Monthly Archives: December 2013

That was 2013

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It’s been nothing if not an interesting year. Here’s a selection from my blog over the past year to keep you entertained while you’re chilling out/avoiding your family on Boxing Day.
I did a few variations on the theme of colliding worlds – the intersection between feminism and digital rights. Ultimately, the message here is that we should all care about digital rights, and that we need a more diverse digital rights community.
When Worlds Collide: My original talk from ORGCon, aimed at the digital rights community.
Colliding Worlds: My talk at the Virtual Gender conference, aimed at a feminist audience.
I also spent a lot of time this year campaigning against internet censorship in the UK.
Porn Blocking – A Survivor’s Perspective: In which I talk about how none of David Cameron’s censorship measures would have prevented the abuse I experienced. (Trigger warning for discussion of child sexual abuse.)
Censored: In which I show how Cameron’s censorship measures would censor me speaking out against censorship.
Truthloader, where I appeared on a panel with Gail Dines, Peter Bradwell, Vivienne Pattison, Leigh Porter, and Jerry Barnett.
Open Letter to David Cameron on Web Filtering, co-signed by Brooke Magnanti, Laurie Penny, Zoe Margolis, Charles Stross, Jane Fae, Holly Combe, Jane Czyselska, and me.
I talked a lot about bisexuality, including spending a week curating the @TWkLGBTQ account on Twitter.
Index post for the @TWkLGBTQ week, which leads to posts on labels, coming out, stereotypes, bisexual role models in fiction and real life, and much more.
I also made a Biphobia Bingo card. It has generated some interesting insights in the last few months.
I was generally unimpressed with pop culture in various ways.
I wrote a series of posts introducing key feminist concepts in the context of pop culture. There is more to come in this, but for now, start here.
I got angry at Joss Whedon.
And I ventured, briefly, into writing fiction.
I talked, here an there, about immigration. Have you noticed how RomaniansandBulgarians appears to have become one word in the English language?
I explained how to talk to foreigners.
I created the Immigration Drinking Game – it comes with a serious health warning.
And I urged people to sign the Let Me Vote European Citizen’s Initiative. (Something which you still have a couple of weeks to do, incidentally.)
I wrote a few pieces for ORGZine including a review of Beeban Kidron’s documentary InRealLife, and a comment on Amazon’s latest attempt to cash in on fanfiction.
I also wrote a handy 5-step guide to being a great ally.
And last but not least, I remembered Maggie.
Here’s to 2014. May it let our voices be heard.

The Immigration Drinking Game

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Today is International Migrants’ Day. Not that you’d know that from the Today Programme coverage of immigration this morning. So I have decided to bring you the Immigration Drinking Game. Get a (large) bottle of your favourite liquor and settle down. (Feel free to add more items in the comments or tweet them @elmyra.)
The United Nations produces promotional material featuring only people of colour? Yes, white people are a global minority, and yes, many migrants are indeed people of colour. However not acknowledging that white people can be migrants too perpetuates racist stereotypes. It’s why I can pass as British unless I shout about being foreign, whereas people with brown skin who were born here, and whose parents were born here are constantly asked where they’re from and complimented on their English. So take a drink.
“Economic migrants” hurled as an insult. Because wanting to work and make a contribution to society is clearly somehow a bad thing. Because having the strength to do a job you are vastly overqualified for on minimum wage is somehow to be despised. Take a drink.
RomaniansandBulgarians. One word. Breathless. A prayer. An invocation. A curse. Take a drink.
Benefit tourism. Check your facts. Take a drink.
It’s all the EU’s fault. Nevermind that it is also the EU that enables you to export over a million of your retired (aka unproductive, with greater healthcare needs) citizens to Spain. Take a drink.
A drain on local community resources. Let’s do some maths. Brits in Bulgaria as percentage of population: 0.246%. Bulgarians in UK as percentage of population: 0.0743%. Bulgaria’s GDP/capita: $7k. UK GDP/capita: $38k. Most Brits in Bulgaria are retirees and thus not contributing hugely to the economy but requiring more healthcare resources than average; most Bulgarians in the UK are relatively young, healthy, evil economic migrants. Now tell me who’s a drain on whose resources. And take a drink while you’re at it.
Learn English. Integrate. We’ve cut funding for ESL classes? Take a drink.
We should welcome immigrants because they do all the jobs the feckless, undeserving, spoiled British underclass is too lazy to do. It’s fun, playing off the poor against the foreigners. They’re so busy hating each other, they won’t even notice when the Tories win the next election. Take a drink.
We should leave the EU if we can’t stop free movement of labour. By all means, cut off your nose to spite your face. Take a drink.
RomaniansandBulgarians and Roma. Would you like some racism with your racism? Take two drinks.
Racists of the world, unite! Down the fucking bottle. And another one for good measure. That’s it, you’re done.

Compare and Contrast

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For those of you who haven’t gone out and found the full version of that Chimamanda Adichie talk that Beyonce sampled in Flawless, here it is.

No need to thank me[1].
I watched this just now, and I was painfully reminded of Joss Whedon’s take on the subject of the word “feminist”.

(I am sorry for putting you through this again.)
Here are two storytellers, both incredibly aware of the power of stories and the power of language, taking on the same word. It is almost uncanny how much of the same ground they cover:
– that the word “feminist” comes with a lot of baggage;
– that this is an issue of equality and shared humanity;
– that it’s an issue of language and an issue of culture.
Now look at how differently they treat those points. Whedon throws the word out of the window in some misguided attempt at humour. Adichie reveals the way all that baggage has affected her, the internalised oppression she is carrying and struggling with:

“At some point, I was a happy African feminist, who does not hate men, and who likes lip gloss, and who wears high heels for herself and not for men.”

Whedon declares that “You either believe women are people, or you don’t.” Adichie examines the social structures and systems of oppression that lead to the majority of people today believing that women are not people. She tells us how we are all socialised to see girls and women as less, to assume that any money or self-worth a woman may have will have come from a man, to see women as guilty, to stifle girls’ ambition by making their first priority marriage. (And if you think that last one is an African and not a Western issue, you need to think again. But that’s another post.) She points out how men are the default – how Joss Whedon probably never had to think about what to wear to that award dinner he made his speech at, while Chimamanda Adichie has to expend energy to look less feminine in order to be taken seriously. She talks about how these assumptions are so ingrained in our society that even her progressive male friends do not see them until they are shoved right up in their face.
Whedon seems to think we have solved racism. Adichie, a black African woman, examines the interaction between different systems of oppression (racism and sexism), different types of privilege.
Whedon says if only we had a word that made it clear that believing that women aren’t human was unacceptable, the world would be a much better place. Adichie looks at practical ways in which we can initiate and sustain cultural change: raising children based on talent and interests rather than gender, being aware of the assumptions we make and the messages we send, challenging sexist behaviour when we see it. She is also keenly aware of all the ways in which discussions about gender get shut down and derailed, often deliberately, often by people like Joss Whedon. (“Why do you have to say ‘my experience as a woman’? Why can’t you say ‘my experience as a human being’?” Yeah, that does sound kinda familiar, now that you mention it.)
Joss Whedon makes a speech, throws a word out of the window, throws another one at the audience, and that’s it, job done. Chimamanda Adichie understands that it takes 100 years for killing twins to no longer be part of a culture. She tells us of the barriers she faces in accessing and shaping her own culture. She acknowledges the difficulty of changing our culture, but very clearly tells us that it is not only not impossible, but that it is vital. “Culture does not make people. People make culture.”
I am inspired by one of these two messages, one of these two people. When Joss Whedon tells me “Go forth and use ‘genderist’!” my response is a resounding “Fuck you!” When Chimamanda Adichie tells me to be a proud woman, a proud feminist, and to go and challenge our society’s myriad sexist assumptions every single day, then yes, of course I will. Because Chimamanda Adichie speaks from her experience as a woman, while Joss Whedon lacks the imagination that would allow him to conceive that women’s experiences are different.
—

[1] It needs to be acknowledged that parts of Chimamanda Adichie’s talk contain heteronormative and cissexist assumptions, and there is one piece that is problematic with regards to sex work. While in an ideal world all of us would be constantly aware of all axes of privilege and all intersections of oppression and speak and act accordingly, this is not the world we live in, and I feel Adichie’s contribution to the feminist discourse is incredibly valuable even with these flaws.

When is it appropriate to gender things?

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Our society genders things. It starts with pink hats and blue hats when we’re babies, continues with LEGO and LEGO Friends when we’re kids and culminates in power tools and handbags when we’re adults. It doesn’t matter how feminist we are, how aware of popular culture and its more problematic elements, it is sometimes difficult to escape internalising some of this social gendering of random objects and concepts. I rarely do a double-take when products I have no interest in (e.g. beer) are marketed in a way specifically aimed at men. I do grumble when items I am interested in are marketed this way, or when, in order to target women, manufacturers think they should make their products pink.
Occasionally, however, someone decides to gender something I never even thought of as gendered in any way before and that serves as a nice reminder of quite how ridiculous the whole concept is. Until last week the Firebox catalog landed on my desk, for instance, I had no idea that I was no longer allowed coffee and related items (filed under “Mens Gifts” – sic) due to my gender identity; also magical fixing putty Sugru; and RFID wallets, possibly because Firebox haven’t worked out that they also come in pink.
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I asked whoever was on Twitter some time after midnight last Tuesday if they could think of examples of things that genuinely should be gendered. Here are some of the responses I got: French grammar, sex toys, babies’ nappies, “feminine hygiene products”, “female hormonal contraception”, safe spaces of some kinds. Let’s group these into a few categories and look at them in more detail.
French grammar: languages
Tom Scott has dealt with this beautifully. Enough said.

Sex toys, nappies, tampons, hormonal contraception: objects
More specifically, these are objects designed for specific parts of anatomy: primary and secondary sexual characteristics, body chemistry and organs associated with sex. Let’s at this point remind ourselves of some basic definitions. I’ll go with a slightly modified version of the World Health Organisation definition:

“Sex” refers to the biological and physiological characteristics (…) “Gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for (different genders).

The important bit here is that sex and gender are not the same, and that when we say certain objects are only for men or only for women, we are making a statement about socially constructed roles, behaviours or activities, i.e. about gender, not biological sex. Your gender is not defined by your biological sex. If you’re lucky in our cisheteronormative society, your gender identity may match the set of physical characteristics you have, or the gender you were assigned at birth, but there are many people for whom that’s not the case, or whose physical characteristics don’t neatly fit into a binary model.
Looking therefore at things like tampons, sanitary towels and hormonal contraception, there are plenty of men out there who have use for these things. There are also agender or non-binary people who need these products. Likewise sex toys designed to stimulate a particular configuration of genitalia can still be used by people of any gender.
Therefore, stating that a product, even one specifically designed with a particular set of anatomical features in mind, is “for men” or “for women” is extremely problematic. A better approach would be to make direct reference to the anatomical features in question. Something might be for people who have a penis, or a uterus, or breasts. Let’s face it, getting less uptight about discussing bodies can only be a good thing, and shedding oppressive gender norms in the process is a nice bonus.
Safe spaces
Given the global epidemic of gender-based violence, it is understandable that many women in particular feel the need for some gender-segregated safe spaces. Refuges and meeting spaces are good examples here. Having said that, a binary approach to gender can create a whole new set of problems when it comes to safe spaces. Trans women, for instance, are often excluded from refuges or find that they have to meet certain criteria for their gender identity to be accepted. Similarly, agender and non-binary people can be excluded from some safe spaces, even if they are not the threat we need safety from or if they are also affected by the same threat. Queer people who experience domestic abuse can also find it difficult to access safe spaces because our model of domestic abuse is so gendered.
I do accept the need for some safe spaces, but I also believe we need a more nuanced approach to them. I don’t necessarily have a good solution here – and I don’t actually believe there is a one-size-fits-all solution – but here are some of the things I would consider. We need to understand what the threat model is that we are seeking safety from and define our safe spaces as much as possible based on that, rather than on proxies like sex. We particularly need to ensure that in seeking safety we are not policing others’ identities or worse, endangering others.
“But what about pink RFID wallets?” you ask.
Here’s the thing. Pink (okay, magenta) is an awesome colour. It’s bright. It’s cheerful. It goes fantastically well with purple; and black; and all sorts of other colours. If you want a pink RFID wallet, get one. But don’t do it because you’re a woman. And don’t not do it because you’re a man. If you happen to be a marketing exec stop gendering things that have no business being gendered. If your product is designed for particular anatomical features, say so, don’t use gender as a proxy. And if you’re trying to create a safe space, put some thought into it to ensure it is both safe and inclusive.
This post has been brought to you by the Fluff and Inclusion Police.