Just in time for LGBT History Month Scottish politics provided the best news headline of the year so far: Opposition party leaders unite over same-sex marriage.
Read more at Scottish Times.
Reading my blog and other online presence, it’s pretty difficult to miss that I’m bisexual. It’s there on my Facebook profile (and no, not just because I enjoy those lesbian cruises ads so much), it’s in my Twitter profile, and it’s something I refer to in my blog posts fairly regularly. I spend some of my time in my day job championing LGBT causes in the workplace, and I am a trustee of Broken Rainbow, the UK national LGBT domestic violence charity. I have also been in a committed monogamous relationship with a man for the last ten years. This seems to confuse people.
Every so often someone asks The Question. The Question comes in many guises – “Why do you flaunt your sexuality?”, “Why put that on your Twitter profile – is it really such a defining characteristic?”, “But you’re with Paul, so how does it matter?” Ultimately, though, it’s the same question: “Why don’t you just shut up and conform?” So here are some thoughts on bisexuality that may go some way towards answering The Question.
Bisexual invisibility
“Why are you involved in the company LGBT network?”, a straight colleague asks me. “You’re not lesbian, gay or…” The penny drops.
“Why are you involved in the company LGBT network?”, a gay colleague asks me. “You’re not lesbian, gay or…” The penny drops.
To both straight and gay people, I don’t fit, I am invisible. There are common stereotypes about bisexuality. It’s just an experimental phase and you’ll settle down and be “normal” again eventually. This one’s popular with straight people. Alternatively, you’re just saying that until you’re ready to admit that you’re gay really. Unsurprisingly, this one’s a favourite of the gay community. Such stereotypes make it easy to dismiss bisexuality, and sometimes bisexual people may find it easier not to correct assumptions of hetero- or homosexuality (depending on the relationship they’re currently in). It certainly cuts down on the awkward questions from people who would never presume to ask of a straight friend or colleague that kind of intimate detail. (“Oh, so you’ve had sex with girls?”) It cuts down on the accusations from the gay community that you’re just making yourself socially acceptable, more like a straight person.
Finding visible bisexual role models is hard. Portrayal of LGB people in media is not great but improving (with portrayal of trans people being a whole different kettle of fish), though arguably the portrayal of bisexual characters in particular is lagging behind. It is often characterised by stereotypes like the character who’s really gay but finds it more socially acceptable to identify as bi, or the “fashionably bi” young woman who’s only doing it to get male attention. While we may see bisexual behaviour, few characters openly identify as bisexual, and this in turn fuels the stereotype that bisexuality is what you do rather than who you are.
So one part of my answer to The Question is that if I’m openly and visibly bisexual, I’ll get the awkward questions, and I’ve more or less worked out how to deal with them. Maybe this will save someone else from having to deal with them further down the line. Maybe it will help other people who struggle with the invisibility of their identity.
“Assumed heterosexual” privilege
“My son saw me in a pink shirt this morning,” my team leader says at the team meeting, “and said I looked like a right poof.” Everyone laughs.
A side effect of bi-invisibility for those of us in “straight” relationships is “assumed heterosexual” privilege. On cursory inspection, we look like a duck and we quack like a duck so we’re assumed to be ducks. An interesting consequence of this is that people will not self-censor their homophobia when speaking to us. When I was less visible about my sexual orientation, comments like the one above used to be a frequent occurrence in my environment. They were never directed at me, and that was almost worse. I can deal with being the direct target of discrimination and harassment; but being there in the room as those things were said made me feel complicit. So I started challenging them and started being a lot more visible as a bisexual and member of the LGBT community.
There are other “perks” of assumed heterosexual privilege. While they’re not as extensive as the full heterosexual privilege list, they’re still significant. I could, theoretically, be engaged and active on LGBT issues while “passing” as a straight ally. In some ways, it would lend me more credibility (see items 31 and 33 on the list). It would also make me feel fraudulent and dishonest. Pretty much all of the causes I’m engaged in, and all my writing, are personal to me in some way. To deny – or omit – my sexual orientation would be to deny part of who I am.
It’s easy to forget, ignore and exclude bisexual people – deliberately or accidentally. I remember an instance where even Ben Summerskill, chief exec of Stonewall UK, got told off at a conference for consistently only referring to “lesbian and gay people”. Those of us who are out and visible as bisexuals can help remind people that we are all still here, and that we need inclusion too!
Earlier this month, the Internet went on strike. Thousands of websites, including high-profile ones like Wikipedia, blacked out for 12 hours on January 18th to protest US Congress attempts to severely limit civil liberties on the Internet in order to protect the vested interests of the content industry. Two days later, Congress shelved SOPA and PIPA, the two contentious bills. Yet barely two weeks later, we face a bigger challenge.
Read more at ORGZine.
I recently gave a talk on the economics of copyright, and why content is a public good. I’m not big on seven-level nested bullet points but I did want some visual aids for my audience so I set out to create a slide deck. Let me be perfectly, crystal clear here: I’m talking about a one-hour talk on a topic that I was intimately familiar with, not writing new material from scratch; I’m talking about 16 slides, 13 of which had any actual content. This should not have taken more than two hours. 12 working hours later…
Read more at ORGZine.
milenapopova.eu will be offline for around 12 hours on January 18th, 2012. I am joining a global protest against the US SOPA and PIPA Acts aimed at limiting Internet freedom and civil liberties in order to protect the vested interests of a small number of corporations in the content industry.
It has been argued that this issue does not concern me – that this is single-issue politics in a foreign country. There are no geographical or political boundaries and nothing “single issue” about the Internet. The Acts target non-US sites specifically – sites like milenapopova.eu. They have global implications for private citizens and businesses alike. They propose to limit freedom of expression which can in turn affect any number of other political issues. Nor is the undue influence of the content industry on governments limited to the United States: this is also the week which saw EMI suing the government of the Republic of Ireland for failure to block pirate sites. The Great Firewall of America must not be allowed to be built. Nor must the content industry be allowed to threaten our rights and civil liberties, to undermine our democracies.
If you are in the US, use the information on this site to contact your representatives and let them know that sacrificing civil liberties on the altar of the content industry’s obsolete business models is not acceptable. If you are elsewhere, I strongly urge you to take an interest in digital rights issues if you don’t already. For the UK, the Open Rights Group is a good place to start. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has and international issues section. In Germany, the Chaos Computer Club is a good starting point, and in France I would point you to La Quadrature du Net.
Digital rights matter – to us all.
I am currently absolutely obsessed with Dragon Age. At this rate, I’m going to have to ask people to pry me off the PS3. The reason this is remarkable is that I am Not A Gamer. I am Not A Gamer to the extent that when I played Devil May Cry, I got two levels in and the game offered me the “You seem to suck at this, here’s the extra special easy version for you” option. With an extremely small number of notable exceptions, I never really got past Tetris. So how did I get to the point where you have to pry the PS3 controller from my cold dead hands?
The story starts with No More Lost, an LGBT rights blog I occasionally read. Some time last year, they covered a story about a role-playing game which – *gasp* – allowed same-sex relationships within the game setting. Not only that, but when challenged over this by a self-identified “Straight Male Gamer”, BioWare, the company behind the game, took an extremely principled stand in favour of equality, even in gaming. That was the first time I ever heard of Dragon Age. That was all the marketing I ever needed for it. I wanted to give BioWare my money. After checking with Paul that he was interested in playing it (I believe the words were something like “You’ll do the fighting and I’ll do the gay”), I bought both Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 for Christmas.
What we’ve found since then is that Dragon Age is that once-in-a-decade game that actually really appeals to me. There is a strong overarching plot, characters you can truly care about, a combat system I can cope with, as well as some truly unique features like the player’s choices making a significant difference to the overall plot. Yet, had BioWare not shown that great principled stand on equality issues, I would probably never have found out about their game and certainly never bought it. I am willing to bet that this is the case for a significant number LGB gamers and allies out there. Market research shows that the LGB community is considerably more loyal to brands and companies who take the time to acknowledge we exist than your average consumer. And why not? All things being equal, if I have a choice between two otherwise superb products, of course I’m going to go with the one made by people who care about me.
There is, however, a fine line between engaging with a community and showing them you care and, frankly, taking the piss. Case in point, yet another Facebook privacy controversy. In this particular one, Privacy International alleged that Facebook’s targeted advertising had “destroyed” a young man’s life. Despite not openly revealing his sexual orientation on the social network, “David” started seeing a lot of adverts targeted at gay men until one day his parents spotted these and kicked him out of the house. Facebook in their eternal wisdom call this a case of “appalling discrimination and unauthorized access to a person’s account, not advertising”.
Yet here is why this is very much an issue of advertising, and an issue of how Facebook treats its users. (Remember, for Facebook we are not customers – we are the product. Nevertheless some minimum amount of decency and dignity should be expected even in this business model.) There was a time after I told Facebook I was bisexual and before I discovered the wonders of Adblock Plus when I used to see adverts on the site. Pretty much the only thing Facebook ever advertised to me were “lesbian cruises”. Which makes me wonder – if Facebook’s algorithms can figure out my sexual orientation even without me disclosing it, why can’t they figure out that there is more to me as a human being than just my sexual orientation? Why am I reduced to that one characteristic and then mercilessly targeted for it regardless of any other aspect of my life?
Here’s what BioWare did right: They created an awesome product and in the process thoughtfully included some options targeted at the LGB community. It’s important that Dragon Age isn’t about gay characters. It’s about characters who have adventures, who just happen to to be gay if the player so chooses. To top it all off, BioWare then stood by that product in the face of criticism, showing they had backbone to go with their amazing creativity. What Facebook does repeatedly wrong, on the other hand, is reducing us to a single characteristic they think they can turn into money and then disavowing responsibility the minute something goes wrong.
Thus ends today’s “Marketing to the LGB community” lesson.
Could it be that the Teach our kids to code e-petition is the smallest successful e-petition in UK politics? It would certainly seem so, after this week’s news that Michael Gove wants to replace the current ICT school curriculum with a Computer Science programme. I do not often (ever?) agree with the Education Secretary, but today’s announcement is definitely a step in the right direction.
Read more at ORGZine.
So the word of the weekend appears to have been “shareholder”. David Cameron and Danny Alexander have been out in force, explaining to us how shareholders should be given a say on executive pay. Here are just three reasons why this is a red herring if I’ve ever seen one.
The uninvolved shareholder
I happen to be a shareholder. I own shares in two distinct ways. Firstly, I’m a shareholder in companies I have a significant involvement with – my full-time employer and a small start-up I helped out over the summer. The start-up hasn’t had an AGM yet, so I can’t tell you how I would vote at that, but when it comes to my full-time employer, I get a letter from the share management company with some vague explanations of what we are voting on (and links to more details), a recommendation on which way to vote, and some boxes to tick. Most years I tick the boxes, some years I even remember to send the form back. This is, frankly, what an involved shareholder looks like.
The other way in which I own shares is rather more removed. I have a stocks and shares ISA which puts my money into an investment fund which is managed by my bank and currently seems to be eating my money. I also have a company pension which too puts my money into one kind of investment fund or another, managed by one bank or another. I don’t even know which companies I own shares in through these vehicles. To be more precise, I don’t own shares this way – I own chunks of an investment fund, which in turn owns shares.
So when the Prime Minister says that “shareholders” should have a say in executive pay, what he actually means is pension funds, investment banks and insurance companies. Those are the largest blocks of shareholders around, and the only ones with enough clout to make a difference. Their interests are not always for the company in question to be productive, stable and long-term sustainable, as long as they can make a quick buck.
The sprawling multinational
The reach of any legislation on shareholder involvement in executive pay is likely to be limited. It will hit small and medium-sized domestic businesses, as well as the “C” level of larger companies incorporated in the UK. Yet if you just happen to be a “Director” or “Vice President” running the UK operations of a sprawling multinational incorporated in the Cayman Islands, well then you’re not an executive, are you? Nevermind that the level of responsibility and the salary to go with it are probably quite similar to those of a “C” level exec of a UK company.
At this point, it’s worth asking ourselves whose pay we’re limiting and why. This is where the answer you are likely to get from the coalition is something along the lines of “not paying for failure”, whereas someone like Deborah Hargreaves from the High Pay Commission will tell you that it’s all about addressing inequality and social injustice. It does somewhat depend on your motivation as to whether the shareholder argument makes sense.
The old-fashioned Marxist analysis
Finally, let me indulge in a piece of good, old-fashioned Marxist analysis. If we look at this through the lens of the capital/labour dichotomy, we quickly see that any move to give shareholders more say in executive compensation retains the power on the side of capital. Employees continue to be disenfranchised in this process. There are of course exceptions in the form of employees who may own a small number of shares in the company – but for those cases I shall simply refer you to the problem of the uninvolved shareholder above.
So if a fig leaf is what we want, then giving shareholders a say in executive pay is the way forward. If we actually want to address both the widening social inequality we are experiencing and the market failure caused by interests of major shareholders being less than compatible with the long-term interests of the company, then we need to look for other solutions.
Neelie Kroes, the European Union’s Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, yesterday invited former German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg to “promote internet freedom globally”.
Mr zu Guttenberg is an interesting choice for this position. It doesn’t take much digging through his CV, even for non-German-speakers, to find that he has had personal – and recent – experience of the power of the internet. It was barely a year ago that a web-based collaboration of scientists and citizens demonstrated that Mr zu Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis was shamelessly plagiarised from over 130 different sources. There is barely a page in the work that doesn’t contain a plagiarised passage. Nearly two thirds of the text are copy-and-pasted – unattributed – from a variety of other works, including the essay of a first-year student and the writings of some of Mr zu Guttenberg’s party colleagues. Ultimately, this cost Mr zu Guttenberg his job as Defence Minister back in March.
Commissioner Kroes justified her choice of consultant saying she wanted “talent, not saints”. Yet surely the fact that Mr zu Guttenberg’s doctoral thesis is barren of original thought shows that the one thing he lacks is talent. Given the challenges facing online activists in authoritarian regimes, one has to question Ms Kroes’ judgement on this matter. In a world where news is constantly manipulated to somebody’s advantage, trust is the rarest of commodities. Any blogger or activist wishing to be truly effective, to really touch and inspire people, needs to earn their readers’ trust while at the same time walking the fine line of ensuring their own personal safety. Disappearances and crackdowns on Chinese bloggers illustrate the importance of anonymity for personal safety. Conversely, the case of “Amina Arraf” or “Gay Girl in Damascus” – a blog which turned out to be run by a middle-aged American man – shows both the potential of the internet to truly touch people, and the disappointment which results when trust between blogger and reader is breached.
Ultimately, when the commodity you are trading in is trust, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is the last person you want fighting your corner.
So Dave used his veto. That must have made him feel manly, and powerful, and in control. For all of twelve seconds. Until someone pointed out that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
What strikes me about this sorry mess is how short a time it has taken for the “we must protect the City at all costs” attitude to become acceptable again. Rewind, if you will, back to 2008. Remember the collapse of Lehman Brothers? The credit crunch and the global liquidity crisis? The resulting recession and flatlining of the UK economy? Am I the only one who remembers the intellectual discourse of 2008/09 questioning whether capitalism had failed, whether the financial system was fit for purpose? Did I hallucinate all these things?
Well, apparently not. It was earlier this year that Mr Cameron’s own Business Secretary was still talking about banking reform and splitting retail and investment banking activities. Back in 2008, David Cameron himself said (emphasis mine),
I’m pleased that the European regulators are looking at our proposal to bring stability to the banking system.
and
Many bankers in the City were quite simply irresponsible.
They paid themselves vast rewards when it was all going well……
…and the minute it went wrong, they came running to us to bail them out.
There will be a day of reckoning but today is not that day.
And yet, not only has that day of reckoning not come; barely three years later it seems to be perfectly acceptable for the Prime Minister to put Britain’s membership of the European Union and the country’s standing in foreign policy at risk in order to protect those very same financial institutions for which he promised a day of reckoning. I seem to have blinked and missed something. What happened?
A second question here has to be what the hell have the Lib Dems done? The Deputy Prime Minister claims to be “bitterly disappointed”, almost as if the situation was nothing to do with him. But where was Mr Clegg last week when Britain’s negotiating position for the EU summit was being decided?
In Germany, Cameron’s name is becoming a by-word for causing a breach with Europe (German link). Much like Mr Cameron, the FDP – the junior partner in the German coalition government – are playing party politics with the future of Europe. Much like Mr Cameron, they are being petty, irresponsible, and myopic.