Office Work It
Dress codes (the set of ‘rules’ that govern what we wear in specific situations) are present in every facet of our daily lives, whether explicitly stated or inherently assumed. For this article, there’s only one dress code I want to talk about: what you wear at work.
Amalgamating the shop worker, flight attendant and businessman, McDonald’s latest uniform incarnation is a far cry from Ronald McDonald’s red and yellow clown suit.
The working ‘uniform’ is ubiquitous to a huge number of professions, despite the possibility that many of us associate it first and foremost with the service industries. By service industries, I don’t mean simply McDonald’s workers, Tesco employees or the like; service means serving you (the consumer) through labour. Retail fashion workers are a prime example, where the ‘uniform’ may not be a classic sweatshirt-and-trousers combo, but rather items picked solely from the collection of garments that the shop provides – living mannequins, in a sense. But this is getting way ahead of myself; let’s go back a bit.
Wearing a uniform, as so many sixth form debates have pointed out, has both positive and negative effects on the individual and the group in any given institution. School uniform has the apparent benefit of making everyone equal (at least, visually) while at the same time ensuring creative idiosyncratic fashion choices are made in the smallest details; how many buttons are done up, how the tie is tied, what badges you wear and the jewellery you sneak in. Even in a photo that has been posed for this Guardian piece, the same uniform turns up in many different styles. So what about the uniform at work? I’ve worked in enough poorly-paid retail jobs to realise what the proposed function of a uniform is, and what actually happens when you wear it.
Just like at school, a uniform is meant to show that all the wearers are equal – visually. For the consumer, workers are identified by what they are wearing; many a time I have been asked in various shops where the changing rooms are, because my particular garb is close enough to the ‘uniform’ of a retail fashion worker to confuse the consumer (although mostly this happens in charity shops. I’m down with that). Workers are set apart from consumers and grouped together as labour through their uniform.
However, looking the same and being the same are (duh) different. My manager and I wear the same uniform: shirt, trousers, and name badge – but are we the same? No. She’s the manager; she’s my boss. Confusing messages of similarity (and potential solidarity?) and hidden hierarchies abound with the working uniform, especially in retail sectors where more than one hierarchy is on the ‘working floor’. You might be able to argue that those industries in which workers are physically grouped by hierarchy – like the factory floor, where the manager is not as physically ‘present’ as on the shop floor – are able to recognise the uniform’s messages of similarity and solidarity more effectively than those where workers of disparate hierarchies are bundled in together.
From Bobby Pin, these are 1950s beauty salon uniforms:
From a 1950s magazine, uniforms that couldn’t be any more ‘feminine’: accentuating waist, hips, drawing attention to face and hairstyle. For this author, they’re utterly beautiful. But then I am a total sucker for ‘the giant coachman collar’.
As well as hierarchy being hidden (but strangely elaborated too, I suppose, by its hiddenness), gender too, is at least under an attempted disguise through the wearing of uniforms. Gone are the days of Mad Men, where women wore skirts and men wore trousers – now we all have to wear trousers, and horrible polo shirts too. An apparently gender-neutral uniform is provided in a number of sectors (mine was previously white shirt and black trousers – or skirt) that never really successfully disguises gender to the consumer in the same way that it conceals hierarchy to some extent. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work, especially if the size is designed for someone who doesn’t have breasts.
And that, my friends, neatly brings me onto those workplaces where you don’t have a uniform. Or, at least, they don’t tell you that you have a uniform. Explicitly, the dress code might be not much more than ‘no shorts or clogs’, but implicitly, the dress code will be bending and morphing round the individuals who are adhering to and working against it. This dress code will tie in gender and authority hierarchies, as illustrated by the business suit and its female equivalent.
From my employment experience (and others who have agreed with me), men wear business suits, but women do not wear business suits, despite this (again) apparently gender-neutral ‘uniform’ being available. A number of women working in offices might wear the female equivalent of the business suit (Next surely embodies this look), which more often than not includes a) skirt b) something frilly c) front-cover-flawless makeup. So it’s the business suit, plus a) traditional emblem of femininity b) annoying and impractical emblem of femininity c) emblem of femininity that is often perceived to be caused by heavy external pressures to look good at all times. The visual ‘uniform’ of the business suit is not gender-neutral, because it is adapted to become gender-specific; whether this is due to individual taste or workplace culture, I’m unsure, but it does inform the hierarchy of the office.
I. Love. Her.
Rather than looking at personal comments regarding taste that may be made about office workwear, my interest instead lies in how this implicit dress code dramatically affects the hierarchical makeup of a working environment, potentially without many of the individuals involved even being fully aware of how it is being shaped around them. If I arrive tomorrow at work with a ‘male’ business suit on, will I be taken more seriously? Or, as a woman, if I arrive in a simulated version of that ‘male’ business suit, will I be declined respect because I appear too much like one of the boys? Am I feminine enough for the office if I don’t wear flawless makeup – or any makeup? If I start dressing like the big boys, will they still know it’s me on the inside? I believe there is a definite question of sexuality and sexual preference here that comes into play with ‘levels’ of femininity in the workplace, although I don’t feel able to tackle this in great detail here (or just yet).
Workplace hierarchies are constituted through a vast number of factors, but the role of dress and dress codes is one that can’t be ignored. From traditional environments where gender and authority hierarchies may have been distinguished and designated by an explicit uniform placed upon the workers, contemporary working environments – especially those in the creative industries – now have to juggle with an implicit dress code that is created and defined by the workers themselves (across all hierarchies) in their clothing choices. Plus, there is the added element of workers’ perception of the importance of that dress code or, conversely, the desire to play with it and break some boundaries, in designating what you can, or can’t, wear to work.
- EB Snare is a full time writer who also writes freelance, makes and sells her own jewellery, drinks, smokes and listens almost exclusively to 80s electropop music. She completed her Masters in 2011, with a dissertation on fashion blogging as a contemporary labour form that included some sweet diagrams. Her blog, The Magic Square Foundation, covers fashion, culture and general life, or you can talk to her on Twitter: @ebsnare. And, yeah, we’ve snapped her up for Team BadRep too. Woo!
New Series: Hopeless Reimantic
Hello. My name is Rei, and I read romance novels.
I’ve been weirdly obsessed with romance novels for about the past two years. I read my first one a lot longer ago than that – I abducted and read, over a period of about three weeks, a romance with a name I can’t remember about a Japanese lady falling in love with an American man just after World War II during my breaks in volunteering at a nursing home – but I didn’t really think all that much about them for a while afterwards. Then I stumbled upon Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and started following it because, damn, those ladies are hilarious, and from there started following Dear Author as well, who focus on snark a little less (although they can also be pretty funny) but who are nevertheless thoughtful and insightful in their reviews. For a long time, I was an avid follower of the romance industry without ever actually having picked up more than two romances.
And then I got a Kindle for Christmas.
You guys, for the reluctant obsessive, ebook readers are poison in super-convenient button-clicky packaging. Thanks to its extreme user-friendliness and the large number of freebooks available on the Amazon website (in case anybody is worried that I’m being paid for advertising, the wireless keeps breaking and sometimes the thing refuses to charge) I have something like one hundred romance novels on my Kindle now – a conservative estimate, not taking into account non-category romances and books debatably qualified for the title. I can’t stop reading them, and I can’t stop talking about them; I am fascinated by romance novels, in spite of the fact that more often than not picking one up guarantees that I will spend half the book with my jaw clenched to the point of pain. It’s a guilty pleasure, if by “pleasure” you mean “bafflement-inducing” and “guilty” you mean “thing that I am liable to be judged for”.
So what brings me to all the jaw-clenching? Well, I’ve been a reader ever since I was a kid – I’ve tried pretty much every genre of fiction, from fantasy to crime to sci-fi to sci-fi fantasy crime – and category romance is, without question, the most formulaic genre I have ever come across. It’s baffling. I mean, every genre has its stock characters and tropes, but while there are things that crop up a lot in, say, fantasy, as far as I can see the only thing really required to write a fantasy novel is the strong enough conviction that what you’re writing is fantasy. Write a category romance, and your story is pretty much plotted out for you. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at the submission guidelines for Mills and Boon Modern Romance (the UK version of Harlequin Presents):
Readers are whisked away to exclusive jet-set locations…When the hero strides into the story he’s a powerful, ruthless man who knows exactly what – and who – he wants and he isn’t used to taking no for an answer! Yet he has depth and integrity, and he will do anything to make the heroine his. Though she may be shy and vulnerable, she’s also plucky and determined to challenge his arrogant pursuit.
Modern Romance explores emotional themes that are universal. These should be played out as part of highly-charged conflicts that are underpinned by blistering sexual anticipation and released as passionate lovemaking…
Got that? So, your story has to be somewhere “exclusive and jet-set” (what does “jet-set” actually mean in this context? I sort of expect the entire thing to be set in the Business Class lounge at Stansted) and your hero needs to be a Romance Novel Hero, you know, hot and alpha and, well, willing to be kind of creepy if he thinks it’ll help. (Bonus points if he’s so manly that his manliness bursts out of the cover – for reference, please see the pictured-below edition of The Very Virile Viking, one of the most beautifully alliteratively-titled works of romance that I have ever come across.) And your heroine needs to challenge him but also be vulnerable to him. And they need to clash and eventually express that clash through a lot of hot sex.
Yes, there are a lot of variations you can play out on that theme – which I suspect is why publishers like Mills and Boon are a long way away from getting stale – but ultimately this frame is pretty limiting, and it makes it easier to see why romance novels are stereotyped as all the same. And this moulding of the romance novel storyline doesn’t stop with the publishing guidelines; the romance novel review websites I follow do downgrade books that fail to deliver on agreed-upon “romance trademarks”, although in fairness the only one that seems to need strict adherence is that of the HEA (that’s Happily Ever After, to those of you who use their time much more wisely than I do). Even that strikes me as strange, because while I can understand it as a trend – if, as common theory purports, romance novels are wish fulfilment fantasies, why wouldn’t they have a happy ending? – I can’t wrap my head around it as the thing which makes a romance novel romantic. More on that later.
Which brings me, finally, to this: Why do I think it useful to subject romance novels to feminist analysis? Aren’t they just, as a friend of mine once put it, “granny porn”? Is there any mileage in analysing such an outdated form of trashy entertainment from a feminist perspective?
I obviously think so, or I wouldn’t be writing this. And here’s why: most romance novel writers are women, writing for a female audience. I’ve read some (very good) romance novels written by men geared towards women, but only a very few, and they tend to focus on gay male couplings – in other words, not part of the main body of mainstream romance publishing. (LGBT people in romance novels is a whole ‘nother article.) More troubling is that most of the flaws and foibles of romance tropes that persist even today – virginal women, marriage and babies or nothing, and the time-honoured classic of “forced seduction” – are overwhelmingly shrugged off as “it’s just wish fulfilment”.
Is it?
As a lifelong avid reader, I’m no stranger to escaping into a good book. And I have no doubt that there are people out there who don’t really want a relationship in which the man takes charge, sweeps the lady off her feet, and loves her with a love that’s never been loved before until her resolve melts into baby-making funtimes, but can still get into a traditional romance plotline just for kicks. But is this still (or has it ever been) so overpoweringly The Female Fantasy that it’s the go-to, the default, the only world a romance fan wants to escape into? Why are these elements so built into “women’s” fiction? And what, in the end, does that tell us about the cultural narrative that has been built around us?
Those are the questions I want to answer; they’re the main thing going around in my head every time I pick up a new romance, and they are what keeps me reading whenever I finish one that has made me want to drill a hole through my skull. (Which isn’t all of them! Some are quite good. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about them.)
To get us started, though, over the next few weeks I’ll be doing a rundown of what I think are the five most central tropes or stock characters in romance novels. It’s going to be difficult to whittle the list down that far, but I’ll power through it. Honest. I don’t really need this university education.
Over the course of the series, I’ll look at the trope itself, where, when and how it shows up in different genres, and how I think it’s been adapted for the modern romance novel, because if there’s another thing that seems to be true of romance? It’s that they never throw anything away. I…am no one to judge on that, as anybody who’s seen my living space will be able to attest, but there’s an impressive level of trope-hoarding that goes on around here, and I’m going to show you why. I’ll also be probing a bit into what that means for romance storylines as a whole.
So stay tuned for Instalment One, which is going to be the aforementioned Virginal Heroine! Are you excited? I’m excited.
See you then!
- Rei (not to be confused with Rai, who writes our Gamer Diary!) is a small but strident university student who is from London but primarily based in Cambridgeshire, except for when she lives in Japan. She is reluctantly obsessed with romance novels, and is starting to think that it is they who are addicted to her; she also likes general reading, general writing, martial arts and acting in pantomimes. In her spare time, she tries to come up with things to do in her spare time. She is often spotted hanging around the tea-and-coffee-making facilities, looking impatient. And we are very pleased and proud to welcome her to Team BadRep!
Our mate Lizzie – she of the wedding adventures – sent us this post a few weeks ago. She’s been taking supermarkets to task, because in 2012 we really shouldn’t be seeing political mags (or Total Film, or Kerrang!) on a shelf marked MEN’S INTEREST. She’s not alone in her view, either – lately feminists around the UK have been making the point, with a particular upsurge recently (perhaps in the wake of other successful retail-themed mini campaigns, like Londonfeminist’s calling out the World Cup sexist t-shirts on sale in New Look, or WH Smith’s decision in 2011 to stop categorising certain books as “women’s fiction”). About three weeks before we were originally going to post this, the Vagenda drew attention to the Magazine Rack Sexism Problem, and across the pond things don’t seem much different either.
A few days after we received the post, one chain emailed Lizzie back. We’ve added the email into the post so you can see CUSTOMER SERVICE IN ACTION.
And if you have a guest post brewing in your brain, you know what to do: pitch us at [email protected].
Image: Flickr user Toban Black (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/)
The Problem
Dear Tesco and Sainsburys,
Can you please cease categorising The Economist, New Scientist, Private Eye, and the Spectator as ‘Men’s Interest’ magazines? I think you’ll find all genders are interested in politics and business. You are perpetuating the myth that women only care about (because they are valued for) their beauty.
While I accept (but hate) that a large proportion of women read Cosmo and Marie Claire and Good Housekeeping, I think that a large proportion also watch the news, vote, work, and may be interested in reading The Economist from time to time. You don’t segregate papers (although papers themselves, with their Femail sections, and Style sections, also start pushing my buttons). Why the shit have you determined that certain topics are not for the eyes of women?
Women still suffer unequal pay way before they think about maternity leave, and this is part of the same problem – you are saying that business and politics (something we are all involved in, one way or another) is purely the domain of men.
Sort this out immediately, please. It’s patronising and misogynistic. Actually, can you please also remove film, photography, game, cars, nature and music mags from the same category while you are at it, as that’s also inaccurate as well? Unless you think women can’t like music, cars, photography, video games, nature and film? I mean, it’s not as if you really think only men are interested in those topics, right? You have to admit that, say, there have been some female musicians, and some women actually enjoy going to the cinema and hey, Diane Arbus existed, and gosh, there are female commuters on the roads.
I’d stick with just Men’s Health if I were you, and even that’s shaky.
Thanks,
Women in the UK
What to do?
To complain to Tesco, please go here. For Sainsburys, here. If we get enough people complaining, maybe they’ll actually listen and change their stores. I mean, if a little girl can get the name of a loaf of bread changed at Sainsbury’s, surely they’re amenable to listening to vindicated complaints by women who are tired of being told to not use our brains and instead just look pretty. I mean, bread name change by photogenic small child must have meant something rather than being innocuous PR in a time of recession, right?
Boom! Progress from Sainsburys!
From: Sainsburys
To: LizzieDear Lizzie
Thank you for your email and suggestion that we reconsider the signage used to categorise magazines in our stores. I understand you feel our current method is dated and we certainly do not want to imply the magazines are gender specific.
Up until now we have used information from publishers, who identify the target demographic for their magazines. We have organised the magazines on our shelves accordingly. We appreciate the points you have made, and have undertaken a review of the signage we use in store.
I am pleased to say that going forward, our magazines will be shown by genre and they will not have a gender prefix. There will not be an immediate change to the magazine sections in all our stores as this will be a gradual roll out replacing the existing signage. This should also address the grammar issues that you kindly brought to our attention.
We appreciate you taking the time to contact us, giving us the opportunity to look into your concerns. We look forward to seeing you in store again soon.
So that just leaves Tesco, from whom, as we go to press, Lizzie is still waiting to hear. Bad form, guys. (Although what Sainsburys mean by “grammar issues” is eluding us slightly here at BR Towers. This is a SEXISM ISSUE.)
Time to get on it, readers! To the Tesco feedback page, one and all.
- Thanks to Lizzie for making a noise and sending us her progress. Have you had a Customer Service Breakthrough or Problem lately? Get in touch and tell us all about it!
[Gamer Diary] What I’ve been Playing – July 2012, Community Relations and a Competition
July has been very empty on my playing schedule. Moving house – all those boxes – kinda took it out of me. I’ve just been pottering on TF2 and aside from that I finally finished Dead Space 2 in one 3-hour stint. I’m also on holiday from the end of July so, that’s put a deadline on things. I thought to myself, “What can I bring to Gamer Diary this month if I haven’t played anything?” and then, while gormlessly starting at Steam, I had an idea: a competition! So, at the end of this post there’ll be some details on how you could win one of the titles I’ve written about this year (via Steam).
First I’ll give you something of substance.
The posts I wrote last month (here and here) were somewhat laden with negativity – you could say legitimately – so I thought that for this offering I’d continue to talk about our gaming community and the relationship developers have with their audiences. Most importantly, I’d like to highlight a couple of examples of those who are getting it right. Or, at the very least – because no one can be perfect – who seem to be doing it better than others.
There are a lot of devs and publishers who have their plus points, and there are those that have their negatives. Most have both, but some are more memorable for either one of these polar options. For this post I’d like to look at the ones who are most famed for being a little bit awesome.
It being summer, those who know them will not be surprised that I’m going to bring up Valve. During the Meet the Pyro update for Team Fortress 2, they announced the Source Filmmaker, and as the Summer Sale began, they announced Greenlight.
I jumped on Filmmaker and have quite enjoyed playing with it. Here’s my one-and-only even-vaguely-close-to-finished short I made. The tutorials started off simply enough but after a few of them, ‘Bay’ (our guide) seems to dispense with the explaining-it-to-a-layperson format and just starts blurting jargon at you left, right and centre. Hence why I haven’t finished the tutorial video yet. (That and the fact I got distracted with my little Western-style showdown there.)
One other criticism at this point is that the Store Page (on Steam) for the Filmmaker has a list of minimum system requirements, but not all of these are accurate. The page lists that you need a minimum resolution of 1366 x 768, which I had, but this creates problems with displaying all the necessary functions of the tool. I had to bump up to the “suggested” 1920 x 1080 in order to get full functionality out of it. But, hey, it’s free, it’s pretty fun and is a great way to get involved in the community.
Now, Greenlight is not something I expect to benefit from – as I’m not a developer – but I will definitely be checking it out from a voter’s perspective. Here’s the basic premise: lots of games get submitted to Valve looking to be sold via Steam; they started to think maybe there was a better way of selecting games; having seen the success of the Workshop ratings system they thought of employing a similar thing for games; Greenlight allows developers to submit their games and be at the mercy of the community. In theory, if the community likes your game(s), you get high ratings/votes, and your game gets to go to Steam and be sold through the client.
This is a brilliant opportunity for a lot of smalltime and bedroom developers to get recognition for their work, to build a fanbase and maybe make some money out of their work. So, Steam users of BadRep, get behind this! When it arrives, let’s make sure we show Valve this is a good tool to help out the smalltimers.
Competition Time!
In celebration of a variety of things (Valve being awesome, “summer”, I’ve been at BR Towers over a year now…) I thought a little gaming giveaway would be nice. As BR is voluntary, this is me buying prizes for you guys, so given that I’m sure you’ll understand why this competition happens to follow the Steam Summer Sale.
Up for grabs:
- Torchlight – as mentioned June’s “…Playing” post.
- Bastion – also from June (see link above).
- LIMBO – recently part of Humble Bundle V (discussed here)
How to enter:
Leave a comment on this post (they do not automatically see the light of the internet so your details will only be seen by Team BadRep) and remember to include an email address linked to a Steam account or your Steam ID and which of the three games you’d prefer.
Early in August I’ll collect all the details, and using some funky random number generators to do some description of Name-out-of-the-Hat magic, I’ll then get in touch with winners to arrange the gifting of their new Steam game.
Simple as that, really. Good luck!
But if you’re feeling generous, could you spare a couple of minutes to complete this little survey?
[Guest Post] Troubled Families: A Moral Maze, or The Seven Traits of Highly Unsuccessful People
Today on the guest soapbox, it’s artist and comics creator Howard Hardiman. The eagle-eyed among you will remember us previously mentioning his comics The Lengths and (with Julia Scheele and Sarah Gordon) The Peckham Invalids in these pages.
If you’ve got a guest post brewing in your brain, pitch us at [email protected].
Last night, I was drawing away at my desk with Radio 4 on in the background and idly chatting to my boyfriend, who is in Poland at the moment.
A Moral Maze came on the radio, aiming to address the moral challenges around the government’s Troubled Families initiative, in the wake of the government’s ‘Broken Britain Tsar’, Louise Casey, suggesting that women in these families should be financially discouraged from having more children if they are struggling to cope at present. This comes off the back of Eric Pickles saying we’re too politically correct to lay blame where it belongs, which is with the troubled families where recidivistic criminality and truancy endures across several generations.
It is, they suggest, a moral failure of the families who languish on benefits that they do not lift themselves out of antisocial behaviour and state dependency.
In this Moral Maze, it was said more than once “we all know who these families are” when panel members asked for clarification on whether they were discussing troubled or troublesome families.
The criteria for being regarded as a Troubled Family are that a family has five or more of the following seven traits:
- Having a low income
- No one in the family who is working
- Poor housing
- Parents who have no qualifications
- The mother has a mental health problem
- One parent has a longstanding illness or disability
- The family is unable to afford basics, including food and clothes
Source: they’re outlined in this Independent piece.
However, the Moral Maze‘s panel also discussed some very loaded terms like “serial fatherlessness” which seemed to point quite firmly to where they apportion the blame for this supposed crisis.
Of course, like most government statistics, the figure of 120,000 families in the UK meeting this definition is disputed, with most attempts to replicate the research finding far, far fewer families than in the initial research.
The panel didn’t seem to pick up on what seems to be glaringly obvious to me as a major issue with the defining traits, focusing instead on whether poverty caused families to struggle to the point where adhering to social norms was difficult or whether the families themselves were essentially lazy or immoral enough to drive themselves into this situation. There are obvious echoes to the description of “feral youths” we had a year ago when the country was ablaze with rioting.
To me, the most pernicious aspect of the definition is the bias against disabled people, particularly against disabled women. Since it’s far harder for disabled people to find decent education or well-paid employment, and since depression and other mental health challenges are incredibly common among disabled people (perhaps because we’re being told that our problems are our own moral inadequacies?), it seems like a given that most families where one or both parents are disabled are automatically well on the way to being labelled as problematic.
In fact, if you examine a family where neither parent is ill, disabled or has mental health problems, they must meet all five of the remaining criteria, but a disabled family where the mother has mental health issues need only meet three of the five non-health-related factors to be labelled as problematic.
If you then add in the idea that the mothers in troubled families should be discouraged, perhaps financially, from having more children than they can afford or cope with, we’re worryingly close to a programme of eugenics that disproportionately targets disabled and mentally ill women.
The discussion on Moral Maze didn’t pick up on this point, seemingly assuming that it should be taken as read that ill-health and impairment, whether physical or mental, constitutes a problem for society.
It’s a disturbingly regressive idea that in order to end poverty, you end the poor, and one that should be challenged with passion at every turn.
Reading through earlier government documents relating to this, however, paints a different picture to the one now being presented by ministers. The definition there ran:
- First, examine families where either there is proof of the child having committed a crime or where a member of the family has an ASBO or similar charge around social conduct.
- Secondly, identify families where a child has been regularly excluded from school, has 15% or higher unauthorised absence or where the child is regularly truanting.
- If families meet one of the two, then examine if no-one in the family works or is in post-compulsory education (one of those NEETs – Not in Employment, Education or Training).
- After examining these identifying factors, local considerations may be applied where families meet two or three of the above factors exist and there is cause for concern.
These local considerations can include:
- Where a family member has been in prison in the last year, where the police have been called out regularly, where the family is involved in a gang or where they are prolific offenders.
- Where a child is on the child protection register or where the local authority is considering taking the child into care.
- Where a family member has long-term health problems, particularly:
Emotional and mental health problems
Drug and alcohol misuse
Long term health conditions
Health problems caused by domestic abuse
Under 18 conceptions
Now, this list of issues seems problematic, but less so when you take into account the idea that these should only be considered once it’s established that there are problems with criminality or where the child is not attending school often enough. Worklessness is given less priority than these and health problems such as alchoholism are even less relevant.
Source: this Troubled Families Programme PDF from March 2012.
I think that the shift from what this document describes to the seven traits of unsuccessful people defined above and communicated by ministers more recently is incredibly telling in determining the underlying ideology at play here. Rather than say that criminality and absence from school or the structure of employment, education or training are the main challenges facing families and requiring intervention, we’re left with the impression that there are wickedly immoral, lazy people, primarily the poor, disabled people and single mothers, who are tearing apart the fabric of the country.
The original notion – that families who are troubled and troubling through antisocial or criminal behaviour, where children are being denied the life chances that education provides, could do with additional support and intervention to assist them in re-introducing structure to what can often be a chaotic and fraught existence – seems sound. To turn this into yet another attack on poor people, disabled people and women just seems like a moral failure of government, and that, I think, is far more likely to tear the country apart.
- Described as ‘suave’ by Simply Knitting Magazine, Howard Hardiman is a writer and artist who makes comic books about lonely badgers, dog-headed escorts and disabled superheroines. He lives on the Isle of Wight and collects jigsaw puzzle pieces he finds in the street.
www.howardhardiman.com
www.thelengths.com
www.thepeckhaminvalids.com
The Most Goddamn Admirable Thing I’ve Seen All Year
There is an international organisation which protects abused children in a unique way.
The alpha-masculinity of the men is honourable and has a positive effect on the community.
The women in it are equals, fully involved in the work of being a physically intimidating deterrent.
Oh yes, and it’s a biker gang.
The Arizona website AZCentral.com recently published this story about BACA – Bikers Against Child Abuse. The theory behind the group is simple, and works very well: if an abused child is scared of their attacker returning, if their home no longer feels like a safe haven, or if the outside world and school feel too exposed, their new family will stand guard for as long as they need.
(Warning – you should definitely read the whole article, but if you do there is a high chance you will cry your eyes out and have your faith in humanity restored. As the comments put it: “How come ninjas are cutting onions in my living room?” “Ahh they’re at my office too!” Not too triggery except in the general discussion of the topic.)
Bikers Against Child Abuse is a non-profit organisation started by a social worker in 1995. John Paul Lilly realised that the 8-year-old boy in his care was too scared to leave the house, and remembered what had successfully taken away his own fears as a child: having a biker gang look out for him. He developed safeguards and checks to make the idea work in a therapeutic environment, and now there are chapters in the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy, The Netherlands and Belgium. The details of precisely what they do are extraordinary.
First of all, the child meets the whole local gang and becomes part of their family. They get the same t-shirt as the gang. They get a biker name. They are under no doubt that these men and women will be there for them from now on. For the bikers, this involves training from qualified social workers and discipline from their leader around how they behave during that first meeting.
I don’t want to see any tears coming out of your eyes, and the child doesn’t either. Remember why we’re here: to empower the child. If you can’t handle it, keep your shades on.
After that, two bikers are assigned as the child’s “Primaries”. (Always two, and no biker is ever alone with a child – two is the minimum number at any meeting and parents/guardian must give permission each time as well). They will be on call, a mobile number the child can ring whenever they need to. And that’s important, because being present and being seen (especially by the child) is what they’re there for.
If the man who hurt this little girl calls or drives by, or even if she is just scared, another nightmare, the bikers will ride over and stand guard all night. … if she has to testify against her abuser in court, they will go, too, walking with her to the witness stand and taking over the first row of seats. (They) will tell her, “Look at us, not him.” And when she’s done, they will circle her again and walk her out.
The emphasis is always on keeping the child safe from fear, of being a wall of friends between them and the influences making them feel vulnerable. And it works, again and again.
I’ve written for BadRep before about how society’s definition of ‘manliness’ STILL involves violence and requires complete isolation from anything feminine, and how this obviously doesn’t help feminism (or indeed men). But there are also many other aspects of alpha-maleness which directly harm men, women and equality. Male aggression is (rightly) regarded as often negative in modern life, and we haven’t come up with new ways of valuing masculinity since the office worker replaced the hunter and warrior.
The challenge facing these bikers is exactly the same as for anyone trying to be a White Knight in the modern age: it’s a very, very narrow and fragile path to stay on. These men and women are valued because of their capability for violence, at least by reputation. Their quiet physical intimidation is precisely what makes them useful to society, and that’s actually a rare role these days.
But a successful warrior is defined only by being the best at combat. If any warrior loses the approval of the community due to being untrustworthy, indiscriminate in who they attack or just out of control, then they become a rabid dog who needs to be contained for the safety of others. A superhero only has the public cheering them on in fights if they don’t take cheap shots, attack a child, injure the defenceless, or any number of things which can break their honourable image.
In the same way, these bikers cannot be seen to be harmful to the children, aggressive to the public or openly criminal – not one of them, not even once. This charity (which I approve of and respect so much I was nearly moved to tears) works only until the first biker breaks that trust. What this means in the real world is that there are incredibly tight restrictions on how these particular alpha males can channel their masculine image, forcing them to be extremely honourable at all times. It sets up a rare situation where private individuals on the street following their own decisions (not soldiers following orders in an army) are able to display all the violent alpha male traits which usually result in problems for society, and use them to create trust, healing and safety from fear.
I thought this post was a good fit for BadRep not because I’m under any impression that biker gangs are bastions of feminism and equality – I know nothing about it, but expect that any chapters led by women are in the vast minority and regarded differently. But while all the women in the article were treated as equals in a family, this time it was the role of the men I particularly wanted to mention.
The article describes such an atmosphere of caring, security and trust between these bikers and the children that it’s made many readers into instant converts. I can totally believe that this approach would work on even the most terrified brain – anything coming for the victim will now have to go through their big friends first. It’s a real-world solution which lets children sleep at night, and I love that both women and men are out there doing it with such selfless dedication on their own time and at their own expense. (In the article, two bikers stay on watch outside a girl’s house from 8pm until 2am, when two more arrive to take the next shift. In another example this rolling watch is kept up continuously for two and a half days, by people travelling two hours to get there.)
An online friend of mine and her husband are members of The Patriot Guard, bikers in the US who (strictly at the invitation of the family) will attend funerals of servicemen to protect the event from protesters such as the Westboro Baptist Church. (The WBC picket funerals of LGBT personnel, shouting that God killed them because of their sexuality.) It’s precisely the same thing: bikers using their image to – when invited – protect the emotionally vulnerable. It’s a hugely positive way to use alpha male traits in the modern world.
The judge asked the boy, “Are you afraid?” No, the boy said. The judge seemed surprised, and asked, “Why not?” The boy glanced at [the bikers] sitting in the front row and told the judge, “Because my friends are scarier than he is.”
“Hello, my name is Hannah… and I am a poet.”
“Hi, Hannah.”
“It started with just scribbling the odd rhyme by myself in my teens. Then I went away to university and learned you can have poetry slams, but even then I didn’t really take to it. Then, in 2009, I moved back to London. Not many of my friends had moved back yet and I didn’t know many people and then one night I just fell into the wrong crowd… you know how it goes.”
OK, not quite, but from the way many people respond when the subject comes up…. you’d think it was something at least a bit distasteful. And when it’s not great, it’s not great, but when it’s good: holy shit, you have no idea.
See Exhibit A:
When it’s done right, performance poetry (or ‘spoken word’ as it’s often coyly referred to) is a thrilling, visceral, hilarious and beautiful experience, going everywhere from music-backed comedy to rap to beat and sonnets. Most nights have an open mic section, too, so the opportunity to try your hand and get involved is always there.
This is one of the first pieces I saw performed live, and I was hooked:
Three gigs and a couple of glasses of wine later and I was on stage trying my hand in the Hammer & Tongue slam. I came second. No going back. Though I’ve been a writer for years, there’s something incomparable about seeing your work hit an audience – getting gasps and laughs right where you hoped they’d be. And – when it doesn’t quite hit the mark – you’ve just had a room full of feedback. OK, back to the drawing board – cut the third stanza, up the ending, sort the rhythm in the third line and try again next week.
And now – wonder of wonders – I’m part of Other Voices, a poetry show that’s going up to the Edinburgh Fringe and is organised by the ‘Welsh whisperer’ Fay Roberts. The shows are (according to an audience member on Sunday:
“A heady blend of rhythms – poems that catch you in the throat, stories so compelling that you realise you haven’t taken a breath in minutes, and if you start to take yourself too seriously, then surely someone will tell life in words so true you wonder if they are reading your diary.”
So, yeah. I’m pretty stoked. The vibe is big, vampy and bold. Red drapes, candles, and did I meantion the bowls of heart-shaped sweeties? The booked acts are an array of outspoken women weaving words about whatever we damn like. We have a London premier this Thursday 26 July at the wonderful Hackney Attic (Facebook event here) featuring Fay Roberts, Sophia Blackwell, Fran Isherwood, Isadora Vibes, and yours truly – Hannah Eiseman-Renyard.
If you read BadRep, there’s a strong chance this is relevant to your interests.
Here’s my own contribution (dressed like a goth glitterball because showbiz):
- Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word Cabaret, at the Hackney Attic tomorrow, and then the Edinburgh Fringe. Book tickets for tomorrow here or see above for Edinburgh.
Catwoman: Film Versus Game
So, the new Nolan Batman has hits screens worldwide and given my disappointment at Catwoman’s portrayal in last year’s Arkham City, I went to see it with breath held, hoping her presentation in the film (and to a much wider audience) didn’t suck nearly as hard. So here I’ll be giving the film points for everything it did better than the game.
Repeat readers of my contributions will know that when we’re dealing with things that could potentially be spoilered, I tend to engage vagaries and nonspecifics to try and save people the pain. This won’t be any different, but just in case, here it is:
THE SPOILER WARNING.
There.
Boobs
Overall, Nolan hasn’t done too badly. Anne Hathaway seems a good choice, and there isn’t any in-yer-face cleavage or suspicious anti-gravity trickery.
Unlike in Arkham City.
+1 to Dark Knight Rises
Though she did have some cool moves, those boobs never seemed affected by the basic laws of physics.
Bums
Catwoman does have a black, skintight suit, but so does Batman – some compensation, I guess? – and there are only a couple of unfortunate shots of her bum as she rides the bat-bike. This is however; a) a big improvement on Arkham City‘s near constant sexy-butt-wiggling right in centre-camera, and b) offset by her being awesome on that bike.
+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises
Backstory
It’s important to remember that the game and the film encounter Selina/Catwoman at different points in her story and her relationship with Bruce/the Bat. Despite this, both mediums do quite well in demonstrating her motivations and character. The film, however, does marginally better as it manages to do this while advancing, generally, a bit more respectful portrayal of her as a woman.
+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises
Bitch
The most disappointing Catwoman scene of the whole thing. “You dumb bitch!” snarls the guy she’s fighting.“No-one’s ever accused me of being dumb before,” says she. Now, Selina ignoring the b-word could either be a) because she’s showing that its intended purpose (as an insult) doesn’t affect her, therefore suck it, or b) it’s such a commonplace piece of vocabulary she doesn’t see why it’s so excruciatingly wrong. I hope, and like to believe (based on Hathaway’s facial expression on-screen), that it’s the former. I was midway through writing this at the time, so I’m extremely disappointed it was there at all. Seeing as we’re comparing the movie to the game, however, having one instance of “bitch” in the whole film is 1000x better than hearing it every other second, like you do in Arkham City.
+0.5 to Dark Knight Rises
Boots
YES THEY’RE TOTALLY PRACTICAL.
Also in that “bitch” scene is the sudden appearance of Selina’s massive metal stilettos. Why?! No one can be that gymnastic in 5″ fucking heels. As you may note, this hacked me off considerably. The film tries to justify these ridiculous boots by having the inside of the heel sharpened like a serrated blade (check out the poster image, right) – but that seems to me like a poor token to try and throw off the fact they’re pure decoration and only there for prettifying Catwoman. She doesn’t need them! They aren’t practical, even if there’s a Swiss Army Knife in those heels, it’s just… no.
The second attempt to validate them comes as a baddie asks her if they hurt (implied: to walk in) to which she responds, “I don’t know, do they?” and kicks him with one. Fun retort, maybe, but they’re still unnecessary, and all the credibility the film gained by not focussing on her boobs is lost as they just use those heels to return her to unrealistic pin-up status. Game-Catwoman has similarly stupid shoes so there’s no betterment to be found here.
+0 to Dark Knight Rises
To sum up…
Nolan & Hathaway’s Catwoman does better than Arkham City‘s, but there remains a lot of space to improve. The age-old issue of practical footwear is the big one for me – after making such an effort to cover up cleavage, making the top half of her outfit much more practical, what exactly was the point in contradicting that by forcing her to don stilettos?
The ‘bitch’ thing also irked me quite a lot, but it was much better than in Arkham City, which was almost unplayable in places for the amount of churning rage brought about by being called a Catbitch so often (I mean, aside from the fact a female cat can be called a ‘molly’, ‘queen’ or ‘dam’ where a bitch is a female canine, of course).
Film Catwoman has the common sense to tuck the boobs away so they don’t lollop around as she beats up baddies
As I said, film-Catwoman’s body isn’t made nearly as much of a focal point as it is in the game. There’s no cleavage to ogle, lots of close-ups on her face, and when her body is in view, it’s often as hidden as Batman’s is by varying descriptions of black attire. Downfall is a bit a of bum-shot while she’s on the batbike, but this is nowhere near as big a negative point as Catwoman’s near-constant sexy wiggling in Arkham City.1
On the whole, film-Catwoman does much better than game-Catwoman for all the above reasons and many more I daren’t go into here for fear of lolspoilers. The film on the whole is pretty awesome, and the female characters are integral to the story: despite what the trailers may suggest, it is not simply Bat vs. Bane with a bit of eye candy on the side. I won’t say more because that’ll give too much away, but go see it and decide for yourselves. I enjoyed it immensely and will probably be seeing it again in the not-too-distant future.
- NB: Yes, I know about the portrayal of Catwoman in many of the comics and blah blah fidelity, but this is the 21st century, not 1940… so, surely, we can update her just a little to move with the times after 70+ years? And I don’t mean revealing more skin. [↩]
Ah! Forget My Fate Part II consists of an ambitious three-woman staging of Purcell’s most famous opera, Dido and Aeneas. A courtly drama with a twist, the production asks: how can the most powerful woman in Carthage survive when her worst enemies lie within?
It’s been a little while since we heard from Better Strangers Feminist Opera Collective. Back in November last year, our Sarah C interviewed them about their show – the first part of their Ah! Forget My Fate! project. Hodge and I went to the show – “part-opera, part-cabaret abridged history of women in opera” – and I’d definitely recommend them.
This week – on Thursday 26 July at 10pm – they’re back at the King’s Head in Islington, North London. They sent us this Q&A press release about the show – Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas – and their work.
Why would a feminist opera company put on Dido and Aeneas?
“Because in many ways, Dido and Aeneas is where it all started. Whether or not Dido and Aeneas is the first opera in Western classical tradition is up for (interminable and pedantic) debate, but it’s certainly one of the earliest that’s regularly performed – particularly here in the UK where we’re based. And Dido is the first in a noble tradition of heroines who die an arguably completely pointless death (in the context of the opera as a self-contained work, anyway), so to me it makes sense for us to begin at the beginning.
“It was also written, we think, to be performed by a girls’ school, which makes it well suited for modern adaptations with exclusively female voices.
“A personal motivation for me is that Dido is a really interesting feminist figurehead. As a ruler, she refused to submit to any kind of conquest (sexual, emotional or literal) from the men around her, and she earned the respect of her people through an ironclad adherence to an ideal.”
What will audiences take away from BSFOC’s telling of the story? Why does it need to be (re)told?
“As a producer/director, the main question I want to ask of the work is why Dido dies. That’s what’s ultimately led me personally to the staging we’re about to present here. I don’t believe that people die of a broken heart, unless they have some kind of congenital heart defect, and I don’t believe that the queen of Carthage has the kind of emotional pallor that lends itself to dying of a hissy fit after the bloke you’ve known for a couple of days decides it’s time to move on. I want there to be a driving force behind it. I want to know what it is about the witches that gives them such power over Dido.
“People who aren’t familiar with classical mythology, and the Aeneid in particular, aren’t all that likely to know much about Dido, and you’re certainly not going to learn anything about her from the text of Purcell’s opera. Our telling of the story – the recasting of the witches as the shadow selves of the named characters – is intended to help to fill in the blanks. Nahum Tate (librettist)’s Dido is not controlling, masochistic, or even particularly bold, and that is why Dido’s shadow self – and, by extension, the witches – have so much power. The impulse is there, and is all the more irresistible for going unrecognised.
“I want to retell Dido and Aeneas because I love Dido and I can’t stand Aeneas. If you take Tate’s text by itself, she’s nothing but a puppet at his mercy, and I don’t want that for her. I want her to have agency, even if it’s an agency that no-one can quite understand. And I want him to look like a tool, because he is.”
Imagine I know nothing about opera and classical literature. What background knowledge do I need to acquire to appreciate what you’re doing with this production? Is it reasonable to assume the audiences won’t know much either? How will you help them into the opera?
“Basically, I would like to transmit the idea that Dido’s story runs deeper than the text of the opera implies. I think we’re helping the audience along there with the addition of newspapers, which help to flesh out what might be going on beyond the confines of Dido’s palace and what kind of impact her dalliances might be having outside. In the mythology, Dido is a really great ruler who is essentially completely derailed by Aeneas’ arrival on the scene. I want the audience to get a sense of that.
“I also want to transmit the idea that Dido’s death, to me, seems impossible without the impulse towards self-destruction.
“I think – or, at least, I hope – that this production will be reasonably accessible to people who have neither a classical music nor classical historical background, and I’d be interested to hear what needs to be drawn out of the narrative and the staging to make it so.”
You want to take your production to schools/colleges. What do you hope to teach young people about? Opera? Feminism? Purcell’s era? Classical lit? Tropes?
“A variety of things. I’d like to teach everyone in a school – meaning also the staff – how you can adapt a work like Dido and Aeneas to be performable by small forces, because I think that’s one of our major achievements with it. I want to teach performers how to be creative with limited resources, and to encourage them to think about alternative readings.
“I want to teach people to sing, and not to be afraid of singing. That would be a unifying motivation in any educational work I do with Better Strangers.
“Back when I was doing GCSEs, Dido’s Lament came up as a regularly used example of how melody + basso continuo worked, so I think it could be a great set of lessons to people aged 13+ of how Purcell’s music was constructed and how his melodies, instrumentation and word-setting were put together. I think it would be more fun and probably more instructive for people to do this/see it done in performance.
“And, yes, I’d like to use it as an opportunity to teach story-makers of the future that they might want to think about why, precisely, they want to kill off their lead [insert kyriarchal minority here] character rather than resolve the plot some other way.”
- Ah, Forget My Fate Part II: Dido and Aeneas at the King’s Head Theatre, 26 July 2012. Book tickets here. Read more about the show’s development on the BSFOC blog.
[Guest Post] On Tatler’s “Lesbian Issue”.
We’re pleased to welcome Libby of TreasuryIslands back to our soapbox today. If you have a guest post brewing in your brain, pitch us at
[email protected].
With a history spanning three centuries, Tatler is Establishment to its very core. It sells itself to advertisers as having ‘the wealthiest readership in the UK’ and accordingly peddles luxury goods and the accompanying lifestyle to Society dahlings and their postulant doppelgangers. The magazine worships the higher reaches of British class structures, fawning over those who through their money, their fame or their postcode can be considered ‘society’ and celebrating an incongruous, archaic social order.
Tatler seems an unlikely champion of diversity. The world it represents is one of deep privilege in which abide the casts of Jilly Cooper novels: men of title or profession and their charity-supporting wives; women in Jaeger gilets and and twentysomethings who order £19 martinis; the worst upper class caricatures made flesh for their own amusement and forwarded as role models for the aspirant gaggles. But editor Kate Reardon has noticed a problem: gay men, she says, are widely represented in Society but gay women are not, and she’s going to do something about it.
Her reasoning is thus: lady-lovers make people ‘either titillated or a little bit frightened’ – a conclusion I can only assume was arrived at with a sense of deep profundity at 3am and through the bottom of a cocktail glass – and claiming that parents are thrilled when their sons come out but embarrassed when their daughters do. Lesbians, she says, have never been accepted by High Society, a fact that Virginia Woolf, Natalie Clifford Barney and Betty Carstairs apparently missed the memo on. The way to address this problem, obviously, is to find some sapphic sisters and do a feature on them. Choose wisely, though. None too butch, none too… y’know… dykey, and if they’re over a size 12 then headshots only.
The fact is that she may well be right, but the issue is not one of sexuality but of gender – lesbians don’t have the status and visibility of gay men because women don’t have the status and visibility of men. A magazine which targets an overwhelmingly female audience (around 80%) is a routine place to celebrate women, and putting a handful of queer ladies in the spotlight is never going to be a bad thing.
We shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging lesbians and lesbianism, claimed Reardon in an interview on Woman’s Hour, and with this effort she’s ‘just bringing it up’; it’s up to us to talk about it. Noble enough, I suppose. The problem is that Tatler isn’t exactly bashful when it comes to creating a sensation when sales are falling (Anthea Turner naked but for a python, anyone?) and according to Janet Street-Porter in the Daily Mail that’s exactly what’s happening right now. With a drop in readership of more than 20% in the last year, and 25% within its target demographic, it’s easy to believe that Tatler is just trying to pretty up the sales figures. And why not? Vanity Fair saw a boost in audience with its infamous KD Lang/Cindy Crawford cover in 1994 just as defunct soap Brookside did with its Beth/Margaret kiss the same year. The mid-nineties may have been the height of lesbian chic, but the same trick might well work today. However easy it is to think that we’ve moved on in this post-Queer As Folk, post-Ellen world, the promise of a bit of girl-on-girl still sets the collective knees of the nation a-tremblin’.
The feature in Tatler is fluff, but what else did we expect? Seven fashion-plate photographs and an ad for a Belgravia-based lesbian and gay introduction agency make what the cover assures us is the definitive portfolio – though seven is not the definitive portfolio of anything, unless it’s colours of the rainbow – and takes up fewer pages than cover star Alice Eve. Whoever sent out the press release dubbing this ‘the lesbian issue’ was clearly overstating things a bit. Each photo is accompanied by a brief, soundbitey blurb in which such insights as favorite colour are revealed. It’s an exercise in mediocrity. I mean, they’ve managed to make Sue Perkins dull. How is that even possible?
Tatler’s website offers ‘behind the scenes at the lesbian shoot’ – a startling prospect given the physical magazine features a what to wear to a [game] shoot guide. As well as vaguely hinting that Tatler staffers get their jollies shooting wild lesbians in the Home Counties at the weekend, the dodgy syntax in this headline treats the women in the same terms that it does its fashion: the Marc Jacobs shoot; the unfathomably expensive sarong shoot; the lesbian shoot. These women are modelling an accessory, and it is lesbianism. Instead of celebrating gay women, Tatler has narrowed the playing field – as this sort of faux-diverse tokenism often does – by offering a blueprint for acceptable lesbianism, a whitewashed ideal for the rest of us to not quite live up to.
A black tie dinner (dubbed the ‘lesbian ball’) hosted by Tatler in celebration of this barrier-smashing seven-pics-and-an-advert brought 200 women, of all sexualities, together for an evening of networking and masturbatory self-congratulation which, while undoubtedly productive for those involved, did precisely nothing for the women (generally) and lesbians and bi women (specifically) who could actually do with a leg up. This was not a benefit for LGBT charities. It was not the launch event for a campaign seeking to address actual inequality. No speeches were made about why the event was held. It was a party. Just a party. For the most privileged group of women in the UK and with a guest list so diverse that knicker obsessive Mary Portas was invited even though she’s trade. According to one nameless attendee over on themostcake, a spiffing time was had by all, and though the photos don’t show it, I like to think the evening ended with a load of drunken women kicking off their Louboutins and singing ‘I am Woman’ at high volume in the taxi queue.
Tatler had an opportunity to do some grandstanding and they nibbled on canapes instead. Radical.
- Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN , the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.