genuine interest in the beautician's life and becomes friends with her - in films rich women don't usually make friends with poor women, but this friendship is genuine.

All the successes of the film are down to women trusting each other and supporting each other.  The woman the legal team is defending used to be in Elle's sorority and so she  only trusts Elle.  They wouldn't have won the case without Elle.  Viv eventually dumps Warren, stops being a bitch to elle and they become friends.

It's nice to see a film that celebrates female solidarity, girliness (pink, fashion, bubbliness) and seriousness and achievement.  It's great.  If I ever get the inclination I will watch it again and do a full analysis of it.  That would be fun.

On a more comics note, I saw my first episode of Teen Titans Go! this morning - it was the one where Raven and rose make friends and Starfire, Cybor and Garth go to Cool School.  It was witty and the characters were in character.  I very much enjoyed it.  Almost as much as I've been enjoying the Rebirth books I've been reading.  It's been a good couple of weeks for my entertainment. :)

Not a misery memoir

On Saturday I went to a talk by graphic novelists Nicola Streetsen and Una as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival, literature weekend.  The title of the talk was 'Not a misery Memoir - gender, identity and overcomign trauma'.  Streeten has written and drawn Billy, me and You, a novel about her grief journey (sorry, I hate that phrase) after the death of her 2 year old.  You can see why I was interested in the talk. Una wrote and drew Becoming/Unbecoming, about growing up 70s Yorkshire when the Yorkshire Ripper was around.

I was expecting a talk about horrible, miserable stuff but that wasn't it at all!  Streeten started, and touched upon a few things in her book, the panels about marking people's reaction to her news, the funeral director's problem accepting they didn't want a religious service, stuff like that.  Una talked about feminism and how women's bodies are policed and judged.  But, most of the talk was about how art can show metaphor in a different (better?) way than words can.  About how we read the comics page and about how readers connect comics in a different way than they do to prose, so comics can be more beneficial than prose when processing traumatic things.  They talked about why they chose to do their story as a comic.  They talked about their art styles.  I think Streeten said her rough and ready scratchy style suits the depiction of grief, because grief is rough and ready.  Or maybe that's something I came up with.  There was some brief stuff about the technical process of comics too.  And, I keep forgetting this, they talked about these sorts of books being cathartic for readers, not the writers.  This is very true, I think.

Una comes from a fine art background and her stuff is beautiful.  I had not heard of her before, and now I think I'll be checking out Becoming/Unbecoming.  There's a lot of empty space in the art which I find quite emotional and nerve wracking, but that maybe because of where I'm at in my head (who knew 2 years later I wouldn't be back to normal and that grief taints every part of my day and mind).

They also talked about Laydeez do Comics of which Streeten is a co founder.

Of the audience, I was one of three women in their 20s/30s.  The rest were in their 50s/60s/70s and were there for the literature weekend.  It was very surprising to me but it felt lovely.  To be in a comics environment dominated by well to do professionals, no costumes, by hyperbole, no fuss, and to be surrounded by older people who didn't know anything about comics and were treating the medium and the other attendees seriously - I loved it.  The atmosphere was friendly and informal and I loved seeing Streeten and Una as older woman, and friends, doing comics professionally and chatting easily.

The day was being sketched by the founder (?) and definitely editor of Graphic Medicine, Ian Williams.  This is a tweet of one of his sketches:
https://twitter.com/WritersCentre/status/734015906825797633
His work was lovely!

More Ghostbusters trailers!

There has been an international trailer released.  It's less racist.  It adresses racism and sexism.  It got me all excited for the sisterhood and the science, like the first one.  Apparently the black actress has been receiving nasty tweets about her performance based on the first trailer.  That seems stupid as well as nasty.  Surely if there is a fault then it lies with the director guiding the actors to perform in a certain way, not the actress/actor themselves.

There has also been a fan edited trailer doing the rounds. Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IDXpOX0Cp0

I don't like it.  It takes out a lot of the science love and makes it more like the first film, and makes it a very male film - in themes and action.  It took away what made me interested in the new film.  It's a male view of the new film, and I'm sick of that.

Ghostbusters 2016 trailer

So after much blathering from the local twitterati I watched the new Ghostbusters trailer.

 - It starts with 30 years ago 4 scientists saved New York.

- I think this is the director talking to the audience line, not an in universe line.  I am unclear whether this film is mean to be in continuity, or is a reboot, or a retelling, or a remake.  This trailer leaves me none the wiser.  But I think that line is an overview of the franchise, and is speaking to the fans saying we did this film 30 years ago, now we're doing another one.
Does that make any sense?  Nearly 8 months of baby has stopped my brain working..

- Various people have said that Winston isn't a scientist so the opening line is wrong. I argue that he may not be a scientist by training but he is doing scientific stuff as part of the team, so therefore he is a scientist.

- There has been criticism about making the only non scientist (by training) a black woman.  If this is a reboot, or remake, then it's makes sense that she, like Winston, is also not a scientist.  I'm questioning whether the original film was racist, not just single out the new one.  Mind you, the introduction in the trailer did seem to make her explicitly not scientific, and potentially crass and a bit thick (the scene with the car), which is making me cringe.

- The possession scene where the black lady slaps the ghost out of one of the other women is embarrassing.

- The scene where the 4 of them are on the steps and talking over each other and sounding indecisive made me cringe a bit.

- I got a rather large thrill at seeing female scientists do science equations and be intelligent on screen.

I'd quite like to see it. I think it will be entertaining nonsense.  I love entertaining nonsense.  And monster movies.  There will be 'problematic' stuff (how I hate that word now... it's used as shorthand but rarely it is explained what exactly is the problem) and that will make me wince, but I'll hopefully enjoy the rest of it.

*goes back to watching The Big Bang Theory season 8*  *considers the ways in which this show makes me cringe*

Malta passes law to ban normalisation surgery on intersex infants

Hey guys, this is really good.

Full story here: http://feminist.org/blog/index.php/2015/04/03/malta-just-became-the-first-country-to-ban-normalization-surgery-on-intersex-infants/

Highlights:

"Malta’s parliament just passed new legislation that allows self-determination of gender (with a simple process to legally change gender), and outlaws unnecessary surgery on intersex babies. This bill makes Malta the first country to ban unnecessary surgery on intersex infants.

In 2013, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture announced it condemns unnecessary surgery on intersex babies. “The Special Rapporteur calls upon all States to repeal any law allowing intrusive and irreversible treatments,” the UN statement reads, “including forced genital-normalizing surgery, involuntary sterilization, unethical experimentation, medical display, ‘reparative therapies’ or ‘conversion therapies,’ when enforced or administered without the free and informed consent of the person concerned.”

Maltese officials and medical professionals are now working to come up with guidelines to make sure all surgeries done on infants are medically necessary and not “driven by social factors without the consent of the minor.”

Excellent!

"Finally, comic book women get a real bodies make-over"

Title in quotation marks because redraws have been going on for years.

I am referring to this article which has been doing the rounds.  A facebook friend asked me what I thought of it so I thought I'd tidy up and post it here.

The motivations of the team behind this are explained as follows:
When the team at bulimia.com saw Buzzfeed's Disney princess makeovers, they decided they should take these super-human ladies and give them some super human bodies. Their hope is that when viewers see these realistic waistlines, they will be able to better relate to the characters. After all, being powerful doesn't have to correlate with being a double-D, size 2 cat lady,

I'll admit that I'm more inspired by men's physiques in comic books than I am by women's physiques.  I'm not sure if this is because I have a fairly relaxed attitude to gendered bodies or because men are shown as being more muscular than women, but if I think about who I most want to look like it's hook handed Aquaman, every time.  I know I'll never look exactly like him, I know his physique is caricatured, but when I think of visual motivation for working out and getting a six pack he's who I think of.

I don't lady comic characters unrelatable because they can be drawn ridiculously.  I think the world of Wonder Woman, even when she's drawn by Mike Deodato.  Relatable doesn't just mean 'looks like me'.

Having said that, I like the idea of re-drawing characters to look more normal.  It made me realise that some art which I consider realsistic really isn't - the thigh gaps for example.  I think that some of the redraws aren't quite right though - they aren't athletic enough.  There's a difference between tits an ass, normal realistic bodies and athletic.  I don't think there's a problem with making superheroes (and villains) look atheltic if their power set and skills demand it.  For example, the Flash should look like a runner.  Guy Gardner is an ex PE teacher, John Stewart is an ex marine.  I'd be surprised if they didn't keep fit, but they shouldn't look like triangular beefcakes.  Aquaman and Mera should look like swimmers.  Batman and Black Canary should look like martial arts experts.  Wondy should look like a gladitorial athelet.

Some of the redraws don't look right.  Black Widow doesn't look as fit as a physically active spy should be.  Her spying is a core part of her character, and if she doesn't look right I can't relate to her.  If she looks like she spends more time behind a desk than out in the field I'm not interested.  Catwoman, Ivy, Power Girl and Phoenix work for me.  Rogue doesn't.  Given the amount of time the X-Men spend training she shouldn't be as soft as that around the middle.  The same goes for Storm.

In making these characters look like normal everyday women that we can now supposedly relate to, they've taken away some of the power fantasy.  If I'm going to be inspired by a superhero I'll be inspired by their strength of character, their morals and what they can do with their bodies and how capabel their bodies are - but I'm someone interested in fitness and what exercise and training can do to the body.  Not everyone is.

To simplify, often lady superheroes are drawn to be fancied by men, and male heroes are drawn to be power fantasies for men.  Female characters should be power fantasies for women too, but to dot hat, you have to understand how bodies and exercise work.

Sexist, lazy bullshit music reporting on BBC 6 music

So right now there's a programme on the radio about Sleater Kinney.  It started 3 minutes ago and I'm already furious.

The presenter described Sleater Kinney as a band who have transcended gender.
Edit - it's bloody Gideon Coe who is presenting!

*Rage flail*  No.  Just no. Sleater Kinney have not transcended their gender.  What you mean is you, a male journalist, have deigned to overlook the fact that they are women and decided to pay attention to them.  You have decided to grace them with your esteemed musical criticism.  Sleater Kinney have just written, played and recorded music.  You are the dick that has trouble seeing past their gender.

*You* have transcended their gender, not them.  When was the last time the music press described a male band as transcending their gender?  I'll bet never, that's when.  Because male bands are seen as the default starting block and women bands are seen as a bloody aberration that have to prove they are good despite there femaleness.

Female bands don't hide, or move beyond their gender, It's the male music industry that has to do that.  Except that they don't because it seems that 99.9% of articles about female bands talk about their gender and want to talk about what it's like being a female musician .  The music industry is bloody obsessed with gender, there's no transcending it.

Sleater Kinney have never tried to move beyond their gender, or ignore it. They are feminists, They are female.  This is an important part of their work.

Gods save me from male journalists who think they are granting us a favour by saying that female bands have transcended their gender.

Visit Sleater Kinney's website here.

Another ASN update/worldwide pickets planned for abortion clinics

40 days of Life are a Christian organisation that picket outside abortion clinics, over (I presume) the Lent period trying to scare and shame women into not having abortions.  Clearly, they disgust me.  If you want to lower abortion rates you need to provide good sex education, free contraception, free childcare and improved benefits for mothers (and fathers).  You do not lower abortion rates by protesting/gathering/praying outside abortion clinics.  A list of clinics they are going to picket is available on their website here: http://www.40daysforlife.com/location.html
I suggest that if you are near a clinic, and feel safe doing so, form a counter picket, or bring in nice goodies to the staff at the clinics.  Cakes, biscuits and fruit would probably be welcomed.

On a similar note, here is a direct fundraising appeal from ASN: 

Have you heard about the recent investigations into rogue Crisis Pregnancy Centres in the UK?Unregulated, anti-choice ‘counsellors’ are telling women that abortion could give them cancer, make them infertile, or even turn them into child abusers. Disgusting, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, this story is all too familiar to me. Crisis Pregnancy Centres inIreland are just as willing to shame, manipulate and flat-out lie to women to suit their anti-choice agenda.

Lorraine - a single mother of three - was over 13 weeks pregnant before she got our number. A ‘counsellor’ at a CPC in Dublin told her that doctors in Britain are “butchers” who would leave her “permanently scarred”.

But that's not all women in Ireland have to worry about. At ASN, we hear from an equal number of women who are horrifically treated by the people they should be able to trust - their own doctors.

When fifteen-year-old Niamh went to her GP for advice, he dismissed her fear and scolded her for wanting an abortion. After the appointment, he made sure everyone in the waiting room knew that the young girl with him was pregnant.

We believe that Irish women who need to end a pregnancy need practical advice, not shame, judgement, and lies. 

When women contact us, we are very clear to them that we are not counsellors or health care professionals. Thanks to your donations, our helpline and email are there to give information and non-judgemental, practical support; if a woman needs, we also arrange hosts and give grants towards their procedure and travel.  If a woman asks for a local resource for medical information, counselling, a rape crisis centre, or a place where she can speak to someone face to face, we only refer to non-directive, pro-choice organisations.

Your donations help us be at the other end of the phone for women like Lorraine and girls like Niamh every day – thank you so much. If you could spare a little more today, every penny or cent helps.

Thank you, as always - here’s to helping more women, together!

Mara Clarke
Director, Abortion Support Network
 
 
*Some details have been changed to protect our clients’ privacy.

Interview with an abortion doctor in texas who has been outlawed from doing his job

From here.  I am going to crosspost all of it.

------------------------

On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court declined to block a new law in Texas that requires doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a local hospital, a measure that has caused at least a dozen clinics in the state to stop terminating pregnancies. Dr. Lester Minto owns and operates one of the affected clinics, Harlingen Reproductive Services. I spoke with him last week as he awaited the Supreme Court’s vote.

Slate: Are you closed? 


Lester Minto: Of course not. I have nine ladies scheduled for tomorrow.

Slate: What do you tell them? 


Minto: That I do not do abortions. I cannot do them legally. And I tell them that I know that there are other things that people do.

Slate: What do other people “do?”


Minto: If they have a passport and enough money, they go over the border to Mexico and go to a pharmacy and buy misoprostol at a pharmacy. It is an ulcer drug, but it works as an abortifacient. It is not as effective mifepristone, which is the on-label medicine used in the U.S. But in these ladies’ situations, misoprostol can be a good choice. It is proper medicine in a blister pack from a proper pharmacy. Someone might even know how to dose it. But it can be an expensive choice. In the U.S., misoprostol costs 10 to 12 cents a pill. I have had ladies charged $80 a pill at Mexican pharmacies. Also passports are expensive and can take too long to get if you don’t have one already. Misoprostol only works up to about seven weeks after your last menstrual period. You need a passport now just to walk over the bridge into Mexico and back. Of course if you are undocumented this isn’t an option at all.

Slate: What do women do if they don’t have a passport? 


Minto: They buy the drug at a flea market. This is bad and sad and wrong. They are going to be buying things on the street. You don’t even know if you are getting the real thing. But these goddamn politicians ... Women are forced to crawl around like goddamn criminals. So I am here to help them.

Slate: How do you help them? 


Minto: I give them a sonogram to make sure they are pregnant—and if they are pregnant, to make sure it is a uterine pregnancy—that they have no ectopic issues or anything. Then I give them vitamins. Because if they decide to keep the pregnancy, you want it be a healthy one. If they decide to do “something,” you don’t want them to hemorrhage excessively. That is a risk if a lady is anemic. A lot of my patients don’t have great health care, so a lot are anemic.

Slate: So the women take the drug and ...

Minto: They stay close to home, and sometimes it all works fine. But if it doesn’t—or it works part-way, that is what often happens— they can come to me, and I can do “miscarriage management.”

Slate: That’s legal in Texas?

Minto: Yes, in Texas once a woman is vaginally hemorrhaging, it is legal for me to help her.

Slate: What does that involve? 


Minto: The same thing as an abortion. It’s just a change in words. It’s double talk. It’s bullshit.

Slate: Why don’t you just get admitting privileges at a local hospital and comply with the new law?

Minto: They won’t have me. They are religiously affiliated. So you know, Jesus.

--------------------------

Jesus indeed.

Gender Through Comics

On April 2nd a free online course about gender and comics is starting! Gender Through Comics is a massive open online course and anyone, from any area of the world, can enroll. The course is not accredited and homework will not be marked. What it does have going for it is an interesting syllabus, interviews with creators and online lectures. As well as being free of charge it should provide a great, structured forum for people to discuss gender and comics. Obviously, I have enrolled in it.

The required reading can be bought in digital format from Comixology, or you could get the books from the library. There is an excellent choice of texts here - Strangers in Paradise, Superman: Birthright, Action Comics #1, 2 Wonder Woman issues, Secret Six: 6 degrees of Devastation and Y the Last Man are the ones I am currently familiar with.

When I was at Uni I wasn't reading comics, and my gender analysis skills weren't developed enough to make informed, convincing arguments. I knew next to nothing about intersectionality, and I wasn't really able to apply real world experience to feminist theory. I identified as feminist, but wasn't anywhere near as sophisticated in my arguments and understanding as I am now. Blogging for 6 yrs has really helped me & now I'm ready to do more structured thinking. So I'm pleased the course exists and is running.

My hopes for this course are that people will engage with the topics and discuss it as they would in an academic setting. By that I mean take it seriously, listen to each other's viewpoints and not devolve into mud slinging (this happens quite a lot in the comics blogosphere). I love learning and I would dearly love to do an MA, but there is no way I can (money, mortgage, work etc..) so I'm really glad I can study online, in a (hopefully) academic environment.

I would love to arrange a UK study group (I am particularly interested in the UK perspective on this), so if anyone would like to join in could you leave me a comment, tweet me @sarangacomics or email me paicomics at yahoo dot co uk.

Follow the course leader on twitter @christyblanch, follow the course account @supermooc or the hashtag #supermooc. The course website is here and the reading list is here.

You have until 6th April to enroll.

Other comics related 'things' people might be interested in are:

Women in Comics Europe - a facebook group promoting women in comics.

The Beat website is doing 24 hours of Women in Cartoonists -

Comix 4 Equality - an EU funded project providing an award for the Best Unpublished Comic Strip Authors with Migrant Backgrounds. Women are submitting stories and women's stories are being told. The website is here.  The facebook group is here.

Reeva Steenkamp

Oh fuck, I've just seen the news about Oscar Pistorius murdering his girlfriend.

She was shot in the head and the hand four times.

Oh my gods. :(

This is why I attended the Norwich Rising part of One Billion Rising this afternoon.

Fuck.  Somehow it seems worse when celebrities do this shit, but it's not worse, because every act of violence against a woman is horrific and must stop.  One act is not more important, or less deserved, than another.  They are all disgusting and nightmarish and the only way they will stop is to teach people that women deserve respect.

Propellor's The Taming of the Shrew

I wrote a review of this play and submitted it to The F Word and it got published.  If you'd like to read it please do so :)

I sort of wish I'd had something to say about Propellor being an all male company, and what implications that has on the play and the performance, if any at all, and what the political ramifications are.  But I don't know enough about the theatre to write anything meaningful.  Ah well.

Suzanne Moore

Suzanne Moore said something recently which made a lot of people angry:
"the desired body for women is that of "a Brazilian transsexual"

She called it a throwaway comment, which no doubt made people more angry.  Not surprising, it's an exoticising, reductionist statement which sexualises trans (women's) bodies.  It's thoughtless and in a climate where trans people are regularly and routinely discriminated against, it is not helpful.

Then she wrote this article that a lot of people took as a fake apology/non existent apology, which also made people angry:  I don't care if you were born a woman or became one.

Now, I read this article this morning and tweeted that "I like this article. Flippant comments aside, I appreciate her stance".  This wasn't well explained by me and is not descriptive of all my thoughts around the article.  As I don't think Twitter is the place to have in depth conversations I said I would blog about it.  So here we go.

I am not writing this to counter or reinforce any particular person's viewpoint or comments.  These thoughts are my own, as I understand them.

Part of the reason I don't view this article as an apology, is because she doesn't appear to want to apologise, or pretend to apologise.  So I don't understand why people are focusing on that.  The article starts off by talking about Bowie, presumably prompted by his recent single, so I don't think she ever wanted it to be an apology.  By all means, be pissed off by the fact she hasn't apologised but I don't think it makes sense to view it in terms of a (non) apology.

There are a lot of things I dislike about her article, but there are some things I do like.

I do not like (quotes from the article in bold, my comments are below each quote):

I was a waitress and I served them (trans people) breakfast at 5am and they were so kind to me. Many had had botched surgery in Morocco and their lives were more than difficult.
I think she's put this in to show she respects and likes trans people, and that she gets on with trans people.  The problem is that meeting, getting on with and feeling sympathy for a small group of trans people is largely irrelevant.  It's possible to get on with people and still consider them second class in some way.  The comments about surgery are a bit odd - this isn't really important to the article at all.  I expect that she's included it as it's how she relates to trans people - through their surgery - which is offensive.

Mostly this (transitioning) seemed to be an obsession with secondary sexual characteristics: peeing sitting down if they had been a man, wearing horrible lumberjack shirts and refusing to wash up if they had been a woman.
Ugh.  This is reductionist, dismissive and horrible.  It illustrates quite clearly that she doesn't care about trans people experiences and is willing to use them to back up narrow minded prejudices.  if what she states is the case, there are any number of reasons why trans people might choose to fulfil gendered behaviours - even me, with my limited understanding, knows that one option is that 'doctors*' insisted that their trans patients had to act in set gendered ways in order to be approved for surgery.  Another reason might be because they just wanted to - and there is nothing wrong with that.

However I mostly think she's talking bollocks and that her observations are cherry picked and made up to support her own view.

*I use the term doctor loosely here, because anyone acting like that clearly doesn't have the health of their patient in mind, which I think should be a requisite for a doctor. 

The radical fluidity of gender vaporised.
Errr, trans people getting surgery does not equate to gender fludity being vaporised.  I'd argue that getting surgery and living as your self identified gender is actually pretty fucking radical, considering the shit that trans people put up with (including the stupid comments in this article).  But then again as a cis person I am not the right person to lecture about trans experience (it would be nice if Moore also understood this).


Some trans people appeared to reinforce every gender stereotype going
And?  I don't see the problem here.  A few things -
I wonder is Moore would criticise cis people for fulfilling gender stereotypes.
This opinion is probably as seen through Moore's own eyes, not seen through trans people eyes.
If this highly subjective statement is indeed true, and if that is indeed a problem, 'some' does not invalidate 'all'.

I speak as a white woman of privilege, though I was indeed born in the wrong body. It should have been Gisele Bündchen's.
So here Moore is mocking and invalidating trans people's experience and feelings.  I am willing to accept that she perhaps wasn't intending to do this, but was intending to make a joke.

There's one more bit I take issue with, but I'll deal with that at the end as it will only make sense in view of the rest of the article.

Things I do agree with, in part (quotes from the article in bold, my comments are below each quote):

For this I have been attacked on Twitter for "transphobia". I made it worse – well why not? – by saying that I don't like the word. I don't think it adds to our understanding of the complex webs of hatred it invokes, but instead closes down discussion.
First off, I think that the word transphobia is highly highly useful, relevant and absolutely needed.  For without it it becomes much much harder to identify, discuss and fight against discrimination against trans people.  So I disagree with her when she says it doesn't add to the discussion.  I think it's quite disingenuous of her to say otherwise.

But, I do think that sometimes some people attack other for being transphobic and use that to shut down discussion.  This is different to what Moore is saying, but on first read of the article that's how I took it.  This isn't the fault of the word 'transphobic'.  It's down to people.  Blaming it on the word itself is wrong.

I absolutely understand why trans people wouldn't want to engage in education and discussion on every single issue of transphobia, but my feeling is that it is allies who put forth accusations of transphobia and then refuse to discuss it.  Sometimes I think people get accused of transphobia without the accuser considering the context in which things were said.   There seems to be a moral high ground in some social justice circles whereby if you accuse someone of being discriminatory you are automatically right and so don't have to engage with them further at all.  Well, sometimes people misunderstand other things and sometimes people express themselves badly and I don't think we should hang people out to dry because they've said a couple of stupid things.

I don't have evidence for this - it's just my feelings about twitter discussions (where I do a lot of my reading nowadays) and I am perfectly aware that my feelings are just as subjective and likely to be ill informed as Moore's statements above.  But all these feelings informed my reading of Moore's article so when I got to the bit in bold above, I went, hmm, she's right.  Except as I said in the second paragraph of this point, my reading of her words is different to what she said.

Intersectionality is good in theory, though in practice, it means that no one can speak for anyone else. It is the dead-end where much queer politics, feminist politics and identity politics ends up. In its own rectum. It refuses to engage with many other political discourses and becomes the old hierarchy of oppression.
I do think she has a point here, especially about the heirarchy of oppression.  I know that's not how intersectionality is supposed to work, but in practice that is sometimes what happens.  Where do you go with creating a cohesive, campaigning movement when you have a lot of disparate interests and identities?  Sometimes you end up with campaigners shouting down those not as enlightened as they are and refusing to engage, in a similar manner to both.  Again, this is an issue more with people than with the theory itself, I think.   I would be interested to hear Moore's reasons as to why the theory itself is fundamentally unsound.

Then again, I absolutely believe that feminism must take into account racism, ableism, ageisim, homophobia, biphobia and so on.  So I think this means I am stuck in an ideological rut, unsure how to reconcile the two views I have.

It makes me ill that meritocracy is the ruling-class myth, that policy is not about economics but rancid ideology.  
So here I think she's saying she's less traditional feminist and more economist (with a feminist leaning).
Well I can't argue with that.

I wanted to say again that feminism is not a white, middle-class concern: look at Sierra Leone, Egypt, India.
Correct.  But unless you decide she is not primarily a feminist, this conflicts with her earlier comments about intersectionality.  It does fit with the idea that she's more marxist economist (or perhaps Lockian?  Is it Locke who developed the idea of the social contract?  No matter, for the next couple of points let's pretend I'm right in calling her a Marxist economist).

When I say "women", I don't much care if you were born or became one. I am with RuPaul: "Honey, we are born naked, the rest is drag." What I do care about is something that is deeply old-fashioned: solidarity. I may not be your colour or your culture, or share your sexual preferences, but open your eyes to what we need to do. This is not some glitch in the uber-sexual matrix; this government makes Thatcher look like Shirley Williams. The boot is in your face if you are not one of them.
Correct.  See my comments above about her being more of a Marxist economist than a feminist.

So to be told that I hate transgender people feels a little ... irrelevant. Other people's genital arrangements are less interesting to me than the breakdown of the social contract. I am asking for anger and for alliances. Less divide and rule.
Yes, well, the problem with this is that when you use the word irrelevant it gets up people's noses.  People start thinking you find them irrelevant.

As for the comment about genital arrangements, well, trans people are far more than their genitals, and if Moore had done any research or put any thought into trans people's lives she'd have realised this.  Again, she's reducing trans people to their genitals.

Regarding the comments about the social contract, I refer you back to my Marxist economist comments.  If you do not take an economic viewpoint of the problems of society you will not agree with her.  One of the many criticism of Marxism is that it does nothing to help women.

On the other hand, she is quite keen on the social contract.  Under the social contract government has a responsibility to care for it's citizens.  In return citizens pay taxes and agree not to riot.  Now under this concept, government should care for everybody and protect them from harm.  That includes it's trans citizens.  And come to think of it, under the social contract government *must* understand intersectionality or it cannot fully protect everyone.  Hmm, I'd not thought of that before.

Lastly, I wrote this bit at the start of the post but don't know where to fit it.  So it gets bunged on the end.

Some people are offensive and will always be offensive - I don't know that I expect all of them to apologise, get over it, get better. I find the manner in which twitter continuously asks people for apologies and berates people for any mistake made quite venomous.  I don't think it works.  I don't find it agreeable.

I now think this post may be a bit of a mess.

Women can do maths thank you very much

So, this article:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/what-male-and-female-scientists-say-about-women-in

talks a bit about the assumption that women are crap at maths. I’m astounded that people think this. I have never, ever had the idea that women can’t do maths. I don’t think this idea has ever been expressed to me. I had a friend who took her GCSE maths at age 14 (normally you do this at at age 16) and got As for it (the top grade). She then went on to do AS level maths at age 16 (you normally fo this at age 18) then you did a maths degree at university.

She wasn’t the only one who did these exams early either. There were between 6 and 8 girls in my school who did these exams early.

From age 13 to 18 I went to an all girls school. An all girls grammar school. After reading the above article I am suddenly, and for the first time in my life, grateful for the opportunties that school gave me. I now realise, that because we were all girls we weren’t subject to the idea that women can’t do science, or maths, or any of those ‘hard’ intelligent subjects. I hated my school, I hated the environment, I didn’t like how it was run and I was depressed. But at the very least I was in an environment where I was able to learn with other people at the same level as me, and I wasn’t taught that women can’t do maths. That’s an amazing thing.

Please, teach basic science

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

From here.

A Republican Senate Nominee said that. You'd think he's be fairly bright.  He should know better.  Man, if you're gonna oppose abortion please use facts to back up your views, not made up science.

Chris Brown music review

I approve.

It's not that I think people should never be allowed to move on from their crimes, it's not that I think people's artistics products can only be consumed if you like them as people as well, it's that he did a truly awful thing when he beat Rhianna, and most of the music industry seems to be ignoring it.  When women are routinely abused by their partners, and blamed for it, I think the music industry should be doing something.  So whenever I see a review like this, I am pleased that someone is saying domestic violence is wrong.  Don't give money to someone who beat up his girlfriend - he's a disgusting human being.

Teaching women how to act and how this corresponds to rape

I just found this on One Dark Angel's tumblr, and it's brilliant. I've read something liked this before but it bears repeating, particularly because it articulates it so well (trigger warning):

If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.
Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.

Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”

Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”

Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.

Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.

Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.

Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.

People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.

And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.

Abortion Laws in the States

So between twitter and the radio I've been hearing a lot about GOP, Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, abortion, contraception, trans vaginal scans and rape.  But I hadn't really paid much attention to it.  Until my Dad sent me this Doonesbury cartoon from today's Guardian newspaper.  Go click on the link, it won't allow me to post a clear picture of it here.

Pretty awful, no?

Then I read the part of the email where Dad said this cartoon had been banned in Texas.  I enquired if he was joking and he sent me this article which I shall cross post in it's entirety:


Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau has defended his cartoon strip about abortion, which several US newspapers are refusing to run, saying he felt compelled to respond to the way Republicans across America are undermining women's healthcare rights.
The strip, published on Monday and scheduled to run all week, has been rejected by several papers, while others said they were switching it from the comic section to the editorial page.
In an email exchange with the Guardian, Trudeau expressed dismay over the papers' decision but was unrepentant, describing as "appalling" and "insane" Republican state moves on women's healthcare.
About 1,400 newspapers, including the Guardian, take the Doonesbury cartoon. The Guardian newspaper is running the cartoon as normal on Monday.
The strip deals specifically with a law introduced in Texas and other states requiring a woman who wants to have an abortion to have an ultrasound scan, or sonogram, which will show an image of the foetus and other details, in an attempt to make her reconsider.
It portrays a woman who turns up at an abortion clinic in Texas and is told to take a seat in "the shaming room". A state legislator asks if she has been at the clinic before and, when she says she had been to get contraceptives, he replies: "Do your parents know you're a slut?"


Later, she says she does not want an intrusive vaginal examination but is told by a nurse: "The male Republicans who run Texas require that all abortion seekers be examined with a 10-inch shaming wand." The nurse adds: "By the authority invested in me by the GOP base, I thee rape."
The Kansas City Star is among the papers not running the cartoon in its normal slot. "We felt the content was too much for many of the readers of our family-friendly comic page," an editor told Associated Press. The Star will use a replacement strip offered by the organisation that syndicates Doonesbury, Universal Uclick, and move the abortion one to its editorial pages.
Sue Roush, managing editor of Universal Uclick, said: "I can't say how many papers will choose ultimately to run or not run the series, but we've had inquiries from 30 to 40 papers asking about the substitutes."
Abortion, contraception and other social issues have resurfaced in politics in recent weeks, partly because they have been highlighted by the Republican candidates in the presidential race. Conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh referred to a student giving evidence to a congressional hearing in support of contraception as "a slut".


Trudeau told the Guardian he thought the issue of reproductive freedom had been settled while he had still been at school: the supreme court 1973 ruling Roe v Wade, which removed restrictions on abortion.


Trudeau wrote: "Ninety-nine percent of American women have or will use contraception during their lifetimes. To see these healthcare rights systematically undermined in state after state by the party of 'limited government' is appalling. "In Texas, the sonograms are the least of it. The legislature has also defunded women's health clinics all over the state, leaving 300,000 women without the contraceptive services that prevent abortions in the first place. Insanity."
Trudeau is dismayed by the newspaper reaction. "I write the strip to be read, not removed. And as a practical matter, many more people will see it in the comics page than on the editorial page," he wrote.
"I don't mean to be disingenuous. Obviously there's some profit to controversy, especially for a satirist. If debate is swirling around a particular strip, and if its absence creates blowback, then I'm contributing to the public conversation in a more powerful way. But I don't get up in the morning and scheme about how to antagonise editors. Some of these folks have supported me for decades."
Asked about the use of the word "rape" to describe what was happening to women seeking abortions in Texas, he said it was perfectly apt for the compulsory insertion of an object into the vulva. "That falls within the legal definition of rape. Coercion need not be physically violent to meet the threshold. Many people here are now referring to trans-vaginal sonograms as 'state rape'. That seems about right to me," he wrote.
"However, if you just mean the topic of rape generally, it's not something I would avoid simply because I work on a page where children can occasionally be found. People know what to expect in Doonesbury. Certainly children do, which is why they never read it. And editors have long known what they're getting; I first wrote about rape in the late '70s, devoting an entire week to a mock rape trial."


The Texas governor Rick Perry, who dropped out of the Republican presidential candidates race in January, signed the abortion measure into law in May 2010.

His press spokeswoman, Catherine Frazier, asked about the Doonesbury strip, said: "The decision to end a life is not funny. There is nothing comic about this tasteless interpretation of legislation we have passed in Texas to ensure that women have all the facts when making a life-ending decision."

Scary, no?  Then I read this article about a 15 year old child facing imprisonment for 'depraved heart murder' - or miscarrying at 36 weeks because she took coke.

What?  How is anyone taking this seriously?  How can you jail a child for miscarrying? How can you jail anyone for miscarrying?  What next, we jail women because they don't eat enough greens or take enough supplements during pregnancy?

I feel sick.  These are hate laws, pure and simple, directed at women.  If these people actually wanted to reduce the number of abortions they'd provide free contraception to every woman and girl of child bearing age.  They would educate children about consent, and healthy sex, and contraception.  But they don't do this because they actually just seek to slut shame and control women's bodies and pass judgement from nigh on high above, where they will never ever ever have any idea what it is like to be pregnant, bear a child or bring one up.  They have no idea about women's lives and they have absolutely nor right to try and control 51% of the population.

I am disgusted.

Aquaman 6

Walking home from work today I had a brainwave.  You know those moments when things suddenly seem startlingly clear and you can't imagine why you didn't understand them before?  Well it was one of those moments, about Aquaman 6 and the role of women, specifically strong women, in comics.

Then about 40 seconds later I lost the thread of it and now I don't think I can articulate what the thought was.  So like me.  Anyway I shall have a go.  Aren't you all astonishingly lucky?  No.  Ahem.

Right, what I was thinking was, although I did like Aquaman 6, and felt the spirit of the sisterhood* cheering Mera on within me, and yes it was gratifying to see her break the man's arm (who was harassing her and had been harassing his staff member), I wondered why is it that to prove a woman is strong, or kick ass, we so often see her beating up a rapist or other man about to commit a sexual assault?

It's like when we consider how to make a woman strong, we think we have to show her doing something related to women's issues.  And we only understand women's issues as domestic violence and sexual assault.


I mean, when we see Batman or Green Lantern proving their bad assery it's because they've taken on an army and beat them, or Darkseid, or the Joker or someone like that.   But women get to deal with bastard men, or if they're lucky bastard supervillains who want to rape them.

It's like we can only ever associate or understand women as being merely bodies that are there for use by someone more powerful than them, but we know that's wrong, so we try to show women as breaking away from this (as a critique of it) but we can only  do so in a framework that reinforces that women are just bodies.  Because gods forbid we show a woman using her mind, or facing off against a bad guy that doesn't want to rape/abuse her or one of her sidekicks/female stranger on the street/female acquaintance.

Damn, I wish I'd retained that moment of clarity.

Now, part of me is saying that hang on, not all women are shown like this. Some are shown in the same way as men are.  Another part of me is going, yes but that doesn't count when the artwork reinforces them as being only bodies (and not minds) and encourages the reader to view them in terms of their bodies only.

Yet another part of me (I'm positively splintered tonight) says but women heroes also prove their heroicness by saving children!  That's not to do with their bodies!  and then the other (sixth?) part of me says yes but children are seen as coming under women's sphere of influence, as the domestic and the familial, so of course children fall under women's province of saving.


Does any of this make any sense?

*this isn't strictly true.  I don't believe in a sisterhood, but you get the general idea, right?