Random acts of feminism

Link in title. I love Wendy Roby's suggestion of random acts of feminism: sticking post-it notes on Nuts magazine that read 'I am someone's sister' or 'Real men read BOOKS'...

Man takes woman's surname, shock, horror

I suppose it is some sort of step forward. How depressing that one man taking one woman's name warrants a column, though...

Talk to your daughter

Here's an interesting thing - an advert from Dove (part of their 'campaign for real beauty') with the message 'talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does' and some strong images of how damaging the quest for 'beauty' can be: plastic surgery, extreme weight fluctuations, eating disorders. Of course, Dove are part of the beauty industry, and this is an advert, designed to sell a range of products, which women use not because they need to but because they feel they need to, thanks to the exact same images that Dove is criticising here.

I guess I mainly think this is a good thing - I also like a previous advert showing exactly how unreal pictures of models can be - and I like Dove putting out pictures of bigger and older women saying that they are beautiful and feel happy about themselves, although it's kind of an annoying reminder that mainstream media images of women are so very limited: we all know beautiful women who don't fit the very limited model of beauty, so 'fat (and old) women are pretty too - shock, horror' ought to be redundant.

What I'd really like, in an ideal world, is for looks to be just one of the qualities that women (and men!) have, and that physical appearance should fall back in importance compared to kindness, intelligence, courage, and wit. I think this is already, to a certain extent, the case for men: if you read a women's magazine 'Top 100 sexy men', you're sure to find less physically beautiful specimens: writers, comedians, sportsmen and politicians, as well as the Brad Pitts and George Clooneys. Of course, I don't really think you can draw very important conclusions from observing glossy magazines, but a men's magazine list will be very different, featuring only pretty women, mostly young women, and plenty who are models or socialites and in the list purely for their looks alone.

Of course, as always, there's a radical divide between what the media shows and how people actually behave: I don't know a man (well, maybe one or two) who could go out with a woman for her looks alone; and of course looks are things that women consider in men. But the media is given to commenting disproportionately on women's looks; so is it better to say 'well, there are more beautiful women than you think, and most of them aren't a size 10', or to say 'fuck beauty - what about my achievements'? Of course, it's foolish to imagine that Dove could make that last statement, but wouldn't it be great if someone did?

HULK SMASH - no 1 in a continuing series

Link in title. Serious or not? You decide. Highlights include:

I sat there watching [my date] tuck into a second huge plate of shepherd’s pie and realised why no self-respecting American girl consumes carbohydrates after 2pm.

I’ve been in a room with two English girls when one is preparing for a black-tie ball. She came out in her outfit and asked: “How do I look?” The other girl cocked her head sympathetically and said: “Adorable”. I thought, “Adorable . . . like a hooker.”

and, most charming of all

There is one aspect of their appearance about which British women do obsess: their shoes. Great, I’m glad you have beautiful shoes that pain you in all types of exquisite ways (that men would never put up with). I’m sure other women will be incredibly impressed by your new Jimmy Choos or Blahniks. But, ladies, the only time a man will notice your shoes is if your feet are wedged on top of his shoulders bouncing either side of his head.

Feministing go all web 2.0

This sounds great, I think - the excellent American feminist blog Feministing are enlarging to become a community where you can join, create a profile, make your own blog and so on. Sounds like a brilliant idea.

Women held back in the workplace

Link in title. Another report tells us that women are held back in the workplace as they get locked into a vicious circle: they take a greater share of the domestic work, so they have to take part-time or flexible jobs, earn less, and then carry on doing more domestic work because they earn less. The report's author suggests that
Changing the divide could come through labour market changes offering women the same full-time, higher status working opportunities as men, he added, or it could come through a greater sharing of domestic labour.

Reclaim the Night

The London Feminist Network's Reclaim the Night march and rally is on this weekend.

Anyone fancy going?

On a lighter note...

... apparently feminists are better in bed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2211202,00.html

Horrified

I just googled a pal of my sister's from school. She's now a Sky Sports presenter, and I went to YouTube to see what she's like on the telly. First three comments on the clips were these:

i'd fuck this girl so hard in her ass and fannie that she wudnt b able to piss and shit for a week ;)

i want her to give me a blowjob, and i cum on her tits. wow wat a cocktease lol, i want to suck on her tits, i want to do her in every hole, bet shes a right slut who would do anything.

I would putt in the rough wiv this lil filly,, Then punt a goal kick thru her legs, might just pot a pink red brown on mill. Not forgeting to score and touch down a try, then if she bowls me a googley i will serve her a ace finished by wanking into her open gob!!! Oops... Well you get wot i mean..... WHOLLLOP!

She's a very pretty woman (and presumably got the job at least partly because of that - that's how the media work), but she's also very good at what she does. I've seen better presenters, but I've seen far worse. Of the sixteen comments on that clip, only one isn't directly about her looks (or her age - the consensus is "legal"), and even then it's by someone with the same surname as her just saying "go [surname]!". Of the remaining fifteen comments, six are obscene.

Why is this even vaguely acceptable? I feel like crying.

What's in a name?

What do people think of this? I've just had a bit of an argument elsewhere on the internet with someone who described Margaret Sandra as "a self-indulgent twit" after he read this article. I was surprised by my own anger.

Doris Lessing has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature

Doris Lessing is the 11th woman to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Her book The Golden Notebook is another of the books which really inspired me as a feminist. I'm utterly delighted about this.

Sexual Politics: the limits of secularism, the time of coalition

Judith Butler - theorist on gender, power, identity and sexuality, and author of Gender Trouble - has a public lecture at the LSE on October 30th on progressive sexual politics and the rise of social movements based on ethnic and religious identity. The blurb for the lecture says:

This lecture considers the conditions for coalition that might exist between religious and sexual minorities through focusing on differential forms of state coercion. Several arguments have emerged in Europe and elsewhere, claiming that feminism and progressive sexual politics are threatened by new religious communities and the effects of Islam in particular and base their views on libertarian principles (feminism and progressive sexual politics rely on increasingly robust conceptions of personal liberty) and on criticisms of multiculturalism (cast as a relativist enterprise that is unable to ground strong normative claims). Such arguments tend to rely on conceptions of sexual or gender freedom which presume certain conceptions of secular progress and to forget or dismiss conceptions of sexual politics that are bound to anti-racist struggle. Without denying that clear tensions exist between religious traditions that condemn and forbid homosexuality and progressive sexual movements that tend to promote exclusionary conceptions of the secular, the lecture focuses on the importance of conceptions of cultural translation, antagonism, and the critique of state coercion to consider what ‘critical coalition’ might mean for religious and sexual minorities.

How other feminists can keep one sane

This stupid, stupid article by David Cox on rape convictions (only published in the Comment is Free section on the Guardian website, which suggests it didn't make the cut for the print version) would really get me down if it weren't for the responses by super lovely great feminists here, here and here. Go feminists!

(Also I love how they all say 'don't even bother to read the comments'...)

Do men speak Martian and women Venusian?

Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist at Oxford, thinks not in the excellent and interesting extracts from her book currently being serialised in the Guardian. (These things are usually only up for a week due to copyright restrictions.)

Edit: part 2 is here.

Just because it's testable doesn't make it innate

A new study by the University of Edinburgh suggests that although mean 'intelligence'* is the same for women and men, there are many more men in both the top and bottom 2 percent (reported in the Times, here). The study tests brothers and sisters, in a way that's meant to eliminate the differences in family background that may influence results - but even within the same family, the way boys are taught and encouraged may be different to the way girls are, so what does that prove? What I find even more questionable is the idea that this is somehow an evolutionary trait - surely the fact that men fall into both the top and bottom areas shows that there hasn't necessarily been an evolutionary advantage for more 'intelligent' men? The Times reports Joan Harvey of Newcastle University as saying: “Men and boys are socialised into higher levels of achievement.”

* lengthy complaint about the impossibility of defining, identifying and testing intelligence in any meaningful way deleted, see Stephen Jay Gould's The mismeasure of man for more.

Which books turned you into a feminist?

Lovely article in the Guardian asking feminists which books inspired them and made them feminists - I love Jessica Valente's story about Naomi Wolf. So: which books made you a feminist? For me, I'd say Little Women had a big effect when I was very young indeed, showing how women have to make an effort to show that they're as good as men - and that this is what they should do. When I was older, The Female Eunuch was brilliant not so much because it showed me new things about the world but because it showed how much my experiences of the world were part of a big, meaningful, connected whole - and also showed me both how far we'd come since the seventies and how far we still had to go.

What books made you a feminist? The Guardian would like to hear (books@guardian.co.uk) - but do comment below as well...

Ladyfests and the third wave

A couple of really interesting Guardian articles I've been meaning to link to for a while. I really love the idea of Ladyfests and was wondering whether we'd have the time to do one at some stage. Maybe that possible Rape Crisis fundraiser we were talking about...

And another article about third wave feminism and where we're going next. I really liked the closing paragraph:

It is time to stop deploying rigid and vapid cliches - damsel, good girl and slut - and fixating on the alleged excesses of one contested aspect. We need to keep our eyes on the wider array of women's issues. May the stripping pole go the way of the charred bra, a quaint reminder of how those calling it from the sidelines got it very wrong.

Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild by Deborah Siegel , also sounds really interesting, if treading a little on old ground...

More on pink for girls, blue for boys

Thanks to Sorcha for the link to Ben Goldacre's excellent article criticising the recent study claiming that there may be a scientific basis behind the pink for girls, blue for boys stereotype. He links to a few more interesting articles: a history and discussion of the pink/blue tradition at gentlebirth.com, an American natural birth website; an interesting discussion of the relationship between colour and gender, reviewing the studies done of male and female colour preference; and a really interesting article about the phenomenon of little (in this case, American) girls refusing to wear any colour but pink.

Feminist fightback conference - 20th October 2007

Link in title to a socialist-feminist conference being held in UEL in October - a friend is an organiser (or at least she was last year). It's free to attend although you have to register and the topics being discussed look very interesting.

For those of you on Facebook it also has a Facebook page.

Guerrilla Girls on YouTube

Great exerpt from a talk by the Guerrilla Girls at New York's MOMA about the origins of the group and how far women have come in the art world since then. Depressingly, not very far...