It sneaks up on you, Ada Lovelace Day. I’ve written about a variety of women as part of this over the years: Eve, Lise Meitner, Caroline Herschel, and my mother. This year, I want to take us slightly further afield – I want to take us to space.

Valentina Tereshkova

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova left school at 16, and then switched to evening classes so she could work during the day. By her early 20s, she was a textile worker in a local factory and an amateur skydiver. It was her expertise in skydiving that eventually led to her selection for the USSR’s female cosmonaut corps. Between February and November 1962, Tereshkova and her four colleagues underwent extensive tests and training, and four of the women eventually passed and were inducted into the Soviet Air Force.

Only two years after Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, on June 16th 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly into space, piloting Vostok 6. She was 26 years old. She orbited the Earth 48 times and was in space for nearly 3 days, logging more flight hours than all US astronauts up to that point combined. During her flight, Tereshkova gathered important data on the effects of spaceflight on the female body, took pictures of Earth, and passed within 5km of another spacecraft, Vostok 5.

After her spaceflight, Valentina Tereshkova took the opportunity to continue her education. She studied engineering and by 1977 obtained a doctorate. She became an instructor and test pilot and later a research scientists. She also entered politics and currently serves in the Russian State Duma.

Sally Ride

Sally Kristen Ride didn’t join NASA until the age of 32. Before that, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in English and physics, as well as a master’s and a PhD in Physics, all from Stanford. Her career at NASA was varied: she was the capsule communicator for two early space shuttle flights, and helped develop the shuttle’s robot arm.

On June 18th 1983, almost exactly twenty years after Tereshkova, Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly into space. She was a member of the 5-person crew of the seventh space shuttle mission, on board the Challenger. As part of the mission, Ride used the robot arm to retrieve a satellite.

Unlike Tereshkova, Ride flew again, in 1984, though after the Challenger disaster in 1986 her career took a different turn, and she led NASA’s strategic planning effort. After she left NASA in 1987, Ride became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego, and later led two NASA public outreach programmes. With her partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, Ride also co-founded Sally Ride Science, a company which produces science education materials for children, and co-wrote a number of children’s science books.

Sally Ride died on July 23rd 2012.

Some asides

In the 1960s the US weren’t terribly keen on sending women to space. Whereas other Soviet achievements in the space race, such as the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Gagarin’s flight in 1961, sent the US into a panic, many regarded the first woman in space with derision.
However, a privately funded programme was established in 1960 to put Jerrie Cobb and a number of other women through the same tests that male astronauts in NASA’s space programme took. 13 women passed Phase I of the tests, with several passing Phase II and Jerrie Cobb passing Phase III while Wally Funk tried to take the Phase III tests after the programme was ended.

The science didn’t seem to match political attitudes of the time which is how it took another twenty years before an American woman flew in space.

Some other firsts

Svetlana Savitskaya was the second woman in space, though she didn’t fly until 1982. She was the first woman to walk in space.

The first American woman to walk in space was Kathryn D. Sullivan in 1984.
The first Briton in space was a woman, Helen Sharman. She was also the first woman to visit the Mir space station.

The first Iranian in space was also a woman, Anousheh Ansari. She was a spaceflight participant on the Soyuz TMA-9 mission to the International Space Station in 2006, and also the first Muslim woman in space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome back to my meandering series on feminist critques of pop culture. In Part 1 we looked at some very crude tests to see if a work of fiction contained any even vaguely realistic female characters at all and were perhaps surprised by how much of our current cultural output fails these basic tests.
In Part 2, we looked at some common, and generally sloppy, writing techniques which serve to marginalise female and minority characters in fiction.
Today, I want to talk about how women are allowed to act in fiction. I’ll cover three concepts that are deeply interconnected: Objectification, agency and disempowerment.
Spoilers ahead for: Sandman (Brief Lives in particular), Firefly/Serenity, Doctor Who (the Donna season), Casino Royale.
Women as objects
In grammar, the subject of a sentence is the one who acts, the object the one being acted upon. So in the sentence “Jill threw the ball”, Jill is the subject, and the ball is the object. The objectification of women is one of the most prevalent phenomena in our popular culture today. If you think back to the Sexy Lamp Test for a moment, you’ll realise that objectification is precisely what it tests for. In many works of fiction, even the few female characters that are around often don’t act of their own free will but are acted upon instead.
Let’s take River Tam in Firefly as an example. The first time we meet River, she is quite literally delivered in a box. To make matters worse, she spends most of the first episode being naked and afraid, presumably for someone’s viewing pleasure. Throughout the series and in Serenity, River is repeatedly silenced, wheeled around in boxes and chairs, and generally prevented from doing anything of her own accord. At the start of Serenity, we see Simon and Mal arguing over whether River should join the crew on a bank robbery. River’s own will is never taken into account in this. River is acted upon, she is not an actor. The only two exceptions to this in the whole Firefly universe are in the final episode of the series when the entirety of the Firefly crew is incapacitated by the bounty hunter and in the final ten minutes of Serenity when, again, everyone else is busy being dead or dying.
Another great example is the pair of stories You should date an illiterate girl and Date a girl who reads. At a first glance, the second story intends to challenge the treatment of women presented in the first. Yet in both stories the “girls” are seen through male eyes, what is highlighted about their lives is what matters to the male observer and ultimately it is only that male observer’s opinions, views and happiness that seem to count for anything in the worlds created by both writers.
Objectification of women in our culture often goes hand in hand with sexualisation: in addition to being merely objects that are acted upon, women are often presented as sex objects in particular, there entirely for the sexual pleasure and entertainment of male characters and a male audience. Some feminists use “objectification” as shorthand for “sexual objectification”, but I find it useful to keep the two separate, as a character doesn’t have to be sexualised to lack agency.
Agency
Agency is the opposite of objectification. Having agency is being the subject, being the one who acts, who has an effect on the world and others. It’s making choices as a character for one’s own, internally consistent reasons, rather than purely to advance the plot. It is remarkable how few women in our fiction seem to have true agency. Our culture is full of tropes that make female characters little more than plot devices, there only to motivate the male lead in one way or another: the romantic interest, the wife, girlfriend or mother of his children, the sidekick who is there simply to ask stupid questions so she can have the plot explained to her. One of the most jarring examples of the latter is the scene in Casino Royale (the 2006 version) where Vesper Lynd – ostensibly a Treasury accountant, so presumably quite good at maths – has the interminable and dull game of poker explained to her, including basic addition of the amounts of money at stake.
Sometimes, two characters can seem superficially very similar, yet a second look reveals profound differences in the amount of agency they have. Looking at Delirium in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Brief Lives, there are some remarkable similarities between her and River Tam in Firefly/Serenity. They both appear as young and vulnerable teenage girls, both have mental health issues and spend large chunks of the story not being very coherent, both actually have considerable powers. Both have moments of clarity where they hold things together while everyone around them falls apart: River in the final episode of the series and the last ten minutes of Firefly; Delirium in Destiny’s garden when Dream works out what he needs to do to find Destruction and has a breakdown as a result.
River’s fight scene at the end of Serenity is fun to watch and it’s pretty epic. It’s also just another way of highlighting how little agency River’s character has. She has spent the entire series and movie being acted upon, being hushed and silenced, being used by others, and her pulling it together enough to save everyone’s ass at the end is just another form of her being used – this time by the writer, as a kind of deus ex machina. River remains an object throughout.
Delirium on the other hand is a fully fleshed-out character, with meaningful relationships with those around her, and heaps of agency. Her siblings may not agree with her, may not want to help her, may even try to use her sometimes, but they listen to her and they talk to her. One of the things Simon pretty much never does with River is ask her a question. Del’s dialog with her siblings in Brief Lives is a constant exchange of questions and answers. They ask her what she wants, why she wants it, how she would achieve it. When Dream mistreats her, she calls him out on it, and he apologises. When she realises that he’s been using her as a distraction and never intended to help her in the first place, again she calls him out on it and after some reflection he apologises and actually resumes their quest. Delirium shapes the events in Brief Lives just as much as Dream does if not more so – it is ultimately her quest that has such a profound impact on him and his relationships with the family.
Despite their superficial similarities, it is the differences between River and Del that highlight quite how much agency one of them lacks and the other has.
Disempowerment
Disempowerment is the process in which a character goes from having agency to becoming an object. It is, unfortunately, the fate of many female characters in our fiction. Simply the act of portraying as tropes, objects and cardboard cut-outs whose lives revolve around the male protagonist disempowers real women. Sometimes, however, the process of disempowerment is made more explicit in the text.
The example that continues to fill me with rage is the fate of Donna Noble in Doctor Who. Donna is taken from her “mundane” existence as a temp, “uplifted” by the Doctor and shown a universe much bigger, scarier, and more wonderful than she could ever have imagined in her previous life. For me personally, Donna was an incredibly powerful character. Due to her age and experience compared to the other modern-era companions I found it much easier to empathise with her. It also felt like she had a more profound impact on the Doctor in many ways, particularly compared to Martha whose defining characteristic was a crush on the Doctor.
As hints began to emerge of a terrible fate lying in wait for Donna, I imagined a gruesome death to save the Doctor, or the Universe, or both. Donna’s actual fate – a mindwipe, completely erasing all memory of her time with the Doctor, and returning her to her everyday life to get married and drudge on in mediocrity ever after – was a low blow indeed. To add insult to injury, the Doctor rocks up incognito to Donna’s wedding and hands over a winning lottery ticket, as if that somehow makes up for stealing a part of her life and personality. She has gone from someone with incredible power – the Doctor’s power – and agency to someone who is acted upon with little free will of her own. Let’s be clear, Donna Noble deserved to die saving the universe and have her name sung in every galaxy until the end of time. That would have been a considerably less disempowering ending than the one she got.
The reason the concepts of agency, objectification and disempowerment matter, the reason the prevalence of the latter two when it comes to female characters in our fiction is problematic should by now be obvious. We tell stories in which women don’t act but are acted upon; or where, if they do act, their agency is immediately taken away and their fate is worse than death. These are the stories we tell little girls about how the world is and how the world should be. Sleeping Beauty is there to be decorative, unconscious, and kissed without her consent; Snow White is there to be poisoned and then revived; Cindarella is to be dressed up – both by her fairy godmother and the prince. Women can be anything but the protagonists of their own stories. Stories matter. They have power. Until women are equal in story, they will continue to struggle to be equal in life.
I will leave you with one final, poetic thought from Google:

Part 2
Series Index