Monthly Archives: September 2013

The feminist problem with InRealLife

[Trigger warning: this article contains discussion of sexual assault]
Some of you may have seen my review of InRealLife over on ORGZine. Something that didn’t quite fit in that context but that I still wanted to discuss was the squicky nature of the film when it came to sex and sexuality – online or AFK.
One of the stories that Beeban Kidron was (unsubtly) trying to tell in the film is that, thanks to the internet, young people are forgetting how to have sex “properly”. There’s a scene fairly early on where 15-year-old Ryan, having talked us through the kinds of porn he watches, bemoans how he is no longer able to form a connection with girls. From memory, the argument goes like this: I want them to do the things that women in porn do, but if they do those, they are slags, and the others have had their hearts broken. (The thought occurs that Ryan might have less of a problem with forming connections if he dropped the slut-shaming.) The final scene of the film is the queer couple who meet online and eventually have an AFK meeting, lying in bed together and transferring data between their phones using NFC. Subtle, isn’t it? Add to this the following quote from Kidron’s CiF piece and a picture emerges:

As teenagers increasingly learn about sex from pornography, their sexual norms change. I sat with a group of boys who, when asked about where they imagined ejaculating, took more than 20 minutes and considerable prompting to come up with a word that indicated vagina. “In the face”, “over the tits”, “up the arse” and “blow job” came to their minds immediately – they were all 15.

What’s disturbing about this is that Kidron clearly has an idea of what “proper” sexuality looks like, and penis in vagina intercourse is high on the list of criteria. Now, don’t get me wrong: young men objectifying and slut-shaming women is never a good thing, regardless of how they came by those attitudes. But thinking beyond penis in vagina (PiV) intercourse in your grasp of human sexuality? I’m all for that.
Let’s face it, PiV is simply not the most pleasurable way to have sex for the vast majority of women. Only about a quarter orgasm from penetration alone. And yeah, PiV may be fun for some, or sometimes, as part of a wider experience, but its fetishisation in our culture is deeply problematic for both men and women. Do I want young people to learn about other forms of sexual pleasure from porn? Depends on the porn, frankly. But do I think a move away from PiV in our sexual culture is problematic in and of itself? Hell no. Subtlety like that, however, eludes Beeban Kidron.
The second, and much more problematic aspect was the treatment of 15-year-old Page, the only young woman featured in the film. Page describes how a group of young men stole her phone, made her follow them to a house and sexually assaulted her. She says she let this happen in order to get her phone back, because this is how much her phone means to her.
Page’s treatment by Kidron is deeply disturbing and offensive to survivors of sexual assault. Taken within the wider context of the film and the addiction narrative, Page’s story looks rather like the stereotype of the crack whore. Attitudes to sex work aside, at no point in the film is it acknowledged that what Page experienced was sexual assault, and that it was not her fault. Page is clearly traumatised by the incident, blaming herself and trying to deal with it by rationalising it. Yet Kidron chooses to serve her own ends by portraying her simply as a “fallen woman”, willing to do anything to get her next hit.
That last issue in particular really makes me doubt Kidron’s integrity and credibility as a documentary maker. It rather looks like she needed a fallen woman to make her addiction narrative stand up, and if that meant using a sexual assault survivor in this way then so be it.

[Elsewhere] InRealLife – a review

Beeban Kidron’s documentary about young people’s relationship with the internet, InRealLife, begins and ends with teenagers having sex online. This is clearly an image that is both alien and deeply terrifying to baby boomers like Kidron and large parts of Generation X. In between these highly unsubtle bookends, InRealLife is a whistlestop tour of every trope about kids these days and this new-fangled technology that a good Daily Mail reader of a certain age takes as an article of faith: porn – check; gaming – check; sexting – check; cyberbullying – check.
Read more at ORGZine.

Colliding Worlds – The Feminist Reprise

Below is the talk I gave today at the Virtual Gender conference. It’s another take on the colliding worlds theme, this time aimed at a feminist rather than a digital rights audience.
ETA 30/09/13
There is now partial video of this talk which you can see below. Huge thanks to @drcabl3 for this!

When Worlds Collide
I’m a feminist of the queer, sex-positive, and intersectional kind. I value allies to my causes and I believe in trying to be the best ally I can to other, less privileged people. One of the causes I’m engaged with is LGBT domestic abuse; another is violence against women – I’m an abuse survivor. But for longer than I’ve been a feminist, I’ve been a digital rights activist.
I grew up in a communist country where freedom of expression, freedom of association and political activism didn’t exist. There was one version of the truth, it was the Party’s version, and you lived with it. And so I believe the freedoms we have in this society – the freedoms to have conferences like this one, to imagine a better world, to meet and work with likeminded people on common goals – are to be cherished and protected. I also believe that the internet provides us with both unprecedented opportunities and never before imagined threats in this.
The internet allows us to organise and exchange ideas beyond the narrow confines of geographic proximity. Where in the past we may have thought we were alone, the internet now opens a window into the world. It allows us to find many other people like us, no matter who we are. It gives even the most marginalised and oppressed groups a voice. It allows disabled people to fight government cuts. It enables trans* people to speak out against media portrayals that are often phobic and downright vicious. It allows sex workers to share their experiences – good and bad – and fight for rights the rest of us take for granted.
At the same time, inherent in both the technology and our use of it is the potential for censorship and state surveillance. When most of us rely on Google to access the information and spaces we need, you only need to stop Google from displaying results for certain search terms to consign an issue or a group of people to eternal obscurity. When most of our communications rely on a relatively small number of undersea cables, it is easy for agencies of the state to monitor everything we say. When each and every one of us carries a tracking device in our pocket virtually day and night, reconstructing your movements from the data your mobile operator holds about you is trivial. As politically active feminists I am sure we will all agree these are clear threats to civil society, freedom of expression and freedom of association. They are threats to women and to feminism.
At a high, abstract level, issues of censorship and surveillance of the internet seem like a no-brainer to political activists of pretty much any flavour. Yet often when it comes to the intersection between feminism and digital rights, what was a no-brainer five minutes ago is suddenly a deeply divisive and contentious issue. On more than one front today, superficially feminist arguments are being made to justify censorship and surveillance of digital spaces.
I want to talk to you today about the importance of looking past those superficial arguments; about the dangers of trying to solve social problems with technical measures; about our duty as political campaigners to understand the technology we use for our campaigns, and not to let our causes be used to harm that technological infrastructure. And I want to talk to you about how we can best engage with issues at the intersection between feminism and digital rights in ways that find constructive solutions that work.
All of us in this room know that being female on the internet can be a less than pleasant experience. A recent example of this is the case of Caroline Criado Perez, the campaigner behind the initiative to put more women on banknotes. The abuse she and other prominent women received on Twitter over the course of several days in July included rape threats and death threats. It was vicious, violent and despicable. It was highly organised and intended to intimidate and silence. Having said that, the vast majority of these threats were not credible in the sense that most of the men behind them were unlikely to leave the safety of their own bedrooms to do real physical harm.
The immediate, knee-jerk fix demanded here by many feminist activists was for Twitter to implement an “Abuse” button – an instant way to flag tweets or users as abusive that would lead to the quick and automatic suspension of accounts. I can see where these calls are coming from. I can sympathise with them, I have been on the receiving end of similar abuse. But the digital rights activist in me, the one who believes that freedom of speech is sacrosanct, balks at the idea.
The irony here is of course that the first use an abuse button would be put to is to silence exactly the same people who were previously receiving the abuse. Because let’s face it, if the abusers are organised enough to sustain a campaign of threats in shifts over several days – and they are – they are also organised enough to hit the Abuse button until an activist’s account is suspended. What’s even worse is that the more vulnerable and marginalised a group is, the more disproportionately affected they would be by such campaigns. Sex workers and trans* activists in particular expressed serious concerns about the proposed Abuse button, and as an ally to those groups, as well as a digital rights activist I cannot in good conscience support those proposals.
This is not a simple issue, and knee-jerk reactions will not solve the problem. We need to look at the different facets. As digital rights activists we need to recognise what we already know as feminists: that campaigns of misogynist online abuse are a free speech issue in and of themselves. It doesn’t matter if it’s the state doing the censoring, or Facebook, or a bunch of trolls who make you feel unsafe about speaking out – the effect is the same. As feminists we need to acknowledge what we already know as digital rights activists: that automated censorship is open to abuse and tends to create more problems than it solves.
And we need to use that knowledge to find solutions that work. One blogger has suggested a “Panic” button that restricts the mentions a user can see to those from people they follow. This way the user is not silenced by having to make their account private or take a break from Twitter entirely, and they are not subjected to the distress of having to see the abuse in their timeline. I would add to that a way to identify credible threats – for instance the publication of personal details like address and telephone number – and enable the user to report those to the police. Distributed block lists are another way of dealing with this issue. Ultimately what matters here is finding solutions that address the real issues, not implementing a quick fix that may look good but does more harm than good.
Let me give you another example: David Cameron’s proposals to filter the web in the name of “protecting children”. In his speech at the NSPCC in July Cameron proposed three measures:

  • Default on web filters at ISP level filtering out pornography and other “harmful content”;
  • Forcing search engines to not return results for keywords commonly associated with child sex abuse material;
  • And a ban on the possession of visual depictions of simulated rape.

I know many anti-porn feminists welcome these measures. But as a feminist, as a digital rights activist, and as a survivor of child sex abuse, I find them deeply objectionable. None of them will do anything to tackle real issues, like the fact that many children do receive their sex and relationships education from hardcore pornography. The way to tackle that is to provide mandatory, high-quality SRE in schools – something this government voted against nearly unanimously. Instead, the proposed filters are highly likely to restrict young people’s access to vital materials on sexual health, pregnancy and abortion advice and LGBTQ issues.
But what is even worse is how open to abuse these measures are. Let’s say the NSA and GCHQ don’t want us discussing their programmes of mass internet surveillance? Google already has the technology to filter search results, the PM is about to strengthen legal powers to do so. Internet Service Providers are already filtering pornography, self-harm websites and “esoteric material”. It doesn’t take much to add “internet surveillance” to the list without anyone noticing. Think that sounds unlikely? If on the 5th of June, the day before the Snowden revelations, I had told you that the legal and technical framework enabling the NSA’s PRISM programme existed, would you have called me a conspiracy theorist? The potential for abuse is there – it’s only a matter of time until it happens.
These are the issues where my worlds collide. They’re the issues where the intersection between digital rights and feminism for me becomes really, really difficult. What I hope you take away from this is that difficult is good. Being able to see more than one side to an argument is good. Being able to see past the kneejerk reaction that invariably will cause more problems than it solves is good.
And I also hope that this has convinced you that it is vital for feminists to engage with digital rights issues. It is vital for us to understand technologies as well as their social impacts. It is vital to examine the motives behind proposed technological fixes and the effects they will have on different groups. We as feminists get intersectionality, we get oppression. We have a responsibility to ensure technology is not used for oppression, particularly not in our name.

Biphobia Bingo

It’s Bi Visibility Day soon and I’ve been pulling together various “Bisexuality 101” bits and pieces for different contexts. In between all the fluffy, constructive, outreach work I needed an outlet for my snarky side, so I put together a biphobia bingo card.
Except I’m physically incapable of doing things like that entirely unconstructively, so here’s what I’m planning to do with it. I’ll print five copies, one each for the following contexts:

  • Work
  • Family & friends
  • Mainstream media
  • The Internet
  • LGBT spaces

I’ll then try to track how long it takes me to fill them up in each context or if particular squares are more/less prevalent in particular contexts. Feel free to play along and report your results.
Biphobia Bingo v2
(*) If these items are phrased in a transphobic/exclusive of non-binary genderqueer people way, you get the “Generic transphobia” square free.

[Elsewhere] Feminism and digital rights – when worlds collide

I have guest post on The F Word today, previewing my talk for next week’s Virtual Gender conference.
As digital rights activists we need to recognise here what we already know as feminists: that campaigns of misogynist online abuse are a free speech issue in and of themselves. It doesn’t matter if it’s the state doing the censoring, or Facebook, or a bunch of trolls who make us feel unsafe about speaking out – the effect is the same. As feminists we need to acknowledge what we already know as digital rights activists: that automated censorship is open to abuse and tends to create more problems than it solves. We need to use this knowledge to find subtler solutions which address the real issues rather than damage our own campaigning infrastructure.
Read more over on The F Word.

In which I do dramatic readings…

Against my better judgement, I may have recorded dramatic readings of Paul Bernal’s brilliant Mr Gove and Mr Gove Goes to War!. Apologies for the sound quality on the shouty bits of “Mr Gove Goes to War!” I do imagine he is quite shrill though.
Here they are:

Mr Gove

Mr Gove Goes to War!