Walk a Mile in her Shoes: Just a Bunch of Wannabe Nigels

The 'Walk a Mile in her Shoes' images are making the rounds on Facebook. Again. They have always made me twitch. I just don't see how men walking down a road in high heels will lead to a greater awareness of male violence against women; not when rape culture is getting worse. I'd like to put them with the group of men, like those who support White Ribbon Campaign, who want to help make things better; even if they don't always get it right. But, there is something about the 'Walk a Mile in Her Shoes' campaign that just makes me really, really uncomfortable.

To be completely honest, despite it making me uncomfortable, I haven't actually thought about what the "Walk a Mile in her Shoes" marches mean or what their origins are. I've just assumed they were from something dodgy, but, then, I think most things involving men yakking about violence against women are dodgy [See also: the unrelenting white hero narrative of Half the Sky ]; unless they are doing it as an ally. Allies are good. Patrick Stewart makes a good ally. He supports women's organisations not by taking over but by using his celebrity to access a public platform to talk about how important those organisations are. Men who co-opt the movement for publicity or to make themself feel cool = bad.

I probably wouldn't have thought much further on this issue had it not been for this Facebook status update by Virginia Pele yesterday:

Dudes, u wearing high-heels shoes might be some kinda fun, but u know what would make a real change? You and your caste stopping raping womyn ! #walk a mile in her shoes, as if all womyn wore heels. They could at least criticize harmful beauty practices for womyn. Do so-called pro-feminists always have to be that ridiculous ?  

 My first response was this: 

Of course, when we point out the physical damage caused to women's bodies by wearing heels, we are told we are over-thinking things and to concentrate on something more important. But, men walking up the high street in suits and heels is totally going to end VAW and is massively important. More important than anything a woman could ever do.

Since then, I've been trying to articulate what exactly it is that bothers me about this but haven't been quite able to make sense of it but I think it does boil down to the double standard: women-only Reclaim the Night marches are jeered and insulted despite it being very clearly about victims of sexualised violence reclaiming their bodies and the public space. A bunch of men tottering about in heels is cheered and supported by all. I think it works to further silence women's voices because it makes it about men; not men stopping violence against women but a mockery* of that. Women's concerns about male violence and the sheer power of the fashion-beauty complex are being belittled by men; men who probably think they are helping.

Today, I took Virginia's advice and had a proper nosey about their website. I suggest everyone do so because it is really quite, well, arrogant and self-righteous. Apparently, "sexualised violence does not just affect women." I think we can all agree with that. Men can, and are, victims of sexualised violence; as are children. But, this isn't what the "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" men are talking about: sexualised violence affects men because of their relationships with women:

It affects the men who care about them, their families, their friends, their coworkers, and their communities. Sexualized violence is epidemic. Some of the statistics:** Every two minutes someone in America is raped. One in six American women are victims of sexual assault.That means someone you know, someone you care about, has been or may become the victim of sexual violence. It may be your mother, your sister, your friend, your girlfriend, your wife, your coworker, or your daughter.

So, they are completely ignoring the issue of male rape and focussing on rape being a problem because it might happen to some woman that men might know or, more cynically, think they have the right to possess. This, in and of itself, is really unbelievably patronising and arrogant. It also neglects to mention that the most sexualised violence is committed by men. It is committed by men on the bodies of women, children and other men. You can not have a discussion about sexualised violence without naming the perpetrators. To do so is asinine, counter-productive and, frankly, stupid. "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" has done precisely that.

I'm also finding it hard to take this line seriously: "See Photos of courageous men taking a stand against sexualized violence." Men, who have not been victims of sexualised violence, tottering about in high heels is not courageous. Women marching in Reclaim the Night marches are brave. Men talking about their personal experiences of sexualised violence are brave. Men playing dress up are not brave. They are playing. I actually find that line unbelievably disrespectful and minimising of the experiences of survivors of sexualised violence.

As irritating as all that is, the mission statement of "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" is really the most obviously stupid:

Co-creating a United Gender Movement, men will be a part of the solution to ending sexualized violence.

Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Events are political and performance art with public, personal and existential messages. At a Walk a Mile in Her Shoes® Event there is no distinction between performer and audience. Our mission is to create a unique and powerful public experience that educates individuals and communities about the causes of sexualized violence, provides them with prevention and remediation strategies and empowers them to further develop and implement these knowledges and skills interpersonally and politically.

First off, WTF is a United Gender Movement? Because, google wasn't exactly forthcoming on this issue. Secondly, sexualised violence requires men to be more than "part of the solution". That only works if you think women rape themselves or are responsible for being raped. If men want to stop sexualised violence then they need to stop raping women. They need to stop raping children. They need to stop raping other men. Sexualised violence will, effectively, disappear if men just stop perpetrating it.

Thirdly, sexualised violence is a crime. It is not an opportunity for performance art with "public, personal and existential messages". WTF does that even mean? Women in Reclaim the Night marches aren't performers. They are women engaged in political protest. They do not have an "audience" to perform for. Men meandering about in high heels does not educate people about the causes of sexualised violence, particularly when they are too chicken to name the perpetrators. And, I can't even begin to work out how they think a bunch of men in Louboutins are learning "prevention and remediation strategies [that] empowers them to further develop and implement these knowledges and skills interpersonally and politically". 

Honestly, who buys into this twaddle? Every page on their website has a huge donate here button which probably wouldn't have set off my trolldar if "Walk a Mile in Her Shoes" weren't now part of Venture Humanity Inc. Venture Humanity only has one another subsidiary: Now House Therapy Centre which runs classes in Postmodern therapies.

I genuinely don't even know where to start with "postmodern therapies". I really don't; except to say that following the money is always a good idea. Not that I have the skills to look out their finances but I find the connection between the "performance art" of Walk a Mile in Her Shoes and the "postmodern therapies" of Now House Therapy Centre deeply suspect.

But, then, I'm always cynical about men trying to fix things without actually naming the thing they are trying to fix; just like with Half the Sky.

*This word came via a discussion on twitter. 

**This embedded link was included in the quote.

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In the missing the point entirely category today:

We have this somewhat ridiculous article by Kamila Kocialkowska on whether or not the cultural appropriation of the Plains Indian War Bonnet is offensive. Now, I fully planned on blogging about this last night after reading the article but the thought of, once again, having to point out that it doesn't matter if white Dudes think it's okay to run around pretending to be 'Indians', it's still rude. White Dudes have a habit of thinking all sorts of things are okay despite them being obviously racist, homophobic, disablist or misogynistic. As a general rule of thumb, if white Dudes think something is socially acceptable, it's probably best to take 2 minutes to double-check. Just in case.

I decided to have a bubble bath instead. I know this isn't a very helpful response to this level of nincompoopery but this will be something like the fourth time I've written about cultural appropriation in the past two weeks and I'm starting to bore myself. 

Here's the thing, I think the cultural appropriation of the Plains Indian War Bonnet by Lana Del Ray, No Doubt and Victoria's Secret is incredibly rude, offensive and totally lacking in critical thinking skills. Frankly, this total refusal to listen to the opinions of other people sets my teeth on edge. That's why we have a Tory party. If you don't belong to them and you are spouting the "it's P.C gone mad" line, you might want to rethink your political position. Or, acknowledge that you're an asshole. Or, both. Probably both.

Pretty much the entirety of Kocialkowska's article pissed me off with it's total refusal to engage with the opinions of others but I found this section particularly telling: 

The truth is that nowadays, cultural assimilation has become so all-pervasive it’s almost unnoticeable. Popular culture has always consisted of mining, borrowing from and subverting the cultural heritage of the past. In fact, Frederic Jameson went so far as to see this as a defining factor of the postmodern age. For him, the past and its symbols no longer exist, "except as a repository of genres, styles, and codes ready for commodification”.

This has vast implications for political incorrectness - no symbol can truly be said to be culturally isolated any more. The eagle-feathered headdress which inspired such extensive outrage on the Victoria's Secret runway doesn't belong to the Native American repositry alone. It's origins date back to widespread early cultures, including Aztec warriors, early Gaelic clan chiefs and Slavic hussars. Now it’s been assimilated into contemporary culture and passed into the collective unconscious. Its original meaning is melded and mixed in a sea of new, secular meanings.

In other words, in a postmodern, post-ironic, globalised world, can anyone really be said to have ownership over their own heritage?

First off, Victoria's Secret were referencing the Plains Indian War Bonnet. They were not referencing Aztec warriors or Gaelic clan chiefs or Slavic hussars. So, let's not play the "other-people-did-it-so-its-totally-not-special" game as it makes everyone look like a buckethead. Secondly, we all know that things-which-one-sticks-on-one's-head are frequently used as signifiers of power. That is because it is a simple and visible way to denote power relationships; see: the Victorian top-hat. Minimising or dismissing these signifiers, as Victoria's Secret did, is rude and is, inherently, racist. Thirdly, even if you were too dim to get this, First Nations, Metis, Inuit and Native Americans have been saying this for years. 30 seconds on google would have been evidence of this. Fourthly, invoking the "John-Wayne-and-Clint-Eastwood-were-in-movies-about-Injuns" argument just makes you look more racist and dim. The fact that they engaged in racist stereotypes does not make using those stereotypes acceptable. It just means there are a whole lot of racist, culturally insensitive, dim people running about the continent. 

Finally, we may be living in a world where postmodernism is God but that doesn't mean that postmodernism is actually God. Or, that most of the people running about claiming to be postmodern have any understanding of postmodernism. The word postmodernism is bandied about a lot by people who think it makes them sound clever when, frequently, it's the opposite. So, yes, people are entitled to have ownership over their own heritage. There is no grey area over this. Deliberately, or undeliberately, minimising, mocking or otherwise plagiarising the cultural heritage of other people is ignorant, arrogant and rude.

There is no such thing as post-irony either. That's the same twaddle as people suggesting we live in a post-feminist, post-racism world. It's just nincompoopery.

Oh, and what  Kocialkowska neglects to mention in her article is that the model in the War Bonnet image was meant to represent the month of November: the month where Americans give thanks for committing mass genocide. Because that wasn't at all stupid either.

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Pippa Middleton: Today's Object of Derision.

So, Pippa Middleton wrote a book. About party tips. Which no one is buying. Because, let's be realistic here, it's a stupid book for which she was grossly over-paid. So, obviously, Middleton deserves all of the vitriol and hatred currently being thrown her way. 

Or not.

I'm going to go with not because, whilst I think agreeing to write this book was a serious piece of nincompoopery on the part of both Middleton and Penguin, it's not really constructive to make this about her ass or to call her stupid or any of the other myriad of insults out there. If Middleton were my friend, I would have told her to skip the book as it was only ever going to end badly, regardless of the contents. She was appallingly treated following her sister's marriage. The objectification and sexual harassment Middleton received was unbearable. No one should be lining up to insult and belittle Middleton on behalf of the Patriarchy. Criticise her decision to write the book, by all means, but don't resort to asinine insults or baseless slurs. It demeans us all.

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Victoria Secrets' Annual Demonstration of Misogyny: This Time With a Side of Racism

Victoria Secret's annual Fashion Show is testimony to the mainstreaming of the pornification of women's bodies. It represents everything which is wrong in the Patriarchy rendering women not only into objects for men to wank over but commodifying their bodies with the woman given the honour of wearing a $2.5 million dollar diamond studded bra considered The Ultimate Woman. It isn't so much a fashion show as a live action soft porn show with titillating photos of the models leaked online prior to the broadcast. I won't link any here but the images are the same poses as found in Playboy or any other mainstream soft porn magazine. Victoria Secret's trades on an image of respectability despite the fact that it uses the same techniques as porn to entice men. They reinforce rape culture by parading women in their underwear for male audiences. They are not selling underwear to women but the image of fuckable women to men who then by the underwear for their partners who can not be expected to look like the models who routinely go on crash diets involving only liquids in the run-up to the show so they don't look "fat". It normalises the Patriarchal Fuckability Test on women who have no hope of passing it.

The women-hating and exploitation of Victoria Secret's has become so common place that I don't even notice them anymore but this year they added racism to their bow. One of the themes of the production this year was the calendar and November was represented by a white model wearing a fairly racist signifier of "Indian". The use of a Plains Indian Warbonnett as a signifier for all Native Americans, First Nations, Metis and Inuit people is racist because it is reductive. You can not reduce huge, disparate cultures down to one item which was worn by men who had earned the honour and pretend it isn't anything but culturally insensitive. The cultural appropriation of such item on the objectified body of a white woman is doubly insensitive.

It really isn't that hard to take ten minutes and think about cultural appropriation. It isn't that hard to think about the links of a nearly naked white woman dressed in cultural signifiers of 'Indians' when Native American women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than any other group of women in the US. The majority of the perpetrators of this sexual violence are non-Native men. Yet, the representation of white women dressed in outfits sexualising a construction of Native Americans derived from racist discourse in 'Cowboy and Indian' films has become a trope in our visual culture, one which has been repeated multiple time in the last couple of months. Lana Del Ray's latest video is possibly the most offensive of the recent insurgence in cultural appropriation; interestingly she seems to have received far less backlash than No Doubt or Victoria Secrets. Whilst I don't think No Doubt's apology is a proper apology what with the whole we have non-white friends trope being called up, they at least seem to understand that they have caused offence. Neither Del Ray nor Victoria Secret's appears to have understood at all. No Doubt pulled the video within days of the complaints arising. It seems unbelievably arrogant for Victoria Secrets not to take 10 minutes to rethink the outfit a week later.

And, FFS, using a cultural signifier for 'Indian' in the month of year where the major American holiday is a celebration of their genocide seems, I don't know, really fucking stupid. 

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Femen Redux: Still Conforming to the Patriarchal Fuckability Test

I've blogged about Femen before because I was utterly gobsmacked that a photo of a topless Femen protestor without any political context managed to win a World Press Photo award (and the total lack of understanding of the irony of this photo being called The New Amazons). Supposedly, Femen protests against sex tourism, the legalisation of prostitution and the selling of "brides" internationally. How they quite expect the Patriarchy to take them seriously when they protest using pretty basic anti-woman signifiers is beyond me and that's without getting into them selling prints of their breasts as a fundraising tactic. In using women's bodies as a canvas of protest, Femen are conforming to the norms of Patriarchal objectification of women's bodies. Their message is obscured by the medium of their protest because the medium conforms to the normalised construction of the Patriarchal Fuckability Test. As Exiled Stardust says, getting naked or stripping aren't acts of Feminist defiance. They are exactly what the Patriarchy  wants after all: 

Doing what men want is appeasement. Feminism is resistance. Appeasement and resistance are opposing forces; the more you do of one, the less you can do of the other. That’s why these groups are insidious; they divert feminist energy into meaningless acts that only serve male interests. Men don’t care if you write incendiary messages of revolt all over your naked body, as long as they get to see that body. 

We all have to appease in one way or another to survive, but let’s not confuse that behavior with feminist activism. It’s not. Let’s do as little of it as we can get away with, and as much resistance as we are capable of.

Femen's activism is the same old Patriarchal twaddle dressed up as "Fun Feminism". The objectification of women's bodies to make a political point isn't new. It isn't clever. It's just the Patriarchy trying out a new hat. After all, PETA's been doing this shit for years and their supporters are a whose who of celebrities with criminal convictions for Violence against Women.

Whilst I'm willing to concede that there might be a reason why using women's naked bodies as a platform of political protest in the Ukraine is an interesting tactic because I know nothing of the their Feminist movement, it isn't a new or even interesting tactic in Western Europe. More importantly, I think it's a tactic deliberately chosen in order to get recognition in the western media because appealing to horny men is really the only way women get any attention. I think Femen are more interested in the attention than they are in achieving specific Feminist goals. They are hopping on far too many bandwagons, such as the Free Pussy Riot movement. Frankly, there are very few attention-seekers who haven't hopped on the Free Pussy Riot bandwagon. It's proving to be quite a profitable one for everyone but the two women currently being transported to a penal colony in Russia. Inna Shevchenko demonstrated her "support" for Pussy Riot by destroying a crucifix in Kiev with a chainsaw. This stunt coincided exactly with the court in Moscow finding Pussy Riot guilty of hooliganism; make of that what you will.  Femen also occupied the Louvre to protest the rape of a young woman called Mariam by two Tunisian police officers. This article seems to imply that the Femen protest in Paris was more important than the woman in Tunis who protested outside the courtroom. Maybe I'm over-thinking things here, but I think the women of Tunis taking to the streets despite the crackdown on women in Tunisia is a shitload more important and so much braver than a bunch of topless women running around the Louvre. Thing is, which protest got more coverage? And, which one really deserved the media attention?














Femen's anti-burkha protests are equally offensive. Regardless of what I, as an individual, think of burkhas, the fact of the matter is that many Muslim wear them. It is utterly arrogant for a group of non-Muslim women to tell Muslim women what they can and can not do. The debate over whether or not the burkha is anti-feminist or whether or not it should be banned is a debate that needs to involve the voices of Muslim women. This does not mean that others can not have opinions. I think the burkhas use as a tool of oppression for all Muslim women in some countries supercedes its use as a tool for freedom for a small number of women in "western" countries. However, Muslim women's voices need to be central in this discussion. In this case, Femen are attacking an easy target; one which has very little access to mass media. Veiled Muslim women are some of the most frequently silenced of women's voices. Femen aren't really doing anything really radical here. They are just doing exactly what western neoliberal men do: attack a visible target with no power. A radical approach would have been for members of Femen to approach Muslim women's groups and ask them how to support them. Running about in front of the Eiffel Tower stripping off burkhas to reveal young, thin white women in their underwear isn't radical. It's not even very interesting. Setting up a "bootcamp" in Paris to teach French feminists how to tackle the Patriarchy using tactics developed in the Ukraine is also not very clever. It's a reversal of the normal imperialism but, nonetheless, it shows a rather incredible lack of self-awareness.

I would not have bothered to write another blogpost on Femen had I not caught the discussion on Femen live-streamed on AlJazeera called the "Future of Feminism". I knew from the beginning that the discussion was going to piss me off when the host got herself confused between Radical Feminism, the political theory, and radical forms of protest. Femen are not a Radical Feminist group. Femen's idea of "sextremism" is not Radical Feminist. This is not to say that they aren't feminists. Femen clearly defines that way. They just aren't Radical Feminists. That said, I agree with Chloe Angyal from Feministing that we should be having discussions about the role of women's bodies in the public sphere but it isn't Femen starting these conversations. These conversations have been started recently by the Everyday Sexism project, the Turn Your Back on 3 campaigns, the publication of nude photos of Kate Middleton, and the unmasking of violent, predatory internet trolls. Femen are getting media attention for being naked; not for their message. They are just like PETA: equally tedious and utterly incapable of listening to others. And, this is the problem. The issues Femen claims to want to discuss are important. They are so very, very important, particularly the issue of sex trafficking and prostitution in Eastern Europe. The sexual exploitation of vulnerable and poor women is increasing at astronomical rates. But, this isn't what the media is discussing. Femen's insistence on baring their breasts, regardless of what they are actually protesting, just reinforces Patriarchal norms. They have become objects for men to wank to rather than feminist protestors. Whatever message they had, is obfuscated. Instead, their breasts are what is deemed important. 

We won't destroy the Patriarchy by reinforcing it's constructions of "acceptable" women. We won't destroy the Patriarchy by targeting one small group of women and demanding that they remove their veil, without even considering the political and cultural structures in which they are either forced or, in some cases, choose to wear the veil. We can not demand the government of Tunisia tackle the issue of rape by police officers by running about art galleries naked. We won't change the control that the Church has by chopping down crosses half-naked. Protest needs to be vibrant, engaging and culturally specific. Suffragettes marching on Parliament this week was truly beautiful but it would have been a stupid protest in somewhere like Zimbabwe where the symbol of the Suffragette does not have the same political meaning. Femen's protests lack the imagery that Pussy Riot managed. We will not smash the Patriarchy by reinforcing its belief that the only women who matter are those who conform to the Patriarchal Fuckability Test.

As many a wise feminist has said: if the penis is keen, it probably demeans. And, that's the problem with Femen. Men aren't listening to the message. They are wanking to the image.

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Watch Porn. Cure Breast Cancer

This rocked up on my FaceBook feed and I genuinely thought it was a joke. I couldn't believe that the misogynists were now using breast cancer as a way to promote the use of porn. This is actually what Men's Health writes about Pornhub's campaign:

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which means every man should do his part in helping to find a cure for the terrible disease that afflicts 1 in 8 U.S. women. And you can start by staring at hot, naked porn stars.

Yep, men can help cure breast cancer by participating in the degradation and objectification of women's bodies. They can help cure breast cancer not by financially supporting cancer research but by financially supporting the rape and torture of women's bodies. And, Pornhub is being totally generous with their campaign and are going to donate a whole penny for the  every thirty videos watched under the two channels "Big Tit's" and "Small Tit's". That's right 1 penny for every 30 videos. Call me cynical, but I'm guessing that that one penny won't cut too much into their profit margins. Thankfully, the charity named on Pornhub's media release, the Susan G Komen Foundation, have refused to take the donation.* 

As ever, I am behind the times since this campaign started on the first of October. I may have been aware of it then and just filed it under "shit that will make me incandescent with rage" and then thought of it no more. I probably would have missed it completely if the link to the article in Men's Health wasn't making the rounds of FB. I can safely say I have never perused that particular magazine before and won't be doing so again. It is an appalling example of heteronormative misogyny. Men's Health is quite clearly just another Lad's mag. This is something I did not need to know. And, seriously in an article on raising money for breast cancer was it absolutely necessary to sneak in a reference to teaching your girlfriend to love porn? Really? In this context, "teaching" sounds a lot like brainwashing. And, calling the (extremely limited) donation "porn pennies" is freaking creepy. Really, really creepy. But, hey, if that doesn't creep you out, this will:* 

Meanwhile, here’s one more awesome way to save breasts: Touch ‘em! Men’s Health partnered with the charity Fuck Cancer, and we want you to pledge to be a gentleman. If you find something fishy on your favorite pair of breasts, you could save a life—90 percent of cancers are curable if caught in stage one. Click the image below and take the pledge to touch some breasts now!**

And, if the above doesn't depress you, Men's Health seems to be running a campaign with a charity called Fuck Cancer called Fuck Cancer: Touch Some Breasts which calls for men to take a pledge on Facebook to touch some breasts to help identify breast cancer in its early stages. Because a bunch of creepy men are so much likely to help identify breast cancer by grabbing their partners breasts. Their is actually no information easily visible on how to check breasts effectively or what the other signs of breast cancer might be so mostly this is just a cheap trick to abuse women's bodies and tell them it's for their own good.

Having read Men's Health's sex tips, I think it is safe to say that none of the staff are having sexually satisfying relationships with their partners. Well, they may be. I suspect their partners might be balancing their cheque books during coitus instead.***

* I may be over-using the word creepy here. It's becoming somewhat of a habit. I promise to invest in a thesaurus tomorrow.

*** There was a link here. I have taken it out. They don't need anymore aattention.

** Men's Health has an article on words not to use during sex. I'm reclaiming coitus because they are too weird for words.


UPDATE: FeministCurrent has written about the problematic breast cancer campaigns here, as has I Blame the Patriarchy here.

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Hilary Mantel Wins the Booker! Again! By Writing about Men

I am genuinely excited by the fact that Hilary Mantel won her second Booker prize for Bring up the Bodies. It is a huge win for Feminism for a woman author to be taken seriously by the Patriarchy. But, like with Kathryn Bigelow's Oscar win for the Hurt Locker, Mantel has won one for writing a book about men. She won for out-penising the penises. Now, I haven't actually read either book, although I do own Wolf Hall, so I can't comment on the books themselves but this is a pattern well understood by feminists. Women are rewarded by the Patriarchy for two things: passing the patriarchal fuckability test or reinforcing patriarchal norms. In this case, Mantel has won for reinforcing the patriarchal approved norm for writing "literature", which as V.S Naipaul likes to tell people, needs to be written either by men or about men. Actually, Naipaul said that no woman author ever has wrote as well as he can, but I'm sure he'd be totally on the only-books-about-men-count-as-literature bandwagon.

Now, I'm not dissing Mantel's accomplishments, because she has done something I wouldn't have thought possible which is to win TWO Bookers. Hell, I'm frequently surprised by the inclusion of women on the list, never mind winning it. But, when do books about women get to be great literature? Why is that women, who write the most books and who buy the most books, are always under-represented in major literary prizes? As Alyssa Rosenberg writes, 

It would be nice to see more Booker-caliber female and male authors delve into the lives and brains of women, and to see the judges that decide what counts as leading literary fiction acknowledge more often that a woman's can be as grand a tapestry as a man's—and that domestic narratives are as worthy as chronicles of state.

It would be nice to see more men realising that the women writers and the lives of women are as worthy of attention as men's writing. We need to stop buying books written by men and about men. We need to start financially supporting women writers and especially those books written by women about women. 

Here are some of my recommendations of books written by women about women:

• Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible
• Lisa O'Donnell's The Death of Bees
• Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club
• Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad
• Chimananda Ngozi Adachie's Purple Hibiscus
• Marilyn French's The Woman's Room

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Clarks: Shoes for Girls that you can't play in.

Just in case you were totally confused about what shoes are for, Clarks has come up with the snazziest, non-confusing name ever: No Playing BL. That way, girls know from being very little that the only thing shoes are for is for looking cute. Little girls aren't supposed to climb trees or play football or play hopscotch or jump rope or What Time is it Mr Wolf in the school playground. Girls have to sit quietly and read Grazia so they know how to pass the Patriarchal Fuckability Test before their 14th birthday. 

Then, they won't find the whole not-being-able-to-walk-in-5-inch- heels weird when they get to be teenagers. Who cares that these shoes do exactly the same damage as the banned practise of footbinding in China. Girls are just ornaments to be admired. It doesn't matter if they don't get to play. Their worth is limited only to their fuckablity as teenagers. We can't have them thinking they are worth anything more than that. They might get ideas and opinions. They could learn their favourite activity is Smash the Patriarchy. 

Do feel free to contact Clarks here to explain why you won't be buying these shoes for your daughter.

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Cadbury Has Officially Jumped the Shark

They now make chocolate for ladeez. Because, apparently, we are all too fat and no longer make the cut for the Patriarchal Fuckability Test. I would have liked to know this before I bought myself a Crunchie this morning. I like Crunchies. I did not know that I had to have a penis to eat one. I have checked on the wrapping and it doesn't say I need a penis. But, now, there is a chocolate bar just for me. Because I have a vagina. It's called Crispello [and whoever thought that up really needs a career change].

Although, come to think of it, I'm sure Weight Watchers* already market chocolate bars for fat women. It's part of their eat nothing but eggs and carrots but then treat yourself to a tiny piece of chocolate that is smaller than Halloween treats. The Weight Watchers chocolate bars are probably twice the price of a Crispello but at least they don't have a stupid name.

I would totally suggest everyone with a vagina run right now and buy themselves one but it's tea time. Probably some pasta would be better. **


* I can't be too mean to Weight Watchers. They were very helpful when I had PND. But, mostly, they prey on women's insecurities and create diets that only 10% of women manage to sustain long-term. Possibly, I could have gotten the same help from a PND support group and saved myself a shitload of money but I was in denial. It happens.

** I await with glee for the advertising campaign for Crispello. I suspect I will get hours of fun lambasting it for the Misogynistic Advertising Walk of Shame

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Salma Yaqoob: Apparently, she bakes.

It is important that we know this. Also, that Salma Yaqoob is very, very slight. As in the perfect example of femininity. Just in case we got confused about what is actually important and its not that she was the leader of a political party who RESIGNED IN PROTEST because of some seriously offensive rape apologist bullshit on the part of another member of the party: George Galloway. Nope, we must remember at all times that Yaqoob is a girl and knows how to behave like one.

In the middle of what could have been a decent article in the Guardian, Yaqoob's feminine performativity is reinforced over and over again culminating in this piece of twaddle:

Yaqoob, 41, is, in person, even slighter than she seems on television – she has long, thin arms and a face miraculously unlined by a decade spent raising three boys, working as a councillor in Birmingham (she resigned for reasons of ill-health last year), running a part-time psychotherapy practice – oh, and leading a new political party. She has just had a new kitchen fitted, and the backyard of her home in the Moseley area of Birmingham is piled with cardboard boxes. The ceilings are high, and the rooms full of light. On the kitchen table sits a straw basket of chapatis she has been baking.

Obviously, if Yaqoob hadn't been baking then we would have forgotten she didn't have a penis. I mean, seriously, how is this even relevant? Who cares what she looks like or does? She's a politician; one with actual morals. How many can claim that? But, still, we minimise her accomplishments by babbling on about her appearance. 

Even more obnoxiously, that paragraph was shoved in between the reporter asking about Galloway's "Assange is just guilty of bad sex" theory and Yaqoob's answer. This is her answer: 

"I've always admired George's anti-imperialist stances and I don't regret, for a second, standing side by side on those issues. But for me, to have to make a choice between that and standing up for the rights of women was a false choice. I thought it was a blurring of something that didn't need to be blurred. It's not that complicated – you can hold two ideas at the same time." Of course, "we're all human, we can't always make perfectly worded and crafted sentences – I really hoped a clarification would sort that out." She published a statement setting out her own position, but then, as she describes it, things escalated. Although she says Galloway never got directly in contact – and still hasn't – she felt she was being personally maligned; that "under the guise of different names there were personal attacks".

Now, this might be because I'm a crazy Feminist type, but I rather think her resigning in protest at some incredibly offensive misogyny is actually a good thing. Standing up for rape victims should be normal behaviour for politicians. Instead, this kind of twaddle just reinforces gender stereotyping. It reinforces the idea that women can only be good politicians if they are also nurturing and caring and bake chapatis. It is damaging for girls to read articles about women where their actual accomplishments are subsumed under the rhetoric of kinder, kuche, kirche. This should have been an article about the splintering of a political party due to misogyny and rape apologism. It did not need a foray into the fashion-beauty complex or baking.

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Misogynistic Advertising Walk of Shame: Vagenda Knocks Them Down

These images are taken from a blogpost on Vagenda. I think they've brilliantly deconstructed the misogyny. But, sometimes, you just need to look at the images a second time to fully understand the WTF?  bit. [Or, a third time in this case].*

**

***

*Between, Kookai definitely don't sell yogurt. I googled just in case there were two companies called Kookai. There aren't.

**Surely, PETA should be starting a campaign against French Connection now. That way, we can admire the misogyny squared.

*** Pot Noodle: The Lynx Effect of Food. Only eat them if you have a penis and are stupid****

****Not everyone with a penis is stupid so please don't bother posting that level of nincompoopery as a comment.

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Publishing Nude Photos Without Consent is Sexualised Violence

I've said this before and I'm sure I'll be saying it again shortly: Publishing nude photos of someone without their consent is sexualised violence. It doesn't matter if its Prince Harry, Kate Middleton or Paris Hilton. This is an issue of consent not free speech. Freedom of speech is not the right to be a jackass. It is not the right to do something just because you can. We need to stop buying into the discourse that free speech is more important than anything else. Supporting free speech in this manner only serves to perpetuate rape culture. 

This is what I wrote when this same discussion came up several weeks ago but with Prince Harry as the object:

Publishing photos of people either naked or in other sexually compromising positions is sexualised violence. This should apply as equally to bucketheaded princes as it does to vulnerable 17 year olds. And, the media aren't the only ones responsible for perpetuating this sexualised violence. Every time ordinary people google these images, they are buying into and feeding the sexual exploitation industry and helping to increase the number of sexually exploited people. The whole reality television and "celeb" magazines industry need to die. Today. People need to stop financially supporting the sexualised violence of others. This serves only to feed rape culture.

Whilst I think Prince Harry was a victim of sexualised violence, I do think there is something qualitatively different about publishing the photos of Kate Middleton's breasts. We live in a rape culture which objectifies women's bodies as fucktoys. Prince Harry's photos were celebrated as evidence of his cheekiness. Kate Middleton is already been blamed for having the temerity of taking off her shirt in private [and this thread on Mumsnet is disgraceful. Such vicious victim-blaming horseshit]. Publishing nude photos of a woman without their consent just reinforces the very specific gendered vulnerability of women. It just demonstrates how little value women really have in rape culture.

The people who take these images are perpetuating rape culture.

The magazines which publish these photos are perpetuating rape culture.

The people who buy these celebrity magazines are perpetuating rape culture.

The people who google these images are perpetuating rape culture.

The people who think it's part of being a celebrity are perpetuating rape culture.

Kate Middleton married a man. She didn't sign up to be sexually assaulted. Her wedding vows did not include the end to her privacy. The person who took the photo should be prosecuted. The magazine that published the photo should be prosecuted. 

As much as I dislike the Royal Family, I hope they sue.

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Naomi Wolf: The One Where I Wear A Tin Hat

I have already written about Naomi Wolf's new book Vagina three times now; despite not actually having read the book. Well, technically, two blogs were about Vagina; the other was about Wolf's utterly hypocritical and perplexing stance on Assange. But, that's not quite the point. Normally, I'd be the first to yell "foul" at a critic who hasn't actually read the book they are critiquing but there are always exceptions to the rules. And, Vagina is one of them. There have been some excellent analyses of the book published recently, notably by Ariel Levy in The New Yorker. Others have veered into unnecessary sexist discourse; there are enough problems with the book that need to be addressed, Wolf's physical appearance isn't one of them. 

Of course, Wolf isn't exactly helping herself with her appearance on Mumsnet or with this article in the Guardian [deconstructed by Glosswatch here]. In general, I have serious problems with Wolf's research and I think evolutionary psychology is just a bunch of teleological horseshit pretending to be academic. It's not. It's just bupkis. But, increasingly, I am beginning to feel that Naomi Wolf is the American academic version of Liz Jones: ostensibly the quintessential handmaiden. Like Jones, I think Wolf is being deliberately set up as an object of mockery. The attacks on Wolf as a person, rather than on the book itself, are simply further evidence of woman-blaming culture. Yes, the book itself deserves ridicule for trying to pass off a personal story as science but the fault for that doesn't lie with Wolf alone, although her obvious inability to see outwith her own very narrow definition of truth is quite distressing.

If Vagina were an academic text, it would have been peer-reviewed. Any academic publisher with an ounce of sense would have sent proofs to academics involved in research in the field of neuroscience [and evolutionary psychology but I think they make it up as they go along so I wouldn't have put too much credence into their stance]. The problem is that Vagina isn't an academic text even though Wolf herself is an academic [yes, one without a PhD but that's hardly shocking considering the misogyny which inhabits academia; technically, I could class myself as an academic despite not having a PhD so I'm hardly going to hold that against Wolf]. Vagina wasn't properly peer-reviewed because for the publishers a text by Naomi Wolf isn't valuable for its scholarship so much as for its eccentricity; she is marketable not as a serious female academic but rather as a somewhat out-there celebrity woman. In other words, they knew they would sell more copies of the book by setting her up for ridicule than they would by presenting it as an academic text on emerging research into neuroscience, sex, sexuality and gender. Wolf is known as a celebrity, not as an academic. Her reputation is that of someone eccentric; a little bit off of centre. She is the acceptable face of feminism in the Patriarchy: kooky and apologetic. But, she's also a middle aged woman and middle aged women are supposed to be invisible and frigid simultaneously. We aren't supposed to be talking about our vaginas. Wolf's publishers went for pulp fiction under the disguise of academic research because they knew it would sell and not because they were interested in changing discourse around sexuality and feminism. They published it because it was a middle aged white woman talking about her vagina. Not just any white woman though. A celebrity. They published it because of Wolf's celebrity but also to spite it.

And, this is the problem. Vagina is being given consideration as if it were an academic publication when, in reality, it is within the self-help genre of literature. Alright, I dislike the self-help genre but that's a personal thing. There isn't anything inherently wrong with self-help books unless they perpetuate victim-blaming myths and misogyny; like that ridiculous quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: "no one can make you feel inferiour without your consent". Instead, Vagina is being advertised as blurring the boundaries between self-help and academic books. This isn't to say that academic books are morally superiour. I've read some seriously awful misogynistic and racist shite published by academics. Academia doesn't have the best reputation for supporting research about non-white, non-dead men written by non-white men. Really, in terms of hypocrisy, academic texts are frequently in a class all to themselves. The problem with the blurring in this case is that it has taken something subjective and insisted on objectivity. Most academics understand that objectivity isn't exactly an achievable goal. So, why does Vagina claim it is?

Vagina is only a feminist text in the way that Caitlyn Moran's How To Be A Woman is one. That is to say they were both advertised as feminist texts when they were really memoirs that also discuss feminism. They are books written by celebrities about being celebrities. They occupy that weird position between celebrity and news. But, they aren't feminist texts and, therefore, aren't really worthy of the scrutiny they have been given as feminist texts. It's rather like taking the biography of Victoria Beckham as representative of the experience of all mothers in their 30s.* 

The real strength in Moran's book is the discussions it spawned rather than its feminist analysis. Sometimes the conversations spawned are more important than the text which spawned them. I think Vagina is one of those texts because the discussions around women's sexuality, reputation, race, neuroscience and feminist theory have already kicked off. It's just incredibly sad that Naomi Wolf's reputation is being ground into the dust. I think this is where we should have seen real feminist sister solidarity: most women would talk their friends out of publishing such a book without being more aware of the science behind it. A real sister would have counselled against taking a personal experience and universalising it as truth. A real sister would have asked questions about the cult of celebrity and ask why the Patriarchy would publish a book like this to such fanfare.

But, that's the real answer. The Patriarchy wouldn't want a serious book on neuroscience, sex, gender and sexuality published which questioned PIV, pornography and heterosexuality. Because, as white and heteronormative as Wolf is, she has challenged the pornography industry in a way that many other feminists haven't just by dint of her celebrity status.** Whether or not, we manage to change the conversation away from Wolf's yoni and into a more mainstream critique of porn remains to be seen. I may buy the book for that reason alone, although the evo psych/yoni crap will annoy me. There are important discussions to be had about this text, in spite of all its failings. But, we need to get out of the trap of insulting Wolf because of her actual vagina.


*I've got a bit of a soft spot for Ms Beckham. I dislike the hysterical hatred which surrounds her. 

** For a better challenge to porn culture see: Gail Dines, Melinda Tankard-Reist, Robert Jensen, Rebecca Whisnant or here. 

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