Monthly Archives: June 2010

Be the one dissenting voice

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For the last week or so, I have been in Bulgaria, on something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a holiday. There are generally two certainties about being in Bulgaria for me: family drama and culture shock. I’ve been having plenty of both, but I’ve gleaned an insight out of them, so I guess it’s been worth it.
Majorities and in-groups have a way of building a narrative to justify their being a majority or in-group. That narrative is deeply embedded in the in-group culture, so deeply that debate about it doesn’t happen; or when it happens it only goes as far as someone asking a rhetorical question so that the other party to the conversation can take the opportunity to re-affirm their belonging to the in-group. An example of this I witnessed a couple of times recently was the discussion among my Bulgarian contacts around Sofia Pride: someone asks “This ‘gay parade’ thing, do you think it should be happening in Sofia?” and there’s a chorus around them of justifications and excuses as to why, of course, there should be no such thing. Here’s how that chorus goes:
1. I’m a great fan of $gay_celebrity, but I don’t see why all of them should be parading about. (This is, of course, the pre-cursor to “I have a gay friend and thus I’m not a homophobe” in a country where most people won’t know that they have gay friends because people just aren’t out.)
2. Even $gay_celelbrity says they don’t feel the need to parade about. (Might that be because the social pressure is so strong that they feel if they did take part in Pride their career might take a dive?)
3. I don’t feel the need to parade around just because I’m normal. (Do I really need to dissect this one? Alright then. Firstly, you aren’t “normal”, you’re “heterosexual”. The two are not synonymous. And secondly you are, right now, contributing to the continuation of a heteronormative culture in which you, effectively, parade around all the time while a substantial minority of the population has to live in hiding and is denied basic rights which you take for granted to the extent that you don’t perceive them as rights.)
After four days of this, both in the national media and in overheard conversations, I felt the need to move on the debate. The constant heteronomative self-reassurance, self-justification and – yes – parading was rather getting on my nerves. So when someone had the temerity to ask me last night whether I thought there should be a Pride march in Sofia I said “Yes, and had I been in Sofia over the weekend, I would have been at it.” The three seconds of stunned silence that followed were well worth it. We then went into a brief argument centred around point 3 above, but as it was late and I was heading for bed already, we didn’t get very far into it.
What I do hope has happened, though, is that I have made a tiny crack in the self-perpetuating heteronormative narrative I’ve been listening to for the last four days. I hope that this person, now that they know someone who doesn’t agree with that narrative, will over time start questioning it; that they will start asking questions, start finding out more information. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t; but if I continue to be the one dissenting voice, the one voice that moves on the debate, then maybe one of the many people I talk to will, and that will be progress.
Here’s another example: I’m beginning to feel my way around the building blocks of the narrative that straight white men have built for themselves, of the cocoon they live in. Even men who are close to me, who I think are decent human beings – my father, my partner, my best friend – fall prey to this to some varying extent.
My partner was shocked when I talked to him about the pervasiveness of violence against women – he simply didn’t know. It’s something that’s clearly not talked about enough. My best friend and I have an on and off discussion about feminism where he occasionally comes out with arguments that sound very like “But what about equality for the menz?” and we have to go back to basics. I am not saying the issues he brings up aren’t real, aren’t relevant, or don’t need addressing – but it is a matter of perspective and of relative seriousness of the issue. The classic example here is anonymity for rape defendants. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s a numbers game – for as long as more women get raped every day than men get falsely accused in a year, I know where my priorities lie.
My Dad, too, came out with some classics over the last couple of days. We had everything from “Women’s hands just aren’t as good as men’s for heavy industrial work.” (Dad, the Second World War couldn’t have been fought without women who did all the heavy industrial work.) to “Well, maybe I do want equality of opportunity for everyone, but I don’t think it can be achieved.” (Dad, if we all thought like this, we would probably all still be living in caves, and nevermind about women still being chattel.)
These are all parts of a narrative that straight white men don’t even know they tell themselves. But they do, and it hurts not just women, or gay people, or black people, it hurts all of us, straight white men included, because it limits all of our opportunities and choices. And so I have been the dissenting voice again. I have been trying to explain to my Dad, with varying degrees of patience, what life looks like from the perspective of the out-group. It took me a good half-hour to explain that he is part of an in-group to start with. I’m slowly tackling the different ways in which boys and girls are socialised and educated, what society deems acceptable behaviour for each gender, how this pervasive gendered culture impacts even my own outlook to the extent that I have to consciously fight it. I threw some stats at him about violence against women, and that had him silent for about five minutes.
The tactic I find most successful is to mix in the statistics and general points with personal experience. The personal is political, and the more I can draw out into my Dad’s (or anyone else’s for that matter) consciousness the crass contradictions between statements like “You’re my daughter, you’re very clever and have had a lot of unique experiences, you have no reason not to be confident, and you can achieve anything” (personal, connected to someone he knows well and cares about) and “Women’s hands have no affinity for industrial work” (generalised), the more (hopefully) they will start questioning their narrative. It is easy to generalise about the womenz or teh gayz, it’s difficult to argue with someone’s personal experience. When that personal experience is then backed up with hard stats, paradigms hopefully will begin to shift.
Ultimately, what I’m trying to say with all of this is that it’s always worth being that one dissenting voice. It’s not always a comfortable experience, it can be incredibly difficult. However, staying silent, staying under the radar, will never change anything. Don’t be afraid to stand out, to speak out, to dissent, to question, argue and persuade. The changes we want to achieve can only be achieved through debate, discussion, argument and persuasion: one person at a time.

The Creation Museum – A cultural experience like no other

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I read about the Creation Museum in Kentucky a couple of years ago. It’s just across the state border from Cincinnati, and what with there being a chance of a business trip to Cincinnati in my line of work I promised myself that if I ever ended up in that part of the world, I would go see the museum. Then, when I booked my travel a couple of weeks ago, I kind of forgot about it and didn’t leave any flex in my schedule for a visit, and when I did remember I was gutted. So when a meeting finished early on Monday, I jumped at the chance, escaped from the office early, threw myself into a taxi and went. It was certainly an educational experience.
The first thing to note about the Creation Museum is that when I told people I was going there, I felt really self-conscious about it. In my mind, there are only two kinds of people likely to be interested in that sort of thing: the religious wingnuts, and the trolls. Now, frankly, I fall in the second category, but I didn’t particularly want to come out to people I work with as a troll. Nor, however, did I want to give the impression that I was a religious wingnut. So finding that fine line where you explain that no, you are not of the Christian faith, but you are interested in different points of view and look at this as a cultural experience is… interesting. I’m not convinced anyone believed me.
Here’s what I found out about the museum beforehand, from speaking to various local people. Apparently they fully own the building and the grounds. It took them a long time to get all the money together, but they were very particular about running it that way and not being in debt before they started the whole thing. The colleague who told me this seemed to think that that gave them more freedom in how they presented their point of view, as they didn’t have to bow to commercial pressure just to make money to pay off debt. Having said that, it didn’t look to me like they were struggling financially. But more on that later. The other thing I learned on my way there from the taxi driver is that when the museum first opened, there were protests outside and significant police presence. There are certainly large signs on the doors asking you to behave respectfully to staff and other visitors. Oh, and another tidbit from the website: Apparently the Creation Museum is within a day’s drive for two thirds of US population.
The building is hardly small, and as well as the main museum, it and the grounds house a planetarium, a petting zoo and reasonably extensive botanical gardens. You can easily spend a whole day there, and the website suggests you actually buy a two-day ticket so you can revisit some of your favourite exhibits on the second day. With only two hours, I barely made it through the main exhibition and a couple of the media shows.
I asked the lady who sold me my ticket if she had any recommendations for a first-timer with limited time. She suggested I saw the entire main exhibition and the multi-media show called “Men in White”. I asked her what that was and she explained that it was about a girl who struggles with the thought of being “only a randomly evolved animal” and then gets visited by two arch-angels – the men in white – who help her with her self-doubt. So I got my souvenir guide book and headed off to the special effects theatre to see “Men in White”.
The show was introduced by a chirpy young woman who explained that it was not quite like the rest of the shows in the museum – it was more of a satire or comedy, and that we might recognise some of the stereotypes we saw. Then we meet Wendy (an animatronic puppet) sitting by her camp fire at night, looking up at the stars and asking questions about the meaning of life. (So far, been there, done that. I became an atheist one night in a graveyard in the Austrian Alps.) She asks whether she really is the product of random collisions of atoms and molecules, and whether there really isn’t any deeper meaning to life. At which point the whole thing just becomes surreal: enter the Men in White, Mike and Gabe, the campest arch-angels you have ever met. As in white dungarees levels of camp. They are glorious, as well as remarkably obnoxious for arch-angels. Mike and Gabe do two things: firstly, they walk us through the biblical story of Genesis – taking a few liberties here and there – and secondly they arm Wendy, and by extension the audience, with a number of soundbites to use when defending creationism against the insidious forces of science. They attack science education as closed-minded, not open to being questioned or to new ideas. They frame believers in creation as discriminated against in the education system (“I don’t want people to think I’m dumb”, says Wendy at one point), as victims of the modern world. They especially have a go at Darwin. Yet at the same time Mike and Gabe can’t fully dismiss science which, according to them, has given us microwaves. It’s an interesting balancing act, assisted by special effects such as water being squirted at the audience to demonstrate what the flood felt like. (This made the kid in front of me cry.) Men in White finished and I went off to see the main exhibition.
If you know anything about creationism, you might know that there’s a fairly wide spectrum of beliefs that fall into that category. The Creation Museum subscribes to the particularly nutty flavour of fully literal young-earth creationism. The guide book says, “In the beginning – in six, 24-hour days – god made a perfect creation.” According to the museum, this happened around about 6,000 years ago. The amount of cognitive and intellectual contortion necessary to actually believe this becomes obvious pretty quickly. There are two key framing devices the museum uses to aid with said contortion.
Firstly, it introduces its own historical narrative and paradigm, the “Seven Cs of History”. They are creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, Christ, cross, consummation. The entire main exhibition is laid out according to this narrative, starting with creation and moving progressively through biblical history to the modern world, again taking a fair few liberties in the process.
The second device, which is introduced very early on, is the dichotomy between reason and God’s word or revealed truth. So we have lots of exhibits which present us with a physical observation about the universe and then two conflicting “interpretations”, one by human reason and another by God’s word. For instance and exhibit on fossil layers says “God’s word: Fossil layers were formed by Noah’s Flood (~4,350 years ago) and its aftermath. Human Reason: Fossil layers were formed by present processes over millions of years.” This is subversive in two ways: firstly, it attempts to set creationism on an equal footing with science, but claiming to simply apply a different kind of reasoning to the same facts, thus attaching to creationism the credibility of the scientific method; secondly, there is a very strong implication that because both interpretations of the same facts are reasonable and possibly valid (though of course the creationist version is the right one), scientists who reject the creationist interpretation are closed-minded and therefore automatically wrong. Given how much of the exhibition is aimed at families with children, I will let you judge quite how damaging this is.
Now, in many ways it is absolutely pointless to do a point-by-point rebuttal of every single thing that is wrong, misleading or nutty in the exhibition. It would be playing the game by the wingnuts’ rules, and that’s not something I’m prepared to do. However, here is a non-exhaustive list of some of the especially striking cognitive contortions, mostly for amusement value.
You remember the bit from the guide book, about how God created the universe in 6 24-hour days? I wouldn’t have spotted this one, if it hadn’t been for the camp arch-angels, but they kindly mentioned Genesis 1:14 (Gods, I never thought I’d have use for a hotel Bible.), which says “Then Gods said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night’ and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years.'” Which incidentally happened on the fourth day. So up until the fourth day, we have no way of really measuring days or hours. How, therefore, do we know that those first six days in which God created everything were exactly 24 hours long, when hours aren’t even defined yet? This is of course the danger of trying to sound scientific when talking about creationism.
There is the usual hilarity of presenting images of humans walking alongside dinosaurs. At the exit there is even the opportunity to take a photo of your child riding a saddled triceratops. There is also a special exhibit/feature (which I didn’t have time to look into at all) about dragons and dinosaurs. The most amusing part is the series of descriptions of the effects of original sin, which include gems like “According to the Bible, animals and humans have “life” (…), but plants do not. So humans and animals were created to eat plants, and in the original world before sin, humans and animals would never die.” So apparently it was only once original sin had been committed that we started to have carnivores.
Incidentally, the museum very squarely puts original sin on Adam’s shoulders, consistently calling it Adam’s sin. I must admit I’m not 100% sure which version of original sin I prefer: the one that blames women for everything for the rest of eternity, or the one that patronisingly takes responsibility away from Eve, making Adam responsibe for her actions. I’m willing to listen to arguments either way.
Another fun bit is where the exhibition has a go not only at science but also at the wrong kind of Christianity, i.e. Catholicism. Apparently Catholicism is wrong in much the same way as human reason is wrong, in that it relies on human structures and institutions, as well as human interpretation of the truth revealed through the word of God. Apparently this is a big no-no, and one should be taking one’s scripture as the only source of truth, quite literally.
Of course one of the biggest problems young-earth creationism has is the abundant scientific evidence that the universe is rather older than 6,000 years, and so the museum spends a lot effort trying to discredit this, starting with Mike and Gabe and going right through this exhibition. The phrase “millions and millions of years” is repeated in a tone of utter contempt until your little brain can’t think of it any other way.
An entire room of the museum is dedicated to what I would describe as wonders of the universe: beautiful pictures of plants, animals, galaxies, red blood cells, you name it. Even a video explaining how awesome carbon is, and another explaining how the earth is in just the right place in the solar system to support life. The little captions in the corners of the pictures tell you how God created all this, especially for us. The fun bit here is that every time an exhibit claimed that something was too good to have arisen by chance, the only scientific counter argument was the anthropic principle; and I must admit I’m really not a fan of the anthropic principle – it’s cop-out. Than again, I think God’s a rather bigger cop-out. But that room certainly gave me an insight into why some people may want to choose to believe in God as opposed to the anthropic principle.
The exhibition ends with another video show – The Last Adam – which takes us through the final three Cs of history (Christ, Cross, Consummation) by telling the story of the crucifixion and how Christ will save us all. One of the few images I remember from this is that of a very cute lamb which didn’t have to be sacrificed anymore because God had sent his only begotten son, etc. etc. At the end of this, a member of staff encourages us to pick some of the free literature and go out to tell others the good news.
Of course no museum is complete without a gift shop, and the gift shop in the Creation Museum is hardly small. One whole wall is covered in textbooks aimed at homeschooling parents. It is one of the scariest things I have seen in my life. Another scary thing is that the back cover of the guide book is taken up by an advert for a “Christ-centred liberal arts college dedicated to presenting a Biblical worldview in all [their] academic majors”. They “embrace a literal, 6 day, 24 hour creation account”. The associated picture is of scientists in lab coats with lab equipment.
From what I can tell, the museum is making pretty good money which, as I understand it, it funnels into the “Answers in Genesis” ministry. My financial contribution to all this, beyond the entrance fee and my guide book, was a t-shirt with a picture of a dinosaur and the words “Prepare to believe” printed on it. I am looking for suggestions on how to deface it. Suggestions I’ve had so far are “Prepare to believe – in science!” from Paul (where I’m tempted to also add “after carefully examining the evidence”) and “Holy crap!” from @_njd_ over on Titter. I would love some more suggestions on this please.
Overall my trip to the Creation Museum was a highly interesting and education cultural experience. Although I must admit the only reason I’m not running away screaming is that I made a conscious choice to look at the whole thing in a detached way. There are some deeply worrying messages and ideas in the whole thing, and the fact that people believe them – even people I work with – is truly scary.
You can find possibly slightly blurry photos of a lot of the exhibits in the Creation Museum here.

Diversity and representation in politics – moving beyond tokenism

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I’m on a business trip in the States this week, so feeling very out of touch with what’s happening in the UK. So here instead a more general piece prompted by events from the last month or so on diversity and representation in politics.
Much has been made of the straight(ish)-white-male composition of the new cabinet over the last few weeks. Let me throw in my 2 Eurocents. Incidentally, this post deals mainly with the “how” of diversity and representation, and not with the “why”. I am assuming that the case for diversity has been made loud and clear – though some recent events and comments do make me wonder. But that’s a thought for another day.
Jane Manning writes over at LDV:

Racial integration is a marvellous bridge. If representation is about sending a message of inclusion to a part of society that has been marginalised before then I don’t need a Brown face at the top to make me feel included. Those days of John Taylor not being selected as a Conservative candidate in the 1992 general election because of his colour is what made me feel deprived and hopeless and gave me sleepless nights. The gates of politics have since opened wide to people like me. We aren’t excluded. If we don’t go through the gate it is because we choose not to for reasons based on individual choices, not because we are barred.

I agree with Jane that a lot progress has been made in the area of diversity and representation in politics. But I strongly disagree that the gates have been opened wide; a crack perhaps, but most certainly not wide, and the make-up of the current cabinet only serves to underline this.
Unlike Jane, I am not writing this from an ethnic minority point of view. I’m writing as a woman and with some insights into the LGB community. However, I do believe a lot of the points I’m making apply across the six pillars of diversity and beyond, and I’d be very interested in hearing other thoughts, especially from those six pillars of diversity[1].
The first thing to realise is that it’s not enough for anyone, and especially not Parliament, to just put up a sign saying “Women (or of course any other of the 6 groups) welcome”. It’s just not as simple as that. While outright direct discrimination has become very rare, there are still deep structural issues which act as barriers to entry. Jane in her article claims that the doors are wide open and it’s only a matter of personal choice that we aren’t seeing more women or people from ethnic minority backgrounds in politics. I would argue the opposite: It is very easy to make the choice to go into politics if you happen to be a straight, white, middle-aged, upper/middle-class man; if you don’t happen to fall into that category, suddenly a lot of other barriers pop up that are easily disguised as personal choices but really are not.
I have been known to quip that one of the ways to address gender equality in politics is to turn some of the 47 bars in Westminster into creches. People are amused by this, but there is a more serious point behind it. Providing 47 bars and a shooting gallery but no child care arrangements for your employees is on the same continuum of discrimination as not having ladies’ toilets or as City firms doing business in strips clubs. The latter is obviously worse as it is actively degrading for those companies’ employees to work in that kind of environment but the former is one of those things that allows us to point at the absence of women in politics and say “It’s a personal choice” while we haven’t actually set up the infrastructure to allow women to make that choice freely.
Here’s another example to reinforce this: Yvette Cooper was questioned a couple of weeks ago over whether she would like to stand as a candidate for the Labour leadership. The reason she gave for not doing so was that she had three children under the age of 14. Yet Ms. Cooper’s husband, Ed Balls, seems to have no such issues. This is an issue so deeply ingrained in the structure of our society, it’s only in these rare cases that the true absurdity of it becomes visible.
And another one: Recent quips about colour-coded ties notwithstanding, male politicians rarely get judged on their outward appearance, provided they meet a basic standard of appropriate dress (i.e. wear a suit). Yet Theresa May’s shoes and the jacket she wore to her first BBC Question Time appearance as Home Secretary somehow seem to be more worthy of media comment than her attitude to gay people.
Now, I’m an agency over structure kind of girl most days. I firmly believe in the power of individual action to overcome structural barriers. But to do so, we first need to recognise that the barriers are there. Here is a non-exhaustive list of structural barriers to wider diversity and representation in UK politics – feel free to add your own:

  • The way Westminster works is based on the premise that either all MPs are single gentlemen with housekeepers or that they have a 1950s-style family with a devoted wife waiting at home with their dinner. And let’s face it, this doesn’t just harm women – any man who wants to be a part of his children’s lives would be put off by the hours, the travel, the sheer family-unfriendliness of the place. And these are the people we expect to pass laws to increase the family-friendliness of our work places. Having said that, having a Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister both of whom have young children and both of whom appear to genuinely want to be involved in their children’s lives seems to be doing wonders for the family-friendliness at least in the Cabinet. I found this article utterly delightful.
  • The absence of visible role models – for any disagvantaged group – doesn’t help either. It sends a subliminal signal to women, people of ethnic minorities, gay people, etc. that this place is not for them; that they aren’t welcome; that they can’t have a meaningful career in that environment. New Labour was pretty good at providing role models for some kinds of disability, with both David Blunkett and Gordon Brown (I didn’t realise until fairly recently how significantly visually impaired Brown is.), as well as Alastair Campbell speaking about his depression. But even they rarely spoke out about how they got to where they were. It is not enough to be the first woman/gay/disabled person in your position, as I’m sure we know from the Margaret Thatcher experience. You have to help other people like you see the way from where they are to where you are.
  • The power of networks is huge in male-dominated workplaces. There is actually a good reason why there are 47 bars in Westminster, and it’s that a lot of the actual business gets done there. There is a certain stereotype that women tend to have the meeting in the meeting, while men tend to line up their ducks in the coffee breaks and use the meeting only for rubber-stamping purposes. This, too, is an extension of the power of networks. Yet, it can be remarkably difficult for women and members of minority groups to gain access to those networks in the first place. There is something cultural about the way women are raised that makes a lot of us instinctively cringe away from doing business that way, and from self-promotion. The same applies to some ethnic minorities too. I have been challenged on a number of occasions at work as to why it is right to organise women-only networking events, or awareness trainig for LGB issues in the workplace, when there is no such support available for white, straight men. The answer is simple: Everyone is being forced to play by straight, white men rules. Straight, white men do not need help to understand or adjust to those rules. But our efforts to bring everyone else up to speed with the rules still don’t seem to be paying off. Perhaps we need to consider changing the rules.
  • Another one on the cultural front, and this one applies especially for women, is the social taboo surrounding the expression of ambition. Women who openly express ambition tend to be seen as pushy and aggressive. Men doing the same thing are strong leaders. There was a very telling interview with three new women MPs (one from each main party) on Woman’s Hour the weekend after the general election. Each was asked what her ambition was as a new Member of Parliament. And each in turn answered that this was a great new challenge for them, they still needed to learn the ropes, they were committed to their constituency, and wanted to do the the best by their constituents. None of them expressed ambition beyond that. When was the last time you heard a new male MP admit that they had a lot to learn?

There is still a lot of work to do before Westminster is truly representative of the people it is supposed to represent. To achieve this in a sustainable way, we need to not only use the short-term measures some parties are already using, such as all-women shortlists; we need to take an in-depth look at the basic underlying structures of our political system, identify structural barriers to entry, and actively work to eliminate them.
[1] Gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, disability, age, for those who don’t know what the six legally protected pillars of diversity are in the UK.