Response to Joint Committee Consultation on Draft Communications Data Bill

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A Joint Select Committee is currently reviewing the Draft Communications Data Bill, also affectionately known as the Snoopers’ Charter. This Bill would compel “telecommunications operators” – everyone from your ISP to your mobile phone company to Royal Mail – to collect and share with the government certain data about your communications: who, where, when, how. There are, unsurprisingly, a number of privacy issues with this approach.
The Joint Select Committee is running a consultation, which you can access here. The deadline for written evidence is tomorrow, August 23rd. You can also submit a written response to the consultation through 38 Degrees, which is what I did. For reference (and reapplication if you want), my response, particularly to questions 2 and 3 of the consultation, is below.
My response to the Joint Committee Consultation on the Draft Communications Data Bill
2. Has the Government made a convincing case for the need for the new powers proposed in the draft Bill?
There already extensive provisions under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). There is currently no convincing case for an extension of data gathering and surveillance powers as proposed in the Draft Communications Data Bill. The proposals are likely to generate vast amounts of additional data, and rather than looking for a needle in a haystack, the effect would be akin to adding more hay to the stack. This also increases the risk of “false positives” – flagging perfectly legitimate behaviours as suspicious, thereby turning us all into a nation of suspects. Rather than introducing the Communications Data Bill, the government should focus on tightening up RIPA, making it more transparent and limiting the number of often frivolous requests granted under that Act.
3. How do the proposals in the draft Bill fit within the wider landscape on intrusion into individuals’ privacy?
Both of the likely uses of the data generated under the Communications Data Bill are problematic from a privacy point of view:
Data mining: This is the practice of looking at the entire data set to spot suspicious behaviour patterns and proactively take steps to prevent an individual from doing something as a result. A possible action that could be taken as a result of data mining is, for instance, putting someone on a no-fly list. We are therefore likely to end up with law enforcement agencies making life-changing decisions about individuals on the basis of data which is likely to be inaccurate, generate false positives and which individuals will have very little or no access to in order to appeal and overturn such decisions.
Data filtering: This is the practice of tracing one individual’s activity through the entire data set. A remarkably detailed picture of an individual’s life can be generated from records such as who they have contacted by phone or email, what websites they have accessed or where they have been, based on location data from mobile phone networks. Simply by existing, this data set becomes a target for malicious activity by criminals, corrupt journalists or other parties not authorised to access the data. Rather than increasing our safety and security, this data set would expose us to additional risks.
Both data mining and data filtering at the scale proposed in the Draft Bill give the state unprecedented powers to invade individual’s privacy. They extend well beyond the sphere of digital communications and into our physical day-to-day lives. There are also additional concerns over the extent of the intrusion into content of communications, as well as potential future secondary uses of the data set.
Intrusion into communication content: While the Draft Bill is intended to only track headline communications data (who, where, how, when) rather than content, the proposed implementation would potentially give access to communication content. For instance, in the case of data on which websites an individual has visited, content is implicitly included in this information. Remarkably accurate conclusions about content may be also be made by putting together different pieces of information from the data set, e.g. if an individual looked up medical terms on the Internet and then went to see their GP.
Secondary uses: We have seen a number of cases where data sets collected by companies or governments for one purpose have later been used for other purposes without gaining consent from individuals. A recent example comes from Germany where the government is in the process of legalising the sale of citizens’ data acquired through the mandatory registration programme to private companies for marketing purposes on an opt-out rather than opt-in basis. Therefore invasion of privacy is unlikely to remain limited to the state and law enforcement agencies.

Fuck it. Let’s talk about consent.

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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.

Why I ditched the Olympics and went to Edinburgh instead

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I had tickets for the men’s 5000m Olympic final in which Mo Farah won his second gold medal. I chose to go to the Edinburgh Fringe instead – and didn’t regret it for a minute!
Like much of the rest of middle(class) England, I got reasonably excited in the run-up to the Olympics – sufficiently so that I applied for three sets of tickets in the initial ballot. I never thought I had a chance to actually get the athletics tickets – they were my wildcard application. I was much more hopeful about the rhythmic gymnastics (little did I know it would be six times oversubscribed) or the BMX (alas, no). Track and field it was in the end, and I was happy with that.
As the Olympics approached, however, I started having misgivings about what was being done to London and to civil liberties throughout the country in the name of Seb Coe and our Olympic overlords. It started with heavy-handed enforcement of sponsors’ brands, murmurs about sponsors’ top executives being given places in the torch relay ahead of people who had genuinely contributed to their community, and even more visible and intrusive “total policing” on my regular trips to London. The tipping point for me though were the Olympic missiles. That was when it became clear that LOCOG and the government were not looking for genuine security so much as enacting yet another piece of security theatre to be able to point at in the event of something actually going wrong. It made me feel both less safe and that I no longer wanted to be part of this.
The Edinburgh Fringe – and more specifically writer Neil Gaiman and musician Amanda Palmer – came to my rescue. They announced a one-night-only show on Sunday August 12th. There was no way I was going to be in London on the 11th and in Edinburgh on the 12th without teleportation, a time machine, or the mother of all headaches. After a quick phonecall to my partner’s parents to see if one of them wanted to pick up my spare ticket, my choice was made.
My attitude to the Olympics changed somewhat with Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony, and I spent much of the following 17 days glued to the television watching the most obscure sports which normally don’t get coverage, and watching women’s sports in particular. My enjoyment of the events did little to ease my misgivings about either the security or the civil liberties issues that accompanied the Games, and so I had no regrets when I put my partner on a train south on Friday or even when I watched from behind a sofa cushion as Mo Farah won his second gold medal on Saturday.
Edinburgh in August was its usual delightful self. From mermaids terrifying tourists to people dressed as nuns or only wearing lingerie, it’s a celebration of all things art and all things silly that the human brain can come up with. No long lists of prohibited or restricted items [PDF] here, no corporate sponsorship, no sinister total policing even when the occasional incident did demand police presence. Over four million tickets are sold for the various festivals each year, not even counting unticketed events. The number of visitors to Edinburgh in August equals or exceeds the half a million (sometimes grumbling but generally cheerful) residents. Compare this to London, with its eight million population, 8.8 million Olympics tickets and only around 600,000 visitors, and you get a good idea of the fundamentally different approaches of both cities to hosting world-class events.
As I got on the train back to Newcastle on Monday morning, regrets (other than perhaps over the slight hangover I was nursing) still failed to materialise. I do wonder, though, how much better the Olympics would have been if London took a leaf out of Edinburgh’s book and put sports and fun ahead of corporate sponsorship and security theatre.
This article also appears at the Scottish Times.

What is the Olympic legacy for women’s sport?

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Like much of the rest of the nation, I have spent the better part of the last three weeks glued to the television watching the Olympics. Olympic missiles and other civil liberties issues aside, the Games exceeded my expectations right from the opening ceremony. One highlight for me have been the amazing women athletes – not just from Team GB but from around the world. From women footballers who – unlike their male counterparts – will take a kick in the face and cheerfully keep playing, to Kate Walsh playing hockey with a broken jaw, to Sarah Attar, the first female track and field athlete from Saudi Arabia, to Nicola Adams and Katie Taylor bagging the first Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing, London 2012 has been a triumph for women’s sport.
Yet of the 29 gold medals Team GB won at London 2012, only 10 went to women (and one to the mixed-gender dressage team). Team GB’s men won nearly twice as many medals overall (40) as their female counterparts (22); and Britain’s thirteen most decorated Olympians are still all men.
Women’s sport continues to receive less funding (out of 1,449 UK Sport funded athletes, 57.2% are male) and less coverage in the UK. Football is perhaps where the contrast is most stark, with male Premier League footballers being paid up to £17 million a year whereas the FA WSL, the highest league in the women’s sport, is not even fully professionalised. Overall, women’s sport only gets 0.5% of all sponsorship money in the UK, a problem further highlighted by the recent revelation that only male rowers on the Olympic team received cars from sponsor BMW.
David Cameron has promised to extend funding for Olympic sport until Rio 2016. This is great news, but we cannot afford to continue with business as usual if we truly want to leverage the legacy of the Games for women in sport. Seeing women like Jessica Ennis, Jade Jones, Gemma Gibbons, Laura Trott, Lizzie Armitstead, Zoe Smith, and Rebecca Adlington (to name only a few) perform at the top of their field, set records and win medals will have inspired millions of girls and young women to take up sport. Seeing the huge variety of female body shapes represented in the Olympics – a lot more than we would usually see on our TV screens – and seeing women confident and happy in their bodies may perhaps even counteract some of the damage the rest of the media is doing to girls’ and women’s confidence with endless talks of dieting and plastic surgery.
Yet getting girls into sport is not enough: the far bigger challenge is retaining them through their teenage years. As girls’ bodies change and they become more self-conscious about their appearance and as different interests compete for their time, teenage girls tend to drop out of sport at a considerably faster rate than boys. Personally, I pretty much stopped doing sport at the age of 14 and didn’t pick it up again until I started kickboxing in my early 20s. In the intervening years increasing self-consciousness about my body combined with PE classes which felt more like torture did more than enough to put me off the idea of exercise. I certainly never expected in my teens that I would one day get a black belt in kickboxing (I’m currently halfway to a second one, in karate), or that I would complete a half-marathon.
Additionally, while elite sport is great, the vast majority of us – male or female – will never be Olympians. It is vital to enable grassroots sport participation and highlight role models across all levels of sport. Being able to see the steps it might take to get to the top, and that success is possible at all levels is also likely to help girls stay in sport through their teens. Yet while Victoria Pendleton, Laura Trott, Lizzie Armitstead and Shanaze Reade, alongside Chris Hoy and Bradley Wiggins, celebrated amazing achievements in cycling, London remains notoriously unsafe for cyclists, even more so for women. Members of cyclist group Critical Mass were being kettled and arrested during the Olympic opening ceremony. Addressing the abysmally bad cycling facilities in this country would be a huge step for mass participation in sport and would benefit men and women alike.
These are just some of the challenges that people like the Prime Minister, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt and UK Sport need to address to truly leverage the Olympic legacy for everybody. For my part, I intend to put my money where my mouth is and watch women’s sport more than once every four years when the Olympics are on. Whether it’s going to see colleagues play hockey and netball, following your local women’s football club, or even just watching the Women’s FA Cup final, there at least one thing each of us can do to support women in sport.
This article is also available at Huffington Post.

Where are the male rhythmic gymnasts?

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We have this week witnessed sporting history with Nicola Adams becoming the first ever woman boxer to win an Olympic title. For the first time ever there are now women competing in every sport where men are competing at the Olympics. While this is a great step towards sporting equality, let’s face it, we’re still far from it. Less funding, less publicity and fewer roles for women in coaching and governance still plague women’s sport. Moreover, there are still significant gender-based differences in how some sports are practised, and there are still at least two summer Olympic sports with participation from only one gender: rhythmic gymnastics and synchronised swimming are firmly established as women-only sports.
Women have always strived to be able to compete in sports traditionally reserved for men. Road and track cycling, part of the Olympic programme for men since the first modern games in 1896, didn’t allow women competitors until 1984. As recently as the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, track cycling featured seven events for men and only three for women. Women’s weightlifting was not included until the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Women’s boxing itself has had a more than 100-year-long campaign for inclusion in the games, starting with a demonstration bout in 1904.
So where are the campaigns to include men in traditionally “female” sports? Why do we not see men’s rhythmic gymnastics in the demonstration sports? Partly, gymnastics appears to suffer from a governing body that is painfully conservative. We can see this, for instance, in the differences between men’s and women’s artistic gymnastics. Where men compete on a variety of apparatus testing both upper and lower body strength and agility, women’s apparatus is heavily biased towards tumbling and leg-based skills with uneven bars being the only exception. Innovation and the introduction of new moves by gymnasts tends to be penalised, particularly for women. While men will routinely perform a one-armed swing on the high bar, attempts by women to introduce this into uneven bar routines have been discouraged with extremely low difficulty scores being awarded. The aesthetics of gymnastics are also highly regulated. While men generally perform in fairly plain attire, female competitors wear full make-up and sparkly leotards, which only get sparklier as you move to rhythmic gymnastics. Women are expected to perform floor routines to music and include dance moves, but men are not.
When I tweeted about the conspicuous absence of men’s rhythmic gymnastics in the Olympics, I was asked if there would even be any competitors. Japan has a strong tradition of men’s rhythmic gymnastics, and there are some male competitors in Europe too, but they are not allowed to take part in any of the major events. Moreover, in terms of skillset, there is absolutely no reason why male aerobic gymnasts couldn’t make a successful transition to rhythmic gymnastics. Still, it is true that there aren’t that many men currently in rhythmic gymnastics, whereas there are, for instance, plenty of women boxers.
We are therefore left with the old problem: things that men do are cool and to be aspired to; things that women do are marginal and niche. Women being allowed to do “men’s things” is – rightfully – celebrated as a great accomplishment for equality, but hardly any questions are being asked about men’s absence from certain fields. This state of affairs is hardly unique to sport – just look at the gender balance in nursing. The effect is the same, regardless of which gender we are barring from an activity. We are preventing individuals from fulfilling their potential. This is not just a shame for the individuals involved but for society as a whole. We’re missing out on male top talent in nursing and gymnastics just as we’re missing out on female top talent in science and technology.
One encouraging development is that newer sports being introduced to the Olympics for the first time generally tend to treat men and women equally. Mountain biking (first introduced in 1996) and BMX (2008) both do this. So does Taekwondo (2000), unlike boxing which despite now allowing women’s participation has different rules for men and women. Yet if we want true equality, we need to challenge the dinosaurs of sport such as the International Gymnastics Federation, to treat both genders equally across different variations in the sport and to encourage participation from all.
This article is also available at Huffington Post.

A Tale of Two Britains

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The story of Britain, of who the people of these islands are and how they – we, I suppose – came to be here, is hotly contested political ground right now. The Conservative part of the coalition government is trying to retell that story. From highly misleading narratives about benefits scroungers sponsored by the Prime Minister to cutting taxes for top earners and practically handing the history curriculum to right-wing historian Niall Ferguson, the story this government is telling of what Britain as a nation values is one of individualism, money, and empire.

From teasers and early coverage of rehearsals for the Olympic opening ceremony (turning the stadium into a representation of rural Britain, complete with sheep and all that), I must admit I was expecting a continuation of that story, a sequel to the sickly-sweet pageantry of the Jubilee complete with miles of bunting. Given that it was Danny Boyle running the show, I perhaps did him a disservice. Yet with everyone and everything else who has sold out to turn London into an Olympic-occupied territory with shocking restrictions on free speech, more troops deployed for the games than in Afghanistan, and the infamous Olympic missiles, I can perhaps be forgiven for having extremely low expectations of the opening ceremony.

Danny Boyle blew my socks off. Bizarre though this sounds given the £27 million cost of the show, his opening ceremony is perhaps the most overtly grassroots-political act in the Olympics since the 1968 Black Power salute. Politics and the Olympic games do tend to go hand in hand. From boycotts and counter-boycotts during the Cold War to the spectacular display of Chinese ascendency that was the Beijing Games, grand political gestures by world powers are par for the course. Yet such gestures tend to leave real people behind. Danny Boyle’s retelling of the story of Britain, on the other hand, swept us all up with it. It presented a powerful, credible image of Britain that couldn’t be more different from the Tory narrative.

From the shipping forecast to the hard labour of miners and factory workers during the industrial revolution, to successive waves of immigration, a celebration of the NHS and a jawdropping tour of British culture and music, the Britain Boyle showed us was idiosyncratic, diverse, multicultural and fun. This is after all the country that gave us the World Wide Web and gave Saudi state television its first lesbian kiss. There is a place here for everyone: black, brown or white, young or old, able-bodied or otherwise, male, female, straight, gay, born here or overseas, it is all of us who make this country the amazing place that it is. This is the Britain I fell in love with, the reason why ten years after finishing the degree I came here for I am still in this country. It is arguably also a Britain that doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist.

In between all the sound and fury, the celebration of different people and cultures coming together, there are plenty of those who do not wish for this Britain to exist. One Tory MP called the spectacle “leftie multi-cultural crap”. At the same time as winged figures cycled into the stadium in another stunning set piece, police outside were kettling and manhandling peacefully protesting cyclists. Then of course there are the aforementioned troops and Olympic missiles. Danny Boyle’s vision doesn’t quite match reality. It is, however, a representation of the best of Britain, of Britain as many of us would like it to be, of the kind of Britain many of us a working towards. At a time like this, when the story of these isles is so hotly contested, creating such a powerful, inclusive and inspirational vision, and using the greatest global marketing campaign to do so, is a truly audacious political statement.

The crowning achievement of the night was – how could it be anything else? – the lighting of the cauldron. Not one single cauldron but 204 individual petals representing the nations taking part in the Olympics. Not one single mega-star carrying the torch those final few steps but seven young athletes, lighting that Olympic flame together. At a time when individualism has practically become a religion, when we are worshipping the rich, famous and powerful, the cauldron and the seven young people who lit it are a stunning symbol of what we can achieve by working together and supporting each other. Against the backdrop of multicultural, diverse Britain which serves as a reminder that we can still be individuals, there is immense power in that image.

Danny Boyle has stuck up two fingers to the story of individualism, money and empire and given us a vision to work towards. Just when many of us have begun to wonder whether we can turn the tide of selfishness, pettiness and narrow-mindedness that seems to be sweeping the country with this government, whether we can tell a different story, Boyle has given us that story and reminded us that we, indeed, can build Jerusalem.

Note: This article is now also available on Huffington Post.

[Elsewhere] When Worlds Collide

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As a woman and feminist working in technology and interested in digital rights, I occasionally find that the different worlds I am part of collide quite spectacularly. Case in point: the growing controversy over how women are treated in certain online spaces, notably gaming and blogging, but also in everyday social interactions online. Let’s take a quick tour of the female experience of online spaces.
Read more on ORGZine.

Fifty shades… of wrong

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Driven by sheer willpower, I have chewed my way through the first two volumes of the Fifty Shades trilogy. It has been a traumatic experience. Now, before I get accused by the likes of Edwina Currie of being a prude, feminist spoilsport, I feel I should disclose that erotica written by women for women is something I’m actually reasonably qualified to talk about: I have been reading it since I was 17, I’ve read over a million words of the stuff over the last six months alone (not counting Fifty Shades), and have written somewhere around 50,000 words myself over the last ten or so years, all across different genres and kinks.
Some reviewers have been particularly disparaging about the trilogy’s origins as a work of Twilight fanfiction. I am willing to bet that neither of the above commentators have actually read much fanfiction – and neither have most people reading Fifty Shades. As a longtime reader and writer of fanfic, it worries me that this is the first impression mainstream cultures get of fandom.
At its best, fanfiction is a great space for exploring issues that mainstream media won’t touch with a bargepole, or will do badly. Non-heteronormative sexualities are a popular theme, but far from the only one. Fed up with the tokenisation of non-white characters? Pick up your favourite black character from a book, a TV show or a movie and give them a real personality and a life of their own. Dissatisfied with the representation of disabled characters? You can do it better. Of course there is some incredibly poor writing in fanfic – just as there is in every editor’s slushpile; but the fact that anyone can write and publish anything without having to think about what will sell well means there is a wealth of extremely good, challenging and thought-provoking material produced by fandom.
Fifty Shades, alas, is not an example of that. Rather, the trilogy reads like BDSM porn written by the marketing department, and this is where the root of many of the problems with the books lies. In order to gently induct more nervous readers into what ends up being fairly mild BDSM anyway, the author makes two particular choices about her main characters which create an incredibly creepy and abusive relationship dynamic between them: Anastasia is a 21-year-old virgin who has never been in a relationship or even masturbated; Christian’s BDSM tendencies are “explained” by a background of child abuse and sexual abuse in his teenage years. What could possibly go wrong? Where do we start?
Do a quick Google search for “signs of abusive relationship”, pick an arbitrary list, and you will find that on average Christian Grey meets between half and three quarters of the criteria. Let’s look at some of them.
Extreme jealousy: There isn’t a man in Ana’s life who Christian isn’t jealous of. Her best friend, her housemate’s brother, her first boss’s brother, her second boss – if Christian had his way, Ana would never see any of these men again. He goes as far as buying the company she works for so he can sack her boss.
Controlling behaviour: Christian wants to control what Ana eats and when, how much exercise she does, how much sleep she gets, where she goes and who with, what she wears. Some of this is ostensibly part of the BDSM arrangement he is proposing; some is allegedly for Ana’s own safety. On about day two of their relationship, he presents her with a BlackBerry, pretty much stating outright that it’s so he can keep tabs on her. What it adds up to is Christian controlling every minute facet of Ana’s life. This is despite his protestations that “[o]utside the playroom, I like that you challenge me. It’s a very novel and refreshing experience, and I wouldn’t want to change that.” Yet when Ana’s friends see her again after only two weeks apart, they all remark on how changed she is.
Quick involvement: By the end of the second book, Christian and Ana have known each other for about a month, and they’re engaged. He proposes halfway through an argument, while Ana is still trying to get her head around yet another revelation about his past. Speaking of which, Ana never gets a chance to get her head around anything: every time she tries to gain some distance to think things through, he follows her, distracts her with sex, or completely changes the game with another of his revelations.
Isolation: Christian starts his relationship with Ana by asking her to sign an NDA. Even when she raises the objection that she’s a virgin who’s never been in a relationship and might want to talk about some of these things with her housemate, he says she should talk to him instead. Combined with the extreme jealousy, this means that over the four weeks of their relationship Ana practically loses touch with all her friends. At one point she is even told off for being friendly with Christian’s driver.
Blaming others: Christian blames Ana for being sexually assaulted by her best friend, blames her refusal to obey him for his outbursts of anger and his controlling behaviour, blames the fact that he overstepped her boundaries on her failure to use a safeword. By the second book, Ana is automatically justifying his abusive behaviour for him.
“Playful” use of force in sex: Let’s get one thing straight here: It is perfectly possible to have a non-abusive BDSM relationship. What Christian and Ana have isn’t it. Here’s a description of their first kiss – before the NDA, before he’s even talked to her about boundaries, or contracts, or the kinds of sexual activities either of them like (emphasis mine):

“Oh, fuck the paperwork,” he growls. He lunges at me, pushing me against the wall of the elevator. Before I know it, he’s got both of my hands in one of his in a viselike grip above my head, and he’d pinning me to the wall using his hips. Holy shit. His other hand grabs my hair and yanks down, bringing my face up, and his lips are on mine. It’s only just not painful.

From that point onwards, Ana’s boundaries are systematically destroyed. By the second book he actually rapes her. Oh, he doesn’t jump out of the bushes with a knife, but he keeps going after she’s withdrawn consent, telling her not to “overthink” things. Once he’s got her back under control he checks if she wants to stop, but it’s way too late by then.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Ana’s word for this one is “mercurial”, but that doesn’t even come close to describing Christian’s mood swings. She is continually forced to second-guess herself, to adjust her behaviour to his moods, to try to work out what will and won’t upset him – often with very little success.
Add to all of this the financial control (he repeatedly tries to persuade her that she doesn’t need to work), the constant manipulative behaviour, the stalking which is pretty much how their relationship starts, and the emotional blackmail which is a key tool for destroying Ana’s sexual and personal boundaries, and you have a textbook abusive relationship which has nothing to do with the BDSM aspects of their sex life.
Now, what does a good, innocent young girl do when she finds herself in an abusive relationship? She sticks around to “save” her abuser from themselves. Ana’s view – which is never challenged in the text – is that it is the abuse in Christian’s past that has given him his taste for BDSM and some of the more quirky (read abusive) sides of his personality, and that if only she could somehow fix that, she can fix him. This conflation of past trauma, psychological issues, abusive behaviour and BDSM is both damaging and insulting on several levels.
First, there is the implication that if you’re into BDSM, there must be something wrong with you, you must need fixing in some way; second, the implication that you can “fix” a lifetime of abuse and mental health problems by meeting the right ingenue with an innate talent for deep-throat blowjobs; and finally, what is perhaps the most damaging message of the book is that if only you could become enough of a doormat, you can change an abusive partner. Yet what has actually happened is not that Christian has changed – he is still manipulative, controlling, jealous and isolating. Rather, it is Ana who has completely changed by the end of the second book, with her self esteem utterly dependent on Christian and her boundaries thoroughly pushed and destroyed.
If you can get over or ignore the abuse issues, there still remains the problem of the incredibly poor writing. There is EL James’ tendency to reach for the thesaurus a bit too much: nobody actually ever “says” anything in the books – mostly they “mutter”, though sometimes they “gasp” or “exclaim”. Plot, structure and pacing are not concepts James is familiar with. Most irritating, though, are the sex scenes. They are repetitive both in terms of content and language used. You only need to tell us once that Christian smells of Christian. There are probably more ways to describe the female orgasm than “I explode around him”, more ways to describe the male orgasm than “he finds his release”.
What is even more distracting is the complete and utter lack of realism. My body doesn’t work in the way EL James describes, and statistically speaking neither do most women’s bodies. 75% of us don’t orgasm from penetrative sex (that’s all the slamming and pounding, in Fifty Shades parlance) alone, and I suspect over 90% don’t come from just… well, being told to come. Neither does the “exploding around him” and the “finding his release” generally happen at the same time. I also suspect men reading the books may find a similar disconnect with reality and be absolutely horrified at the thought that their partners might now expect them to get it up three times within an hour. I find it hard to get turned on by something which is asking me to identify with feelings and actions that in no way come close to any sexual experience I’ve ever had. Fantasy sex is great – it can turn us on, give us ideas, allow us to explore our sexuality; but to do that we have to be able to relate to it on some level. Fifty Shades is not so much fantasy as it is farce.
Finally, there has been some discussion about the Fifty Shades effect of getting women to read erotica in public (or at all, really). Is it creepy? Is it socially acceptable? Having shared plenty of public spaces with men engrossed in FHM, page 3 of the Sun or Nuts magazine, I’ve absolutely no problem with reading Fifty Shades in public. At least people would have to make a conscious effort to work out whether I’m reading the juicy bits, unlike page 3 which everyone in a ten-foot radius has to endure. On a more general level, I do think women should consume erotica and porn (see above comment re fantasy sex). We should explore our sexuality more, seek out different experiences in fiction and in real life, talk about it more and figure out what we as individuals do and don’t like. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the issue is not porn, the issue is that objectification and exploitation of women is the only socially and culturally sanctioned expression of sexuality – for both men and women.
So if Fifty Shades worked for you, great – though I’d encourage you to think about some of the abusive aspects of the relationships depicted and not take the books as a bible on that front. If it didn’t – go find something that does work for you! There’s plenty of free erotica on the Internet, fanfiction and otherwise. Just ask Google. Personally, I’m tempted to direct you to Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls which is not only fabulous porn but also challenges some of our preconceptions about women’s sexuality and the relationship between sexual fantasies and sexual reality. Give it a go, and explore from there!

[Elsewhere] Cake or Death

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At the end of May this year, new EU rules on cookies came into force. We are not talking the chocolate chip variety here, but the small chunks of seemingly-random text which websites save on your computer as you browse the web. These little files enable basic functionalities like online shopping or setting your language preferences, but they can also be used to identify you and track your browsing across multiple sites. This allows, for instance, advertisers to build up detailed profiles of your interests and behaviour to better target their ads. Most internet users are only vaguely aware of cookies, what they do or how they work.
Read more over on ORGZine.

[Elsewhere] English identity crisis

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I was born Bulgarian, am legally Austrian, have spent most of my life in the UK and I self-identify as European. So let me tell you about Englishness.
It strikes me as highly amusing that the English – and, frankly, from Newcastle it looks more like just those south of Watford – are having an identity crisis prompted by Scots’ desire for independence. It feels like they are waking up to realise that not everyone on this island is English after all. But if they’re not, then what is it that makes English people special and unique? Well, as an outsider, more-or-less, who has spent a substantial amount of time in this country, I have some thoughts on how “Englishness” relates to Britishness and other national identities of the UK.
Read more at the Scottish Times.