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I wasn't going to talk about Thatcher, but the Daily Mail today is treating us to a spectacular trainwreck of a headline: "'They danced in the streets when Hitler died too': Drama teacher who organised Thatcher death parties remains unrepentant as it's revealed she had NHS breast implants"

To which, I must admit, my first reaction was "Surely Maggie could afford to go private".

If Daily Mail editors read more material that involved long passages of exposition talking about two people of the same gender (slash fiction for instance), they would be aware of the pitfalls of connecting the wrong subject with the wrong predicate in a sentence. Frivolity aside, though, it strikes me that this particular crash blossom is more likely to have its roots in our culture's assumptions about who holds power rather than in the dubious reading habits of Daily Mail staff.

As a former Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher may have had the "body of a weak, feeble woman", but I rather suspect that in the minds of the Tory faithful she had "the heart and stomach of a king". I'm not sure it even occurred to the poor sod who wrote that headline for the Mail that Thatcher, too, had breasts.

I may be reading too much into this, but I do think it illustrates quite nicely that for many in our society those in power and those with female bodies are still two very separate groups of people.

When you ask me the above question, here's what I hear:

• I think I am funny and original. I live in a bubble so privileged and sheltered from the real world that I cannot even imagine that at eight o'clock in the morning on March 8th I'm not even the first person to ask you that question.
• Despite this International Women's Day clearly being a thing, I have never even given a single thought to why it might be a thing; why people feel there may be a need for it; how women's lives are different to my own little bubble of privilege.
• On a day deliberately designated for the celebration of diversity and inclusion, I can't be bothered to take a second to think about whether my behaviour and comments are inclusive, or within the spirit of that day. Let's not even talk about all the other days of the year.

When you ask me the above question, here's how it might make me and others around us feel:

• Dismissed and trivialised. It's bad enough that there were cupcakes involved.
• Put on the spot. I can either stand up to you and be a role model to those around me, at the price of some significant personal discomfort, or I can not look in the mirror for the rest of the day. Either option will upset me sufficiently to distract me from doing my job.
• Disappointed. Because really, you should know better, and there is no way in hell that I should have to deal with this.

And when I finally answer the above question, here are some things you maybe shouldn't do:

• Be surprised that I spoke up for myself.
• Look at me like I just kicked your puppy for telling you that "That'd be all the other days of the year."
• Tell me you don't think that's quite true.

Just some food for thought.

Following on from last week's rant about intersectionality and @pozorvlak's request for an explanation of solidarity "in operational terms", I thought it might be a good time to actually write up some thoughts I've been having on what makes a great ally.^[1] So here's a five-ish step guide to being a great ally.

Step 0: Can I be an ally?

No matter who you are, you can always be an ally. This is not a role reserved for the ultra-privileged straight, white, middle class man. You can be the proverbial disabled black lesbian [This link will probably make you angry.], and chances are that there is still someone out there for whom things suck harder. That's what intersectionality is all about, and ultimately that's what solidarity and being an ally is all about.

Step 1: Check your privilege

If we accept the basic premise of intersectionality - that for some people things suck harder - and we want to do something about it, the first thing we need to do is be aware of our own privilege. This will help us understand the kind of power we have, the kind of power we don't have, and who we can be an ally to. Being aware of your privilege is not some kind of point-scoring game that you win or lose. It's an exercise in self-awareness, perspective, and humility.

Here's an example. I am a member of three oppressed groups: I am female, bisexual and an immigrant. That doesn't mean that I don't have a whole bundle of privilege:

• I am white.
• I speak English well enough that few people can actually tell I'm an immigrant from a brief interaction.
• Even as an immigrant, I am an EU citizen so I have the automatic right to live and work in this country.
• I am in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender, so unless I deliberately out myself, I have assumed heterosexual privilege.
• I am quite disgustingly middle class, both in background and in current living standard.
• I am, as Julie Burchill would put it, "educated beyond all common sense and honesty". (I have an MA in European Politics; some day I may want to do a PhD.)
• Though I'm an atheist, I am culturally Christian in a country that is dominated by cultural and historical Christianity.
• I am in my early thirties.
• I am (for the moment at least) able-bodied.
• I am cisgendered.

Every single one of those points has a tangible impact on my day-to-day life that makes things suck less. If you want some concrete examples of how that works, the Invisible Knapsack (white privilege version, sexual orientation and gender identity version, the male privilege version) is a good place to start. It also gives me a certain amount of power and credibility with particular groups of people - it gives me a voice that someone who is not of the same group may not have.

Equally, some of these points also give me huge blind spots in my experience and view of the world. I don't know what it's like living as a non-white, or Muslim, or working class, or disabled person. Some areas are bigger blind spots than others. The closer I am to being under-privileged in a category, the more pre-existing knowledge and empathy I will have with people in that category. So even though I am a very privileged immigrant (see points 2 and 3 above) I have a relatively good understanding of what it might be like being a less privileged immigrant.

Checking our privilege allows us to start mapping out the "unknown unknowns" we have in our experience and world view so that we can begin to turn them at least into "known unknowns". It's a basic prerequisite for being an ally or showing solidarity.

Step 2: Do no harm

There are lots of ways in which we can do harm or perpetuate oppression, sometimes even with the best intentions. Probably the most common ones are denial, silencing, and dysfunctional rescuing.

Denial

A classic example of denial would be "Why do you need an LGBT group at work? Sexual orientation is not relevant to the workplace." If you're finding yourself questioning the validity of someone's experience because it's different to yours, you're probably engaging in denial. This is harmful in several ways. Even if you only engage in denial towards the target group (say, LGBT people) themselves, you are likely to upset people and maybe even cause them to question their own experience which can be very hurtful and counterproductive. If you do this in public, you are actively using the power and platform given to you by your privilege to undermine a target group.

Silencing

"We have bigger problems - we'll get to yours once we've sorted those out"; or, of course, "Transsexuals should cut it out"; or talking of "lesbians and gays" at an explicitly LGB or LGBT event. As someone more privileged you have the power to give a voice to someone else, or to silence them in all sorts of subtle and entirely unsubtle ways. Don't do it. Just like as, say, a woman you don't want men to speak for you or silence you, make sure you're not speaking for or silencing others.

Dysfunctional rescuing

This one is subtle, insidious, and much like the road to hell, paved with good intentions. In a workplace LGBT context, it might be not offering the fantastic job opportunity in Saudi Arabia to the employee you know is gay, without even consulting them. The problem with this kind of "rescuing" is that, while it is indeed well-intentioned, it rarely addresses the real underlying needs of the person or group you are trying to rescue and more often than not it robs them of their own agency.

The thing about doing no harm is that you need to accept that you will get this wrong. None of us is perfect. We will commit microaggressions and sometimes macroaggressions in thought, in words or in actions sometimes on a daily basis. There are a few things you can do to minimise the harm you do with your privilege:

• Become more aware of when you might be causing harm. Think about past experiences where you think you might have got things wrong, and learn from them - don't repeat the behaviour.
• When you do put your foot in it, and someone calls you out, don't get defensive. Think about it, apologise, learn from the experience. Yes, this is difficult. I get it wrong all the time. Practice. If you find yourself becoming defensive, think about the "dental hygiene approach to racism" (and other -isms).
• If in doubt, shut up. For more advanced allies who may have someone they can ask, ask. But the minute you begin to doubt whether something is a good idea, put it on ice until you can validate it.

Here's an example: I've been known to use the words "just because I have a uterus" as a convenient shorthand for gender discrimination. Then I started actually paying attention when trans people on Twitter kept saying "penis != man and lack of penis != woman". Now I'm looking for a different shorthand because my previous lazy phrasing actively excludes and silences trans women and men.

Step 3: Listen!

We've already established that our privilege gives us blind spots in our world view, and that those blind spots can cause us to actively harm others and perpetuate oppression. So now that we have some "known unknowns" and we're at least trying to not do harm, we can move on to turning some of our unknowns into knowns.

There are many ways to do this. If you are a novice at being an ally to a particular group, then just listening to or reading around the current discourse in the field will give you a good grasp of the key issues, the key problems, the needs of the group, the preferred language and terminology. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we live in an age where even the most marginalised groups have ways of at least talking to each other, have a little corner of the world they can call their own where they have a voice. Google will take you to it. Any type of material, from first-person accounts like microaggressions.com to academic research can give you new insights.

Asking people from the target group about their experience is also generally a good idea. However, be aware that they may not want to talk to you about it - now or ever. While I think a lot of people will be happy to answer questions if they are respectfully and sensitively framed, they are under no obligation to educate you. Don't be discouraged if you don't get answers the first time - sometimes it's just not right for a person to share their experiences with an ally. That's fine - ask someone else, ask when a better time would be, don't give up on other ways of listening and understanding.

The act of listening and trying to understand will probably lead you to question and discard some of your assumptions - some things you thought you knew. This is a great achievement as it puts you in a position where you are less likely to do harm and more likely to be able to move on to the next step of being a great ally.

Step 4: Use your power for good

The simplest thing you can do with your power, once you have listened and understood the oppressed group, is to be the one dissenting voice among the in-group you are part of. As a straight white man, you have credibility with straight white men that a woman doesn't. As a cis woman you have credibility with other cis women that a trans woman may not. Use that to challenge prejudice, hateful language or abusive behaviour. Call out sexism, tell your friends that rape jokes are not okay, go to Pride as an ally. Those are all great ways to show solidarity.

Having said that, sometimes it may not be the right time or place to speak out. If your actions or words may put the people you are trying to be an ally to at risk or create an unsafe space for them, then consider staying silent. Also see "Do no harm" above, and this great post on being a feminist ally.

There are other things you can do to be a great ally. The rule of thumb though is that they should always be driven by the needs of the target group. You goal as an ally is to make things suck less for them. Sometimes in the short term that may be through shutting up and not drawing attention to them, while in the long term you want to ensure that you are not part of a silent majority that tolerates or commits oppression.

The more you have listened and understood the target group, the more confident you will be in challenging oppression and doing the right thing as an ally. When I speak out against the government's rhetoric on immigration - even when as a white, English-speaking EU citizen I technically count as a "good immigrant" - I speak both as an immigrant, but also as an ally of less privileged immigrants. Because of my own experiences, this is a topic I am very confident speaking out on. Ask me to comment on race issues, however, and I'm likely to look around for someone more qualified and point you in their direction. That's fine too.

Some of the best allies I have worked with will go beyond speaking out. They will proactively look for opportunities to further the target group's cause and then, in consultation with the target group, go after those opportunities. As well as accomplishing important things, this kind of behaviour can be a huge morale boost to the target group. Knowing that someone believes in you and is likely to put their personal reputation and influence on the line for you is a huge motivator. Allies like that make me work harder for my own cause as well as strive to be a better ally to others.

Step 5: Be prepared to have the difficult conversations

Every once in a while, as an ally you will be in a position where you have a better insight into how to achieve something than the target group. It may be because you have better knowledge of the privileged group, better connections, more influence. Sometimes the right thing for the target group to do may be to take a step back, to take a different approach. Those are difficult conversations to have. They can be incredibly frustrating for the target group, cause a loss of confidence or momentum. They are vitally important conversations to have, and to have respectfully and sensitively.

If you are ever in that situation, make sure that you make your commitment to the target group clear. Sometimes, from the target group point of view, it is difficult to tell whether someone is a genuine ally trying to help or just making the "right" noises while putting obstacles in your way. Make sure there is no doubt about which side you're on, and make sure to explain why you believe a certain course of action is necessary. If you have built a trusting relationship with the target group, if they have a reason to believe in you, these conversations will be a lot easier. Ultimately, though, also be prepared for your advice to not be taken, and respect that.

As an ally, you may never get beyond step 2 of this process. That is perfectly fine and you'll be doing a hell of a lot better than many others out there. I would encourage you to at least try step 3 - challenge your own assumptions and preconceptions; you will find it rewarding. How much you speak out and put yourself up as a target in the cause of being an ally is up to you, will vary by situation, and as long as you've done your homework with steps 1-3, will be greatly appreciated.

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[1] Solidarity is a term you are more likely to hear in overtly political left-wing discourse. Ally is a term that is slightly less scary for corporate types. Operationally though there is enough of an overlap between the two concepts that I'm going to use them interchangeably. I do have a slight preference for "ally" not only because of the warm fuzzy feelings it gives corporate types but also because the nature of the word is less abstract and puts responsibility on individuals.

Did someone declare Transphobia Week without telling me? The torrent of vile hate speech that seems to be making its way around the Internet, from Twitter to normally at least vaguely respectable sites like Comment is Free, started earlier this week with the publication in the New Statesman of an essay by Suzanne Moore on female anger, which contained the ill-advised throw-away line

We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape - that of a Brazilian transsexual.

What does that even mean?

I watched the ensuing train wreck "live" on Twitter, as Suzanne Moore - instead of taking the high road, saying "Oops, my bad, lazy writing, sorry" and asking her editor to remove the line - degenerated into a veritable tirade of genuinely shocking hate speech. Much though I like some of Moore's writing, the comments she made were unacceptable to me, and I unfollowed her, expecting - perhaps somewhat naively - that that would be the end of the story.

Of course, the next day Moore went on the offensive in Comment is Free, and the article ended up in my Twitter feed anyway. What got me this time was the following line:

Intersectionality is good in theory, though in practice, it means that no one can speak for anyone else.

If Moore was trying for self-parody, she's right up there with the Church of England. Before we go on any further though, let me make one thing very very clear: I am a cis woman; Moore's comments are transphobic; Julie Burchill's comments, spawned by the reaction to Moore, are also transphobic; they make me feel physically sick.

But let's talk about that incredibly complex, difficult to grasp, highly theoretical concept that is intersectionality. Stavvers in another similar debate recently put it wonderfully: for some people, things suck harder. Think things suck because you're a woman? Try being black, or disabled, or non-straight, or a trans woman. Things suck harder. This does not mean that things don't suck for straight, white, able-bodied, cis women. But it does mean that for some women they suck even harder. This is not a difficult concept to wrap your head around if you have a minimum level of human empathy.

Now let's go back to Suzanne Moore's comment above: Intersectionality means that no one can speak for anyone else. Imagine the same comment being made by David Cameron; or Nick Clegg; or, frankly, any straight, white dude. Imagine a straight, white dude complaining that they weren't allowed to speak for women, or people of colour, or gay people. Suzanne Moore would be the first on the barricades. That's precisely what her original, unfortunately formulated essay that started all this is about.

When she complains about men legislating on women's reproductive freedoms, she is objecting to others speaking for her. When she complains about certain parts of the left rallying around Julian Assange, she is objecting to others speaking for her. When she complains about David Cameron telling Angela Eagle to "calm down dear", she is objecting to others speaking for her. What kind of cognitive failure does it take to write all that and then complain that intersectionality means she is not allowed to speak for other people?

There are some cases when it is appropriate to speak for others. They are few and far between, but they are there. They are those occasions when you have taken the time to truly listen and understand others. They are the occasions where your privilege - no matter how limited - gives you a voice more likely to be heard. They are the occasions when you can act as an ally.

Unless that is what you are trying to do - and you have truly taken the time to listen and understand - you are better off keeping your thoughts to yourself. And if, occasionally, you do slip up, then have the backbone to apologise and learn from the experience when called on it.

It was around 1am on Saturday and I was rather inebriated and amongst some of my best friends when the above comment on my post about consent and the Julian Assange case hit my inbox. That perhaps accounts for my complete and utter failure to be upset by it, or take it as anything other than another badge of honour, following in the footsteps of the "fat and ugly" and "fuck off back home" comments that I occasionally receive on this blog and other parts of the Internet. We even had a dramatic reading!

The tragic reality, however, is that this is not even par for the course for women online - it's remarkably mild and restrained compared to the kinds of things hurled at people like Anita Sarkeesian, Helen Lewis, or anyone who dares to play video games while female. Anonymous is not threatening to harm me directly, or even encouraging others to do so - merely speaking in hypotheticals, surmising that I may change my mind if I was subjected to what they regard as "proper" rape. Bless their little cotton socks, Anonymous cannot even imagine that I may already have experienced sexual assault and that my opinions may be coloured by that experience.

Statistically speaking, of course dear Anonymous, I am about as likely as not to have experienced a major incident of gender-based violence such as sexual assault (including, as you so eloquently put it, "penis in vagina rape"), domestic violence, or stalking. You on the other hand Anonymous, being almost certainly male, rather lack the frame of reference to even begin to imagine what it's like to live in a world where everyone thinks they're entitled to a piece of you. The fact that you feel entitled to make this kind of comment to me rather proves this point, but to be honest I don't actually expect you to understand that - or spot irony if it bit you in arse for that matter.

When I asked Twitter for ideas on what to do with my thinly-veiled rape threat, a number of people suggested I report it to the police and get it traced (it did come with an IP address and what looks remarkably like a real email address). I must admit this had not occurred to me - partly because the comment is, after all, comparatively mild and does not constitute a direct threat; and partly because the bit of me that's a digital rights activist really does not want to see restrictions on free speech and people arrested and jailed for mouthing off on the Internet. We have already had way too much of this kind of thing recently.

So I am putting it up here instead. I am doing this to raise awareness of the kind of harassment women experience online and the epidemic levels of gender-based violence in our society, but also as an intellectual exercise for digital rights folk. Or as @graphiclunarkid put it, "If you choose to publish a held-for-moderation threat against yourself are you guilty of s127 menacing, um, yourself?!"

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Today we blog about great women in science, engineering, technology and maths - women who have inspired us, women who can act as role models to a whole generation of girls and show them that a successful career in a male-dominated area is not only possible but also fulfilling. Today is when I tell you about my mother.

My mother was born in the 1950s and grew up in Communist Bulgaria. She wanted to be a doctor. At the time, trainee doctors were shipped off all over the country, and you had no control over where you would be sent - my grandparents were not happy about this, and as far as I know the story, my grandfather put his foot down and told my mother that she wasn't allowed to study medicine. They made a deal: if she agreed to study something more acceptable, like chemistry, he would enable her to go on exchange to Moscow. My mother kept her end of the bargain but for reasons I don't know she never went to Moscow.

Once she graduated, my mother had a successful, decade-long career as a research chemist. She had specialised in organic chemistry and surfactants - things that you find, for instance, in washing powder. What she actually worked on were better, foam-based fire extinguishing chemicals.

Fairly early on in her career, my mother decided to have me. She got married at 23 and had me when she was 25. In some ways, having children young was easier in Communist Bulgaria. Maternity leave provisions were extremely generous with a paid period and up to three years unpaid. Childcare was affordable and pretty much universally available. In some ways, it was tougher - my parents lived with my grandparents until I was four years old.

My mother wanted to put me in nursery when I was six months old and return to work. I'm afraid I was having none of it, and in the end, she took the full three-year maternity leave. I'm not sure I can really regret something I did when I was six months old, but this one I do. Once she did return to work, she continued to work on fire extinguishing foams, and her career progressed pretty well.

I have a very vivid memory - I must have been eight or nine - of my mother taking me into work. It may have been during the school holidays, or school may have been closed for some reason - I'm not sure. I got to watch one of her experiments - I got to watch her set things on fire! That was exciting! Very shortly after that, like so many women in so many different circumstances, my mother sacrificed her career for our family.

When Communism collapsed in 1989, things took a turn for the worse very quickly. By early 1990, there was quite literally no food. There was food rationing. I remember booklets of yellow vouchers - this many for sugar, that many for flour, that many for oil. I remember - aged nine - fighting in a supermarket with a middle-aged woman over a bar of soap. I remember one bitterly cold January day standing with my mother in a queue at the butcher's only to watch as they ran out of everything just before it was our turn. The butcher had put aside some meat for his own family, and when he saw me, he decided to share it with us. By mid-1990, my father had decided that we were leaving the country.

How exactly we ended up in Austria is a different story entirely, but while my father was fluent in German, neither my mother nor I spoke a word. I was thrown in at the deep end, sent to school, and within a few months, I was fluent. My mother had a much tougher deal. While I was at school and my father was at work, she was home alone with a pile of textbooks. She didn't have the confidence, nor really the opportunity, to go out and speak. On top of that, my father insisted that at home we spoke Bulgarian - and while in the long run that was the right decision for me and the whole family, in the short run it made my mother's life even more difficult.

By the time my mother's German was good enough to work and she managed to wrangle a work permit, she'd been out of chemistry for four years. She was in a foreign country which hardly had any industry at all - certainly not in the part of the country where we were - and had very little of a social network. Would she have liked to return to science? I think so, but I don't know for certain. In the end, though, she looked at which of her skills she could market and began first to teach German to refugees from the various Yugoslav wars and then to translate for an insurance company. She has changed career twice since then and now works in back office in an investment bank.

Here are some of the things my mother taught me:

Women work. For as long as I remember, my mother has had a job and most of the time a career. The short periods between jobs or careers were the times when she was truly miserable. She always wanted to work. There were - as far as I'm aware - never any questions about "having it all", about combining motherhood with a career. My father pulled his weight around the house, and my mother worked outside the home. This was normality. I distinctly remember, when we moved to Austria, finding out that there were women who were "housewives". I did not understand that concept. Women worked.

Not only do women work, but women can be anything they like. My mother was a research chemist, after all. When I was still in kindergarten, I actually thought she was a firefighter, because she worked in the research division of the national fire service. When I told the other kids this, they told me that women couldn't be firefighters. I never believed it for a second - my mother was one, after all. When I was growing up and considering various career options, at no point did I ever think "I can't do that because I'm a woman" or "It'll be more difficult for me to do that because I'm a woman".

These two very basic assumptions - that women work and that women can do whatever they like - are incredibly deeply ingrained in my approach to life. They give me what I'm sure looks from the outside like a huge sense of entitlement: as long as I work hard and bring the right skills to the table, I have a right to be in any workplace and any profession I choose. Yet this sense of entitlement is tempered by the third thing that my mother taught me - that sometimes we have to make choices and adapt.

In her fifties now and on her fourth career, my mother's done her fair share of adapting. She's adapted to changing priorities, to external catastrophes, to circumstances beyond her control. It is that adaptation that for me has enabled those first two basic assumptions to survive contact with western capitalist society. I'm nothing like as good at this as my mother - or possibly my priorities lie elsewhere and I have made different choices - but I greatly admire her for it, and for everything else she's achieved.

Every few months, Julian Assange's ongoing struggle to evade facing allegations of sexual assault and rape in Sweden makes the news and Twitter is flooded with fanboys (and the occasional fangirl) explaining how it was all consensual really and this is a huge conspiracy to get Assange ultimately extradited to the US. Today is no exception. Consent does not work the way these people think it does. So let's talk about consent, because maybe if Mr Assange and his supporters understood it, they might not rape people in future.

Consent should be enthusiastic

Enthusiastic consent is not something I've just made up - google it. Basically, it means that at any point during a sexual encounter all partners should be happily and enthusiastically into it. Not "Um, this is alright", not "Thinking of England here", but "YES, YES, fucking YES!!" kind of enthusiastic.

Let me add that this enthusiasm should not just be based on physical arousal or the "quality" of the sex you're having. Your partner may be incredibly turned on, really wet or hard for you, and they may still not want to have sex with you at that point in time. They might have to get up early the next morning, they might fear getting cystitis, they might find you physically hot but think you're a creep - it doesn't matter. Consent is a thing of the mind as well as the body. "You want me, really" is one of the most hurtful, damaging things you can say to a partner who's trying to withdraw consent or not give it in the first place. If you find yourself saying that (other than in carefully negotiated BDSM situations where withdrawal of consent may happen through a safeword), you're probably in the process of raping somebody.

So how do you establish enthusiastic consent? Here's clue: getting them to sign a contract doesn't do the trick. Understand your partner. Read their body language. Pay attention to and respect their needs, desires and boundaries. Talk to them. "Do you like what I'm doing?" "Do you want to keep going?" "What would you like to do?" It's really not rocket science.

Which neatly leads us to one of the allegations in the Assange case: that he had sex with somebody who was asleep. I hate to break this to you but somebody who's unconscious cannot give you any kind of consent, let alone the enthusiastic variety. And yes, this also applies to people who are drunk. Even if your drunk friend is really coming onto you, you're better off letting them sleep it off. If once they've recovered from their hangover they're still up for it, good for you; else, at least you haven't raped anyone.

Consent may come with conditions

This should be a no-brainer, but apparently some people struggle with it in the Assange case. If I have given enthusiastic consent to sleep with you provided you use a condom, that does not mean that I have given consent to sleep with you without one. If you have consented to having penis-in-vagina sex with me, that does not mean you've consented to me fucking you up the arse with a strap-on.

It's not that "not using a condom is considered rape in Sweden". Swedish people still exist after all. Rather, not using a condom when the use of one has been negotiated as a condition for consent is considered rape by civilised people.

Finally, consent can be withdrawn at any time

Also see "talk to your partner" and "getting them to sign a contract isn't enough" above. At any point during a sexual encounter any party involved is perfectly entitled to withdraw consent. The other party or parties involved are obliged to stop. If they do not stop, then this is rape or sexual assault (depending on what exactly you're doing). So if, in the words of Roger Helmer, MEP, you find yourself "in the heat of the moment, [...] unable to restrain [your]self" and carry on, then yes, you are probably a rapist.

Seriously, if someone withdraws consent, in the heat of the moment, go take a cold shower. Or even just go take a shower. It will afford you the privacy to use your hand. You do not need to get your rocks off enough to warrant raping somebody. You will not suffer lasting physical and mental damage from having to wank.

Now go forth and multiply. Enthusiastically consensually.

Apparently, science is a "girl thing". Thank you for that enlightenment, European Commission! As a female astrophysicist friend put it, the EU's brand new initiative to attract more women into science is offensive to both men and women - and frankly to scientists. So looking at the teaser video (above) and other content on the site, let's play Stereotype Bingo!

Let's start from the top, shall we?

Women want to know about work-life balance as much as about the job

Looking at the profiles of women in science videos, nearly half the time in each video is dedicated to what these amazing women do in their free time, be it play football, go shopping or look after the kids. Firstly, there are plenty of women out there who just want to know what the job is, thank you very much. More importantly though, perpetuating this stereotype with employers is actively harmful to women's careers. Women are already seen as a liability because they "they can run off and have kids any time", with high-profile business leaders like Alan Sugar demanding the right to ask women about childcare plans at interview stage. Sure, if we'll treat men in the same way, let's talk about work-life balance. But let's not make it the most important topic for one gender only.

Women are naturally caring

In Six reasons why science needs you, we are told about scientific careers in healthcare (healing); food security (feeding); transport, energy and climate action (fixing our broken planet); and "innovative and secure societies" (keeping everyone safe). Hang on! Where are my explosions? I demand explosions!

Women like pink!

It is impossible to attract women to our website without pink. Perhaps the European Commission should have a word with Pink Stinks. 'nuff said.

Make-up! The science of make-up!

Apparently the Commission have been cribbing ideas from the German Greens [article in German] who recently suggested that one way to get girls interested in science was to teach them about make-up. Apart from the fact that there are plenty of other more exciting applications of chemistry, physics and biology, one does wonder whether the people behind this appreciate the amount of time scientists researching hair dye spend handling strands of cut-off human hair.

It's a "girl thing". Even running your own department you'll still be a girl.

Brian Cox notwithstanding, most people entering scientific careers do actually age beyond 12. Calling women in science "girls" infantilises them and diminishes the achievements of highly professional women like Dr Silke Buehler-Paschen, featured in one of the role model videos.

Clothes and shopping are supremely important to women

In under a minute, the teaser video features three close-ups of shoes. Award-winning veterinarian virologist Dr Ilaria Capua spends a significant amount of time in her role model video shopping for clothes. This is the woman between us and the bird flu apocalypse! I don't want to know about her clothes!

Women ask for directions

This one is from Iris Slootheer's video. She talks about the difference between girls and boys, and how women will ask questions if they don't understand something, whereas men will just get bogged down. There are two problems with this. Firstly, it depends very much on the context whether women will ask questions. In a large mixed-sex group, even a gender-balanced one, women will rarely ask questions. I've been to talks on abortion with largely female audiences where only men asked any questions. Secondly, when women do ask questions in situations where men don't - generally because they would like something explained in a different way - this makes their peers perceive them as less capable. There are many such differences in the ways the same behaviour is perceived in different genders, and they do tend to make it more difficult to for women to progress in male-dominated professions. (Sheryl Sandberg does a great job explaining some of this, as do Pat Heim and Randall Munroe.)

Event when it's messy, "girl science" is clean

This is one of the things that struck me about the teaser video. We have a bit of dry ice, we have eye shadow going all over the place, but ultimately, everything is crisp and clean. My mother was a research chemist before circumstances forced her to change career, and she got to set things on fire. Let me tell you - that was messy!

Women like practical and applied things. No theory here.

With the exception of Dr Yael Nazé who is an astrophysicist, all of the women featured in the role modelling videos are in the applied sciences. Where are the theoretical physicists and mathematicians? I'm sure women can cope with theory just as well as men!

A scientific career is a good way to meet men

Look at Microscope Boy in the teaser video! The sharp jaw line; the smouldering looks! Don't you want to go into science just to meet him? Dr Marieke Huisman also mentions this in her video. Because clearly the reason I want to spend my entire career in a male-dominated field is so I can meet boys. There's a running joke that Vienna's medical school is Austria's largest dating agency, but really, that's so 20th century!

You have a free choice of career at the age this website is aimed at

This is one of the more insidious messages of the campaign. Let's face it, if you're a girl at 16 or 17 looking at this and trying to decide whether to go into science, you have years of schooling behind you during which you will have been subtly (and sometimes not-so subtly) encouraged to think that real science isn't for girls, that liking science makes you unfeminine, or that femininity and attractiveness to the opposite sex matter more than intelligence and your future career. We have bigger problems that convincing 17-year-olds that science is sexy. Let's start by removing the requirement for sexiness from everything girls and women do.

Your achievements are not as important as your "passion"

All of the women in the role model videos do a brilliant job of getting across their passion and enthusiasm for science. This is great! Yet why are we not recognising their achievements in these videos? Several of these women are at quite an advanced stage in their career: they have not only doctorates but run departments and have won awards. Why are their titles not used in the videos? Why don't they get to talk about some of the amazing achievements of their careers? Passion is hugely important, but being able to showcase your results is what will get you up that career ladder!

Women are creative and being so is important to them

Creativity is one of the buzzwords that's hugely overused across the site and I suspect this has something to do with gender stereotypes. Women are commonly seen as more creative and therefore when marketing careers to them the opportunity to be creative is a selling point. I know enough scientists to know that science is very much 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. You will spend a lot of time on your own, looking at a computer screen. You will stare at data until your eyes are square. You will drip liquids into test tubes until your fingers hurt. And then you'll do it some more. Setting unrealistic expectations of a job helps no one. Yes, of course there's room for insight and creativity, but there's a lot more room for hard work, for Hubble having used the wrong filter on your data so you've now misplaced a galaxy, and for staring at your code for hours until your colleague looks over your shoulder and points out the missing semi-colon.

International careers are awesome!

Well, they are, to an extent. Several of the women in the role model videos talk about the fantastic international opportunities they have had. However, what is hidden behind this is the fact that science careers, certainly in the early stages, are extremely uncertain and precarious. When your school friends are on their second baby, you'll just about be finishing your education. After that, chances are you will end up in a series of itinerant postdoc positions, moving to a different university every couple of years. If you're lucky, you might become a lecturer one day, though tenure is increasingly elusive. Oh, and you'd better not have met a nice boy-scientist (or another girl-scientist) after all, because their career will almost certainly take them to the opposite side of the world to you!

Women are innately social creatures

A few of the videos emphasise the social interactions of scientific work (teaching students, meeting colleagues, etc.) over the time spent staring at your code or dripping liquids into test tubes. You know what? Some women hate people and will happily sit by themselves with their code and their test tubes. There's nothing wrong with that!

Boy-scientists will ogle you

This one is actually probably true. Look at how we are again prioritising attractiveness to the opposite sex (see Microscope Boy) over our own achievements!

There are a few things I do like about the campaign. Despite their flaws I like the role model videos. I like that they cover a range of sciences as well as women at very different stages in their career. Role models are hugely important and the range of women we see here can hopefully give girls confidence that there is place and a path for them in a scientific career. Overall though? Could do better.

So Lara Croft is a rape survivor^[1]. Guess what - so is one in every four women in the UK. If you put sexual assault (including rape), domestic violence and stalking together, almost one in two women in the UK^[2] has experienced this kind of gender-based violence.

There has been a lot of outrage in the feminist community about this new twist in Lara's story, and some of the points made are valid. The game developers want players to feel protective of Lara - not something they would ever dream of in a male character. Rape is a cheap way of establishing a female character's vulnerability. It plays to stereotypes and male fantasies, reinforces the rape culture we live in. Yes, to an extent these are all true. The one that struck me though was the argument that we don't feel the need to show back stories of tough male characters that portray them as vulnerable and depict their journey to becoming the strong, badass characters we know them as. This is problematic in many ways.

My main bone of contention is that we don't show men as survivors of sexual violence because, unlike women, the vast majority of them aren't. When a problem affects nearly half the people of one gender but a much smaller proportion of the other, I don't think a differentiated portrayal is inherently sexist. How those experiences are depicted and treated by any work of art is a separate question and there the developers behind Lara Croft may well have a case to answer. We haven't actually seen the new game yet. Does it glorify rape and violence against women? Does it reinforce stereotypes and clichés about the experience and the victims of rape? Does it fail to challenge rape culture? Yes, it probably does some of these things - but right now we don't know yet.

Another issue I have is that the reaction from the feminist community implies that by making Lara Croft a survivor of sexual violence, her character is somehow diminished. She was strong and badass and now we see this part of her past she is somehow "ruined" for us as a potential role model. To the 45% of us who've been through gender-based violence and come out the other side this is, frankly, insulting. Has my experience of sexual abuse changed me and shaped me? Absolutely. Has it diminished me? Hell no! If anything, it has made me stronger, fiercer and more passionate when it comes to fighting violence against women.

Realistic and challenging portrayals of gender-based violence in culture are badly needed. Every time I speak out about being a survivor of sexual abuse I get more and more women coming forward to share their own stories. It's as if one of us speaking openly about it frees others to do the same. Where previously we felt isolated and ashamed, we gain strength from the knowledge that we are far from alone, that it happened to others too; not just one or two others, but half the women we know.

All the stories I hear are different from one another. What's more, they're often radically different from the accepted narrative of rape and gender-based violence portrayed in the media and popular culture. Stranger with a knife jumping out of the bushes? Hardly. Father? Husband? Best friend? Boyfriend? Much more likely. Yet those are not the stories we see, which makes us feel we're alone, makes us doubt the validity of our own experiences and feelings, makes it much easier to internalise blame, to feel we will never be believed and therefore to let the bastards get away with it.

Rather than jump on creators every time they portray gender-based violence for doing it all, we should be challenging them in subtler, more nuanced ways. Was the attacker a stranger who jumped out of the bushes with a knife? Was the victim beaten black and blue? Was she white and blond? Did she break down crying in court? Yes, all of these things occur in real life, but rarely do they all happen on the same case, except in fiction. To tackle the epidemic of gender-based violence we are facing, we will need much more candid, realistic and varied portrayals of the issues in art and media than we currenty have. So by all means, let's call out Crystal Dynamics, but let's do it for depicting sexual violence badly, not for doing it at all.

[1] Attempted rape actually, maybe.

[2] 45%, source: the British Crime Survey via the White Ribbon Campaign

Monday's Twitterstorm revolved around ASUS's Computex 2012 coverage on Twitter. Among a bunch of pictures from the show, this one turned up, along with the Neanderthal comment. The outrage was immediate and came from men and women alike, though there was the odd troll who thought it was funny. For their benefit let me briefly summarise why this comment was a bad idea.

The use of "booth babes" at tech trade shows is a pretty questionable practice to start with. But okay, everyone does it, and I'm sure if everyone jumped off the roof ASUS would follow, so we may perhaps forgive them for that. And if you use booth babes at a trade show a couple of thousand people will see them, but the vast majority of your potential consumers - like me - will continue to be blissfully unaware. If you, however, tweet about your booth babes, you send a number of messages to everyone on the Internet. They are messages like:

• Women are decoration.
• We do not value women as people.
• We do not value women as customers.
• We do not value women for what they may have to bring to our business other than tits and arse.

This is business suicide on several levels. For those who haven't dragged themselves out of the 1950s it might be news that women not only influence major household purchasing decisions (such as those on computers) but have disposable incomes of their own. That's therefore 50% of your consumer base that you have just told you do not value. If I held any shares in ASUS I'd be selling them about now.

What's worse is the message this sends to any female ASUS employees or women considering working for the company. The technology industry has a well-deserved reputation for being male-dominated and infantile. I occasionally speak to female Computing Science students. Provided they've managed to fight through years of teachers and the media telling them that they shouldn't do maths and science because those are not feminine subjects, and they get to university, I find it's around the tail-end of their first year that reality hits them in the face. In terms of ability they're often top of the class. Yet they've now spent a few months being shut in windowless labs with their predominantly male colleagues, probably done most of their homework for them, and are beginning to wonder if that's what the rest of their life will be like. What ASUS has just told these kids is that not only will you have to put up with that, but we will not value you at all beyond your tits and arse.

This is generally the point at which I can offer these kids a career path that may suit them better in an environment that is proactively inclusive and diverse. Which is great for me, but not so great for companies like ASUS. Because here's the thing: diverse teams consistently outperform homogenous teams, and companies which value diversity and inclusion financially outperform companies that don't.

It took ASUS over an hour to take the tweet down (by which point of course there were a number of screengrabs of it), and several more before they apologised, promising to "take steps to ensure this doesn't happen again". The fact that it happened in the first place doesn't fill me with confidence in their ability to take the right steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. So here is some free advice for ASUS - and I'm happy to talk about my consultancy rates if they'd like more.

Often when a company makes this kind of gaffe, this is indicative of a wider cultural problem. I can guarantee you that if you had a company culture that valued diversity and inclusion this sort of thing would not happen. If one of your employees thought it was acceptable to be misogynist in public, on the Internet, and put the ASUS brand on it, chances are lots of your employees think misogyny is okay, both towards their female colleagues and towards potential customers. Sacking the PR intern in question isn't going to do the trick.

I would start by having a look at the data. How many of your employees are female? From ethnic minority backgrounds? Lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender? Disabled? Now, say you manage to hire a representative work force at entry level, how does that look once people start getting promoted? Do you find that once you're two or three levels up in the organisation you've lost everyone who's not straight, white and male (or perhaps straight, Asian and male in your case)? Here's a tip: that's not because all the women have gone off to have kids and all the gay people have decided to go into hair dressing. It's because somewhere along the way you as a company have treated them badly.

Start looking at your systems. How do you handle pay rises and promotions? How do you measure success? Do your promotion criteria say something like "demonstrates great leadership"? What does your model of leadership look like? Is it all command and control, being assertive, telling people what to do? Well, guess what: on average non-straight-white-male people do not lead that way. That doesn't mean they don't lead, it means they do it differently and you're not recognising it. What other systems do you have in place that may act as indirect barriers to people who do not fit your default stereotype? Ask your employees. Support the start-up of affinity groups and consult them on policies, systems, and what their experience of working at ASUS is like. Start celebrating diversity and inclusion - let all your staff know that this is something you believe in as a company. Start proactively reaching out, recruiting and supporting diverse top talent.

Once you've truly embedded diversity and inclusion in your corporate culture, come out and tell the rest of us. Start by not using booth babes at your next trade show. If your products are that good, you don't need tits and arse to go with them. By all means do use competent qualified employees from diverse backgrounds at your stand to draw customers in and talk passionately about your products. Go out and work with schools and colleges to get women into technology by inspiring them, showing them what an inclusive workplace looks like and presenting them with some awesome role models. Reach out to female consumers in a way that is respectful and engaging without being patronising and stereotyping. Show some of the humility, integrity, diligence, agility and courage that are part of your cororate "virtues" - because what you did on Monday displayed none of these. Oh, and do apologise in public, in more than 140 characters.