Green shoots - feminism on the up

Gallery of pictures from student feminists in today's Guardian.

Well worth a look.

Older women and younger women

Interesting conversation between Sally Greemgross and Laurie Penny on today's Woman's Hour.
Also this publication .

Note to self - come back to this.

Join me on the bridge

www.joinmeonthebridge.org  Women all over the world have held marches on bridges, symbolising their support for women in war zones.

In Brooklyn women and men too marched across the Brooklyn Bridge just before midday - in support of victims of fighting in the DR Congo.  There were representatives from other organisations too.

According to the website there are events over the next couple of days in various places too.

Three faces of feminism - Libertarian Lou's blog

Why Jodie Marsch is more interesting than the Mensch-Penny discussion on Newsnight. I confess to turning off partway through Newsnight, but didn't even think of Channel 5.

Post from Left Eye Right Eye on the 3 faces of feminism 

Worth a closer look.  Last two paras are very good.

Why are so many men scared of feminism?

http://www.michaelkaufman.com/

worth a read.

Ms/Miss/Mrs - Madame/Mademoiselle

A load of trivial bullshit, or something more?

Have you ever been in the position of being asked 'Miss or Mrs' and feeling annoyed, embarrassed, put on the spot? Perhaps it applies more to my generation (60+) than to younger women, but it always struck me as acutely unfair that personal questions start from something so simple as a child wishing to write a teacher's name on an exercise book.
For a man, it's just 'Mr'. No problem, no wondering. Simple.

And even now, in England, Ms is seen as the title mainly used by stroppy feminists, though it is useful in business situations, when a single title avoids the embarrassment of using the 'wrong' one.

In France feminists are demanding that all adult women should use the title 'Madame'. Now, would it be more practical, more equal, more feminist for all female English speakers over 18 to use 'Mrs'?

The fact that people think about this doesn't mean they cannot also think about social injustice, violence, people-trafficking.

Jo Brand interview in Graun

I do like a lot of what this woman does and says.

Not an April Fool - just a fool?

How many brains? Universities minister?

Progress, where is thy backlash leading?

Words (clearly) fail me this morning.

The best article I have read on this is from Laurie Penny in the New Statesman on 7 April.

Social mobility is a scam. It's a scam that is useful to governments implementing austerity programmes: after all, if anyone can make it, anyone who fails to do so must be personally at fault. Social mobility, however, is not an adequate substitute for social justice.

Which brings us neatly back to feminism, and to the uncomfortable admission that David Willetts does, in fact, have a point. Mass female employment has affected social mobility. Feminism is nowhere near as significant a factor in the stagnation of social mobility as the destruction of industry or wage repression. The fact remains, however, that if one accepts an unequal system whereby only a handful of elites make it into well-paying professions, and if one also accepts a feminism which settles for cramming a few extra women into those elite jobs, then some people are going to be nudged off the podium. What we have, to paraphrase Willetts, is neither feminism nor egalitarianism. What we have is a ruddy mess of recrimination and sharpened elbows.

Willetts has a point, and he is using that point to stab innocent bystanders in the back. Along with most of Westminster, Willetts has mistaken bourgeois feminism, which merely boosts the life chances of wealthy women within an unequal system, for feminism proper, which demands redistribution of work, wealth and power in order to deliver equality. Along with most of the country, Willetts has mistaken social mobility, which merely boosts the life chances of a few middle-class aspirants, for social justice.

Anecdotal evidence: why we still need feminism

A column from a couple weeks ago, Lucy Mangan's The feminist fight is not over yet, and especially the criticism in some of the comments that it is all anecdotal and therefore meaningless, has clearly been percolating in the back of my mind since. I've heard more instances than I can count of similar, purely anecdotal, stories—on Twitter, overheard on commuter trains, from friends, in the news—that support my original reaction that the power of these anecdotal stories is precisely their representativeness, that we don't find them surprising. They're anecdotal, but they're not one-offs. This makes anecdotes powerful tools of argument in a way that an anomaly isn't; a two headed-lamb isn't an argument for anything, since it's unique or vanishingly rare—something that surprises no one is a powerful anecdote because it isn't rare. It's not a statistic, but it's a digestible instance of a bigger truth.

Arbitrarily I'll take Mangan's five examples and argue why I think they're representative, anecdotal or not.

1. 15 year-old wolf-whistled: if this were a one-off, it would be upsetting and obnoxious, but it wouldn't be an argument for awareness-raising or the need for social change. But it isn't. I've heard so many stories recently (and forever) of women saying how unsurprised they are by street harassment (physical as well as verbal), that it's a daily occurrence, that the first time it happened to them they were 12; and seen people harass others online, on the train, in the workplace, that's it's hard to believe some people are still surprised when they learn things like this happen. Objectification and harassment, and the fear of it, is a daily fact of many people's lives, and it. Shouldn't. Be.
2. Berlusconi: this might look dangerously like a two-headed lamb, but do you really not know anybody who has said, "So he slept with a teen call-girl, so he's a red-blooded male..."?
3. Funny porn: this is already not really anecdotal, since the argument relies on large numbers of instances to start with, but there is a point here about (a) the nature of pornography (women inserting ridiculous objects in various orifices is not in any meaningful way an erotic display), (b) the lack of judgement of men in sharing such images and (by extension) their own interest in the source of such images, without wondering whom it might offend, or disgust, or trigger a traumatic memory, and (c) the casual and socially acceptable objectification of the female body in popular culture.
4. Top Gear: again, everyone knows that the two-headed lambs that are the presenters of this repugnant show are pathetic, popularizing throwbacks, so why quote them and pretend to be shocked? I'd be a lot less shocked by their puerile nonsense if it weren't spouted on network television to a huge popular audience that admires their iconoclastic "outspokenness" and laddish "naughtiness".
5. Casual domestic violence: the sad thing about this story is not that one man somewhere was physically cruel and disrespectful to his partner one time (and that she accepted it as unpleasant but apparently unremarkable), but that (i) he did this in a public place, with apparently no expectation that anybody would object to his treating his partner like chattel, in a way it's no longer acceptable to treat a child or an employee; (ii) that more than one woman present on the train had the same thought, that this was horrific treatment, that they recognised the pattern of abuse it foreshadowed, and were clearly personally touched by it; (iii) that nobody present felt able to say or do anything about it (and even a commenter on the Guardian blog felt the need to protest, "how dare you presume to know what this means in the context of their relationship?"), as if public violence suddenly becomes acceptable so long as it's performed by a man upon a woman of his house.

The fact that these five classes of sexist behaviour and attitude exist in our society are all arguments—not the only arguments, and not the strongest arguments, but arguments nevertheless—that feminism's work is not done, that we all, women and men alike, need to work for a more respectful and egalitarian society.

(Sadly comments on Mangan's column are now closed, but I've used rev="comment" microformat attributes in my links above to make this response discoverable.)

Hardy Girls, Healthy Women

I just received the newsletter from Hardy Girls, Healthy Women based in Maine, USA.   It includes Girls Rock Award Winners 2011,  news of a Girls Rock weekend (April 8-10 2011), details of local (Maine) events, and some interesting links to explore.

Do feminists all hate men?

Suzanne Moore writes for the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday. But I think this article has more than a smidgen of truth in it. I expect the comments to prove her point.

Coming back a few minutes later, well they do..and I'm going to have to go through with a fine tooth comb to see where she 'hates' or 'puts down' men as a group....

Later still - why, why, why do so many men react as though they think women's dearest wish was to exterminate them? (Tempting as it is, with some of the comments below the article ;-) )

Programmes on Women's Movement BBC4

Oh my, just watched a programme on BBC 4 with so many of the women who were active in the 70s (Greer, Millett, Rowbotham, Marilyn French, Susan Brownmiller) - so much has changed, yet so much hasn't.



There are programmes all week.

Feminism is not dead

A Times article discusses how lap-dancing clubs, and lads' mags have come to increase under a Labour government whose only criterion seems to be that if people will pay for it, it must be desirable. Anyone who opposes these is easily dismissed as an outdated feminist puritanical party-pooper.

Of course, as well as the article itself, the comments, on both sides of the argument are enlightening. Mainly they enlighten me about just how far feminism has yet to go.

The election is coming?

A few stirrings in the politisphere made me think it worth noting, as and when they arise, any news items which reveal the attitude of politicians and parties towards women, or , dare I say it, feminism.



Something from a Lib Dem, Jo Swinton is campaigning about the pernicious effects of airbrushed ads on how teenagers and others see themselves. Important stuff, since we as a society seem obsessed with perfect bodies, and intolerant of anyone who falls short. This causes real misery, and makes vast amounts of money for the unscrupulous who market products, including drastic plastic surgery.

Harriet Harman has taken advantage of her two weeks in nominal charge of the Labour party to talk some sense, which has been picked up as feminist nonsense by certain newspapers.
For a couple of articles giving her a positive welcome see here and here.

Fawcett Society and Katherine Rake

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jul/17/feminism-fawcett-society-katherine-rake

Katherine Rake finishes her seven-year spell as director of the Fawcett Society today. She moves on to the research organisation Family and Parenting Institute.

More feminist than thou or damaging the 'cause'

A furore between more traditional feminists and those who proclaim the freedom to be bad.
Click on the title to read the article. I have skip-read - my quick precis may not be entirely accurate.

Call yourself a Feminist - programme 2

9 am Tuesday 17th March

Call Yourself a Feminist Radio 4
17 March 2009
Bettany Hughes presents a series of discussions tracing the development of feminism. 2/3: Linda Bellos, Roz Morris, Lynne Segal and Beatrix Campbell discuss feminism in the 1980s.

repeated at 21.30

Call Yourself a feminist? worth a listen?

I caught this on Listen Again. It is here . To those of us who were around in the late sixties and early seventies, it didn't say anything new or startling, but was an interesting trip down memory lane. Will try to summarize later.

(I know - the road to hell...)

It contains some interesting observations about clothes and feminist humourlessness, as well as taking stock of the very real progress made in Europe and the US in particular. Though one of the contributors thought the programme concentrated too much on trivia.

Interesting timeline of women's achievements - feminist or otherwise.

Call yourself a feminist?

A three week series on Radio 4 - Tuesdays at 9 am.

Call Yourself a Feminist
10 March 2009

1/3: Bettany Hughes presents a series of discussions tracing the development of feminist ideas. With Ann Leslie, Elaine Showalter, Sally Alexander and Sonia Fuentes.