One of the pleasures of hosting such a carnival is that of being lifted gently out of parochialism, the tendency to become preoccupied with the most burning issues at home. It reminds me of opening the window on a spring day, when the fog has lifted, to reveal a spectacular view, no longer restricted to a few gnarled trees in own garden, but stretching to the distant coastline and the edge of the horizon. Contributions from over the oceans predominate, yet it is striking to see just how much we have in common no matter what corner of the globe we occupy: the struggle for access to political power, violence (albeit with huge differences in degree), autonomy, full humanity and control of one’s own body and, with it, destiny, as illustrated most potently with abortion and gender reassignment. In spite of the controversy, the occasional bouts of mutual recrimination, wounding inflicted intentional or otherwise one of our primary virtues is open-mindedness, our willingness to reassess our preconceptions, examine our flaws and blind spots and focus on what unites us as women, whether we were born with female reproductive organs or not. Feminism is diverse and can accommodate many strands. Some might regard this as a weakness that splits us into warring factions so that we dissipate our energies in bitter battles over ascendancy and definition, rather than channelling them into ending oppression, whether of the overt or the more insidious stealth variety. I do not advocate stifling disagreement, quite the opposite, conflict is not pathological, but the inevitable outcome of competing claims and a source of vitality as opposed to a force which saps it. Exchanging views, however vigorously, can clarify our thought, challenging our cosy assumptions and allowing us to perceive where, perhaps, we have been insensitive.

US Elections

Being a spectator of American politics on a superficial level is a peculiar feeling, as I can watch the most ferocious battles with almost complete detachment, an impossibility when caught up in squabbles nearer home.

Over here, media coverage has almost completely ignored the Republican campaign, speculating on whether voters will overcome their gender- or race-based prejudices. This trend became even more pronounced once Mitt Romney had dropped out of the race, as the press had discerned a certain novelty value in a Mormon running for office. On a spare afternoon in Nicosia on mission, I watched CNN, the only English-language channel available, listening in with grim fascination as Romney gave a perfect summary of everything I find most repugnant (as a left-wing fully-recovered former fundamentalist and confirmed atheist) about American conservatism: let the poor starve, they are all undeserving detritus anyway, bring fathers back into the home, as women lack the ability to instil discipline, they are too tender-hearted and boys won’t listen to them. As he threw down the gauntlet to feminists with his unapologetic reassertion of patriarchal authority, I shuddered when I realised his statements were being greeted not by derision, but enthusiastic cheers and terrifyingly sincere howls of dismay when he actually got as far as his announcement: “The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960’s welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven’t given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and to remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug—we have got to fight it like the poison it is!

The attack on faith and religion is no less relentless. And tolerance for pornography—even celebration of it—and sexual promiscuity, combined with the twisted incentives of government welfare programs have led to today’s grim realities: 68% of African American children are born out-of-wedlock, 45% of Hispanic children, and 25% of White children. How much harder it is for these children to succeed in school—and in life. A nation built on the principles of the founding fathers cannot long stand when its children are raised without fathers in the home.

The development of a child is enhanced by having a mother and father. Such a family is the ideal for the future of the child and for the strength of a nation. I wonder how it is that unelected judges, like some in my state of Massachusetts, are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the millennia of recorded history. It is time for the people of America to fortify marriage through constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it!”

And on the subject of Europe, my ears were assailed with blood-curdling lunacy: “Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength. And we are not dissuaded by the snickers and knowing glances when we stand up for family values, and morality, and culture. We will always be honoured to stand on principle and to stand for principle.”

Against this backdrop, my ambivalence towards the vulgar, brash, showy, glitzy, chintzy, somewhat surreal world of US politics, I hope, become slightly more understandable. I cannot escape my acculturation in entirety. British politics are bland, staid and bloodless by comparison. Over here, we take a certain (misplaced) pride in our cynicism, our worldly-wise disillusionment with the whole charade. We don’t want to be saddled with another Bush amoeba, butbeyond that, we don’t mind who wins. From the outside, Americans seem to be far more passionate about their politics, evincing depths of feeling that we, steeped in our British reserve, find hard to fathom.

A victory for either candidate (not the nomination, but the Presidency itself) would be symbolically extremely potent, as Holly Ord of Menstrual Poetry acknowledges in Voting for Hillary Just because She’s a Woman?, roundly rejecting the idea of gender-based partisanship: “Are people counting on the population of feminists to secure Hillary’s standing in the presidential election? Are people counting on the population of women as a whole to secure Hillary’s standing? I think some are, but in a way I feel that that specific way of thinking is doing nothing but addressing women as nothing but sheep who believe that just because a woman is looking to find her way into the white house that other women will help her get there. I do not believe that by being a woman, or by being a feminist, that I am trumped to vote for Hillary no matter what just because she’s a woman.

This argument also reaches to Obama. Are black people voting for Obama just because he’s “one of them?” When putting it that way, of course it sounds racist, but by believing women will vote for a woman candidate based purely on reproductive organs, it is treating that situation the exact same way if people were to come right out and say “Well the only reason you’re voting for Obama is because you’re also black.” Or the same goes for McCain with “You’re only voting for McCain because he’s an old, white man and you also happen to be an old, white man.”

What ever happened to voting for a candidate based purely on how they stand on issues you feel strongly about?”

Staunch Hillary supporter Christine of Me, My Kid and Life in Think Before You Vote asks: “As a man, would you rather have any man in office than any woman? Be honest. Would having a woman as president put your old boy’s club status (which all men belong to regardless of race) in jeopardy? For a lot of American men I believe the answer is yes.

Obama may be an underdog due to his race, but I believe Clinton is more of an underdog due to the misogynistic rhetoric we live with in our daily lives which runs rampant in American culture. Clinton has never once played the ‘gender’ card. Obama is freely and continually playing the ‘race’ card and it’s getting out-of-hand”.

Ultimately, her message is the same as Holly’s: “Don’t vote race. Don’t vote gender. Clear your thinking from the rhetoric and stigmas and please choose the person you truly believe can best meet the needs of American citizens. It’s really important this time around. We are in new territory, internationally, and we better be careful”.

To give a flavour of how the elections are being tackled in the British press, I quote journalist Libby Brooks in This is about power, not shared sexual characteristics (The Guardian, 7^th March 2008) who arrives at a similar conclusion to Holly and Christine: “Polemics about female ambition and sisterly duty provoked by the Clinton candidacy show feminism is evolving.

That the personal is political has ever been a central tenet of the women’s movement. But never has it caused such conflict, generational collision and soul-searching for American feminists as when contemplating whether to support Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

To have a female leading the world’s most powerful democracy remains an intoxicating prospect for many women. This week, with that possibility renewed, it’s worth reflecting why. With women at this level of influence still an extreme exception, it’s inevitable that they will primarily be viewed through the prism of their gender, and not only by men. Is the election of a woman head of state as symbolic as it once was? And what can her candidacy tell us about contemporary attitudes to sisterhood, ambition and power?

Feminists of all hues have been quick to challenge the misogyny that has afflicted Clinton’s campaign: the incessant carping about her appearance and demeanour; the double standard whereby she is at once too rigid and too emotional; the sneers that she will never be more than her husband’s wife (and a betrayed wife at that). But it is evident that women are not basing their voting choices on gender solidarity alone: despite her gains on Tuesday, national polling has shown support from Clinton’s core female constituency slowly draining to Obama over the past month.

Axiomatically, nor should they be expected to vote on the basis of shared secondary sexual characteristics”.

Brooks continues: “While it’s true that women are encouraged by the prevailing culture to perceive ambition as unseemly, unfeminine and greedy, our own experience of powerful women is more complex. First, the expectation that any female would necessarily be more attuned to her own gender’s concerns is countered by the freakish exceptionalism of an individual who has successfully combined extreme talent with extreme drive. For all Clinton may struggle to integrate the cookie baker with the commander-in-chief, she’s a world away from the conflicts that most working mothers face. That exceptionalism inevitably distances her from the lack of power that so many women experience – to the extent that her femaleness almost ceases to be a valid identity”.

MW of Divided We Stand United We Fall addresses the question of media distortions motivated by a desire to squeeze out every drop of drama from the contest between Hillary and Obama, which fail to look beneath the surface in “The Story” in Ohio and Texas: “This is the dynamic – Clinton is such a polarizing personality, that if a primary is perceived by voters as a popularity contest, or even just a mechanism for allocating delegates, Obama wins. If, in the voting booth, the voter is simply answering the question “Who do I like better?” – they tend to vote for Obama. It is only when the voter clearly understands that they are voting for the end of the 2008 Democratic party selection process, that the dynamic changes”.

Desiree of Baser Instincts in My Own Private Hillary likewise ponders media depictions of Hillary’s perceived personality defects: “It must suck to have people doubt your capabilities for no other reason than you were born with a slit.

And I truly feel that that is the gist of it. Hillary’s less admirable characteristics wouldn’t really be a big deal if she were a man”.

Desiree then turns to her own recent promotion and the barrage of insinuating and snide comments she has had to endure from her envious male colleagues, viewing her workplace as a microcosm: “This speaks to a much bigger issue of course. Women in the workplace still don’t get the respect (and in many cases, the money) they deserve, even when they prove themselves, their brilliant, competent selves, time and time again.

Brilliant, competent women in the workplace are called bitches. Crazy bitches.

Brilliant, competent men in the workplace (and even men with talent that’s mediocre at best) are called CEO’s”.

That certainly struck a chord with me.

Abortion

My own position will not come as a surprise: I support full abortion on demand without having to jump through hoops, justify yourself and be poked, prodded and patronised by doctors who assume you are mentally impaired by virtue of your hormones at the best of times, a handicap only exacerbated when up the duff. Armed with their superior knowledge, and the authority bestowed upon them by the Order of the White Coat they delude themselves into believing that they are better placed to determine what is best for you with only the most cursory knowledge of the constraints you are forced to function within. Given the massive pressures to fulfil our nurturing role, the social stigma of contravening it and the idyllic images of peach-skinned beaming babies that abound, no woman takes the decision to have an abortion lightly.

By way of a preface, I believe it is worthwhile reminding ourselves exactly what is at stake and the most profound and eloquent statement I have thus far been able to locate is Susan Bordo’s Are Mothers persons? (in Unbearable Weight, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, pp71-97). Our culture has never been particularly sympathetic to women’s sense of themselves as participating in full humanity: “(…) sometimes entirely mechanistic conceptions of the body dominate, conceptions from which all concern from the inner self have vanished. In practice, our legal tradition divides the human world as Descartes divided all of reality: into conscious subjects and mere bodies (res extensa). And in the social expression of that duality, some groups have clearly been accorded subject-status and its protections, while others have regularly been denied those protections, becoming for all medical and legal purposes pure res extensa, bodies stripped of their animating, dignifying and humanising ‘subject-ivity’” (p73).

This prejudice has seeped into judgements banning women from drinking alcohol whilst pregnant, for example: “(…) ontologically speaking, the pregnant woman has been seen by our legal system as the mirror-image of the abstract subject whose bodily integrity the law is so determined to protect. For the latter, subjectivity is the essence of personhood, not to be sacrificed even in the interests of the preservation of the life of another individual. Personal valuation, choice, and consciousness itself (…) are the given values, against which any claims to state interest or public good must be rigorously argued and are rarely granted. The essence of the pregnant woman, by contrast, is her biological, purely mechanical role in preserving the life of another. In her case, this is the given value, against which her claims to subjectivity must be rigorously evaluated, and they will usually be found wanting insofar as they conflict with her life-support function. In the face of such a conflict, her valuations, choices, consciousness are expendable” (op. cit., p79).

Advances in medical technology could easily be wielded as a pretext to curtail abortion rights in a climate where we witness: “(…) the increasing subjectification of foetal being. For, strikingly, as the personhood of the pregnant woman has been drained from her and her function as foetal incubator activated, the subjectivity of the foetus has been elevated” (op. cit., p85). In short, the rights of the foetus would be allowed to take precedence over those of the woman, surely perverse given that the adult woman is already a fully-fledged member of human society unlike the foetus, which only possesses the potential to become one.

We need to tease out the wider implications of any changes to the law: “What gets obscured when abortion rights are considered in abstraction from issues involving forced medical treatment, legal and social interference in the management of pregnancy, and so forth, is the fact that it is not only women’s reproductive rights that are currently being challenged but women’s status as subjects, within a system in which – for better or worse – the protection of ‘the subject’ remains a central value (…) So long as the debate over reproductive control is conceptualised solely in the dominant terms of the abortion debate – that is, a conflict between the foetus’s right to life and the woman’s right to choose – we are fooled into thinking that it is only the foetus whose ethical and legal status is at issue. The pregnant woman (whose ethical and legal status as a person is not constructed as a question in the abortion debate, and which most people wrongly assume is fully protected legally) is seen as fighting, not for her personhood, but ‘only’ for the right to control her reproductive destiny.

The nature of pregnancy is such, however, that to deprive the woman of control over her reproductive life – whether by means of involuntary or coerced sterilisation, court-ordered Caesarean, or forbidden abortion – is necessarily also to mount an assault on her personal integrity and autonomy (the essence of personhood in our culture) and to treat her merely as pregnant res extensa, material incubator of foetal subjectivity” (op. cit., pp93-4).

At the same time, Bordo warns: “Attempts to devalue foetal life, on the other hand, have fed powerfully into the right-wing imagination of a possible world in which women would be callously and casually scraping foetuses out of their bodies like leftovers off a plate. This image – so cruelly unrepresentative of most women’s experiences – must be challenged, must be shown to be a projection of ‘evil mother’ archetypes, reflective of deep cultural anxieties about women’s autonomy rather than the realities of its exercise” (op. cit., p95).

Holly Ord of Menstrual Poetry, draws attention to a deeply disturbing phenomenon in Crisis Pregnancy Centres Having to Tell People Lies? Hell, Yes!

By way of background, for the benefit of those, such as myself, who are unfamiliar with the Centres, the report by the NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland Fund, The Truth Revealed, (from which the quotes below are drawn) is illuminating. Its findings are based on visits by trained volunteers posing as clients to eleven Centres during 2007 and on an analysis of websites and pamphlets handed out. The Centres began to appear in the 1960s as laws making abortions illegal were removed from the statute books. Furthermore, the Centres (of which there are approximately 2,500 to 4,000 in the United States) are funded by churches and run by volunteers of an evangelical Christian persuasion who have no medical training, although they offer a range of services, including “pregnancy testing and counselling, adoption information, parenting classes, financial assistance for baby clothes and supplies” and ultrasound scans. As such, their operations constitute a rearguard action against terminations, their main objective being to dissuade women from undergoing the procedure. In order to achieve this, they employ a variety of underhand and morally reprehensible tactics, extending from blatant lies (for example, that abortion increases a woman’s risk of contracting breast cancer by as much as 80%, or that they run the risk of “Post Abortion Stress Syndrome”), wheedling their clients into putting matters off in a deliberate and cold-blooded attempt to prevent the abortion from taking place (“In addition to providing false information on abortion risks, CPCs often encourage women considering abortion to wait before making a decision. One counsellor stated: “Don’t panic. Abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, so you have plenty of time to make a decision.” However, Maryland does not have a single provider who will perform an abortion after viability”), employing emotional blackmail (“(…) most centres failed to maintain the professional neutrality that is a commonly accepted tenet of counselling. Every centre that investigators visited used some type of emotionally manipulative tactic, such as offering congratulations for a positive pregnancy test, referring to the pregnancy as a baby, and giving the investigator hand-knitted baby booties. One volunteer disclosed that she had adopted two children herself and strongly encouraged adoption. At two separate centres, the counsellors disclosed that they themselves were pregnant. Another CPC provided an investigator with a model of a 12-week-old foetus (even though they had estimated her gestation to be six weeks), and was told to “show this to your boyfriend when discussing options.”), through to outright intimidation, preying on those who have nowhere else to turn to (“One of the most unsettling aspects of CPCs is their effective targeting of the most vulnerable: young, poor, and minority women. According to a 2006 CPC newsletter, 69 percent of their clients were under the age of 24.17 CPCs often advertise in high school and college newspapers. For example, our campus activist group at the University of Maryland, College Park reports that a nearby CPC advertises regularly in the school paper, The Diamondback. CPC advertisements can also be found in the school newspaper at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County.

CPCs appeal to low-income women by offering free services, some of which can be costly in the private sector, such as ultrasounds. They also often target minority populations and exploit specific vulnerabilities in order to dissuade women from choosing abortion. One investigator, who posed as a Latina immigrant, was told, falsely, that it would be “very, very difficult” for her to obtain an abortion if she was not a legal resident of the U.S.”).

Once the foetus has been ejected from the womb, however, their concern quickly fades and their charity along with it, cutting the hapless mother adrift holding the baby literally and metaphorically, callously indifferent to her and her offspring’s fate (“All eleven CPCs offered assistance to women who decided to parent, but the assistance was typically limited to six months to one year after the child was born. In addition, many volunteers failed to acknowledge realistic considerations like childcare, employment, housing or education. In one case, an investigator expressed concern about being able to pursue her education if she continued the pregnancy. The volunteer told the investigator that she was early enough in the pregnancy to finish out the semester and that later the investigator’s mother could provide childcare. The investigator stated that her mother was not an option for childcare because she worked full time. The volunteer offered no other solutions for childcare or information on programs that assist young parents in college, stating instead: ‘Even so, having a baby isn’t that hard. I’m sure you can handle it.’”). Let’s not forget that the mother is only of interest to them as the repository of a male’s sperm, as a warm, mobile incubator. Once she has outlived her usefulness as such, she is consigned to the ranks of benefit scroungers (to lapse back into my native British vernacular).

What I find so shocking is that in Britain we set great store by the impartiality of information furnished by institutions dispensing medical advice, whereas these Centres appear to dispense abhorrent, toxic lies, manipulating culturally-inculcated shame and doubt, playing on ignorance in the name of superstition, glutting on fear and anxiety. Since they cannot coerce women to go through with the pregnancy in the physical sense, they resort to underhand tactics.

As Holly informs us, a ray of sanity is about to penetrate this gloom, as the Maryland state senate is weighing up making it mandatory for the CPCs to issue a disclaimer to the effect that they are not required to provide accurate information. I sincerely hope that this will be enough to enable the clients to treat what they are being told with due scepticism (given that, as the NARAL report makes clear, a standard ploy on the part of the CPCs involves spuriously invoking an aura of medical authority).

Holly’s conclusions echo my own: “I do not believe that crisis pregnancy centres like this should not [I am assuming that this second negative is extraneous] be able to practice. They should not be able to brainwash desperate women and guilt them into believing that abortion is not the answer to their unwanted pregnancy when an abortion is what they are seeking. Not to mention, Planned Parenthood clinics who support women and support the informed choices that women are able to make on their own–Imagine that!”

By way of a minor digression, Sophie of Life Junkie, in Indecent questions highlights the immense cultural differences surrounding where the boundaries of acceptable conversation are drawn. French attitudes could hardly be less prudish than those evinced by the staff of the Crisis Pregnancy Centres.

Tracee of Blog Fabulous on Stop Abortion Vote Healthcare! proves that even a self-professed believer with an aversion to abortion can adopt a more compassionate approach.

She directs us towards a report by the Guttmacher Institute setting out the Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States, highly informative reading matter. Through my own subjective filter the following snippets stood out for me. Firstly, attesting to the abiding potency of religious faith: “Forty-three percent of women obtaining abortions identify themselves as Protestant, and 27% as Catholic”.

Secondly, and this certainly puts paid to the myths of selfishness and fecklessness (in British rhetoric politicians are fond of talking about parasitical lone mothers jumping the council housing queue): “The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner”.

Thirdly and finally: “Only 8% of all abortion providers offer abortions at 24 weeks”. So all the hysterical reports about viable foetuses being callously dumped in dustbins like so much human refuse and being rescued by neighbours or council workers is a blend of rank nonsense and scaremongering.

Tracee spotlights the harsh realities: “Compared with men, women are less likely to have employer-sponsored health care coverage because they are more likely to work part-time, on contract, or freelance and to take time out of the workforce to care for their children and their family members. They are also more likely to be covered as dependents on their spouses’ employer-sponsored health plans. As a result, women are more vulnerable to losing their coverage if they are widowed or divorced.

There are 21.5 million uninsured women and these are the same women who are most likely to seek an abortion because they have no access to healthcare. This statistic doesn’t even include women who carry only catastrophic insurance and therefore have to pay for all healthcare expenses on top of their high premiums. These women frequently can’t afford basic OB/GYN care, including contraception.

No one likes abortion. If the goal is to reduce the number of abortions in the United States then pro-lifers should jump on the opportunity to drastically reduce the number of lives lost by providing equal and affordable access to healthcare for women”.

Before examining two courageous first-hand accounts of abortion from the blogosphere, allow me – without seeking to diminish or belittle the pain and trauma she suffered – to bring out the contrast with more conventional narratives by quoting from an interview of Jo Woodgate by Natasha Courtney-Smith (Daily Mail, 6^th March 2008) I had one of Britain’s first legal abortions … 40 years on, I’m still torn apart by guilt: “How could I admit that all I could think about was the baby I’d killed and what might have been?

We’re always told time is a great healer, but for me – at least when it comes to the termination I had – it has proved to be the opposite.

I had an abortion believing it was the right thing to do, and I presumed I would move on from the procedure without so much as a backward glance.

But I was wrong in thinking abortion was the easy way out of what, at the time, felt like an intolerable situation.

With hindsight and maturity, I now know that I could have coped, and with each year that has passed I’ve only felt a growing sense of guilt and regret over my actions.

It makes my blood run cold when I hear of the many young women today who see abortion as little more than a form of contraception.

No doubt many of them go into it, just as I did, thinking little beyond their desire to get rid of the baby that, for whatever reason, they don’t feel they are ready for.

I wonder how many stop to think that perhaps they, too, in 40 years’ time will still be feeling the ramifications of their actions”.

The abortion was carried out just short of 12 weeks: “Like so many young girls, I just saw it as an easy way out of a messy situation. With maturity, I’ve realised that life is complicated, and that getting rid of a baby to solve an immediate problem is not always the obvious solution it appears to be.

I feel that today the law on abortion is far too lax.

In an ideal world, I would like to see it brought forward to a 12-week limit. After that, the foetus, although tiny, is fully formed, and in my opinion you are technically killing a child.

I think a young woman should have an abortion only if she is 100 per cent sure it is what she wants, and if her physical or mental health is truly at stake.

To my mind, too many women are using it as a form of contraception, thinking that afterwards life can return to normal.

They have no understanding that life will never be the same again”.

Audrey of Audrey and the Bad Apples – I am sticking to her blogging pseudonym – devoted one of her mainstream media columns to the subject of abortion, which – predictably – elicited a slew of vilifying reactions to the extent that she issued an appeal to her more sympathetic blog-followers to rally round. It is very different from the sackcloth-and-ashes, wring-out –the-hankie stories journalists seem to think makes good copy without any appreciation of how the endless repetition of such tales of woe might have a deterrent effect: “I’ve had not one but two abortions. I know I’m supposed to grovel and scrape my belly along the ground for all eternity begging the world’s forgiveness.

I’m supposed to kowtow and claim they were each the hardest decision I ever made, that I think about them every day, that I fall into violent pits of depression because I feel such intense agony over the fact I’m such a heartless, baby-killer.

Bollocks to that. I feel no shame regarding either of them.

I acted in my own best interest, a fact I refuse to apologise for.

It wasn’t the “hardest decision I have ever had to make”. It was actually really, really easy.

The only thing I felt afterwards was intense relief.

Does this mean I enjoyed it? Of course not.

It just means that I’m honest.

I don’t believe that a 12-week-old foetus qualifies as a baby.

Oh, the anti-choice (and let’s not be mistaken about this, anti-choice is the only way to describe those that seek to denigrate the fully formed life of a woman to somehow less than that of a cluster of cells) movement would have everyone believe the majority of abortions are requested by fickle women bursting at the seams with a baby the size of a 10-year-old, and the whole procedure’s feverishly led by a maniacal doctor.

But you know what mostly happens in that little thing I like to call real life? The majority of abortions are performed within the first 12 weeks”.

As alluded to earlier, the anti-choicers’ priorities are somewhat skewed: “Many in the anti-choice movement will passionately attribute a range of emotion and feelings to a tiny zygote, yet they seem incapable of empathising with the one-in-three women who have terminations.

Ridding ourselves of this compulsion towards shame is a huge step in the battle against people who’d seek to make our established life less important than that of a potential one”.

Stef of The ex-expat blog in A Forgotten Story in the Abortion Debate recounts her experience: “Because like all my good stories, this one starts in Asia where the local condom production is not as good as back home and I found myself pregnant. I did my best to contact the male with whom I had had a casual fling but he was not answering his phone and I was left to make the decision by myself. I was living alone in a foreign country thus did not have the means to support a single mother lifestyle nor give the baby up for adoption in a society that still frowns heavily upon non-married sexually-active women. I was also taking medication for my skin that amongst its many side-effects also causes severe foetal abnormalities thus my decision was a humane one.

However getting an abortion proved quite difficult because abortion in that country is technically illegal. My gynaecologist would not perform the procedure due to the heavy fines imposed by the state. However she referred me to another clinic that did perform the procedure. After doing my research, I was confident the clinic was legit and went through with the procedure but not before coughing up over $1000US in bribes and medical fees plus a *boyfriend* to sign off on the procedure before I would be *permitted* to have one”.

Deborah of In A Strange Land, in “Legal, safe and rare” – what does it mean? cautions against the use of trite phrases in a cogent analysis: “Aside from the anti-abortion crowd, even people who say that they support a woman’s right to choose often tag it with saying that abortion should be “legal, safe and rare”, a tag that I think is inherently contradictory. And that exposes those who use the phrase as not really accepting abortion, as being deeply ambivalent about it. Sure, women should be able to access abortion, but really, they shouldn’t use it at all. The unspoken justification is that abortion is wrong, that it shouldn’t happen, but they will accept it as an evil necessity.

I also suspect that people who use the phrase haven’t given thought to what making something legal, safe and rare actually entails. When it comes to minimising abortion, then we need easy access to effective contraceptives, and good education about contraceptives. Abstinence won’t work; the genie of sexual freedom is long out of the bottle, and it won’t be going back. In any case, who really wants to return to the repressed and repressive world on the 1950s?

Even then, contraceptives do fail. So we need easy, reliable access to the emergency contraceptive pill. But that’s not failsafe – I have friends who ended up pregnant despite using both condoms and the ECP. They had twins.

My friends were lucky – they were in a position to continue the pregnancy. But many women aren’t. If the “legal safe and rare” crowd really want to make abortion rare, then they need to ensure that women are not penalised for continuing the pregnancy. And that will entail ensuring that mothers have adequate financial support, that young children can be well fed, clothed, housed and educated. A woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy should not need to engage in feverish calculation about whether or not she can actually support a child, if people really want abortion to be rare. Alternatively, mothers need access to high quality child care, and flexible work, so that they can continue to work, and support their children themselves. Even then, they would need to have social supports available too, so that they can get a break from the demands of parenting and working, and juggling, juggling, juggling all the time”.

Carla Kulwicki of The Curvature in Pregnant Women and Drug Addicts: They’re People Too responds to an odious piece of legislation in the pipeline in Arizona, which, if adopted, would mean that pregnant women who are addicted to methamphetamine could be taken into custody and held in treatment programmes against their will as child abusers (the foetus having been elevated to that status).

Here, respectability appears to be a key element, whereby mothers are consigned into one of two categories: controlled fertility as acceptable and promiscuous fecundity unacceptable. As Carla points out, such classifications possess both a class and a race dimension. Her lucid examination reminded me of Beverley Skeggs’ reflections in Class, Self, Culture (London, Routledge, 2004): “(…) class divisions are also drawn on the basis of respectability. Those receiving benefit are separated into the deserving and the undeserving poor. Benefits are seen to be bad for the recipients, trapping them in a culture of dependency. There is a growing tendency to describe and explain poverty in cultural terms: for example, blaming the poor for their own circumstances.

(…)

The sign of the ‘single mother’ once operated as that onto which all dependency, fecundity and disorder was crystallised. It was used consistently throughout the Thatcher years and had its US equivalent in the ‘benefit mother’ (which was racialised in a way that the UK version was not). But ‘New Labour’ rhetoric also deployed it, both to justify state welfare cuts and to promote the normative white heterosexual bourgeois family. However, the rhetoric seems to have diversified, so whilst the single mother is still shorthand for the undeserving, it has also produced some resistance amongst middle-class single parents, who can access circuits of symbolic representation to challenge their pathologising by association. The pathological crystallization process has been spread into other signifiers, and women’s bodies are less central” (pp88-9).

Returning to Cara: “(…) there are a lot of people who support the rights of Good Women to have Legitimate Abortions. Arguing that the Bad Women who are addicted to drugs have a right to not be forcibly locked up just because they’re pregnant? Well, that’s a little bit trickier.

Or, it’s a bit trickier in terms of convincing those people who think that they’re all liberal-minded and supportive of women’s rights, but only do support women whose behaviour they personally approve. You know, there are the Good Abortions — abortions by women who used birth control but got pregnant anyway and simply cannot raise a child due to financial concerns, and really it’s what’s best for the woman and potential child. And there are the Bad Abortions — abortions by women who didn’t use birth control, who have more than one sexual partner, or who can afford to raise a child but simply don’t want to, the ones at whom we can shake our heads and say tsk-tsk while feeling superior, the stupid horrible sluts who we couldn’t possibly relate to, and luckily, whose shoes we therefore never have to wear to walk a single step. Of course, those with this point of view could never possibly have a Bad Abortion themselves. The Bad Abortions are for other women, because otherwise it would defeat the whole purpose, which is to fit some bizarre and arbitrary cultural morality that says abortion is very icky and wrong, that is unless the woman has a very good reason that can pass each individual citizen’s personal legitimacy test.

You see, for many people, supporting the right to an abortion has very little to do with female bodily autonomy at all. It’s about securing a right that they feel they or a close family member may personally need one day. And few people ever anticipate themselves or a loved one having a crippling drug addiction”.

Cara cuts swathes through the obfuscations: “It also turns out that (as of 2002, at least) women still make up a minority of metamphetamine users. So by targeting pregnant women specifically and openly, we’re not only talking about discrimination on the basis of sex, we’re also talking about discriminating against a group that does not make up a majority of the meth-using population. But hey, the woman-haters will argue, it’s not the legislators’ fault that only women can get pregnant! Yes, I’m sure that if men could get pregnant, we would not only still argue over abortion rights, we would also incarcerate men who take drugs while pregnant and handcuff them to hospital beds during labour. It’s not that our society hates women, it’s that our society hates anyone who has the capacity to bring another human life into this world. And biology just made it so women get stuck with the job. Tough break, huh? Nothing to do with prejudice at all.

Clearly, we don’t want pregnant women to use drugs, particularly one as dangerous as methamphetamine. Many would argue that this is because of the risk placed on the foetus. And certainly, we do want to discourage practices that are avoidable and could result in a baby being born with medical problems. But personally, I don’t want pregnant women using methamphetamine not because of what’s in their uteruses, but because I don’t want women using methamphetamine. The drug isn’t good for foetuses, but it sure as hell isn’t good for born adults, either.

Who wants to do to non-pregnant women what this bill proposes doing to pregnant women? Who wants to send sheriffs around to their homes, pick them up and force them into treatment facilities against their will, with no input from family, no choice whatsoever? A few people, I’m sure, but probably not most. We don’t want to do this because it would be dehumanizing, senselessly discriminating on the basis of sex and a violation of basic human rights, including those of proper due process. This doesn’t mean that we don’t care about drug users (though certainly many people don’t), it means that we still see them as people. So why the hell don’t we when the women are pregnant? Clearly, it’s because we’re used to reducing pregnant to objects and political arguments”.

Cara also mentions Jill Filipovich of Feministe’s essay from May 2007, chronicling the defeat of a similar move to reclassify foetuses as children in New Mexico (which was thankfully quashed) in Good News out of New Mexico. Had the law been amended, the “rights” of the foetus would have cancelled out those of the (supposedly) fully incorporated member of society, the woman: “Child abuse and drug trafficking statutes refer to “persons.” For a mother to be tried for child abuse or drug distribution for her neo-natal drug use, the foetus must be considered a person under the law. This is problematic for all the obvious reasons. While establishing foetal personhood for the purpose of criminal prosecutions will not immediately wipe out abortion rights, it lays very strong legal groundwork for eliminating abortion rights in the future. It is very, very difficult to argue that the foetus is a “person” for the purposes of child abuse and drug distribution, but not a person when you’re ending its very existence. I do think that the argument can be made, but only if we radically re-shape the legal grounding for abortion rights, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon and which does not fit into the Roe framework. That is, we would have to assume that the foetus is a person with all the rights and protections that people in this country receive, and from there argue that a person does not have a legal right to use someone else’s body for his own existence, and if a person objects to having their body used, they have a right to remove the attached person. (…) So the establishment of foetal personhood is a very bad thing, because if Roe ever does fall, states have already set a legal standard for foetuses to be considered people under the law. It’s not much of a leap to argue that abortion should therefore be illegal”.

Delicate Flowers, Birds and Bees

Imelda Whelehan, in Overloaded (London, The Women’s Press, 2000), tackles the men’s rights movement: “Many of the issues raised by various men’s movements are feminist ones too – for instance that men may suffer from lack of choice in their adult role by the fact that their primary identity is supposed to be realised through work rather than their family. In this equation women also clearly suffer because of the association of childcare and domestic responsibilities with their essential selves. Feminists have tried to show how structural ideological inequalities overlay these oppositions and complicate matters – not least (…) the conception that a man without work is unemployed, a woman with a family without work is a housewife. To effect possible transferability between roles, you need to alter the consciousness of those who make these associations. Such a transformation of consciousness might make it easier to convince employers that greater flexibility serves a useful purpose, but should also prompt a revolution of unimaginable proportions in the domestic sphere.

Feminists are looking forward; many of their ideas have to rely upon the envisaging of a utopia which cannot be fully predicted until we are nearer to formal equality. The men’s movement, conversely, seems to favour some kind of stasis, or rather a backward-looking return to the sixties, since they are repeatedly citing changes over the last thirty years as the cause of their ills (a period obviously associated with the rise of second-wave feminism). For groups such as the UK Men’s Movement, fatherhood and masculinity are essences of a human nature which is static and unchanging, especially in the personal sphere of emotions. While attacking women for having more power today than men, they are really also attacking women for overstepping the mark and not keeping their part of nature’s bargain” (pp122-3).

The stark truth is that: “Women have made some gains and these men want to get even – which means that they want to return to a system of naturalised social inequity. To make this happen they will play the equality card, using feminism’s own rhetoric against it and exploiting the fact that the language of equal opportunity cannot assure ‘fair play’ at all times” (p123).

This brings us on to a glorious, sarcasm-laced demolition of the men’s rights movement, Rage Against the Man-chine’s MRAs: A bunch of fucking crybabies?

Although I would dearly love to reproduce the entry in full, I will restrict myself to picking out just a couple of Rage’s delicious rebuttals: “The right to equal treatment in custody battles. I’ll say up front that I think fathers, unless they’re total assholes, ought to be involved in their children’s lives. I had one around and it was an important factor in my personal development. That said, most fathers are fairly minor actors in the raising of children, which is simply a manifestation of the fact that our culture places the onus of childcare on women, and the fact that childbearing and rearing is seen in our society as nearly synonymous with womanhood. If these MRAs want to get all butt-hurt about the fact that our court system tends to favour mothers in custody hearings (which I doubt anyway), they ought to at least take these factors into account. I’m willing to bet that a lot of these disgruntled fathers, if they were honest with themselves, would have to admit that before the end of the relationship, it was the mother who provided most of the care for the child(ren), otherwise the judge would be unlikely to award custody to the mother in the first place. That men feel entitled to a woman’s labour in the form of childcare, and then to custody of the child(ren) that she raised in the event that the relationship dissolves, is pretty unreasonable”.

Susan Maushart’s Wifework (London, Bloomsbury, 2001) is highly relevant here: “Our new egalitarian convictions have made it even harder to penetrate beyond the veil, as it were. Both males and females in our society publicly profess their dedication to the ideal of what social researchers call ‘companionate marriage’ – a covenant between two equally loving and nurturant partners, in which the division of labour and leisure are negotiated rationally, equitably and, above all, without reference to gender.
But when a woman marries, what she sees is not what she gets. The exterior architecture of the contemporary marriage emphasises fluidity, simplicity and light. No wonder it’s got such fantastic street appeal. Venture inside, however, and you’re in for a nasty shock. Notwithstanding the tastefully renovated façade, the interior of today’s marriages remains as dusty, cramped and overelaborated as a Victorian drawing-room. It looks awful. And it feels worse” (pp2-3).

She spells out what getting hitched actually entails: “Beyond the lip service paid to ‘equal marriage’ by both men and women, the contemporary family remains primarily, and profoundly, organised around gender. Beneath the veneer of its sleek post-feminist contours, the divisions of labour within the family remain rigidly gender-specific. Females within marriage are strenuously, overwhelmingly, outrageously responsible for the physical and emotional caretaking of males and offspring. (…)
Research conducted throughout the English-speaking world continues to show that wives, whether employed or unemployed, perform 70 to 80 per cent of the unpaid labour within families. And husbands whose wives work full-time for pay do no more domestic labour than husbands of women who are not in paid employment at all. What such dreary and familiar statistics conceal, however, is that wives also contribute 100 per cent of the husband care – the myriad tasks of physical and emotional nurture that I call ‘wifework’.
By anybody’s reckoning – if only somebody would reckon it – wifework is a time-consuming, energy-draining and emotionally exorbitant enterprise. Centred primarily on the care and maintenance of men’s bodies, minds and egos, wifework is a job that violates every principle of equal-opportunity employment – often, chillingly, in the name of ‘love’. For there is no counterpart to wifework, no reciprocal ‘husbandwork’ driving males to provide caregiving to their female partners at the expense of their own well-Being” (pp9-10).

Depressingly: “As (…) marital researchers have stressed, parenthood exaggerates and hardens gender differences within marriage, pushing husbands to become more ‘husbandly’ and wives more ‘wifely’ – and then leaving them there to get on with it. After the birth of her first child, the research suggests, a wife will do even more housework, cooking and shopping than ever before, and she will also work fewer hours outside the home and for less pay. And all of this will be in addition to assuming major, and in many cases overwhelming, responsibility for child care. The new father, by contrast, will perform even fewer household tasks, and work longer hours for pay outside the home” (p123).

Indeed: “Researchers estimate that, in the US, women still do about 80 per cent of the child care – as much as in the 1960s. And most of the time men do spend with their children takes the form of what sociologists call ‘interactive activities’ rather than ‘custodial activities’. In other words, Dads play – and Mums pay. According to research published in 1997, the arrival of a first child more than doubles a wife’s domestic load, working out to an average increase of thirty-five hours a week. One large-scale study conducted in 1991 found the increase in domestic labour to be as high as 91 per cent for new mothers – while the fathers’ (lower to begin with, of course) did not increase by a single minute. To put it bluntly, Mummy becomes the work horse and Daddy the show pony” (p128).

Dirty nappies are not even the half of it: “It is precisely this mental work – the ‘remembering, planning and scheduling’ thing – that is the most arduous of all parenting tasks. It also happens to be the work that married fathers steadfastly avoid doing. Married mothers not only carry out the lioness’s share of parenting work, whether they work for pay or not. They shoulder the additional burden of administering the endless minutiae if family life – a task which consumes untold gigabytes of a woman’s intellectual hard-drive. Husbands may go shopping, but wives still write the list, Dad may take baby to the playgroup, but Mum will enrol her, pack her nappy bag, organise her lunch, and settle her to sleep when she comes back home again” (p131).

Maushart’s findings are corroborated by more recent research by Dr Caroline Gatrell of Lancaster University (as interviewed by Kate Hilpern, The Guardian, 2^nd February 2008, in ‘Well, why haven’t my shirts been ironed?’): “It is still the case that the washing of clothes and bed linen and ironing are seen as a woman’s responsibility, as are things such as packing the lunchboxes and managing the kids’ activities, explains Gatrell. ‘This is despite the fact that the amount of housework trebles when you become a parent. In some ways, it is linked to maternity leave – the woman is there at home at the beginning and it becomes assumed that she is available to do everything’.

Of course there are men who do help out, often a great deal, Gatrell says. But here lies the problem: deep down, many see it as just that – ‘helping’ women fulfil the maternal role. Little wonder so many feel at least some angst about the woman returning to work.

‘This isn’t stuff they’d say outright or probably at all in front of their partners,’ says Gatrell. ‘In fact, most said they liked the idea of being with this independent woman who does her own thing. I think they genuinely want to be with an equal. But you spend some time with them, you chat away about these complex issues and sometimes some ambivalence comes out’.

It is easy to imagine Gatrell extracting people’s hidden beliefs and values, perhaps even surprising themselves at what comes out of their mouths. She has an unusual mixture of warmth and fervour. Her most-publicised finding in recent months is a stark contradiction of previous research that has always found that, despite more women returning to work after having babies, fathers remain work-oriented and distant from their children. Conversely, Gatrell has discovered that men are spending more time with their kids than ever before. The problem, which the media has labelled ‘the daddy wars’, is that what men are really doing is trying to reassert their power in the relationship. ‘Put simply, I found that some men feel disempowered because they have lost their traditional role as breadwinner and are seeking to reassert their authority in the home by becoming far more involved in childcare. They want to be the number one parent,’ she says.

What the press didn’t really pick up on, which surprised Gatrell, was her finding that these fathers ‘cherry pick’ the time they spend with their children. ‘Dads aren’t just spending more time with their kids; they’re spending more one-to-one direct time with them,’ she explains. ‘This is the critical bit for me – men’s desire to have an equal parenting role does not extend to child-related domestic chores such as washing clothes or packing lunchboxes’.

Indirect childcare is tedious and does not further fathers’ power in the household, she explains. ‘With one exception, all the mothers I spoke to found themselves responsible for most child-related domestic work’

Eleanor, a senior education manager, told Gatrell, ‘What’s really important is what has to be done every single day to keep the family ticking over. Women still bear the brunt of that, even women in professional jobs, because women are thinking ahead all the time. I’m thinking, ‘We haven’t got any bread for the sandwiches in the morning; we’ve run out of loo-roll.’ I make sure that the school uniforms are washed and ironed and all that sort of stuff – the boring detail of everyday life’.

A worrying consequence for women such as Eleanor, says Gatrell, is that while fathers get more quality time, mothers get less. She’s just too busy around the house. ‘The people I spoke to also said that they don’t have a lot of time for one another, and the women said they had no time whatsoever for themselves,’ she adds.

So strongly do some men feel about seizing all the quality time with their children that they even resent women for breastfeeding, according to Gatrell. ‘Some fathers regard it as an inconvenient barrier to the establishment of paternal closeness to babies,’ she says.

William, an architect, is typical in stating, ‘My partner is breastfeeding and that is the catch, I find. I’m generally holding him when he’s crying’.

One woman deeply regretted not breastfeeding her daughter – she felt she’d given in to her husband ‘elbowing’ his way into her maternal space. When she exclusively breastfed her son, her husband spoke of his relief when it stopped. ‘I found a very satisfying identity being an active parent with my daughter and I felt very sad, quite lost about not having this very direct involvement with my son,’ he said”.

Rosie Boycott, in The world is still organised to meet the wishes of men (The Guardian, 28^th February 2008), drawing on the results of a survey by Dr Gillian Paull, provides further confirmation: “The 1969 Divorce Act had meant that women could leave a marriage, confident that they wouldn’t be forced leave their children behind. The establishment of the Equal Opportunities Commission made it illegal to sack a woman for being pregnant and introduced statutory maternity pay.

We didn’t think it would be easy; even so, it did feel that we were finally entering a new world. Feminism, I always believed, made sense for both sexes. Wasn’t it just as much of a trap for a man to be consigned to go to work every day of his life, earning the money to support his wife and children, as it was for a woman to be relegated to stay at home and look after them? Surely, men would welcome living in a more equal world, where childcare and breadwinning could be shared between parents?

Thirty-six years on, the answer is, sadly – and shockingly – no. Far from wanting to share the childcare, men are still just as happy as my father was to leave the task to their partners. Before the arrival of children, more than four out of five (85%) working women in Britain are in fulltime employment, working more than 30 hours a week. But once they become mothers, the proportion is much lower: only a third (34%) of working mothers with pre-school children are employed fulltime, and only 41% of working mothers with a youngest child of school age”.

Once again the evidence speaks volumes: “Instead of sharing childcare, the proportion of men working fulltime increases once they have children. And women’s talents and skills are wasted as they get shunted sideways into part-time jobs, or no jobs, as they frantically juggle their lives to bring up their kids.

What this survey shows horribly clearly is that real equality between men and women is still a pipe dream. It only exists in the years when men and women are inhabiting the same planet as human beings, unencumbered by children, who have the right to sit at a desk – part of our modern work culture, which insists that you not only do your job but be seen to do it every hour of the day between nine and five. Once children enter the picture, this fragile veneer shatters, exposing the deep, sexist divide that still dominates our culture.

It now seems naive to remember my own optimism in those early feminist years. The dreams of universal childcare have remained just that, and the reality is a free market in which only the richest can afford the sort of childcare that means a working mother can fulfil herself as both a parent and a worker. The world, in short, is still organised to meet the wishes of men”.

Rage also deals with divorce: “MRAs assume women ought to be left at the mercy of their husbands in the event of divorce. I understand that they find the thought of having to give up a portion of their assets disquieting, but I imagine that fear is a little easier to deal with than the fear of being abandoned with no money and no job skills, which is something that many women, especially those in the generation before ours, are faced with. Men can’t expect the freedom to divorce dependent partners at will, and also the freedom to leave those partners with nothing with which to support themselves. And community property laws work both ways; if a woman earns a larger amount of money than a man, she may also be required to turn a portion of her income over to him after a divorce”.

For these unreconstructed and delusional chauvinists, women are nothing but disposable commodities and to be traded in for a newer model, as the cliché would have it, with impunity. Wouldn’t they just love to walk away, letting her fester in poverty and regret?

Rage’s debunking is particularly enlightening in relation to the law (note the figures on the number of women in positions of genuine power): “After a tradition of defining citizenship through maleness for over 2000 years, women have been awarded citizenship by men (despite the fact that legal rights purportedly transcend the rule of man) just in the last century or so in the western world. But equality before the law, which all men enjoy in America, is something that American women have not yet attained, despite being recently included in the category of “citizen” that ought to have guaranteed equality before the law according to the foundations of our own legal philosophy. We still, 43 years after the Civil Rights Act that awarded equal rights to all men under the law, do not have an Equal Rights Amendment for women. Additionally, as of today, men still make the laws in America; of 435 members of the House of Representatives, only 70 are women, and of the 100 members of the Senate, a mere 16 are women. For those who are worried about “legislating from the bench,” there is ONE woman on the Supreme Court. I find it difficult to take pity on men for their supposed lack of legal rights within a system that they have created, that they control, and that they administer according to their own needs”.

One last quote before moving on: “(…) these men see a zero-sum game when they look at relations between men and women. When women gain, they lose. MRAs are expressing the kind of anger that comes from feeling threatened but not being able to say clearly why. They feel entitled to the privileges they have come to see as their birthright, and when women want the same kind of treatment that they feel entitled to, they feel that their territory is being encroached upon. That mental process is understandable (though not excusable), but it’s intellectually weak and dishonest to argue that men’s “rights” are in danger. What these guys are doing is fairly transparent: they’re arguing for the maintenance of male entitlement and privilege and for the limitation of women’s rights vis-à-vis men, not for the protection of men’s rights. They can euphemize that in any terms they want to, but they still sound like a bunch of fucking crybabies”.

One of the real remedies to unwanted pregnancies rather than harping on about abstinence, the sickly romanticisation of girlhood innocence and our culture’s morbid obsession with virginal “purity” is putting an end to enforced ignorance about the mechanics of reproduction. Ex-pat Christine of Me, My Kid and Life in The French School System and Sex Education casts a critical eye over the French system, as relayed to her by her daughter: “In France, every teen has the right to free contraception and abortion without their parent’s permission and without needing to inform the parent. I wish the States had the same policy in place.

There are centres set up where teens can get free contraceptives and it’s nobody’s business but their own. Honestly, I’ve never seen a pregnant teen, in France, in the year-and-a-half I’ve lived here.

I want Sophie to have free and easy access to both contraception and abortion. If it’s her life or that of the unborn, I vote for Sophie’s life. She’s already here and her life matters just as much as anybody else’s and more so than someone who doesn’t even exist yet. Killing the future of one life in lieu of another makes no sense.

If Sophie was afraid to tell me she was pregnant, I’d much rather that she have a free, safe and legal abortion than finally confront me with the issue when she was four-to-five months pregnant, showing and it was too late to doing anything about it and then have that affect the rest of her future. Talk about oppression. Yikes!”

Refreshingly frank though it may be in comparison with, say, what passes for sex “education” in British schools, the lessons are only as good as the specific individuals in charge of giving them: “This speaker, a male gynaecologist, said that if a woman wasn’t excited by sex than it was her own fault because she wasn’t into it. I laughed when Sophie told me this. She knows how I feel about sex. Sex should be a fabulous encounter for both people and if the woman isn’t getting off then something is wrong because there are two people there and both should be sexually satisfied. I told Sophie that the man was clearly a bad lay and a selfish lover. If a man isn’t taking the time to make sure the woman is reaching orgasm he’s simply missing one of the most beautiful experiences in life… and as a result this man should be passed by.

It’s so important that parents have open communication with their children. Kids hear the most incredible things. They need us to balance things. They need us as their sounding boards. The male speaker/doctor said that if a man hits a woman she should leave. He says that if she doesn’t leave, then she deserves it. I was stunned when Sophie told me this. Of course, Sophie knew he was wrong and didn’t need to ask me about it, more she was relaying the highlights of the talk”.

Rape

Ken of The Feminist Pulse in a sensitive and moving examination Rape Is A Social Issue, discusses the ripple effect of the crime, its impact on friends and relatives: “(…) the utter devastation that comes along with knowing that this has happened to someone you love. I was completely powerless, both to prevent it, and also to fix it. I cannot make this go away. Its been four months, and still, even today while taking the city bus to school it was all I could do to keep from crying in front of everyone. As men, we are taught to be strong, to remain in control, well you can’t be strong in the face of this- it will tear you apart. Strength comes not from the ability to fight back the feelings; it comes from the willingness to experience them. Today, for the first time, it was an empowering sorrow. There are different types, I have found. Its not just tears, sometimes they are mixed with rage, despair. Sometimes the pain comes out in gasps, like dying. I don’t tell you these things so you will feel sorry for me. I tell this story, because I want people to understand that rape is not an isolated event, it is not just a single person who is hurt. It is her husband, her children, her parents”.

Marcella Chester of the indispensable abyss2hope catalogues the warning signs betraying a propensity to commit rape in Advice for Rape Survivors: Personal Safety: “What doesn’t help is the typical victim-blaming safety advice like don’t drink, don’t go to parties, etc. This advice/lecturing focuses on the rape victim’s behaviour when what is needed to improve your personal safety is to focus on the behaviour of rapists and could-be rapists and to have allies who will genuinely do the same.

Nobody sensible would blame a bleeding carjacking victim who is shoved out into a crime-ridden area if that crime victim were subsequently raped. Yet wrongful blaming is what happens to many rape victims. The trauma of rape can leave victims disoriented and defenceless.

Despite what many victim blamers want people to believe, when it comes to rape there is no neighbourhood or place which is guaranteed rapist-free. Rapes happen at wild parties and rapes happen in churches by those who are in positions of trust”.

Lamenting the binge-drinking “epidemic” in the UK, newspapers have printed photograph after photograph of young women draped senseless over benches in pedestrian areas as if post-pub crawl disorientation were the only situation in which any of us are at risk (the inference being that if we are attacked it is our own silly fault). Marcella forcefully puts paid to such misguided propaganda: “Any discussion of personal safety for rape survivors must include dangers which have nothing to do with alcohol. Rape victims who avoid alcohol and stereotypical dangerous places can be in as much danger as those who get drunk and pass out at a party.

It is the vulnerability due to trauma which brings out so many predators.

Unethical professionals such as clergy members and counsellors have raped those they are sworn to help. Some of these rapists rationalize that they are better people than rapists who took advantage of rape victims like me. Because the rape survivor may still be lost in the trauma which follows rape, alcohol and overt violence may not be needed.

Quietly raping a sober survivor who barely knows which way is up is real violence. I have heard of some men who told rape survivors that reconstructing their rape, with him as a safe stand-in for the rapist, will be therapeutic. Those who call rape survivors stupid for cooperating with someone who turns out to be a rapist are wrongly dismissing the impact of real trauma.

These professionals are likely to call their rapes and other sexual abuse an affair or a sexual relationship. This is a lie. In some states certain professionals are forbidden by law from having any sexual contact with their clients because of the level of danger for those clients. These criminal statutes don’t allow consent as a viable defence.

My advice for rape survivors who are still deep in trauma is to realize this danger and respect any sense that something isn’t right. Better to bolt from a room because something innocent triggered you than to stay because what is troubling you might be nothing. These types of rapists are likely the type who will use manipulation and isolation to disable you.

Any professional who asks a rape survivor to keep any secret about what the professional is doing or saying raises serious red flags. If helping professionals get offended at not being given the rape survivor’s complete trust, my advice is to find another professional”.

Dispatches from the Outcast Fringe

I settled upon this heading with tongue firmly in cheek, but a serious purpose in mind, namely that of accentuating how, for all our warm and fuzzy proclamations of sisterhood we sometimes push those who do not perfectly conform to our take on feminist philosophy to the periphery, leaving them marginalised. In the most general of terms, if we are guilty of attempting to impose a single vision in a sterile or exclusionary manner accompanied by an offhand dismissal as opposed to a genuine debate (and confrontation of our own shortcomings and biases) we should hardly be surprised if this provokes bitterness and anger. Perhaps certain mutually antagonistic positions can never be fully reconciled (the best example being the pro-/anti-porn divide), but I firmly believe our diversity is something to celebrate, not stifle. We shouldn’t be doling out disapproval – we have more than sufficient enemies ready to malign us as it is.

In a powerful and eloquent claims-staking, Lisa of Questioning Transphobia in Transphobia and Sophistry vehemently objects to being excluded: “Why do so many radical feminists waste their time trying to define trans women as not women, trying to characterize us in insulting, offensive, misogynist ways if you’re not transphobic? I mean the actual meaning of the word, not your shifted goalposts meaning. If that’s still too much for you, why the hell are you such bigots about us? Are we oppressing you? Are we perpetrating sexism? Does our position as migrants from one sex to the other (or, as with many transgender people, outside the gender binary entirely) grant us some unique patriarchal power?

There’s one thing that’s true about bigotry and prejudice that has always been true – you can’t trust the privileged to deny their privilege to the oppressed. You can’t trust this because the privileged are blind to their privilege, protective of it, or both. Men don’t like to admit to sexism, white people don’t like to admit to racism, and cis people don’t like to admit to transbigotry, transphobia, transmisogyny, you name it.

So when anyone – not just radical feminists, but anyone – proudly proclaims how they don’t accept trans women as real women, or don’t want us around, or construct elaborate theories about how we’re really patriarchal and gender oppressors, I find it difficult to take them at their word when they turn around and say “Oh, I’m not a bigot.” Please forgive me, but you’re not in a position to be the judge of that”.

She vividly conveys the distress of not being permitted to belong anywhere and the resulting spiritual and emotional homelessness: “My oppression comes from the fact that women are supposed to be A and men are supposed to be B, and while I was born male-bodied, I am A and that is wrong and bad, and I get this from mainstream society, from religion, from talk show hosts, from people cheering on the murder of trans women, from people who casually joke about the murder of trans women, and so on. From radical feminists, I get, “No, you’re really B, and you can never ever change, nor should you want to, because changing like that is wrong!” And then some of them accuse me of being a gender essentialist.

If you think that transgender, genderqueer, etc are about upholding the gender binary, you don’t understand that either”.

If you wish to acquaint yourself with the debate in greater depth, I recommend the original post on Buried Alive, Radfemphobia; belledame222 of Fetch me my axe in Still more people unclear on the motherfucking concept and a further response by Renegade Evolution, Transpeople.

George Norton of q-sputnik in Cyberqueer and the importance of transgender representations in the internet for gender politics furnishes us with a valuable and stimulating overview of the literature concerning the political potential of cyberqueer.

Renegade Evolution of the eponymous blog shatters preconceived ideas of the composition of the sex-positive camp in an entertainingly combative Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum: “Hehehe, you knew we’d get there sooner or later, right? The appearance and fucking issues? Well of course we would, because that’s what it all seems to come down to in so many ways. The older wiser feminists have it all figured out, have the ins and outs of appearance related issues down to a fine art and the politics of fucking mastered with the ease of a Machiavellian student. Because they are older and wiser and smarter or something. They know! They have seen! They long ago put away childish things! And it pains them, akin to torture, to see all these sex positive feminists co-opting and corrupting the movement, what with their heels and work out routines and short skirts, their “perky tits”-real or fake- and their eyeliner and lipstick. And oh yes, with all that sex talk! Who they’re banging, when they’re banging, how they’re banging- in such unfeminist ways! Engaging in BDSM and power dynamics and rough sex or even just plain old PiV intercourse with one or more people…gah…sometimes male people! With their blowjobs and anal sex and condom drives! With their ambivalence towards or even more dreadful, their support of, pornography and bondage art and alternate lifestyles.

Gads, maybe if those tramps would just stop fucking and worrying about their selfish orgasms maybe, just maybe, they would grow up and see the error of their ways and become real feminists and stop fucking up the movement, right?

Right?

Smirk. Hate to break it to you, but hell, not even all us sex positives have sex. Some are women in menopause, or have other reasons for not boinking like the drunken party girl bunnies you make us all out to be. Some of us see our sexuality as a very huge part of our female being. Oh, and we do see it as ours. Some of us look at all the window dressing as not only something we enjoy, but a damn good way- much like plumage in nature- to attract someone we are attracted to and want to fuck…solely because we want to fuck them! Because fucking feels good! Hell, maybe we are way less concerned with our own choices, made as adults, in regards to appearance and sexuality than you are! Maybe not every choice we have to make has to be a feminist one…especially if it denies us our own voices and opinions, our pleasures and our individuality, our sense of expression and a very real and large part of ourselves, or in one old sex poxes case, the way she happily makes a living. Maybe there is more to us as people than a cause. And hell, maybe the fact that we’ve not felt burned by men, or society, or the pat, or sex plays a little bit into it…Hell, no one else was gonna say that, so I figured I better”.

She joyously hurls a feline amongst the rats of the city skies: “Maybe it just makes us different. Thank god, goddess, and all the minor deities. Because I sure as hell could not live that way. I’ve gotten naked for and or fucked more dudes than most people can imagine, for fun and for money, I get degraded and screwed on film regularly, by choice. I’ve willingly cut up my body to have it look a way I not only find more attractive but is more man approved™, I wear heels even if they do hurt sometimes, I’ve lived and worked in absolute hell-holes, I’ve cleaned someone else’s blood and cranial fluid out of my carpets, and I would take all of that, the good and the bad, to the smug, condescending, grim desperation y’all seem to offer: a world where men are the absolute enemy, we’ve already lost the war, plans are things that exist in some nebulous place, and anyone who admits to liking conventional girly shit, unapproved sexual practices, or being attractive to the gender she is attracted to is a traitor and one day, will be up against the wall! Or, oh wait, she’s a deluded victim who cannot make choices or operate autonomously and one day, she will by crying on your shoulders…and then, and only then, will she have repented sufficiently and be allowed her own persondome”.

I agree that finger-wagging is a real turn-off: “I don’t think feminism is about some women telling other women how to dress, alter or adorn their bodies, how to earn a living, or who and how to fuck. I never have. Choice goes beyond abortion and all. And you know what else? I have yet, in all my deluded, fuck-obsessed years, to see any sex positive telling you how to dress, adorn yourselves, what jobs to have, or who and how to fuck. Imagine that? Most of us have overbearing elder figures in our lives, and didn’t come to feminism to find new ones. We came because we thought it was something positive”.

My only slight quibble is with the term “sex-positive”, as if those of us not out there wrapping ourselves around poles in skin-biting leather outfits were nothing but dowdy, fat frumps whose concept of undergarments is limited to granny bloomers with industrial-strength gussets, sublimating our desires by guzzling the umpteenth slice of cheesecake – but enough about boring old me!

Eliot Spitzer Scandal

Ah yes, Mr Clean’s comeuppance… Our political masters, so keen to meddle in every aspect of our lives with their moralising and petty rules, whereas none of them, regardless of affiliation, is as pure as the driven snow, not unless it happens to be snow that has been driven over by a lorry with dog excrement stuck between its treads and stained the pristine white accordingly.

The ever-witty Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane’s Political Madness regales us with An Ode to Eliot Spitzer, whilst Therapydoc of Everyone Needs Therapy in What Would Freud Say: Eliot Spitzer presents us with a mischievous, Sigmund-for-Dummies-style dissection of the disgraced sleaze-buster’s drives and motives. Here is but a brief sample: “The pundits keep saying, when they talk about Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York, recently indicted for soliciting the services of a high-priced prostitute,

What was he thinking?

So I have to wonder, What would Freud say?

Yes, even though his paradigm has melted away for me like good chocolate, when I think of sex and human behaviour, certain Freudian ideas come flooding back. We family therapists smile at Freud and Jung (although that Jungian concept, the collective memory, really appeals to me) and solidly reject the idea that the therapist should be an omniscient nod behind a screen, smoking a cigar, optimally.

But when it’s about sexual attachments, it’s Freud I turn to for an explanation, and I think you probably could use one, too. So let’s trot out some of that old-time psychoanalytic lingo. I’ll wait while you go and make a sandwich and grab a little Diet Coke if you want. Food is an object of attachment, if you talk Freud, beginning with breast milk”.

A Tapestry Woven of Multitudinous Threads

Lori Jewett of Between Us Girls in Ending Violence Against Women, cites some harrowing statistics compiled by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, urging us to support its campaign UNite to End Violence Against Women: “At least 1 out of 3 women in the world has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

For women aged 15-44, violence is a major cause of disability or death.

In a 1994 study, World Bank data showed that women age 15-44 had a greater risk of becoming victims of rape and domestic violence than they did of suffering cancer or being involved in a motor vehicle accident.

1 in 5 women will become a victim of rape in her lifetime”.

Louise of Socialist Unity rightly deplores the state harassment of Pauline Campbell, whose daughter died in Styal prison in 2003 and who has been arrested for the fifteenth time whilst protesting about another young woman’s suicide in the same institution, on this occasion charged with obstructing a public highway. As Louise writes: “Pauline is absolutely right when she says that this prosecution is vindictive and disgraceful. It is outrageous that this woman, who has been arrested 15 times, should be treated in such an inhumane way. She has courageously campaigned and highlighted the shocking reality of the number of women who have needlessly died in prison and who will continue to die.

Yet it’s Pauline who ends up in the dock and not Jack Straw”.

Kate Smurthwaite of Cruella Blog in Stop the Strip Pub Blog, showcases the movement to prevent Satchmo’s from being granted a licence to put on strip shows, the 26^th March deadline for protesting to the local authorities looming large. She outlines the key objections, which reveal the seamier side of the sex industry and its very tangible negative impact: “This area is very much family orientated with a large number of residents with children. It is not appropriate for such an establishment to be located in a family area;

There are a number of religious places of worship within close proximity to Satchimo’s. Additionally, I am aware that the premises directly adjacent to Satchmo’s’s is used during the week for educational purposes and at weekends as a place of worship. To locate a sex encounters premises is entirely inappropriate in such close proximity to places of worship;

In addition to places of worship in the vicinity I am also aware that there are a number of buildings used for educational purposes very close to Satchmo’s including schools and nurseries. To locate a sex encounters premises is entirely inappropriate in such close proximity to educational establishments;

There will be a substantial increase in noise and disturbance caused by patrons outside the premises smoking; and

I also am concerned that there will be an increase in harassment to residents, crime and disorder”.

Tali Shapiro of The Pin-Up Shop Blog scrummily illustrates for us the proposition that Gay Men Still produce the Best Beefcake.

Raymond of Money Blue Book on The Millionaire Matchmaker Show – Revealing Traditional Stereotypes About Men, Women, Money, And Love reviews the kind of programme I assiduously avoid (as I would find it profoundly depressing not to mention inane), waxing lyrical about its format: “You’re not going to find any feminist trailblazers on this show. What you’ll get is no-nonsense traditional views of what men and women want when it comes to love and relationships, especially when money is no limitation. Caveman tenets of lust, love, and attraction apply – with men being attracted to beauty, youth, and fun; and women being attracted to material possessions, confidence, and power. It’s the age old swap of money for beauty. Just from watching a few episodes, it’s clear that millionaire dollar men feel entitled to a higher standard and quality of women than common folk. As the show astutely points out, millionaires choose women the same way they would order a new car off the lot – they want the perfect, newest trophy model gift wrapped to suit their existing lifestyle without the flaws”.

Although he describes the programme as one of a genre of “trashy reality television shows”, I can’t help but feeling that he veers too uncomfortably close to endorsing the very stereotypes the title suggests we ought to be moving away from. How else am I to interpret an assertion like this?: “Whether the traditional values promoted by the show are right or wrong is not for me to say, but I think the reality is that despite the modern progress men and women have had in terms of human relations, in many ways we’ve stayed the same. Many commentators have blasted the show for perpetuating traditional stereotypical views of women and I understand why they are upset. But at the same time, the show is about hooking up men and women who want love, not about political correctness. Love is a crazy thing where traditional ideas still hold true”.

Or, referring to Patti Stanger: “According to Patti’s values for there to be matchmaking success, this means men need to be chivalrous, they need to be generous with their money, and they need to take charge and be confident with women. Females on the other hand are encouraged and taught that they must accentuate their physical qualities – if they have nice “assets” they must flaunt it, they must dress alluringly to appeal to male tastes, and they must show a little leg here and there – basically don’t dress like you’ve just left work. Another disturbing but perhaps real life lesson is that she also lectures women on the need to downplay their own professional accomplishments – basically if you are a doctor, never introduce yourself as one initially – because when it comes down to it, men don’t want to compete in that department”.

This smacks of, there’s no getting away from it gals, if you want happiness you have to give him what he wants (and that’s looks, not brains or opinions, dear). Set aside all your feminist qualms, downplay your intelligence, lighten up and simper and giggle as you flick your opulent tresses – you know I’m right. Ugh!

Ken of The Feminst Pulse contemplates the nature of activism in Do you consider yourself an activist?

Neena Chaudhry of Womenstake.org warns us of A Stealth Attack on Title IX.

Again some background for the uninitiated is useful:

“Fewer than 32,000 women participated in college sports prior to the enactment of Title IX, and today that number has expanded to more than 160,000 women. Female participation in high school athletics has increased from fewer than 300,000 to over 2.8 million. These opportunities have provided huge benefits to a new generation of female athletes. Playing sports promotes responsible social behaviour, greater academic success, and increased personal skills. Compared to their non-athletic peers, athletes are less likely to smoke or use drugs; have lower rates of sexual activity and teen pregnancy; have higher grades; and learn how to work with a team, perform under pressure, set goals, and take criticism”.

In spite of the positive effects listed in the foregoing: “In March 2005, without any notice or public input, the Department of Education issued a Title IX ‘Clarification’ that lowers the bar for what schools have to do to provide equal sports opportunities for women and girls. This new policy allows schools to show compliance with the law simply by sending an email survey to all female students and then claiming that a failure to respond indicates a lack of interest in playing sports”.

Moreover: “The new ‘Clarification’ shifts the burden to female students to show that they are entitled to equal opportunity. Prior law put the burden on schools that are providing women with less than their fair share of sports opportunities to show that they are nevertheless fully meeting the interests and abilities of their female students. But the new ‘Clarification’ shifts the burden to women, forcing them to prove that their schools are not satisfying their interests and that they are entitled to more opportunities”.

An increasingly popular tactic.

Chaudhry is completely justified in lambasting the manoeuvre: “The Clarification is the Department’s attempt to do under the radar what it was unable to do publicly—change Title IX. The notion that schools can decide whether women are interested in additional sports opportunities by sending a mass email is ridiculous. What if the email gets stuck in a female student’s spam filter or the student just doesn’t read it (hard to believe, I know)? The Department of Education thinks, in another Orwellian manoeuvre, that a failure to respond, even under these circumstances, shows that the student is not interested in playing sports. If that’s such a good idea, maybe the Department should propose using this method to decide whether schools should field men’s football and basketball teams”.

As a self-confessed computer gaming addict I empathised with the frustration expressed by Redwall33 of The Mind of Genevieve in I’d like to stab you, but I might mess up my hair! I completely understand the rapid onset of irritation after the initial enthusiasm about a new Facebook application called Knighthood. The default assumption on the part of programmer teams is mired in the dim and distant past when only pimply adolescent males lurked in darkened rooms on sunny afternoons whilst their more athletic peers engaged in infinitely more serious pursuits, such as the ritual combat of kicking a leather ball around a pitch. Those responsible for the graphics always give the impression of having graduated from the Lara Croft School of Design…that they can only overcome their reluctance to include female characters at all by endowing them with delectable (and for the most part grossly exaggerated) attributes.

Redwall33 assesses the skimpy outfit in which the Lady is clad: “Contrast her with the male knight (and the Baron). You could not tell what either of the male knights’ hair colour or style was. But the female knight’s has to be long and blond. The men were covered and battle-ready–the girl has NO chainmail and nothing but a tiny dress. The dudes get huge swords, her weapon looks like a glorified bread knife. Her pose isn’t active, it’s come-hither. All of the men had bodies which showed physical readiness to fight–I obviously have nothing against skinny girls as I am one myself, but I’m well aware of the fact that I’m not exactly in shape to get into life-and-death battles with people. Knights should have muscles. If they can draw in her bosom, they can give her some biceps, triceps, quadraceps…
Oh, and she doesn’t have a shield. Tiny blade, no protective clothing, and NO SHIELD”.

And as for the viscountess: “My first thought upon seeing this was–oh, so she’s wearing a ball gown now? But no, it’s not, it’s just a swirling cape accompanied by plate armour (finally real metal stuff) fitted to look like a ball gown top. Her arms are still mostly bare, her upper chest region is still completely exposed (because showing off the cleavage is FAR more important than protecting the throat, don’tcha know?) Sword’s good, I suppose…still no shield…

But back to the cape…what’s up with this apparent billowing of it? If the wind is affecting her cape, it should be affecting her hair (which for once is not ridiculously long and blond–does having more power make your hair darker? How’s THAT for stereotyping?) It’s not, though–which makes me think that the dudes who drew it must’ve thought: “Well, she’s got a seriously cool sword and some actual armour now…let’s make her cape look like a princess dress to accentuate the fact that chicks STILL can’t fight!”

Greg of Greg Laden’s Blog cogitates over whether including images of semi or fully naked women as illustrations in serious blog posts is an inherently exploitative act in Squat toilets, Sexy People, and The Nature of the Internet.

If he is genuinely recommending the Sociological Images: seeing is believing website then what he writes is either slightly baffling (or subtly ironic). Comparing the fortuitous traffic spike resulting from a picture of a squat toilet (the Beijing Olympics an occasion when many surfers anticipate having to avail themselves of such facilities for the first time in their lives) with the traffic spike that inevitably follows when naked female flesh is slightly disingenuous. The latter takes place in a context of relentless exploitation, and is therefore no coincidence. In other words, no parallel can be drawn unless you completely ignore the cultural backdrop. Oglers attracted to the site by a photograph of a famous model probably have the attention span of the proverbial newt – no offence to small amphibians intended. They will feast their eyes and quickly move on. You would have to look at the number of minutes spent on the page to gauge whether the engagement with the actual contents of the site went beyond consuming the image. Whilst it is sad that serious posts are overlooked, the majority of Internet users are not particularly interested in them, apparently. Unless they are trawling to crib for essay assignments.

We live in a social environment where the commodification of women is rife – some members of the female sex might earn a tidy profit from collaboration/ collusion, from putting their bodies on display and they are perfectly entitled to do so – I, for one, am, not about to sit in judgement upon them – they have to make a living somehow and posing for the titillation of men is one avenue open to them in the patriarchy.

Greg invites us to examine the question of each poster’s motive rather than whether inclusion of such images deliberately perpetuates exploitation. – Greg himself pleads innocence by reconstructing the circumstances leading up to his decision in detail (in the course of which he reminds us of his credentials: “I was engaged at the time with developing a course on gender, sexuality and race (yes, they are connected topics), a course which I later taught on a regular basis, to widespread acclaim, for several years”). His motive was therefore “unsullied”.

In his case, the choice of image resulted from one of his preoccupations at the time, pregnant women. Since he was writing about why no male pill has materialised, he could potentially have culled the poster for Junior (1994) with a swollen-bellied Arnie to comic effect. For me, this would have been the more obvious choice.

The power of representations derives from their cumulative effect. Each individual picture acts like a Foucauldian micro conduit. Gorgeous women are held up for emulation, admiration (all the better to sell cosmetics and surgical procedures to you, my dear…), reinforcing the message that a woman’s value derives from her appearance, not her intellect. From her childbearing function, not her unique and precious individuality.

Greg wonders: “Was this exploitative and objectifying of me? I can tell you, since I was there, that if it was, I was acting as a dumb cog on a gear running in a massive machine of patriarchal oppression. Indeed, [Elle] McPherson would presumably also have been a dumb cog on one of those gears as well, because she probably did not do this shoot at gunpoint”.

In a second contribution, Board Room Gender Gap, Greg publicises a study published by the Women’s Executive Circle of New York on the glass ceiling in businesses in New York State: “The findings indicate that while about half the workers in these companies are women, less than 15 per cent of the board and executive officer positions are held by women”.

Management stubbornly remains a male preserve. For the fiscal year 2006: “On boards of directors, women represent less than 16 per cent of the 1,129 board seats in the 100 largest public companies in New York; 14 percent have no women; 24 percent have one woman; and 21 percent have three or more women.

Women serve as executive officers in less than 12 percent of the 354 executive officers in the 100 top public companies in New York; 67 companies have no women executive officers; eight companies have two or more women executive officers; and four companies have a woman serving as CEO”.

Tellingly: “The companies given top marks for women leadership are Avon (47 percent of board directors and executive officers are women), The New York Times (38 percent), Estée Lauder (35 percent), Ann Taylor Stores (33 percent) and NYSE Group (31 percent)”.

What would a Carnival of the Feminist be without a contribution from the Founding Mother, Natalie Bennett of Philobiblon? In Women, nature and history: combining my interests, she reviews Sylvia Bowerbanks’ Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England with her trademark blend of balanced and judicious analysis, sincere appreciation and a knack for singling out the most entertaining and intriguing passages. Just enough to whet your appetite. It is a conspiracy to bankrupt me, I swear – Natalie only ever gives blogroom to the kind of book I want to grace my already groaning shelves…

Librarylapin of The Feminist Pulse shows how Youtube does not have to be nothing but a sprawling archive of sexist rubbish in Re-Genderication.

Lisa Sabater of Awaerness Blog likewise unearths a Youtube link worth watching in Searching for Scandal, I Found Angela Davies.

Since we are in Youtube mode, I cannot resist the temptation to link to an excerpt from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the outrageous, irreverent and oh-so-deadly swipe at religion and patriarchal pomposity, Every Sperm is Sacred

Escaping from the radiant sunshine and relentless din of the traffic outside, I took refuge in the British Library café, the perfect backdrop for a serious and stimulating conversation where, over a medium latte, I had the great privilege of talking to Professor Liz Kelly of London Metropolitan University, one of Britain’s foremost experts on violence against women.

 

Chameleon: Could you tell me a little bit about your background and the research you have been involved in?

LK: I come from a working class family in the north of England; I’m the first woman in my family to go to university and I do find it astonishing that not only did I do that, but I ended up a professor. I never had a career plan about academia and I certainly didn’t have a career plan to be successful in academia. I came to feminism because I was pregnant when I was nineteen – I got pregnant the first time I ever had sex. It was consensual, it wasn’t an issue, but I was still negotiating my way out of Catholicism, and so whilst I’d got as far as abortion was OK for other women, it certainly wasn’t OK for me, so instead of going to university at nineteen, I had my daughter. I don’t regret it now at all because I did something different at university than I would have done and I have a sister who is also a daughter. I feel very lucky that we got to spend her childhood together at a time where I wasn’t trying to do two things at once. What I did was be around her and become a feminist, and those two things were actually quite compatible. How I became a feminist was through going to a meeting of a women’s liberation group – reluctantly – I didn’t think it had anything to do with me, whereas of course, it had everything to do with me and changed my life. I have always been somebody who loves ideas and talking about ideas, but they’re never enough. I want to do something. I want to make a difference, so, within about a year, I was itching to do something with these ideas and someone came to talk about whether we might need to have provision for abused women in the small town that I lived in. It sounds ridiculous now to say this, but we didn’t know; we didn’t know whether there were any women who were experiencing that kind of violence in the town where we lived, so we had to go and ask lots of services whether they ever encountered anybody and in the end we opened the second shelter outside of London in this small town called Norwich. Since then my academic life and my activist life have always centred around issues of violence, but, from the time I did my PhD, I’ve been trying to look at violence against women as a whole, the connections between forms of violence – you can isolate them conceptually, but actually in women’s lived experience they’re not, they have histories of encounters with violence, sometimes with the same perpetrator, sometimes with different ones, and so I have worked with this idea of the continuum, that there is a continuum of kinds of violence on the conceptual level, from the normalised and almost acceptable through to the obviously criminal and lethal, but also a continuum in women’s lives, that some of us are relatively fortunate and that we only encounter the low level kinds of violence. They still teach us lessons in femininity and in the gender order. Then there are other women whose lives are suffused with brutality and who I think struggle to have a sense of personhood in the aftermath of all of that. There are obviously women who are killed, but there are also women who I think take their own lives because they can’t live with the history of what’s happened to them and its meanings and how they feel others see and treat them because of it. So I would say my intellectual and activist life is connected to these issues in a very profound way. It’s connected to all aspects of it, both the normalisation and in certain circumstances glamorisation of violence in popular culture and what that means for all of us, but particularly what it means for young women and men growing up with that cultural discourse, a very strong cultural discourse, through to working with women who have actually killed their abusive partners. For the last almost twenty years, in fact it is twenty years this year, which I find very scary, I’ve worked in a research unit, which I’m now director of, called the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit. We were the only research unit in the UK, and Europe, that looked across all forms of violence against women and also linked it to abuse in childhood. We’re still quite rare in doing that. We’ve worked on domestic violence; we’ve worked on trafficking; we’ve worked on prostitution; we’ve worked on child sexual abuse and in the last eight or ten years we have dedicated ourselves to working on rape. With the death of Sue Lees [author of Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial] there was really nobody in the UK, apart from Jennifer Temkin [author of, inter alia, Rape and the Legal Process] working in the legal field, who was actually researching rape. We carried out an analysis for Claire Short before the Labour Party won the election in 1997, in which we demonstrated that – and we didn’t know this at the time – we’d had an unbroken increase in reporting here in the UK, a slight increase in prosecutions, but a virtually static number of convictions and what that means over time is that your conviction rate falls year on year on year and part of what we’ve committed ourselves to doing is not just exposing that, but also trying to explore what’s going on and why that might be the case. We’ve had a number of pieces of research where we’ve tried to look at what we think is going on, also to look at it in terms of Europe, and we’re just about to start a project with colleagues from seven different countries in Europe where we simultaneously track a hundred cases in our own systems and see whether the same things happen at the same points in time or not – that’s exciting.

Chameleon: That sounds really interesting. You talk about low-level violence, how do you define it? Is it wolf whistling in the street when a woman walks past a group of builders?

LK: I meant low-level in the sense that it doesn’t result in a physical injury, or a physical harm. There are, however, harms connected to it which are more social and psychological. They are enactments of masculinity, a particular kind of masculinity, at women’s expense. It also includes things like the presence of pornography in the workplace, the pressure by partners to look at pornography when women don’t want to, a whole series of intimate intrusions, which don’t involve any kind of physical or sexual assault on the body.

Chameleon: Is Susan Brownmiller’s analysis in Against Our Will [Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976] of rape as a weapon to keep women in line still holds true? Or has any progress away from this been made in the meantime?

LK: I think as a piece of feminist rhetoric – and we need rhetoric – it was actually profound, challenging and remains important. As a sociologist and a researcher, I don’t think it’s sufficient to understand the motivations of men, or why some men don’t. I am increasingly thinking that in critical men’s studies what researchers ought to be doing is looking at why some men don’t buy into hegemonic masculinity, and it’s not just that they are from a subordinated group, it’s that they make conscious choices. Why do they do that? What’s the social context in which they make those choices? What I think is most important about it was what she said afterwards, the fact that some men rape, all men benefit, because all men benefit from the social control that it then exerts on women and women’s behaviour – and they benefit from the male protection myth. At a very complex, often unspoken level, women seek the protection of a male partner to stave off the supposed threat from the predatory stranger. Ironically we know that she’s actually more at risk from the male partner, which is not to say that there aren’t predatory men – there are – but what we know more and more is they’re not the stereotypical stranger. They’re quite smart, clever men, who target women in particular ways, in particular contexts and they’ll have strategies that they adapt, depending on whether they’re in a bar, or at a party, or whatever. I’m interested now in exploring those complexities of male behaviour across the entire spectrum, from the ones who eschew the powers that are invested in them to ones that exercise them as a sense of entitlement and then to the few who, one could say, have some kind of diagnosable mental health issue, who are not actually acting rationally.

Chameleon: When we talk about rape myths, the image is always of the pathological stranger, the man who commits the rape is always cast as a demon or a deviant, but that isn’t always the case, is it? A kind of background violence exists.

LK: It’s very rarely the case, which is not to say that there aren’t some men who fit that stereotype. There are. The trouble is that the media, and to an extent also popular fiction, present them as much more commonplace and every day than they actually are, because they give you the dramatic material that you want in a film or in a book. The fact that the guy next door is an everyday sexist isn’t dramatic enough. Even feminist authors, I think, find it difficult to write the everydayness of a lot of violence and I would say the fiction writers who have done so most powerfully and most consistently are actually African-American women in the US and also some Indian women writing fiction in India. I don’t understand why some of my friends are so preoccupied with reading about serial killers. There’s a very odd engagement with that by some feminists. I wonder whether that means that, inadvertently, we get caught up in some of these mythologies too, even though we know rationally that they distort. But they have a very powerful cultural resonance. Maybe it’s that they symbolically represent the kind of threat that women perceive. I think it’s interesting that we’ve moved away from cultural representations of what the majority of violence is to this extreme. I also think it’s probably a cultural response to the feminist challenge in a way. Our challenge was, sorry, no, these are everyday guys, these are our partners, our fathers, our brothers, our uncles, our work colleagues, the men we sit next to on the Tube, and I think that was a very shocking message. I think there was a point at which in the Eighties a willingness existed to engage with it on some level. Increasingly I feel we are pulling away from that recognition. Because everybody now wants to use the word paedophile. I hate that word, no feminist should ever use it because it literally means “lover of children”. I can’t think of anything more misnamed. But we should also not use it precisely because it distances people from the message we were trying to get across, that it’s not these weird deviant guys, it’s our fathers, our grandfathers, the guy next door, the music teacher, the sports coach, the religious leader. These are the men who abuse and they get away with it precisely because of their normality. The more we focus on these weird guys, I think, the less children are protected.

Chameleon: Because you’re homing in on the one who doesn’t fit in, who’s hanging around the playground, rather than, as you say, the father or the brother who’s sneaking into the bedroom at night and wreaking havoc.

LK: Absolutely, and their advantage is that they have access. Most of the reason these guys can do it and can do it often is that they have regular access and legitimised access to children or women.

Chameleon: They are invisible, whereas the “paedophile” is very visible indeed. If you look at the articles in the Daily Mail, they’re terribly hostile towards and dismissive of feminism. What a surprise! For example they would say that Brownmiller’s contentions in the past were merely that, contentions and that we’ve got equality now, so why don’t we just shut up and get on with life? How do we counteract this kind of argument?

LK: My response to that would be if we had equality, I would shut up, I would be very happy to shut up. I wish I could think that in my lifetime I would have the opportunity to shut up, but everything tells us that we don’t have equality, from the evidence from our most recent Women in Work Commission, which showed that the gender pay gap hasn’t reduced significantly for the last fifteen years, we had a fall, but then it stayed static, to the fact that we have more reported rapes than we have ever had in this country. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there are more rapes, but it certainly doesn’t mean that there are less, and if the Daily Mail is right, then there should be less. I still encounter women, both students and in other places where you can see they don’t have the same sense of entitlement, the same sense of worth as men. I still sit on the Tube and men take up three times as much space as women do.

Chameleon: (Laughs) They spread their legs aggressively.

LK: Absolutely. Space invaders, as somebody calls them. I think it’s those things, things that you notice every day – if we really had equality, they wouldn’t happen. Men wouldn’t need two or three times as much space as women. They might need a little bit more if they are significantly taller, but they don’t need two or three times more.

Chameleon: If people read the Daily Mail and they start getting lulled into complacency by its constant barrage of claims that we’ve achieved equality, how can we then overcome such complacency and the denial of inequality that’s implicit in the articles?

LK: I think we should take the fact there is such a consistent and deliberate engagement as evidence of success. I don’t agree that we should just talk the language of backlash and undermining. It’s not necessary to do that if you don’t think that something is changing and you’re trying to resist change. We should see this as part of the process of change and transformation – our gender order, our patriarchy or whatever we want to call it, is changing and this change is contested. It is contested at all sorts of levels. It’s contested at the level of individual relationships, it’s contested in classrooms and it’s contested in the media. We have to be smarter about how we engage with that. The response of some women is to be really frustrated and angry that it’s happening rather than to engage with it and to make sure that there’s not just one voice. For example, can we find a journalist in the Daily Mail to whom one could feed some different information and who might develop a slightly different voice in the newspaper? You’re not going to absolutely change the political tone of a newspaper, but you can affect some of the content. I don’t do enough of this, I know I don’t, but I do think we have to find smart ways of engaging with these contested areas and we have to do more. Robin Morgan once said that if every feminist wrote a letter a day to the newspapers, or to their political representatives we would be a serious force to be reckoned with and it’s still true. If every day each of us did a small piece of activism about what moved us the most we would see different voices. Not every letter gets published, not every response or little campaign has an impact, but the more there are the more there is a sense that yes, there are these voices of resistance, but they’re not going uncontested. There is still a women’s movement. That’s how you sense that there’s a women’s movement because you sense women engaging in disputation in the public sphere. I think we got pulled into establishing organisations working at more strategic and policy levels and I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done that, we should have done it and we need to continue doing it, but we also need to do the things that seem smaller, not so significant, that actually make those who are not feminists feel that there is a feminist voice. Because otherwise they don’t hear or see it.

Chameleon: Or they get a very distorted notion of what that voice involves with phrases like “screaming sisterhood” or the image of the feminist with three moustaches and who only ever walks around in dungarees and bovver boots.

LK: Yes. I think it would be interesting to find out how far those images actually resonate with people because they are so extreme and so unlike real women whom they must encounter and they must see on some level. What is the rhetorical power of it and how long does it last? Does it last long enough to make them smile when they read that particular piece in a newspaper, but that’s all? Or does it have a deeper de-legitimising message? And how does that operate?

Chameleon: My impression is that they’re trying to undermine feminists and feminism, which I suppose could be looked on as a recognition, however implicit, of the fact that we’ve achieved something.

LK: And that we’re considered to be a threat. It always was thus. I sometimes talk to young women about the fact that we never ever were anywhere close to a majority; we were always a small minority. The question was, did you make enough noise? Did you do things that were newsworthy or challenging, and did we have a message that was interesting? But we were never, never ever I think anywhere close to a majority. You could have polls about particular issues where a majority of women would say they agreed about equal pay, they agreed about childcare, but if you asked them were they a feminist, they would say no. That’s OK. I don’t think we have to have the majority of women saying they’re feminists. We do have to have the majority of women on the same page about the direction that they want to go and the rights that they think women ought to have, as well as supporting, holding on to those rights if they’re threatened. That’s where we need the majority of women. They’re never going to be part of a movement that is so amorphous. That’s not the ambition, the ambition must be that they feel that feminist perspectives speak to them and of them.

Chameleon: We were talking about feminists being perceived as a threat. If you look at what the newspapers are printing now about abortion, using advances in medicine as an excuse to try to erode our right to terminations – to return to the backlash – it does seem like there’s a shift in the offing to try to assault the rights that we’ve managed to obtain through the work of feminist activists in the past. Do you think that’s a misreading of the situation, or do you think that there might be something to it?

LK: I think there’s always an attack on abortion and I think it’s always orchestrated by fundamentalist Christians in unholy alliances with other groups depending. I don’t think they have any chance of succeeding in a European country other than those where women still don’t have the right, such as Poland, for example, or where the right disappeared at that moment of transition. I can’t see, in any Western European country, where the right to abortion has been legislated for that it could be lost. I do think there are ways that inroads can be made into the number of weeks, the hoops that you’ve got to jump through in order to get one, how much of a right it is or how much of a bureaucratised, difficult process it’s made to be, so I think it’s possible for those groups, the Christian Right, to make it more difficult for women to achieve the right, to exercise the right and in so doing prevent some women from having an abortion, because the barriers are made so complex that women who are feeling ambivalent are deterred. Most women feel ambivalent on some levels about having an abortion. It’s not an easy decision; none of us make it without a heavy heart, so the more barriers that are placed there the more this can affect the ambivalence and shift it away from the abortion rather than towards it. So I think they can have an influence in that more subtle way. I don’t think we’re going to lose the right. Instead, the ability to exercise the right can be affected, which is a slightly different thing.

Chameleon: One of the aspects that has been highlighted in recent articles is that doctors are increasingly either invoking their conscience to refuse to perform an abortion, or they just say, “Oh well, there’s no money in it, there’s no prestige in it” or “We doctors are trying to save life, not destroy it”. The resources available for abortions could dry up.

LK: I think that’s a very convenient argument for the Right to make. I’m not sure what I think about this, because on the one hand, I think we ought to be able to require doctors to deliver the health service that they are employed to deliver. On the other hand, I would not want to go to an incredibly committed Catholic doctor and try to get him to give me an abortion, so in terms of my dignity, my integrity I don’t want to have to ask for it from that person. I think the more we move into the subtleties and complexities of the positions, the more we have to move away from absolutes and the more we have to negotiate the balance between the right that I have and that I want to exercise in a way that doesn’t stigmatise me, that doesn’t make me feel bad and what we have the right to demand of people we are paying to deliver a health service. It’s not always obvious which way to make that work. I do think that if you’re going to go into gynaecology you have to be willing to carry out this procedure. If you’re not, then don’t be a gynaecologist. There are lots of other fields of medical expertise that doctors could develop, so again we need to think in a smarter, strategic way about it. I say this because I have a father who is a fundamentalist Catholic and, although I love him very much, we do clash about issues and we have to agree to differ about them. I’m never going to change him; he’s never going to change me, so how do we reach some kind of accommodation where the things that we do share, the connections we do have aren’t destroyed by this other thing. On particular occasions sometimes they are because it’s too fraught. Maybe what we need to be focusing on is how do we let these doctors practice medicine in the ways that they are skilled to do, but don’t let them deny services to women who want them. I would say the same about contraception as well. I would say that if you’re a Catholic who doesn’t believe in contraception then you can’t practice certain kinds of medicine. There are lots of Catholics who square their conscience in their own lives, let alone in anybody else’s, in different ways and not everybody sees that as a point of doctrine, but if you do, how then do you provide appropriate health care?

Chameleon: If we turn to Sue Lees and her wonderful book Carnal Knowledge, she talks about the stranger rape myth [The reference is to the following passages from Carnal Knowledge: Rape on Trial, Revised Edition, London, The Women’s Press, 2002: “One explanation for the drop in the conviction rate seems to lie in the fact that a steadily increasing proportion of reported rapes do not conform to the stereotypical rape scenario of the psychopathological stranger rapist, seizing women in dark streets. A far higher proportion of the women reporting nowadays are, by contrast, raped by men they know, often in their own homes, and these are precisely the cases where it is most difficult to secure a conviction (…) Such acquaintance rapes have increasingly been termed ‘date rape’ by the media. Such a term carries the implication that such rapes are not as serious as ‘stranger rapes’, but there is no evidence to support this. There is, however, evidence that acquaintance rapes can be just as traumatic as stranger rape for the victim” (pxii).
And: “Most of the women were raped by men they knew. Of these, more than half were friends, colleagues, neighbours or casual acquaintances – men with whom they had never had consensual sex. Most assaults appear to have been carefully planned. Men approached the women in a variety of situations, but most commonly in the social setting of a pub, club or party. Many women were taken unsuspectingly to a place where the rapist would not be disturbed. With regard to the men the victim knew well or fairly well, first contact with the victim was most likely to be made in the man or woman’s home (60 per cent), or an inside public place (17 per cent), and least likely to be made on a date (3 per cent). Yet many people believe that a woman who goes to the home or flat of a man on the first date implies she is willing to have sex. Others believe that it is the woman’s fault if she gets herself into the situation where she is likely to be raped”, p11]. These myths are really very tenacious and persistent so how can we overcome the prejudices contained in the misconception that rape, “real rape” or whatever label people want to put on it, has only happened when it involves a stranger that jumps on you from the bushes? What can we do about counteracting that, because to my mind that’s the undercurrent in all of these articles in the Daily Mail when they cast aspersions on the victims. There’s a chronic problem of the justice system not believing the women: when it comes down to her word against his, it always seems to be his word that prevails.

LK: There are two things here. I want to come back to the “her word against his” question, but I suppose I want us to move away from just thinking about these issues in terms of myth to actually thinking about them in terms of how rape has been historically constructed, both legally and in terms of heterosexual ideology. It has been constructed as this narrow range of behaviour in order to protect the more coercive aspects of heterosexuality. We need to take seriously therefore the challenge that we’re actually making. This isn’t just about myths, this is actually about challenging the foundational principle and set of practices that maintain a particular kind of masculinity and maintain certain relations between men and women. That’s why they’re so tenacious, that’s why the beliefs and constructions are so tenacious, because they are at the foundation of intimate relations between men and women. Sometimes we remember this. Sometimes I talk about sexual violence as the fault line of patriarchy and that, in challenging it, we are exposing the ways in which gender relations are coercive, unpleasant and harmful to women. When we do it well, it’s very powerful and very disruptive to the gender order. Sometimes we forget that that’s what we’re doing and almost get caught up in only talking about rape in the criminal sense. I don’t excuse myself from this: there are ways in which doing particular kinds of research, or trying to influence law reform reflect that. You are on a terrain where at some level you have to work with the discourse as it is and attempt to push it further. Underneath, as feminists, our challenge is far deeper, far more profound. On some level the responses in the Daily Mail, from the Right come from a maybe even implicit understanding that that’s actually what’s going on, this is about saying we no longer support male entitlement. You do not have the right to sex, you don’t have the right to take it, you don’t have the right to buy it, sex should be negotiated, it should be communicative and it involves two parties who have the same rights and responsibilities. We’re not there yet, but that’s our challenge. It’s not an inconsiderable challenge and we need to remember that, we need to remember that it questions behaviour that men and boys are taught to take for granted, that they can just behave like that, it’s OK. We are in that sense a threat to privileging this kind of masculinist sexuality. One of the horrible paradoxes and ironies at the moment is that women are being invited to pretend that they can operate like this…

Chameleon: Raunch culture!

LK: …and I think it’s an illusion, but it’s also an invitation, “You can behave like men too, you can have sex with no consequences”. Unfortunately, to have sex in that way means something different still if you’re a woman than it does if you’re a man. I also know young women, young lesbians who want to call themselves bois [See Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, New York, Free Press, 2005, especially, From Womyn to Bois, pp118-138] and think that somehow being sexist about other women shows how cool they are. I find it a kind of paradoxical tragedy in a way. At the same time I don’t think it helps just to be outraged, I think we have to engage in critical conversations with them in the same way that we need to have critical conversations with young men about what does this mean? What kind of relationships do you want? I also want to ask what’s transformative about it?

Chameleon: It simply shores up the old order. It’s just you taking a slice of the privilege without contesting the privilege.

LK: Exactly. It’s some women wanting to claim male privilege in relationships with other women. That’s not very transformative. Business as usual. It’s just that the sex of one of the players has changed.

Chameleon: So what should we be doing? Let’s say a feminist mother has a boy and she wants to bring him up to respect women and have a different view of relations between men and women. She can be as careful and honest about trying to bring this boy up in a different way and yet we are embedded in this culture that does everything to undermine such an upbringing.

LK: I think we mustn’t be totally pessimistic because if everything were so totally determined there would be no feminists. Everything is not totally determined and we all know – we might not know very many – but we all know the odd good man here and there, so it is important to work out how they get where they do. One of the things I say at the end of talks to general audiences these days is that we’re never going to change the situation if we continue to excuse the worst of men and not expect the best. I give them an example of what I think the best is, and it’s the example of two sons, friends of mine who are now in their early twenties. Feminist mothers, lesbians, the boys had opportunities to reject conventional assumptions. It’s not been easy or without conflict, but there’s always been an engagement. Both of these young men are found by their mothers, when they come down on Sunday morning, sleeping on the sofa. They’ve got used to what it’s about now, but at first they asked what’s going on. The sons had been out in a mixed group with a young woman. They knew her, but not very well, she was getting really drunk. They didn’t trust their friends not to take advantage of her so they brought her home, she’s asleep in their room and they’re on the sofa. That’s the best [Chameleon smiles warmly in approval]. It ought not to be a shock, you ought not to smile, it ought to be ordinary, but it’s not. Once that’s the norm, then we can shut up [We both laugh]

Chameleon: Germaine Greer wrote an article in 2006 about rape [The reference is to Rape, The Independent on Sunday, 2^nd April 2006: “The law of rape is anachronistic, unworkable and should be struck down. Tinkering with it has resulted in a huge expenditure of resources and effort by police forces which have little enough of either, in return for no improvement whatsoever in women’s chances of redress. The fault lies in the very concept of rape itself.
The crime of rape is not committed against the victim, but against the state, the victim is Exhibit A in the case of Regina vs the rapist. As a piece of evidence, the victim must be interrogated and tested in every possible way, because rape is considered to be so grave, second only to murder.
It is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous, but men. The only weapon that counts in rape is the penis, which is conceptualised as devastating. Yet a man can do more harm with his thumb than he can with his thin-skinned penis. But it is his penis that is to him the symbol and instrument of his potency. The notion of rape is the direct expression of male phallocentricity, which women should know better than to accept.
If you talk to raped women, they usually resent all the other insults that accompanied the rape more than the unwanted presence of a penis in the vagina. The forcing of a penis into a mouth, for example, is not rape but sexual assault, yet a victim may resent it more; likewise forcible buggery, ejaculating on to the face or breasts, and so forth. In some cases, what remains in the memory and continues to perturb years after the event are the words a rapist forced his victim to say”.
Her article continues: “There is a solution, but it is not recognised as such by feminists or legislators. That is to abolish the crime of rape altogether, and instead to expand the law of assault to include sexual assault in varying degrees of gravity; so that, for example, mutilating assaults on children would be recognised as many times graver than penetration of a grown woman”]. She thinks that rape legislation as it stands at the moment should be abolished altogether. I guess that when she wrote the piece she wasn’t aware that this had already been done in Canada.

LK: Yes, Germaine is a feminist institution here and she’s sometimes brilliant and so insightful, and sometimes she doesn’t do her homework. She’s not kept pace with what’s happened. What has happened here in terms of sexual offences legislation is actually quite interesting. We’ll come back to that later. She’s making this argument that it should be assault. This was the argument that was made in the 1970s, that somehow the fact that it was a sexual offence made it different and it shouldn’t be different, we should just say it’s a crime of violence because if we say it’s a crime of violence there wouldn’t be a focus on the woman and her behaviour. Feminists in Canada, the United States and in Australia took this very seriously and campaigned to change their law and to have it made into assault, but it was a sexual assault. It’s not the same. They carried out law reforms in which they had gradations of sexual assault in the same way that we have gradations of physical assault. What’s happened is that the stranger attacks are the ones that are prosecuted at level one and the assaults by partners and ex-partners are at level two or three.

Chameleon: It should be the other way around.

LK: This distinction between real rape and not real rape is absolutely encoded in how law operates. That would be my major argument for not doing it because if you actually look at the sociological data – a lot of which they didn’t have then – what we need to remember is that we didn’t understand the dimensions of any of this – fully – in the 1970s. We didn’t know how common all of these forms of violence are, nor did we know then that the vast majority of perpetrators are men whom we know. We didn’t know that. If you look at Susan Brownmiller’s book a lot of it, not all of it, but a lot of it has a presumption that it is a stranger. We have learned and are trying to get the rest of society to catch up with us in a way. I think Germaine’s still in the debate as it was then. If you go in that direction it just solidifies these distinctions that are actually not accurate in terms of experience. If you’re raped by somebody you know it’s more likely to be repeated. Rape isn’t a one-off event in lots of women’s lives, it’s a repeated event. Rapes by ex-partners are second only to strangers in the amount of injuries there are and in the amount of times that a weapon is used. At the level of meaning, there’s an abuse of trust, a betrayal of trust, how could somebody that you did at some point love do that to you? As you say, arguably, if we are going to start talking about seriousness and relative harm, actually it’s reversed. I don’t particularly want to do that, I want to follow what a friend of mine in Bosnia said, which is: “Rape is rape is rape”. She carried on by saying that the only difference in war is that your government wants you to talk about it. When the war’s over they want you to shut up like at every other time. I think we have to say that and I don’t want to lose the word. We decided here we didn’t want to lose sight of the fact that it was a gender-specific crime. Some people would say that we fudged it, I would say we were smart. We’d already recognised male rape in law, so in our new Sex Offences Act, which came in in 2004, rape is defined as something that is done with a penis, so it’s committed by men. They can rape women, they can rape men, they can rape girls, they can rape boys; it’s a gender-specific crime in that it is done with the penis. Some would argue that this reifies the phallus, whereas I would say that we live in a gender order where it is already reified and that’s part of the reason why it means what it means. I don’t think you change that by removing protections and meanings from law and saying, “Oh, it’s not that serious, it’s not that important”. We also created another crime called sexual assault by penetration, which has the same maximum penalty and is about using instruments or fingers, not a penis, basically. Female perpetrators could be found guilty of that offence, but more importantly I think, or as importantly, where you have a regime of sexual assaults by a particular person you can charge them with two offences. They can be charged with rape and they can be charged with sexual assault by penetration. Where a child, for example, doesn’t know whether it was a penis or not, the offender can be charged with sexual assault by penetration. I think we’ve created something quite useful in the complex issue of how charges are made and how you mount a prosecution, but we also wanted to hold onto the word rape and that it’s a gender-specific offence. I will be very happy when it’s no longer necessary to do that, but so long as sex is used as a form of masculine entitlement and power over that’s the reality that we’re in.

Chameleon: It used to be the common sense view that the rapist was somebody who hadn’t had sex for a while so he was boiling over with pent-up biological drives, whereas rape has nothing whatsoever to do with that, it’s got to do with power, domination and humiliation, is that not true?

LK: I think sometimes it’s got to do with precisely that, whilst sometimes it’s just to do with a sense of entitlement. It’s certainly got nothing to do with a biological necessity in the embodied sense. It is to do with men understanding that discourse and using it to justify their behaviour, which is a very powerful element in the construction of a certain kind of masculinity. I would suspect that if we carried out a project to look at why some men think of sex as an entitlement – or not – it’s linked to the extent to which they buy into that construction of male sexuality. Men who don’t, men who are very clear that it’s in their control are looking for mutuality, they are looking for an erotics of mutuality. It doesn’t have to be bland, but it is about mutuality and negotiation. I think we would find that the extent to which men buy into that explanation and that way of thinking about sexuality is then how they come to act through this sense of necessity and entitlement. If we think of rape again as a continuum, there are obviously the ones where it’s planned, the rapists behave like a sexual terrorist in precisely the way that they scout everything out, and have decided exactly what they’re going to do, how they’re going to do it and who they’re going to target. Then you also have the partners who are avenging themselves where rape is a kind of punishment and then you’ve got men who are out on the town, they’ve decided before they went out that they were going to get their end away and they either engage in kinds of flirting with particular women, expecting that to be the outcome, or they target someone – and they do this more and more I would say – who is getting drunk. They may encourage and enable her to get drunk by buying her drinks, or they may just let her pay herself to be relatively out of it. Sometimes they wait until women leave, they follow them home, they might even offer to help them home. Sometimes they just engage with the women before they leave. That isn’t planned so systematically and if for some reason whoever they first decide might be a target appears not to be after all, there’s no obsessiveness about it, they’ll just move on and think, “OK, that didn’t work, who else?” It’s a matter of what’s available and easy where I can find someone who’s just going to let me have sex with them. They don’t think that actually what they’re doing is taking advantage and coercive. They don’t. Again, I think this is one of the paradoxes that we are having to encounter, that women are claiming the right to drink, be drunk – and I’m not saying they shouldn’t – but the paradox of it is that it then can leave you vulnerable in that you are not as in control of yourself. You may not be reading cues that you would do if you weren’t affected by alcohol and men can decide that they’re going to take advantage of that situation. There is a paradox for women in that the world has changed and we’ve changed it to mean that we have more access to public space, that we don’t think that femininity precludes us behaving in these ways, but those powerful constructs of acceptable femininity are still there. They haven’t gone away, so if something happens then they come into play and we then become responsible for what’s happened. There’s a fantastic piece of work by a Swedish researcher called Stina Jeffner – it was her PhD – unfortunately it never got published, but she did this work with young Swedish men and women where she demonstrated that actually alcohol increased men’s space for action, that being drunk meant that they had more possibilities to act, they would be excused, whereas it had precisely the opposite effect for women. It narrowed their space for action, so that if they were drunk they were considered more responsible, not less. In other words it’s not just alcohol, it’s that alcohol has gendered meanings and, unfortunately, possibly gender consequences as well. So it’s not just alcohol, it’s what alcohol means if you’re a man or if you’re a woman.

Chameleon: A double standard. So if something goes wrong and a man rapes a woman and by some miracle it actually gets as far as court, this whole ideology of males being active and females being passive comes into play, certainly for the judge and the jury I would imagine. It seems to me that the world has moved on and we have staked our claim to access to public spaces, yet the old definition of what constitutes a “respectable woman” persists and there is a class element to it as well.

LK: I think there is, I think there definitely is. There are also really complex legal issues at stake. In many European countries, for example, the definition of rape is to do with force. Actually if you’re drunk you are less likely to resist, which is what’s read as the evidence of force. How the crime is constructed in law provides this space for action for men. In England, Scotland, Ireland and Cyprus, it’s defined more in terms of consent. The problem there is that if you’re very drunk and the lawyer asks, “Well, did you or did you not give consent?” and you reply, “I can’t remember”, one of the legal strands has gone. Part of what we were trying to do when the law was reformed was to say that being intoxicated to a certain level meant that you no longer had the capacity to consent. They weren’t prepared to go with that except in instances where someone else administered the alcohol or the drugs to mean that you were incapacitated. We tried to say that that was illogical. It can’t be a matter of who gives you the intoxicant that determines whether you have the capacity to consent or not. If you don’t have the capacity here, and you consume exactly the same here, but you chose to do it, the resulting incapacity is the same. I think many lawyers operate on a formal logic basis and they don’t want to engage with what we want to talk about, the communicative model of sexuality. For us, it isn’t just about rape law, it’s about what kind of sexuality we are interested in creating, and we’re interested in creating one where you do actually communicate with the other person, and one in which you cannot presume the outcome of that communication. Part of what I find revealing and deeply, deeply disturbing is that in all these cases that have come up through the courts here there has been a huge discussion about the woman, binge-drinking and so on, but never, not once that I have seen in either the courts or in the newspapers has the question been asked as to why is it possible for a man, who has never met someone, they don’t have a relationship, this is not a date, on what basis can he presume that it’s OK to have sex with someone when she’s totally drunk and he doesn’t know her? On what basis of human communication is that acceptable? Is it not exploitation? What really disturbs me is that nobody asks that question. It’s taken as given that if a man sees a woman who’s drunk, he’s immediately going to get an erection and going to have sex with her. I think men ought to be writing in and saying “This is offensive”.

Chameleon: Yes, it’s an insult to men – it’s every bit as much an insult to them as it is a gross travesty for women.

LK: We need men who actually pick up on those silences and engage in public discourse about it and say, “Excuse me, that’s not the kind of man I want to be and I don’t think it’s OK to behave like that”.

Chameleon: So presumably you were every bit as dismayed as I was when this Sir Igor Judge said he didn’t want a grid system [the reference is to Steve Doughty’s report in the Daily Mail, 27^th March 2007, Labour's rape law plans are thrown into turmoil as top judge declares…It's not always rape if a woman is drunk: “[Sir Igor] said: ‘If, through drink, or for any other reason, the complainant has temporarily lost her capacity to choose whether to have intercourse, she is not consenting. Subject to questions about the defendant’s state of mind, if the intercourse takes place, this would be rape.
‘However, where the complainant has voluntarily consumed even substantial quantities of alcohol, but nevertheless remains capable of choosing whether or not to have intercourse, and in drink agrees to do so, this would not be rape’.
The judge said it would not be right to lay down rules – ’some kind of grid system’ – that say a woman who has reached a set level of drunkenness is incapable of consent.
He added: ‘Experience shows that different individuals have a greater or lesser capacity to cope with alcohol.
‘Provisions intended to protect women from sexual assaults might very well be conflated into a system which would provide patronising interference with the right of autonomous adults to make personal decisions for themselves’”] introduced to the law about capacity to consent, deliberating on one particular case.

LK: It was the case in Wales, wasn’t it? [which gained notoriety when the prosecution dropped it, arguing that his client had been so drunk that she could not remember whether she had given consent] I think you’re always going to get reactionary judges and I also increasingly think – and I don’t want to get into accounts of despair here – but I increasingly ask the question whether adversarial legal systems are equipped to deal with sexual violence. That’s part of the reason for wanting to do this European study, to take a serious look at whether inquisitorial systems fare any better and whether they are less prone to playing on gender stereotypes and constructions of acceptable femininity. This is a very serious question that we need to explore, about whether the adversarial process rewards the playing on stereotypes and blaming women. Actually, we know it does. Jennifer Temkin has interviewed barristers twice now and basically they – the honest ones – admit they’re looking for something, anything, that will question her credibility because then they can say it’s one word against another and we can’t trust her word – they know that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Chameleon: How can they sleep at night? I certainly couldn’t!

LK: I hope they don’t! They justify it through this formal logic, that their job is to give the best defence possible to their client and that it’s the job of the prosecution to prove the case. They justify it through a formal logic rather than an ethics. Jennifer Temkin has said that maybe what we need to start doing is talking about an ethics of defence and of prosecution, an ethics of legal practice because she thinks that’s the only way to move it into a different realm. I think there is a problem about the formalism of the law and I definitely think there is a problem about adversarial systems because I do believe they reward the invocation of prejudice and stereotype. That in a way is where the role of the Daily Mail – to come back to where we began – is actually the most insidious because what it is doing is reinforcing these models of masculinity and femininity in a manner that individuals might not accept in that particular case, but it reawakens them, it makes sure they’re not abandoned, so that when they’re invoked in the court case they retain force. Somebody has done a really interesting study of how speech and rhetoric is used in courtrooms in the US. I don’t think that prosecutors pick up on these things sufficiently because what they say happens is that the defence uses a language of voluntarism all the time in relation to women…

Chameleon: Or passivity – the defendant will say “Oh, her knickers fell to the floor” rather than “I ripped her knickers off” [Here I was adapting from Susan Ehrlich’s superb Representing Rape, Language and Sexual Consent, London, Routledge, 2001, ‘My shirt came off…I gather that I took it off’ The accused’s grammar of non-agency, pp36-61, the source I was fumbling for]

LK: It’s not the defendants that do it, it’s the lawyers; the lawyers give them that construction and the defendants then say, “Yes, that’s what happened”. The agency – and again this is a horrible paradox of feminism, where we’ve wanted to invoke women’s agency, and all the agency in legal cases is focused on the woman and there’s hardly any agency in relation to the man. I think we need to start thinking that way about prostitution too. If we only think about women and we think about female agency – selling sex – you look through it through a particular lens, but if you start looking at the agency of the male buyers and at what does it mean that they feel entitled to do this, what does it mean in terms of gender relations that it’s increasingly legitimised? It’s considered cool because celebrities do it, etc. What does that mean in terms of male agency and masculinity? This is not just about women as actors, it’s actually about gender relations and it’s about what it also means in terms of the larger gender order. We get caught up in looking from only one direction.

Chameleon: If we talk about the moral panic surrounding women and binge-drinking, would you agree that what lies behind this bout of anxiety about women’s drinking habits is a struggle over traditional definitions of “appropriate” feminine behaviour? Is it an attempt to control women’s behaviour?

LK: I think that’s one dimension of it. Another dimension of it is women’s ambivalence about heterosexual relationships and about trying to do femininity differently; drinking is not called Dutch courage for no reason. We all know this, it does act as a kind of relaxant, it enables you to have slightly more confidence. All the research data tells us that a proportion of young women are having sex when they’re drunk that they do regret afterwards. The public lie is that they all then go and report it as rape to the police – no, they don’t. If they did, we’d have a hundred thousand, a million complaints. We don’t: we have thirteen thousand complaints. The amount of unpleasant sex that women experience massively exceeds that, so no they don’t do that. Despite all the suggestions to the contrary, they do have ambivalent sexual encounters that are made both more possible and more forgettable by drinking. There are complicated things going on and young women are trying to re-negotiate, position themselves differently in public and in heterosexual relationships. It’s not simple and it’s not without contradiction. Sometimes alcohol can be a way to paper over the cracks. One of the things I’ve learned as I’ve got older is that when the Right picks something up, there’s normally some grain of truth, or resonance that it’s important for us to understand and engage with. It wouldn’t work as political rhetoric if it didn’t connect to something. It’s actually trying to work out what it connects to and how we might understand that differently, how we might have a different take on what we think is going on, but it’s not that nothing’s going on.

Chameleon: In The Guardian [3^rd April 2007] I recently read an article about the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs report saying that women shouldn’t go to pubs and parties on their own. Would it be way too much of an exaggeration to get the feeling at least that this is tantamount to imposing a curfew on women?

LK: There’s a danger of over-interpreting some of this because we have this 24-hour media now where they just try to say something different and they fall back on clichés. That’s not to say we shouldn’t object to it and we shouldn’t expose the illogic of it and the stupidity of it, but I also think we shouldn’t necessarily read it as some kind of coordinated campaign against women. Mostly it’s bogus as well, because most women don’t go to parties on their own. If it wasn’t the case that sometimes you didn’t leave with the same people you came with then you wouldn’t be having a social life anyway – why bother going in the first place if something interesting isn’t going to happen? Everybody knows that from their own lives and one of the things that really irritates me about all of this is when you have journalists writing these things when you know that they will have gone to a party themselves with someone and not left with them. Also I know that many lawyers who defend rapists – and these days, the clients seem to prefer to have female barristers defending them – you know that these lawyers will have got really drunk, staggeringly drunk themselves. You can be in parts of London on a Friday evening and the pubs and wine bars are full of lawyers from particular firms and they get off their face. Something could happen. Their privilege is that they earn enough money to be able to afford a taxi home. None of us know whether in this particular encounter we’re going to be safe or not. They use these tactics against women when actually on some level – I don’t know how they square this – they know that they could have been in that situation themselves.

Chameleon: Going back to the continuum of violence, the argument that women shouldn’t go to parties on their own conveniently overlooks the fact that women constantly modify their behaviour because of the endemic threat of violence. We’re acculturated to believe that there is endemic violence, that we constantly run the risk of it, that we shouldn’t walk home after dark or go home via a safe route and not along the abandoned canal tow path. Women are continually modifying their behaviour aren’t they?

LK: Yes and no! Some young women – and I’ve done it myself at certain periods in my life- have just reacted by saying “No, I refuse to do this, I refuse to be controlled, I want to do this!” I think there are also women who do incredibly risky things because it’s a way of dealing with and challenging their own fear, or maybe their own history of violence. We do different things at different times. For me it has to do with how I’m feeling at the time, if I’m feeling really tired, if I’m preoccupied. I used to live somewhere in London that felt a bit risky and I had about a fifteen minute walk from the Tube station to the flat I stayed in. If I was coming home late and I was feeling preoccupied and I was feeling a bit jumpy, I would get in a cab. Lots of evenings I wouldn’t because I felt OK. My partner teaches self-defence and she says that men can and do read our body language – we read each other’s body language, we know this. That’s not to blame women, but it is to say we monitor our own context, our own sense of well-being, our own sense of safety and I think we adapt – I certainly do and I’m sure lots of other women do too. We adapt to how we are at any particular point in time as well as to the context that we’re in. If it’s a context that you know really well you can read it relatively easily. A lot of sexual assaults seem to happen when women are away or on holiday and it’s actually to do with not being able to read that situation and not having your safety mechanisms able to operate on an almost unconscious level. I suspect predatory men read that too.

Chameleon: I just resent the fact that we feel we have to modify our behaviour just to be able to live a semi-normal life.

LK: Indeed.

Chameleon: Free from the threat of violence, free from the feeling that violence is imminently about to be visited upon you.

LK: Some women would say that we can choose not to. Not everybody has that freedom in the same way. I can’t do that, I’ve lived my life working on these issues, I have stories. Certainly when I did my PhD and I interviewed women who lived in the same small town and rural areas that I lived in street names, place names actually had stories attached to them of violence that women had experienced in those places. These were just the few that I knew about, so I can’t ignore it, but I’m not totally controlled by it either. I refuse to be totally controlled by it, but I also can’t pretend that I am not aware of the realities. I think the more you realise that it’s in the everydayness of life that these things happen the less I feel troubled by being in the public sphere, although if I hear steps behind me I am alert to paying attention to who it is. It then becomes about where do you live? Who do you live with? Who do you share your life with? These other kinds of questions. Whom do you choose to trust with certain kinds of intimacies? There are not that many men in my life to whom I feel able to offer that kind of trust. That’s one of the costs and it’s a cost to men. That’s one of the challenges for men of good faith, if they really want to have strong relationships with women and with feminists they are going to have to take responsibility for changing this context.

Chameleon: Why should it always have to be women who have to modify their behaviour, why shouldn’t men have to, frankly, since they are the ones who commit these crimes in most cases?

LK: I think some of them do modify their behaviour, but they are a very small minority, so you’re not that likely to encounter them on your way home [laughs]

Chameleon: Let’s talk a little bit about “date rape” [The following passage from Sue Lees is illuminating: “Another misconception is that so-called ‘date rapes’ are often conceptualised as occurring as a result of men misreading the woman’s signals or not realising that she was not consenting, or that women have sex consensually and then regret it the night after and cry rape. We know that some men claim to misread signals even when the woman has said ‘no’, or in clearly premeditated cases where the rapist has locked the door. Some rapists have a distorted belief system – and even following conviction are in denial, continuing to maintain that the woman wanted it, just in the way that some paedophiles believe children wanted it”, pxii]

LK: Another concept that we should not use, we should get rid of. It comes out of a particular survey carried out in the US by Mary Koss in the late 80s, which was with US women college students, who reported quite a lot of coercive sexuality, including with men with whom they were somehow involved on some level. It doesn’t translate, though, across to other contexts. We tracked 3,500 cases for a piece of work called A Gap or a Chasm? which examines attrition in reported rape cases in England and Wales and I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of cases which were in the context of a date. That wasn’t what acquaintance rapes were; they were much more about men targeting women in bars or at parties. They hadn’t met before that evening, so it was not a date. We started to talk about them and code them as what’s called “Stranger Two”. Stranger One is a total stranger, whilst Stranger Two is someone whom you met within 24 hours of the rape happening. It’s one of those funny little things that you think of as an achievement as a feminist that the Metropolitan Police now use that coding in their data as well. It’s much more accurate. These are not people you know and there wasn’t any presumption of intimacy either – I don’t think there should be even on a date, but that is how that phrase is read, you have a date with someone because of some kind of erotic interest and you want to see whether it’s shared or not. That’s not true of these situations and calling them date rapes means that people misunderstand – it’s not the misreading by men of signals, but our misreading of what was going on through the term “date rape”. I would encourage us to not use it. Get rid of it! There’s a woman called Aileen McColgan who wrote a little book called Taking the Date out of Rape and we should indeed do this.

Chameleon: What about Katie Roiphe’s position in The Morning After? [London, Hamish Hamilton, 1994]

LK: Again, you see, I think this is an interesting issue about research and feminist analysis, because part of what she’s taking issue with, but doing in a very populist way, is drawn from Nigel Gilbert – her book is based on his work even though she doesn’t say so – which comes back to this survey Mary Koss carried out. Part of what they’re taking issue with is that Mary Koss defined as rape incidents that women didn’t define as such. What they neglect to tell us is that the analytical definition that Mary Koss used was the one in the law, so this isn’t even feminists talking about the continuum and saying, “Well, there’s rape and there’s coercive sex and there’s pressurised sex”, which is what I did in my PhD, because I was working with how women defined what happened to them. I was working with the experiential definitions that women use, which is not the same as a legal definition, which is also not the same as an analytical definition that you might use in study. You can use all of those legitimately, they all have a relevance, but to pretend, as Katie Roiphe and Nigel Gilbert do, that the only really valid definition is the experiential one, and because women minimise and don’t label sex that they didn’t want as rape then it’s not, when actually, in terms of the letter of the law, it is. What bothers me about it is I think they are disingenuous in the arguing with these cases. It’s not to deny that there is an issue here about definitions, which definition and why do so many women not call what happens to them rape? It’s a valid issue. We need to talk about it and we need to debate it. It is also valid to talk about under what conditions in research should you define something that someone hasn’t labelled as rape themselves as rape in the research? What does it mean to do that? Absolutely fine question, that’s different from saying these are advocacy numbers, feminists are making it up, they’re drawing the lines to include behaviour that isn’t problematic. That’s not what is happening, but that is the impression that is given. One of the things that I really try to do – we’ve just started an MA in women and child abuse; I don’t think there is one anywhere else in Europe – one of the things we are trying to do is to enable students, many of whom work in women’s services, are activists, to understand the complexity of numbers, what it means to say it this way and what it means to say it that way. Sometimes we can use statistics as advocacy numbers. For example, in our very first piece of research in the unit looking at child sexual abuse we found that one in two young women reported some form of intimate intrusion before reaching the age of eighteen. That did not mean they were all sexually abused by their fathers. It was flashing, it was being pressured to have sex by a boyfriend, a whole range of things and a much, much smaller number of them, I would say probably one in sixty, one in seventy, reported ongoing abuse by an adult male family member. We quote these figures, one in two, one in four, one in whatever as if it means serious ongoing abuse always and it doesn’t. It’s exactly the same with domestic violence figures. Yes, one in two, one in three, one in four in whatever survey in different countries have had an incident at some point in their lives. That’s not the same as the pattern of coercive control, which is what I mean by domestic violence. There are complicated issues about what these measurements mean and we need to be more accurate and more careful when we invoke them, being clear that we do so in an accurate and not an inaccurate way. The figures do say something accurate, but we sometimes stretch that to mean something that it doesn’t.

Chameleon: Or our opponents, let’s say, or the media will pick up on a statistic, if you say, sixty per cent of young women under the age of eighteen have suffered a form of abuse it might be reported on in a way that distorts it. What I’m driving at is that it is not necessarily the fault of the researcher that the media latches on to a figure and takes it out of context to try to discredit the argument behind the figure.

LK: I think that can happen. It’s less likely to happen if we are more careful about how we use the figures, so I wouldn’t say “abuse”, for example because I think people understand abuse in a particular way. If you say “intimate intrusion”, it’s not a term that is commonly used and that has a common understanding. When people hear the word abuse they do think it’s somebody they know and that it takes place more than once. It’s not flashing, for example. Unless we’ve got the space to explain what it is we mean…

Chameleon: The media don’t always give us the space, though, does it?

LK: No, that’s true, but I think we also don’t always want to make the explanation because it’s not such a strong case. Again it’s complicated [laughs]. If they’re picking up on something, it’s powerful and it’s having a resonance it is because something is going on. People do say, “Well, if it’s one in two, why haven’t half my friends told me stories about being raped by their fathers?” Of course, half your friends aren’t going to because it isn’t one in two that are raped by their fathers. There’s a way in which we need to think about how we sometimes invoke statistics, which ends up having the opposite effect. It’s not raising awareness; it’s actually undermining our message because what people think is, “Well, that doesn’t make sense to me, so it can’t be true”. The rejection isn’t just a gesture of bad faith; it’s sometimes that how they understand it isn’t true. For me, it’s a responsibility on us to endeavour – you can’t always do it, but to endeavour not to overclaim and to be clear about what it is that these figures do and don’t mean so that we’re not unintentionally creating a resistance to the message.

Chameleon: What are the worst defects of today’s rape legislation and how can they be remedied?

LK: I don’t think it’s the legislation that’s the problem. Had you asked me that question five years ago, I would have had problems with the legislation. I actually think we reworked our legislation in quite an interesting way and created a whole raft of offences. We removed all the offences that were only homosexual offences, for example. We’ve got a series of offences that are offences against children. We’ve got sexual exploitation offences. We’ve got certain kinds of protection for people with disabilities where they haven’t got capacity to consent. We’ve got offences that are about breach of trust where you are exploiting your position as a worker or a carer. I haven’t seen an evaluation of the legislation yet, but I don’t think the problem lies with the legislation. The problem is with implementation and these narrow understandings of what rape is and isn’t. The problem is that police – not all, but in the majority of cases – start from what we call a culture of scepticism. They’re looking for anything that gives them a reason to not believe, which is not how they approach investigating other crimes. You approach investigating a crime in such a way that, until you have reason to believe otherwise, you think that it has happened and you look for the evidence that supports the account of the complainant. That’s not what happens in rape cases. If we’re talking about myths, one of the massive myths is that a much higher proportion of rape complaints are false compared to other crimes. Why would any woman or man report that they had been sexually assaulted, undergo a forensic medical examination and be treated in the way that too many are treated? I know that it happens, but it mainly happens because of mental health problems. In reality, the majority of complaints are about something that has happened. Whether it qualifies as rape under the law is for the police and the prosecutors and, ultimately, the court to determine. The vast majority of these reports are about something that has happened. We have interviewed police officers who say – and these are specialists who are supposed to be trained – where they say a third, fifty per cent and one even said seventy-five per cent of complaints are false. How can they possibly be carrying out a proper investigation if that’s the place that they begin from? That’s the first thing and the second thing is that because this concept of real rape is so powerful, the whole way in which investigations and evidence is thought about is through a stranger rape model. That’s not how this case is going to play out today, certainly under our new legislation and with DNA. Alice Vachss was a prosecutor in the US and says there are three defences for rape: it didn’t happen, it wasn’t me, she wanted it. DNA and all sorts of other technical advancements mean it’s much less likely that you can say it didn’t happen or it wasn’t me, so basically your defence is she wanted it, she consented. I don’t think that the whole investigative process and how you think about collecting evidence and presenting the case in court is understood through the lens of it’s going to be a consent defence. I would say – and we’ve been saying for a while – that actually they need to rethink the whole way they do this, start again from the very beginning. They know how to do it when you’re talking about a stranger, they know how to do that, but the majority of cases don’t involve a stranger. So start again and think about the whole process that she knows the person and/or they’re going to plead consent. What evidence, then, are you looking for? How are you going to present the case as the prosecution in the court that gives credibility to her account? If all they’re thinking about all the way through is what discredits her they’re never ever going to arrive at a position where they know how to present the story in court that is to her credit. I think it’s about starting at the beginning and rethinking investigation and prosecution. It’s not so much about the legislation; it’s about those processes that enable the legislation to function.

Chameleon: Presumably what you’ve been talking about, the fact that the police almost instinctively disbelieve what the woman says is one of the reasons why the conviction rate is so low.

LK: It’s not instinctive – there’s a book by a woman called Patricia Yancey Martin from the US called Rape Work in which she talks about how institutions almost require that their staff adopt this sceptical attitude and that you need to change it at the institutional level if there’s going to be a different approach. What’s different about women’s services is that, institutionally, they absolutely don’t require scepticism; they almost require the opposite, which is why women experience them so differently – because they enter into a culture of belief. It ought to be possible to create a culture of belief in the police and medicine, which is only suspended when they have strong reasons to do so. We’re talking about ways in which institutions reproduce this scepticism. It’s not about the individuals and their attitudes only, or even especially. It’s actually about how institutions require or reproduce those orientations. That’s what we need to change. We need to change the institutional cultures that support or require this way of doing things.

Chameleon: That brings us back to the feedback loop, as it were, of assumptions within the culture in the broader sense, for example the 2005 Amnesty International survey [One third of the people polled believed that the woman was partly or wholly responsible for being raped is she had behaved flirtatiously. Yvonne Roberts responded in an article in The Independent on Sunday (27th November 2005), Asking for it. Why do so many women think rape is a woman's fault?: “The truth about rape, of course, is that whether women ‘ask’ for it or not, it happens. The ‘justice gap’ is widening. In the 1970s, a third of reported rapes resulted in a conviction. Now, more women are reporting sexual assault, including rape, but the conviction rate has dropped dramatically. In 2003, 11,867 rapes were reported; 1,649 went to trial and only 629 resulted in a conviction. However, there is cause for optimism. The little reported aspect of the Amnesty International survey is that the majority of the public believe only one person is to blame for rape – the rapist”] on rape where so many, dismayingly many, of the respondents still believe that it was the woman’s fault, that she was to blame. I read an eye-catching phrase in a newspaper article somewhere: “Alcohol is the new short skirt”.

LK: It was Julie Bindel who wrote that. She’s good at those.

Chameleon: How can we tackle this persistent attitude that women are somehow “asking for it” no matter what they do?

LK: In no one way. There’s no one way to do this as it is about culture change. It is about changing the discursive construction of everything – not just rape, but femininity and heterosexuality. They’re all connected. I wish I could say – and this is one of the irritating things about being an academic – there never is a simple answer any more because you see how everything is connected to everything else and if you make an inroad here, the something else over here will prevent it from being as effective as it might have been. I just think that we’re here for the long haul and it is about feminists engaging on every level. It matters that popular culture is re-sexualised. It matters that what Angela McRobbie calls the “new sexual contract” – her argument is that, in return for a recognition of equality in the worlds of work and education, there’s been a re-sexualisation and re-subordination of women in the more private, intimate sphere. Then you’ve got Ariel Levy’s raunch culture idea, so we have to engage in critique on that level whilst, simultaneously, trying to change the institutions and the laws, taking educational programmes into schools and youth clubs and at the same time inviting men of good faith to lend their voices too, recognising that at particular points, in certain historical contexts you make progress and then it feels like it’s either halted or you’ve moved back a little bit, or sideways. This isn’t a linear process – it would be a lot easier if it was! [Laughs] It is a bit like shifting sands that we’re having to negotiate. I suppose the most important thing is that there continue to be groups of women who call themselves feminists and who commit themselves to trying to make the world better for women. When I say that I mean I don’t think it’s OK to call yourself a feminist and that just be about your own personal achievement. However much it’s important for women to achieve things, that to me isn’t sufficient to be a feminist, for which you need to be interested in the lot of all women and be doing something to bring about change on that more social level. And to be reflective about women who have less privilege and fewer options than you. And how their situation can sometimes even be made worse by some of the ways that privileged women operate and argue their case. I think there are ways we can be, for example, judgemental of young women that have all sorts of class and maybe also race prejudice in them. That’s not to say there isn’t a conversation to be had about what does it mean that young women dress in particular ways, behave in particular ways in public, accommodate this re-sexualisation. Many conversations and engagements are needed, but in a way that respects that they’re trying to manage contradictions in the same way that others of us do in different contexts.

Chameleon: Let’s move back to the media. Do you think that a programme like The Verdict was a valuable exercise leading to serious debate or did it simply indulge in empty sensationalism, reinforcing already entrenched negative attitudes towards rape victims?

LK: We actually had two TV programmes: one called Consent [Channel Four] that was more like a real jury and The Verdict, which was obviously celebrities. I actually think the programme Consent was very interesting in the sense that we’re not allowed to do research on juries in this country. We’ve got one piece of research by a woman called Vanessa Munro, which has been simulating jury deliberations, but we imagine that we know that these prejudices are circulating. What the programme did was evidentially show us that was absolutely what was happening. It showed us that they brought all their prejudices into the room, they brought all their ideas about acceptable femininity and ways that men are excused bad behaviour and a lot of it wasn’t to do with the facts of the case. It exposed the kind of delusions that the higher echelons of the British judiciary operate under in terms of how they eulogise the jury and the common sense of the jury. I don’t think that was a bad thing and I suspect that we’ll read various student dissertations where they use it as source material. OK, fine. The Verdict, however, was, I think, much more cynical. It wasn’t, I don’t think, a serious attempt at exploration. It was one of these things that happens in TV: somebody leaked the fact that the other channel was going to do this, so they thought, “We’ll trump them, we’ll do it better, we’ll have celebrities”. These are people who perform for the camera. These are people who have agents. These agents know if they adopt X position, it’s going to get reported in newspapers, so I have no sense of how authentic their responses were at all. How much of it was a particular deliberate and constructed performance? We don’t know. I don’t think then that’s as useful, because you don’t know whether what you’ve got is celebrity acting or engagement with this particular account. What I think is interesting in both cases was the extent to which female jurors felt that they couldn’t find the man guilty, but knew that harm had been done and felt totally conflicted by the decision that they reached. I’ll tell you the reason why I thought the Consent programme was particularly good was that at the end, when they reached the verdict of not guilty, as the credits rolled, you were shown the scenario acted out as the woman had recounted it, not how he had recounted it. What it showed you was: this happened, it happened in the way she said it happened, but he was found not guilty. I thought it was a powerful message, a very powerful message. I’m not of the opinion that there should be no fictional representation of these things, but as with what we talked about earlier concerning how lawyers operate, there needs to be a certain ethics about it and I do think one of them made a serious attempt to be ethical and the other did not have that at the foundation of what they were doing. They were making reality TV, celebrity TV. They were not using the medium of television to explore a complicated, serious issue. However, that’s not to say I expect all TV programmes to do things right, but I expect them to make a serious attempt and an ethical attempt. One programme did that and one didn’t.

Chameleon: Now that we have the Internet and you can download every variety of humanly, or inhumanly imaginable, pornography in endless quantities, do you think that the ready availability of pornography has an impact on the number of rapes by fostering a rape mentality?

LK: I don’t know whether it does that or not. I am fairly certain that it has a very bad effect on already damaged men. They can use it to fuel obsessions and hatreds. They are a small number. I think, much more insidiously, it has an impact on what men think heterosexual sex is and how they understand women and women’s engagement with sex. To me, that’s not just about the number of sexual offences we’ve got, it’s about the quality of sexual engagement and encounters between women and men. I think it gives men a weird sense of women’s sexuality; I think it gives them a weird sense of men’s sexuality. I’m not any longer convinced that this is just a reinforcement of one kind of masculinity. I think it can actually make a lot of men feel uneasy and insecure, but they’re not allowed to talk about it. There’s no space to talk about that. So, for example, slightly to one side of this, you have all those Internet sites where they can rate women they’ve paid for sex. The men who try to post on those sites who are ambivalent and who are saying “I’m not sure I really liked it; I thought it would make me feel like this – it didn’t” are discouraged from posting again. These communities of men who are interested in the sex industry, in paying for sex and pornography don’t want other men saying “We’re not sure about this; this feels unsatisfactory”. We are just doing a project at the moment where we’re talking to men who pay for sex. We didn’t expect to have so many of them phoning up to confess, to say how bad they feel about it and how uneasy they feel about it. It doesn’t fit in with a particular feminist construction of predatory men, but actually these men are interesting because there’s a possibility for change there, if we engage in a particular way. I feel the same about porn on the Internet. What bothers me is that, certainly in this country, we have very poor sex education in schools; young people don’t get it as a right, so some might get nothing. Most of what they get is what we call “plumbing and prevention”, it’s not about relationships, it’s not about complexities, it’s not about contradictions and that’s what most of them want to talk about. And so where are they going for sex education? Porn on the net. I think the implications of that are huge for both young men and young women. I don’t know whether what we’re doing is producing a generation of young people for whom sex is solely performance and technicality, something you should do and want and perform at all times and then what kind of sexualities we’re going to be confronting. So for me, I’m much more interested and concerned about its broader cultural meanings and consequences than whether in a particular instance it’s implicated in a sexual assault or not.

Chameleon: Do you think that pornography creates a kind of “background tolerance” of rape through portraying women as “ever ready”, like the battery.

LK: I think certain kinds of pornography legitimise rape and certain kinds of it eroticise rape and if men get caught up in orchestrating their own sexual desires and sexual practices through that, then that’s very problematic, clearly. A significant proportion of it purports to be consensual – fair enough, but what about the representation? Whether it was consensual in the making of it is a different point from the representation depicting consensuality and it’s a particular kind of consensuality, which is about these women who can’t get enough. It’s also about these men who are constantly ready and able and well-endowed. I increasingly am not convinced – I never really was, but I’m not convinced by this argument that, well, it’s just fantasy and everybody knows it’s fantasy because you can see that in the guys who pay for sex. On one level they know that they’re paying for a performance, but on another level they believe it – they’re paying to believe that they’re good at doing sex. They’re paying to believe that they give pleasure, but if you push them a little bit about it, they go, “Well, maybe, but I really think she had a good time”. This idea that we make clear distinctions between fantasy and reality doesn’t work because you’re paying for a fantasy that then allows you to construct your sense of self in a more positive way than before you made that payment. It’s has material consequences in the way you think about yourself, how you perceive yourself to be. How do these men then engage where payment is not an issue, where you have to be a human being, where you have to negotiate, you have to confront the fact that maybe the person isn’t going to find it pleasurable that just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean that somebody else likes it. That’s the complicated part and I think a lot of men find it quite difficult. There’s that horrible thing, chilling, in Pornified by Pamela Paul [New York, Henry Holt, 2005] where some of the young men whom she interviewed are very clear that they’ve become quite obsessive about accessing porn and not certain about it, but some of them are actually saying they prefer sex – and they call it sex, they don’t call it masturbation – through porn than with a real person because they can just get their relief and they don’t have to engage on a communicative or an emotional level. Women have always said that men are less emotionally literate – and that’s putting it nicely – but there is a real possibility that what porn does is reinforce this emotional illiteracy.

Chameleon: They just feel that they couldn’t be bothered with the complications of involvement with a flesh and blood human being rather than this classic, surgically enhanced fantasy creature that bears no relation to the saggy boobs and stretch marks most women are.

LK: And most women are complicated and they’re sometimes bad-tempered, irritable and have expectations of certain kinds of baseline behaviour. There is the question of how it is implicated in particular kinds of sexual assault and there’s no doubt that it is in certain instances, but this deeper implication in the cultural construction of masculinity and femininity is in many ways more significant and possibly even, at a cultural level, more dangerous.

Chameleon: When men purchase the pornography or the sex, as you very rightly said, they’re trying to purchase the ability to overcome their own anxieties or sense of inadequacy, whereas for the women who see these images of media perfection with celebrities, it doesn’t even have to be porn stars, they might feel inadequate, driving them to the surgeons in droves, or to Weight Watchers. Men can overcome their inadequacies whereas women are made to feel more inadequate.

LK: You would say that they can overcome their inadequacies – I would say that’s debateable. It might be that they have a way of appeasing the sense of being inadequate, and who’s to that shopping doesn’t do the same thing for women. That this particular consumer, celebrity culture of the moment is producing extremely insecure femininities and masculinities, neither of which are particularly healthy, neither of which are about any kind of human dignity and, when combined, are not a recipe for engaged heterosexual relations. I think there’s a group of men who use the sex industry in a totally consumerist way and they just bolster their sense of entitlement, privilege and power, but it doesn’t have that effect on all of them. It isn’t uni-dimensional, it’s multi-dimensional and we need to show more interest than we have done in those dimensions.

Chameleon: I’ve noticed an alarming trend whereby women who fail to get their attackers prosecuted in court are subsequently taken to court themselves by the men who raped them and are sometimes being sent to prison for false accusation. How do you react to this?

LK: There are layers to this. There aren’t very many where the case goes to court and that happens. If the case goes to court and there’s an acquittal and the accused wants to do something, they will normally go through civil courts, through damages, suing for libel or whatever. We’ve had a couple of cases like that and there have been a couple of sexual harassment cases that have gone through the civil courts initially. What’s happened in terms of rape cases has been when a case has been dropped because it’s a false accusation that the police have prosecuted for wasting police time. There’s another charge – I can’t remember precisely what it is – that’s slightly more serious as well. There have been a few cases like that. The danger is to think it’s happening all the time. I actually think that probably any such case is reported in the media and the misreading is that there are lots of other ones behind. What’s more significant is that if you have made a previous allegation that didn’t result in a conviction, if you report a subsequent sexual assault that previous allegation will be seen as going to your discredit, so the fact that we have this massive attrition rate, that only one in forty cases now results in a conviction – we’ve got a 5.3% conviction rate – means that we’re creating a generation of women whose subsequent complaints will be discounted. That’s much more significant, but it’s not so obvious. We’ve seen it because we’ve gone and looked in the files and we’ve asked police to tell us why they’ve dropped cases at particular points in time. This information has come out and you can see that it has a significant impact, but that’s more invisible than these high profile cases, although there are many more where that happens than are prosecuted for wasting police time.

Chameleon: You talked earlier about the glamorisation of violence in our culture. I agree that such a glamorisation is taking place – it’s amazing to see some of the films that are released now. They are so stylised that when a woman is punched she doesn’t develop a bruise, her lip doesn’t split and gush with blood. On the one hand, there are lots of women who think that something like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Kill Bill, both of which could be said to glamorise violence, tries to do away with the myth that women are wimps, or that women are not resilient – some women look on these fictions as a kind of empowerment. So how should we be looking at the phenomenon of the glamorisation of violence? It is quite nuanced, isn’t it?

LK: There isn’t one answer you see because I do think – I know from myself that I can see representations of women being strong, fighting back, being able to win a fight with a man can involve a sense of enjoying that representation. To me that’s not the same as empowerment. I can enjoy that representation, I can enjoy it as a challenge to the traditional ways women are represented – I can even enjoy the aesthetic of the choreography of the violence. I enjoy it because I know it’s not real, I know it’s a fiction, which gives me permission to engage with it in a particular way. We’re all doing that to some extent. Underneath this is a different issue, one that has frustrated me for a very long time, which is a conflation of victimisation, victim and passivity. Women are victimised, so are people with disabilities, lesbians and gay men, people from ethnic minorities – and those aren’t mutually exclusive categories – victimisation happens. What it means, how you respond to it, whether you take it on as an identity are entirely different questions and are different again from whether you are accorded the status of victim by the justice system. If you are not accorded the status of victim by the justice system you have no right to redress or justice. You see this most clearly in relation to women who are trafficked. If they are not given the status of victim they then become a criminal, who can be deported with no rights, nothing. It can be hugely important and significant, even to the point of being a matter of life and death, whether you are accorded the status of victim. That has nothing to do with how you process what’s happened to you in terms of your own identity. We don’t even use any more “victim” or “survivor”, we talk about “women who have been raped”, “men who have been raped” because that leaves open what kind of identity they may or may not choose. I think some of this happened through a therapeutic turn in the Nineties that was then attributed by people like Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia to feminism. It wasn’t feminism, or it wasn’t in any activist feminist way – there was a kind of populist feminism that they are also a part of in a different dimension – with all of these self-help books about the journey from victim to survivor. If you look at the research that’s been done on sexual violence, violence against women, but particularly if you look at the service providers, the ones who provide support, a lot of them didn’t – some of them do now – use those words in that way. We saw them as being two sides of the same coin. That being victimised didn’t mean you had no agency. Women resist, physically or in their minds, holding a part of them somewhere, where they think “You’re not having this bit of me”. They resist and fight back by deciding to report, or deciding to tell their friendship group what this person’s done, to expose them. There are all sorts of ways. It does, though, narrow, constrain your space for action at that particular point in time, which is one of the harms of it, that actually you don’t have the possibility to prevent it. It happened. For me, the interventions that we make should be about expanding that space for action again. It’s not that there’s no agency, but it’s that agency is constrained by violence. I find this invocation of victim and victimhood really unhelpful and also entirely inaccurate in terms of what actually happens when women confront violence. You talked about how we manage our fear by doing or not doing certain things. Those are forms of agency. We might resent the fact we have to do them and we might engage in discussion about whether that’s the most appropriate or useful thing to be doing, but it is action. Women who live with domestic violence are managing that situation all the time and a proportion of them are so damaged and so diminished by this intimate domination that their space for action is hardly anything. Those are the women who it’s really difficult to work with because they are terrified of doing anything as everything they’ve ever tried to do didn’t work. It doesn’t mean they were passive and didn’t do anything. It means they live with a nasty bastard controlling man who used every strategy they ever tried to develop as a reason to further abuse. Not all of them are like that, but with some of them, the sophistication of how they undermine every strategy women ever try is actually quite frightening.

Chameleon: It’s cold-blooded, isn’t it?

LK: Yes and I find them more frightening, more disturbing than the ones who use physical assault.

Chameleon: It’s the ruthlessness, the calculatedness of their behaviour, isn’t it?

LK: Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think there’s a whole way in which we as feminists need to revisit these concepts. If I were to point to something I’d do differently I think I wouldn’t abandon the concept of victim like we did. I think I would want to fill it with other meanings, so that it wasn’t seen as a contradiction to agency, but that it limits your agency in particular ways, but it doesn’t mean that you have none. It doesn’t mean that you’re passive and helpless. It means that your space for action has been constrained by the behaviour of another person. I think we have to acknowledge that for women who want to seek justice and want to use the criminal justice system as a means to obtain justice, being accorded the status of victim is very significant and important. It’s a recognition that they’ve been harmed and it’s a route to certain rights.

Chameleon: Some progress has been made, however.

LK: Yes. There is a coalition that we have recently developed here in the UK, the End Violence Against Women Coalition. It’s the first time that all the organisations that work around violence, across the different forms of violence, have come together, groups working on domestic violence, on sexual violence, on FGM, forced marriage, trafficking and prostitution. We are actually part of a network, but more than that, we’re also in a formal alliance with Amnesty International, the Trade Union Congress and the very big women’s organisation called the Women’s Institute. We are committed to trying to get our government to have a coordinated strategic response to violence against women. We have a number of action plans on different forms, but none of them are gendered, they don’t talk about violence against women, they talk about rape, or domestic violence and they’re not linked up, they’re strands of work that are separated. We don’t have a plan of action on violence against women in this country. We don’t have really a commitment to want to do that despite having signed the Beijing Platform for Action. Within that we also want there to be a much greater emphasis on prevention and we want there to be a commitment to increasing service provision, especially protecting the women-only services. I think this is a really interesting development – it’s not without its tensions and difficulties, but it has given us a voice and a strategic position. One of the things that we’ve decided to do is to audit the government every year on whether it’s moving in the directions we’re saying we think we should be moving in. We’ve produced this report called Making the Grade and we’ve done two so far. As a result of the second one our prosecutors have said that they want to develop a violence against women strategy. The police in London have said that they want to, so we’re seeing some departments get the message and say, “Yes, we understand what you’re saying, we want to do better”. The other thing that I think is worth mentioning is that we’ve just had this law come into force called the Gender Equality Duty. We’re about to move to a single equality body and that will mean that we no longer have a specific equality body for women, or for race, or for disability. One of the things that was very clear was that there is a statutory responsibility around race and around disability, but not around gender. What the law states is that every body, at national and at local level – everything from a government ministry to a school – has to have a gender equality scheme, which has to be about how they are going to eliminate gender discrimination and harassment in their institution and they also have to carry out a gender equality audit of any big change in policy, all new law. This is the first time you’ve ever had a legal requirement, so part of what EVAW has been trying to do is to say you must put violence against women in there because one of the things that the duty says is that you should address the most serious inequalities and forms of discrimination in the first instance, so we’re saying, actually violence is one of the most serious. Everybody has to publish their gender equality scheme by Monday [30^th April 2007] and then these have to be monitored and rewritten again in three years’ time. I think this is a really interesting approach to trying to put gender and women back on policy agendas, because we have been relatively invisible for a while. It was a very smart move by the women in the Equal Opportunities Commission to agree to enter into a single equality body, but only if we have a gender duty in the same way that we have these other duties.

Chameleon: Thank you so much!

Essential Links:

The End Violence Against Women Coalition

The Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit

[Excerpt from an interview on A Blog Without a Bicycle]

It is always worthwhile as an intellectual exercise to remind yourself why feminism is relevant in spite of the constant onslaught of the apathetic who claim that now we have the vote and a handful of us are paid wages almost on a par with men that we should shut up and stop whingeing. Once your eyes have been opened you can never see anything in the same way again: what once appeared trivial or harmless is revealed as a small component of a series of representations reinforcing the status quo, however subtly (in fact the very subtlety is what renders the effort so successful, as it assumes the appearance of being “natural”, that is, “meant” to be or “the way things are”, beyond the reach of social intervention).

Becoming a feminist reminds me of the scene in The Matrix when Neo is given the choice between two coloured pills: feminism is definitely the red pill, ripping you out of whatever uneasy compromise you may have had with your oppression and plunging you into a harsher environment of constant struggle.

From an early age, I was determined not to make do with my mother’s lot. She had been denied an education by her own mother, who used the excuse of not being able to afford the uniform to prevent her from attending the private school to which she had won a scholarship. Whereas my grandmother took out her bitterness at having toiled away on farms as the wife of an itinerant ploughman, giving birth to five children, and never being permitted to achieve her potential on her daughters, my mother was more generous in spirit and gave me every possible encouragement to improve my chances through study. Fortunately for me, I was able to benefit from a social mobility, which has been almost completely eliminated in contemporary Britain.

My mother stayed at home during the day, cooking and cleaning, before working part-time in the evenings as a hospital cleaner and, once she had obtained the relevant qualifications at college, a domestic supervisor. Having been brought up in a working-class environment it never occurred to me that I would not have to earn my living independently.

At school, I was reviled as a “swot” and for my denunciations of marriage. Again, it was a fairly inchoate sense of innate injustice that inspired me, an abhorrence of containment, stifling, like putting on a corset and pulling the cords so tight you can never breathe freely again – I still had not even heard of feminism. Outcast status left me yearning for company. When I converted to Christianity at the age of 14 at a “Christ is the answer crusade” meeting in the local city hall, I swallowed the teachings of the church wholesale. I felt that I belonged, fitted in for the first time, so poured every ounce of devotion into the fellowship. The message preached was one of utter subordination and obedience to men. The wife must accept the authority of her husband. Women could not occupy any leadership positions in the church either. The most that a female believer could aspire to spiritually was heading a prayer or house group, but only if its membership was exclusively feminine. As soon as a male put in an appearance, he was in charge. Divinely ordained superiority.

For a few years the relief of being accepted outweighed any reservations that might have caused me to question the doctrines. Then the anarchy of sexual desire threw my faith into turmoil. Two of the men wanted me as their girlfriend. I felt completely trapped. I couldn’t be expected to take such a momentous decision (not even a relatively innocuous kiss on the lips was sanctioned outside marriage), God had to intervene and reveal His will to one of them. I had to abdicate all responsibility to follow the teachings I had absorbed, yet I was supposed to submit to both suitors, which presented me with an intractable dilemma. I attempted to express my desperation in a short story, a thinly fictionalised version of what was happening, a copy of which I gave to the pastor. The result? I was punished by being forced to burn the story along with all my other writings. It was all my fault. I must have led them both on, teased them, played them off against each other. So much for my dutiful, righteous passivity. I was accused of false prophecy and the demons that had possessed me had to be cast out. With the emotional distance I have now, it all seems perfectly absurd, yet I willingly embraced humiliation rather than renounce my God.

The situation had still not been resolved when I left for university, but, away from the direct surveillance of the fellowship, I slowly began to extricate myself from its grip. This was no easy undertaking: my immortal soul was in jeopardy. We had been taught to sneer at the “established church” in a most uncharitable and intolerant fashion, so a more conventional, non-charismatic brand of Christianity offered no refuge. The choice was stark: stay with the new covenanters or face eternal damnation. I responded by devising my own set of beliefs, a bespoke blend of pantheism and reincarnation with cosmic balance (as opposed to sin) thrown in for good measure, my primary and more urgent concern being to demonstrate my spiritual purity in spite of the mockery of my detractors. This involved purging my body of meat. Blood was the carrier of life and consuming it blunted sensitivity. I lived as a vegetarian for eight years.

In the meantime, I became a single mother and started in remunerated employment. Although a friend from university never tired of extolling the virtues of Simone de Beauvoir, I had never really listened to her. In my isolation abroad, cut off from all support networks, I purchased a copy of The Beauty Myth, the first feminist book I read. I had my reasons, transgressing more than one norm with my unrepentant unattached state and having put on 30 kilos during the pregnancy. After that, I spent a substantial proportion of my disposable income on feminist literature, one bibliography leading to another.

It was not feminism that finally freed me from the residual guilt of religion, however, but Emile Durkheim’s masterpiece The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Feminism equipped me with an interpretative framework with which to decipher my experiences and place them within a wider context of discrimination and oppression. Feminism is an emancipatory project beneficial to women and men alike. It focuses on the here and now and demands an end to inequality, unlike the sop of religion, which might afford some comfort, a compensatory fantasy of better things to come for the conformist (I am tempted to say defeatist). It both absolves and imparts a greater burden of responsibility. It engages with arguments, never shying away from controversy. It quickens the mind and removes the fetters of passivity. It glories in its subversiveness: feminists will always challenge the dominant social order.