Christmas Songnerd: Santa Baby
It’s December.
I have no idea how that happened so fast, but either way you can’t now enter the local shopping centre without being bombarded by Now That’s What I Call The Best Xmas… Ever! (Vol.64). In honour of the season, I thought, time allowing, that I’d do some little case studies on some of the songs currently assaulting your ears as you shop. You may hate all Christmas music, or you may love it – personally I’ve never minded it much – but pop singles are like miniature time capsules, so examining their gender politics, and what happens to these when new artists cover them, is one way to divert your brain into a state of broad feminist contemplation rather than all-out anti-consumerist rage in the queue at HMV1.
Um. I said contemplation. But I can’t guarantee that every vid embedded in this series I’m proposing won’t have you reaching for a pretty stiff drink.
Been an Awful Good Girl
Anyway! Cast your mind, readers, back to the postwar baby boom – specifically 1953. Elizabeth II ascends the throne here in the UK! Everest is climbed and DNA discovered! And the volume of the Kinsey Reports titled Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, an attempt to research women’s sexual appetites and desires, is published to great controversy and brouhaha. And in December, this guy called Hugh Hefner launches some magazine or other and sells over 54,000 copies. The cultural melting pot for the sexual revolution of the Sixties is neatly bubbling away.
Christmas novelty smash hits have become a Thing since the War – White Christmas came out in 1942. And into this arena slinks Santa Baby, recorded by Eartha Kitt and penned by Joan Javits (a Republican Senator’s niece). It sashays onto the airwaves with a ba-boom-ba-boom of barbershoppy backing vocals, tongue shoved firmly in its cheek.
These days it’s been heard so often and covered enough times that people seem to have forgotten that it’s witty, that it actually stands out as distinct from more earnest fare like White Christmas. White Christmas is about a generation of people longing for their loved ones during the War. It dreams of idyllic peacetime Christmases. Santa Baby, on the other hand, is a playful and sly kick in the tender area for rising peacetime consumerism, as well as a tale of a trophy wife who always wants more stuff, from yachts to platinum mines to rings (not on the phone). In 1954 Eartha re-recorded a version called This Year’s Santa Baby, the lyrics of which reveal that the yacht wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and our heroine still isn’t satisfied.
Come And Trim My Christmas Tree / With Erotic Capital From Tiffany
For the feminists in the queue at HMV, especially those being subjected to the Pussycat Dolls version, this is naturally not unproblematic, not least because the kind of woman the song portrays appears to be exactly what Catherine Hakim, in her book Honey Money, wants women to aspire to be like. Without any tongue in cheek about it. And Honey Money only came out this year, despite the fact that it appears to be the product of what happens when you take Eartha Kitt completely literally. The gold digger the song portrays is a popular stereotype, and the song’s contemporary with the postwar rise in popularity of the “male breadwinner” family model, which wasn’t economically feasible across all social classes. More generally, of course, it’s a riff on a whole social trope around women’s bodies and feminine sexual allure as a source of transactional power.
I think for a lot of people, being exposed to the versions Kylie, the ‘Dolls et al have come out with has somehow managed to dampen our sense of the irony within the original – which makes more sense within the context of more ‘wholesome’ Fifties Christmas music, which it does snerk at, and class politics of the time – perhaps because newer versions are contemporary with many songs that aren’t particularly ironic in their appreciation of Worldly Stuff?
Shame, really, because Eartha had this sending up the golddigger stereotype thing pretty down. Check out her recording of Old Fashioned Millionaire, which is similar to Santa Baby but ever so slightly more acerbic, ably sending up cliches of postwar consumerism, patronising Empire-era South Pacific-style racism (which as a mixed race performer she was certainly no stranger to) and middle class pretensions around social properness and upward mobility with lines like “I want an old fashioned house with an old fashioned fence / and an old fashioned millionaire” and “I like Chopin and Bizet / and the songs of yesterday / String quartets and Polynesian carols / But the music that excels / is the sound of oil wells / as they slurp-slurp-slurp into the barrels…”
Some Very Different Covers
There are a lot of other covers of the song out there, like the bratty pop-punk stylings of the Dollyrots – Wikipedia lists loads. Most notable for me, in very different ways, are these two.
RuPaul’s 1997 cover takes precisely no prisoners, announcing “Been an awful good queen”, and adding in caustic asides like “Now honey, Miss RuPaul has been so good, it just hurts, and now I want you to reciprocate… by givin’ me a few ITEMS, you know…” and the wink-nudge reply to “come and trim my Christmas tree…” of “Honey, you ain’t trimmin’ nothin’.”
Surely after that glorious effort there was nowhere else the song could really go, right?
Wrong!
Santa Buddy
From the sublime, dear readers, to the ever so slightly ridiculous.
For lo, Santa Baby has just this year been covered again by – wait for it – Michael Bublé, god-emperor of bland, whose official site bio at the time of writing boasted frankly awesomely reality-disconnected statements like “his essence remains solid as a rock”, and “like Elvis”. But let’s not stare into that particular abyss too long – back to Santa Baby, for which Bublé’s version has completely rewritten the lyrics to recast the entire song as being about… um… a straight dude who likes presents.
That’s it.
No erotic funny business round here; Michael’s after CARS and FOOTBALL TICKETS and he’s going to MAKE PLATONIC MANLY BRO-FRIENDS with Santa until he gets them. Clearing all that flirting out the way – presumably to make room for all the “decorations bought from … Mercedes”, because I have NO idea how you hang a car bonnet on a Christmas tree, after all – he cracks out “Santa, buddy” at one point, and makes sure to stipulate that the convertible needs to be “steel blue”, since presumably “light blue” wasn’t quite macho enough. Though I’m not sure it really works, it’s fascinating – and the complete opposite of what RuPaul does with it. He even throws in a fastidiously heteromanly “I’ll wait up for you, dude“, to avoid looking too camp.
Of course, in this, as with nearly everything else Michael Bublé attempts to accomplish that isn’t looking like every photo of him would be marvellously improved by the addition of hungry velociraptors, he fails hilariously.
Mind you, to be fair to Michael, for every alteration he makes to keep the conversation with Santa strictly platonic – “Santa pally” (?!) – he also adds in “been a sweetie all year” rather than Eartha Kitt’s original “been an angel”, and where Eartha has “think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed”, Michael’s got “hotties”, which is pretty gender neutral, the writers clearly being aware that in the marketing niche he belongs in, squarely between Ronan Keating and Will Young, for every five straight middle aged women buying his records, there’s also a pretty significant gay following – he mentioned it himself with some enthusiasm in an interview.
And really, for all the “women like jewellery and men like… CARS” binary implications in there… there’s something about the way he goes “forgot to mention one little thing / cha-ching!” that just isn’t really all that macho after all. It’s almost rather sweet. Or maybe I’ve been looking at all those images of him being stalked by raptors just a bit too much and started feeling sorry for him.
It only seems right to end such a string of different treatments of a song about femininity and consumerism with the ultimate scion of both: Miss Piggy. I truly believe that she is perhaps the only one who’s almost on a par with Eartha herself. Think of all the froggies she hasn’t kissed!
Enjoy your Christmas shopping as far as possible. I’m contemplating tackling Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses next. AREN’T YOU EXCITED. I BET YOU CANNOT WAIT.
- NB: for the record I’m inclined to think said rage quite justified, but at the same time, you probably can’t afford a criminal damages bill in these pressing times of recession and tinsel. [↩]
A bit late to the internet table on this one, which was meant to be part of the Women in Protest series (sorry!).
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a massive foodie. I will happily spend an entire day poncing around making dinner from scratch for my friends (including sugar-coating rose petals for Rose Martinis. Helpful hint: overdo it and they glue to saucers, never to come off). I was the only person at school who wanted to take Home Economics at A Level, with the result that it didn’t run so I had to do Chemistry instead, which is just Maths Cookery anyway *ducks*.
So, I love food, food prep and all things kitchen related. Yet there’s a Bad Reputation (geddit?) between women, feminism and kitchens, and I’d like to talk about that. Not just in the wake of the Great British Bake Off, either.
Women’s Lib, to coin an old phrase, has been linked to the rise of labour saving household appliances, yet it’s a fact that women do most of the shopping and cooking, probably because whilst we’ve made great leaps forward in terms of being able to vote and not being treated as the property of husbands, there’s still a massive social expectation around looking after the home. Separate Spheres for the 21st century.
Now, on a practical front, this means that it’s women who are often in control of what a family eats, what a family thinks about food. This can be both a good and bad thing. This setup means that many families understand a “woman’s role” as one which involves spending time feeding and looking after them, and whilst it’s great to be the nurturing one, the one who can make the AMAZING pie, the one who keeps the place feeling like a home. It’s less great to be that person because you are female. And that’s the problem.
The kitchen is the centre of a lot of families and households. Control of the kitchen means control over a lot more than that. Women are, whether they realise it or not, at the very centre of what kinds of food we eat and hence the sort that is offered, produced and sold. Realistically, the entire industry of FMCG products – and the potential for increasingly environmentally friendly products, fair trade products, and organic products – is supported by the habits of women when they go to the store.
In short – women can make a huge amount of difference to the world by leveraging their role as consumer. And this is where the feminist bit comes in. It’s not about consigning the entire role of “homemaker” to the bin of 1950s retro parties and relief over how we’re not Betty Draper. It’s about using the history of women in the home, women cooks, our mums and grandmothers, to think about (and act upon) a new tradition of taking charge and getting on.
My gran taught me how to cook. She also taught me many other things about making my own way in the world, which included a damn good shortcrust pastry.
Wooden spoons at the ready? Here we go.
First up, and an easy starting point are some big name women cooks. From Mrs Beeton through to Delia and Nigella, these are women who have helped shape how we think about food, our homes and ourselves.
They’ve even helped us understand more about countries and cultures beyond the UK and Europe – food being an excellent and tasty way of enjoying a bit of intercultural sharing. In the 70s, Madhur Jaffrey’s travel-diaries mixed recipes with vignettes on where the food was found, who made it and interesting titbits of stories on Indian culture. More recently, Harumi Kurihara has given us access into the world of Japanese home cooking.
Next up, we can look at women’s roles in the kitchen in connection with the economy. The recent waves of recession after recession have seen a rise in cost of living with a corresponding reactive change in shopping habits as women revolt every day against the high cost of food prices by changing where they buy things and what is being cooked and eaten in the home. The fact that the cuts fall more heavily upon women, and that the burden of dealing with households with lower incomes also falls into the pockets of female aprons, has led many women to become increasingly political.
The revolution begins in the kitchen. Bake for victory!
The connection between politics at home and the wider political world is not a new thing. Many food awareness and food movements have been driven by women, such as the aptly named Kitchen Revolution and the almost too awesome to exist Isa Chandra Moskowitz who heads up the Post Punk Kitchen a refreshing mind-spin for anyone who thinks vegan cooking is about boring mung beans. The memory of her peanut butter and chocolate cookies are making my mouth water right now.
I’m going to close by saying that I really believe that teaching everyone to cook, to know where food comes from and the value of properly sourced, sustainable food products is part of the feminist movement. The power of the kitchen is not something to be set aside in the belief that we are letting down the sisterhood by being chained to the oven. Instead, we can help make a much better world by getting everyone involved.
And yes, you can lick the spoon afterwards.
Review: The First Actresses, National Portrait Gallery, London
Perhaps one reason we now refer almost exclusively to ‘actors’ is that, for the longest time, the word ‘actress’ was synonymous with ‘prostitute’. Presumably this relates to the Immodesties they are obliged to suffer on stage; as Shakespeare in Love taught us all so well, pre-Restoration these were considered so severe that women were not allowed on stage at all.
Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies
This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery looks at the moment immediately after Charles II reversed this rule, and it’s a fun little look at some portraits, caricatures and paraphernalia of women who were allowed on stage, ‘from Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons’. It’s focused on portraits, but there are some super little earthenware tiles with different actresses on them in Room 3. There’s also a facsimile of the Yellow Pages-style brothel directory, Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies; or, The Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar, illustrating the fall from grace of the once ‘Convent and Garden’ of Westminster Abbey – a bit too close to eighteenth-century Theatreland for PR-comfort. Since its reissue by the History Press this book has now achieved some cult status – the guy next to me, looking at it, said to his companion, ‘You know, Gladys: Harris’ List – that’s the one we’ve got in the toilet’.
Nell (c.1651-87) opens this exhibition – a talented comic actress, although she is popularly most recognised for inspiring Charles II’s last words ‘Let not poor Nelly starve’ (she survived him by barely a year, fact fans). There are two portraits of her here, in both of which she’s got her mammaries out. This exhibition would have these as evidence of her ‘skillful manipulation’ rather than ‘brazen hussydom’; the second portrait shows her naked to the waist and looking directly at the viewer with a gaze at once languid and challenging. You might be reminded of Manet’s Olympia, condemned as ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ on its first exhibition at 1863, mainly because the nude is looking directly at the viewer rather than obligingly turning her head away for better ogling comfort. And indeed, such a tension between looking and being looked at probably underscored a lot of the moral uncertainty about the early actresses.
Later on, we get Sarah Siddons (1755-1831), powerful, tragic grande dame. She appears in Room 3 painted by Thomas Lawrence as public intellectual, tutor to the royal children – and at a vantage point that forces us to look up at her imperious face, rather than to avert our eyes from her naked bosom. This is hung alongside a number of grandiose actress-as-Muse paintings, large as their themes, and also including Muses of Comedy and society amateurs like Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
But even in the late eighteenth century ‘actress’ still wasn’t a career you’d want for your wife. Thespiennes like Elizabeth Ann Sheridan (1754-1792) and Elizabeth Farren (1759-1829) – both exhibited here – gave up their acting careers, on request, upon marriage. While the eighteenth-century gentleman was not renowned for being into female careers in general, the issue here seems to be more ‘other men looking at your wife’ than anything else: after all, these men were ‘forward thinking’ enough to marry an actress in the first place. Perhaps they were nervous of the number of early actresses, like Nell, who had affairs with kings and nobles. If so, they had a good few hundred years of uncertainty left: Edward VII was still pretty into actresses at the turn of the twentieth century. ‘I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship’ he complained to Lillie Langtry (1853-1929), eliciting the tart response ‘And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.’ (It may have been such impertinence that led to her replacement by another actress, Sarah Bernhardt, shortly afterwards.)
Dorothy Jordan in travesti - engraving after the John Hoppner painting in this exhibition
But, as this exhibition shows, one of the primary moral gripes with these early actresses was actually about something a bit unexpected: the travesti roles many of them built careers on. There are some fascinating visual representations in this exhibition of actresses – like Dorothy Jordan (1761-1816), whose bosom apparently ‘concealed everything but its own charms’ – in their famous ‘breech’ roles, both Shakespearean (stalwarts like Twelfth Night and As You Like It) and just… male (Tom Thumb). It seems that, after decades of young boys aping womanhood, the first actresses set themselves the challenge of continuing the noble tradition: it was conscious decision, rather than occasional dramatic necessity, for many of them to adopt the travesti.
The Immodesty here implied resulted in endless caricatures, many of which are exhibited here. My favourite was entitled ‘An Actress at her Toilet; or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’ – though perhaps even stranger were the portraits of various male actors, including David Garrick, in drag – enormous hoop and all – as a kind of forerunner to the pantomime dame.
Take a feminist friend and thrash it out in the Portrait Gallery café with their superior yoghurt and granola, says this reviewer. And visit John Donne on the top floor, if he’s not gone into cleaning yet.
- The First Actresses runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 8 January 2012.
A post-World AIDS Day Linkpost: Go Forth And Read
So, you’ve read HIV Aware, you’ve mythbusted with us (and thank you, by the way, everyone who linked and RT’d that post on Twitter and elsewhere)… what now?
What about stigma? As we tweeted yesterday, Act Aware isn’t, and should never be, about judging and othering people who are living with HIV. It should never be about erasure.
Unfortunately for all of us, the majority of mainstream media approaches to HIV issues in the UK are either woefully ill-informed, groaning under the weight of crappily pieced-together assumptions, often even kind of creepily bigoted, or just plain fifteen years out of date. Even with NAT’s helpful press guide freely available. Hooray.
But here’s a thing: if you’re reading this, you’re in luck. For lo, the internet is as full of glory as it is full of shit. And with very little effort on your part it basically becomes your own PERSONAL BULLSHIT ESCAPE TUNNEL. And we’re about to make it even easier.
So here are some World AIDS Day links you might or might not have seen before, which we’ve been reading at BadRep Towers. Beyond Acting Aware and reading myths and facts, are real people. So go and read about them. Make it so!
- The Body: this is a really, really valuable resource. It’s also a blogging platform for a large team of people living with and/or campaigning about HIV and AIDS, featuring personal stories from a wide range of backgrounds and age groups (though we have not found any trans* men’s stories on there as yet). It’s been going for years and has tons of pop culture analysis. Our picks: ‘I Agree, We Are Not A F***ing Scorpion’, ‘HIV, AIDS and Latinas: What Does Gender Have To Do With It?’, ‘The Trials of Transition’, and ‘Wanted: Feminist Warriors To Fight HIV and AIDS’,
- The Poz: like The Body, this magazine is also a giant resource with tons of interesting blogs. Our picks: ‘Game, the Down-Low and AIDS’ and ‘Wearing The Red Ribbon’.
- Twitter: @NAT_AIDS_Trust (they run HIVAware) are enthusiastic, friendly, ready to engage with and @-reply to as many people as they can and eager to arm you with facts and stories from around the UK. Through them, we found UKPositiveLad: diagnosed a few months ago at 25, he’s tweeting his experiences, and blogging them too.
- QueerTransMen: a Canada-based sexual health site for queer trans* men with research, mythbusting and Primed, a sexual health guide written by and for. Not worksafe!
- A Girl Like Me: this is a resource “where women of all ages can share their stories and promote understanding of HIV through online storytelling”. It hasn’t been very active recently, and in many ways it’s not as ‘off the ground’ as it could be… but we think it’s a great idea anyway.
- Womankind Worldwide: one of their areas of work is around supporting effective responses to HIV in women around the world. Our picks: World AIDS Day 2011 post, ‘I was so glad of how interested people were of what is happening in Ghana’, and ‘The Long Walk Home’.
So, hey. You have all this stuff at your fingertips! Connect. Discover. Find stuff out. What’s the point of being on a feminist pop culture adventure if you don’t, you know, go forth and read? Exactly.
Markgraf’s World AIDS Day Rampage
HELLO, INTERNET. My name is Markgraf. In recognition of World AIDS Day this year, I’ve been rampaging all over Cambridge city centre with FACTS, my talented friend Kirsten (who took the completely amazing photographs) and a whole load of mis-behaving paper!
COLD HARD FACTS ON IRRITATINGLY FLIMSY PAPER
ARE YOU READY FOR THE FACTS? Of course you are. Everyone should be ready for facts about HIV transmission and statistics, because it’s ignorance that fuels prejudice, and prejudice that shits on people’s lives.
Fun fact: there’s effective treatments for both HIV and hideous misinformation and ignorance!
…So hug away! :D
Can we stop assuming things about people’s lifestyles, now? Please?
HIV can be spread regardless of anyone’s background or immigration status. And you can’t seek out treatment for free for a virus you don’t know you have. Get yourself screened regularly.
I mean, the fish don’t even get anywhere near your bloodstream. And if they do, YOU HAVE BIGGER PROBLEMS THAN HIV TRANSMISSION TO WORRY ABOUT AS YOU ARE PRESUMABLY RECEIVING A SHARK PEDICURE.1
AND THAT’S A WRAP, FOLKS. Pop over to HIVAware for more.
Spread facts, not fear. Wear a ribbon. Get screened.
- Ed’s note: For those made curious by the fish pedicure placard, this is a misconception that’s currently so widespread, it has its OWN SECTION on the HIVAware Mythbusting FAQ. Yeah. [↩]
Who’s Afraid of Sex Education?
I’ve moaned about shoddy sex education on BadRep before, but it’s back on my mind thanks to a recent survey by Brook which showed that nearly half of secondary school pupils don’t think their sex and relationships education is fit for purpose. This has prompted a brace of new anti-sex education stories in the news (a typical example appeared in the Daily Mail last week1 and Education For Choice have responded here) including one that caught me totally by surprise: a BNP protest outside a primary school in Sheffield that had dared to extend SRE to all age groups. The what now? Are racism and xenophobia passé?
Innocence and Sexualisation
The vigour with which some people are prepared to attack moves towards more open, honest and comprehensive sex and relationships education is baffling. What are they so afraid of? Educating young people about safer sex doesn’t lead to an increased sexual activity (that’s from this great Avert resource, by the way). Two words that pop up fairly regularly in the fog of general objection are ‘innocence’ and ‘sexualisation’. I think they’re masking other, simpler causes for so much reactionary guff, but let’s have a look at them anyway.
The idea that the ‘innocence’ of children must be protected at all costs is absurd. Innocence in the criminal sense is a good thing to hold on to, of course. But innocence in the wafty Victorian lamblike sense (aka “freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil”)?. I fail to see the value of being ‘unacquainted with evil’. Knowing about sex isn’t the same as having sex. And also: SEX ISN’T EVIL, GUYS. Besides, it’s a bit of a risk, if you ask me, turning someone loose in the world if they have no concept of evil. They’re in for a nasty shock and quite possibly some dangerous or exploitative situations. Likewise someone who has been kept in the dark about pregnancy, STIs or abuse. Even if you’re working with some kind of arcane points-based system of morality, how can you get your approval for being without sin just because you don’t know what sin is? That’s like congratulating someone on not eating the cookies they didn’t know were there.
Anyway, that’s enough poptheology. Next: ‘sexualisation’, on which I basically agree with Laurie Penny that the word is a “troubling piece of cultural shorthand” which
suggests that sexuality is something that is done to young women, rather than something that they can own and control: that they can never be sexual, only sexualised. This is not a helpful message to send to girls as they begin to explore their sexuality.
The moral panic over “sexualisation” assumes instead that sex is only ever damaging to young women, and that having sex or behaving sexually must be resisted for as long as possible. The problem is not, however, that young women are “growing up too fast” – rather it is that they are growing up to understand that they are erotic commodities, there to be used and abused, shamed if they express legitimate desires of their own, and taught to fear their own bodies.
Child sexual behaviour is complex and difficult to discuss, but it exists. Children have this weird habit of growing up. And it doesn’t work the way the Sun would have it – every girl is an innocent princess until a few moments past midnight on her 16th birthday, at which point it’s A-OK to start slavering over her. Seriously, until 2004 plenty of Page Three girls were 16. There were even 16th birthday specials in some other tabloids. Your, er… your double standard is poking out, by the way.
Ewwww Isn’t Good Enough
Critics of broader sex education have done a pretty good job of cosying up to some quarters of the feminist movement, and I’d love to believe that concern over women or children’s wellbeing lay at the heart of the Bailey Review and the media outrage. But it doesn’t. Sexual conservatism is shorthand for a certain kind of morality, and this is a holier-than-thou contest fuelled by the crippling shame and squeamishness about sex that is our shared cultural inheritance. That’s why we feel the need to keep any notion of sex away from children for as long as possible, because on some level, we do think there’s something bad about sex. What other explanation can there be? An otherwise sensible, right-on and feminist former manager of mine once insisted we end a teabreak conversation about how often you should have a sexual health checkup, saying “Can you just stop talking about it please? It makes me feel all ewwww.”
Well, feeling ‘ewwww’ has created a dangerous situation. Without giving children and teenagers a safe space in which to discuss and learn about sex, relationships and sexuality we are creating a vacuum that will be filled by three things: a) whatever their parents choose to tell them; b) all the shit teenagers talk to each other; and c) ideas about sex derived solely from cultural representations of it. Advertising and porn are the big guns here. The version of sex in most porn and advertising isn’t particularly safe, consensual, varied, respectful or even likely to be that much fun (good luck to any women planning on having an orgasm) and the additional messages it peddles about gender identity, power, race and sexual orientation are pretty unhelpful.
Some Scary Numbers
As well as the great Tory terror of teenage pregnancy *cue Hammer Horror evil laughter and lightning strike* this is a public health issue. Although last year there was a small decrease in the total number of STIs diagnosed in England, 2010 still clocked up 418,598 new diagnoses, and the under-25s experience the highest rates of STIs overall. In 2008, the UN reported that globally only 40% of young people aged 15-24 had accurate knowledge about HIV and transmission, while the same group accounted for 45% of all new HIV infections. SRE also presents an opportunity to undermine the stigma faced by people living with HIV through education about transmission without moral judgement. (Stats from here.)
This is important, big picture, long term stuff. It’s very hard to unlearn attitudes and prejudices formed in your early life, and not everyone has an Usborne Guide To Growing Up at hand (even that magnificent volume had its blind spots – Miranda reminded me of the ‘kthanxbai!’ box-out on homosexuality…2 ) But there are excellent people fighting the good fight who deserve your support. Here’s a linklist – go show them some well-informed, safe and respectful love.
Campaigns, Organisations and Events
- Education for Choice
- A rallying cry by Zoe Margolis on Comment is Free
- Petition for 21st C sex and relationships education
- Sex Appeal comedy fundraiser
- National AIDS Trust campaign to get HIV education into classrooms
- Brook
- FPA
- HIVAware
- Avert
Resources and Badass Sex Educators
- Vagina Pagina
- Bish
- Scarleteen
- UNESCO International technical guidance on sexuality education: an evidence-informed approach for schools, teachers and health educators
- Sexedukation
- SRE Project
- Contraception Education
- Dr Petra Boynton
- Dr Petra’s Twitter list of sex educators
- Ed’s note: I can’t bear linking the Mail and am still in mourning for IstyOsty, but search and ye shall find; it’s titled “Casual Sex and ‘Bad Touching’: Guess What Your Eight Year Old Is Learning At School These Days”. *facepalm* [↩]
- Ed butting in again: has this been expanded yet? Anyone seen if they’ve revised it to be even slightly less heteronormative? *shuts up* [↩]
World AIDS Day: Violence against women and HIV
World AIDS Day is coming up, and loyal readers will remember Miranda’s shoutout last year about why HIV and AIDS is a feminist issue. I’m not going to try and tour all the issues around women and HIV and AIDS, partly because that’s WAY too big for a blog post, but also because I’m not an expert. If that’s what you’re after, this fantastic resource on women, HIV and AIDS from Avert has lots of great information and clear explanations.
Picture CC Terriem, 2011
So why am I writing this at all? Over the last nine months I’ve gotten interested in the interactions between violence against women, gender roles and HIV, which I confess is mostly down to my job at Womankind Worldwide.
It struck me that even though I’ve been working with different organisations tackling violence against women in the UK for years, I don’t remember HIV ever being mentioned. It’s just not something I’d ever really thought about. But then, I had also failed to really think about, you know, the rest of the world. This job has been an eye-opener, and I heartily encourage other feminists in the UK, the US, and Western Europe to look up and see what’s happening in the places you don’t see on TV.
“This epidemic unfortunately remains an epidemic of women,” Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS said in 2010. At the end of 2009, women accounted for just over half of all adults living with HIV worldwide. In some areas of the world the proportion is much higher, for example in sub-Saharan Africa it is 60%. High levels of HIV among women in these areas are both caused by and causes of violence against women.
Violence, HIV and Women’s Health
Violence against women (you remember, that really prevalent thing that occurs in all countries in the world) interacts with the HIV epidemic in several cheery ways. This paraphrased from a World Health Organisation briefing:
- Sexual abuse in childhood is associated with risk-taking behaviour later in life, increasing an individual’s lifetime risk of contracting HIV.
- Rape exposes women to HIV, and the chances of a woman contracting HIV via a forced sexual encounter are probably increased due to the physical trauma.
- Violence and fear of violence can stop a woman insisting on condom use or refusing unwanted sex, leaving her with no means of protecting themselves.
- Fear of violence, abandonment or stigma can dissuade women from learning their status or from sharing it with their partners, and can also effect HIV control, treatment, and programmes aiming to prevent mother to child transmission.
Women’s health has been the subject of more discussion in development circles in recent years, thanks in large part to the Millennium Development Goals, one of which (MDG5) is focused on maternal health. Women’s health doesn’t begin and end with children though, so I’ve been pleased to see greater recognition of the impact of gender-based violence appearing under MDG6, which is dedicated to ending the spread of diseases including HIV infection and the associated illnesses it can cause. Next step, an MDG which is focused on reducing levels of violence against women? Something which has a pretty damaging effect on women’s health in its own right.
Ghana
Through work recently I was lucky enough to meet some of the women and men fighting to reduce violence against women and women’s vulnerability to HIV infection in rural Ghana. Although Ghana isn’t the country worst affected by the HIV epidemic, of the 240,000 HIV+ adults living in Ghana, almost 60% are women. Women in Ghana also experience high levels of violence: 1 in 3 women has experienced some form of physical violence in their lifetime, and 20% of women report that they first experienced sex against their will. (Stats)
In addition there are a number of harmful traditional practices that contribute to the spread of HIV among women, as well as the cultural acceptability of men having several partners and the right to demand sex. Traditional practices, such as widow inheritance (where a widow is forced to marry her dead husband’s relative), or polygyny (22% of married women are in polygynous unions) increase the likelihood of contracting HIV.
Women living with HIV or AIDS in Ghana also face enormous stigma and go to extraordinary lengths to find support and keep their status secret. One reason is that belief in witchcraft is widespread, and HIV infection or death from AIDS-defining illnesses is sometimes blamed on the malign influence of a witch. Incidentally if you’re interested to know more about what happens to women accused of witchcraft in Ghana I recommend watching The Witches of Gambaga:
‘Witch’ persecution is also alarmingly common in Nepal.
Reading about all this every day at work would get a bit depressing if it wasn’t for our amazing partners – health workers, educators, lawyers and activists – who are working for change for individuals, and local and global communities. Part of that change is recognition of the complex interactions between HIV and AIDS and violence against women, and the need for targeted, local, gender-sensitive interventions and support. UK feminists can help by looking up, and recognising that HIV is a feminist issue on a global scale.
What the Hell, Advertising? Beverage Edition
A while back we took a look at some recent adverts and discovered that, in a surprising turn of results, they were a bit crap when it came to portrayals of gender. And when I say a bit crap I mean it appeared that the advertising executives responsible had just recently stepped out of a portal from 1953 and brought their value system with them.
Today we revisit that topic because there are so very many adverts out there and we need a reminder that this is a field in need of a change. Advertising plays a large part in shaping our views of the world, so when it’s portraying something that’s almost casually wrongheaded, that’s a problem.
Now, confession: I watch a lot of American football. And this apparently makes me the target demographic for adverts pushing light beer, pickup trucks (September is truck month! Truck Month! TRUCK MONTH! Also so are all the other months) and soft drinks. Every ad break is packed full of these, and if there’s one thing American football does not lack for, it is ad breaks. What I’m saying here is that I’ve seen a lot of these adverts, and they are seventeen different shades of bad. The truck ads are surprisingly free of the sort of overblown machismo you might expect from the automotive industry, but the beer and soft drinks? Oh, my. So let us take a look at three terrible beverage adverts.
1: Dr Pepper Ten
The advertising industry is known for its orginality. No wait, the other thing. Lack of creativity and original thinking, that’s what I meant to say. So it is perhaps not surprising that Dr Pepper have lifted the entire idea for this ad campaign directly from the old “Not for girls” thing Yorkie did.
Dr Pepper Ten, like Coke Zero before it, is a diet drink for men. Men don’t go on diets, you see, so you can’t put the word “diet” in the name of the drink. Calories are manly; watching what you consume is not. That, Dr Pepper assures us, is for the ladies. This message is forced through our eyeballs and directly into our brains via the medium of explosions and toughness, because if there is anything that women hate, it’s explosions. That’s a science fact.
And okay, you can say “But Dr Pepper are clearly being ironic! It’s a sly and hip jab at sexist values! Get a sense of humour!” Except no, the problem with ironically supporting terrible gender values is that you’re still supporting terrible gender values, and those are still an active problem that negatively impact the lives of countless people. It would be nice to be in a place where we can look back and go “Ha ha, those outdated ideas, how quaint and comical they seem now from our position of enlightenment.” But we’re not in that place yet – we still live in a world where these values are things people actually believe. Read the YouTube comments if you want to see why this is still a problem. Except don’t, because much like reading the creepy eldritch book in a Lovecraft story, reading Youtube comments can lead only to infinite screaming madness as your brain confronts unknowable horrors.
Of course, the real reason no one drinks Diet Dr Pepper is not because diet drinks are somehow effeminate, it’s because Diet Dr Pepper tastes like licking the underside of a pub table.
2. Miller Lite
Drinking the wrong light beer makes you less of a man. This is another science fact. We’re learning a lot today. Thank you advertising! This is one of many recent Miller ads that makes a link between choice of beer and ability to conform to established gender roles. They also have an “unmanly choice” range in which men are judged by their peers for making unmanly choices such as riding on a scooter or drinking the wrong brand of light beer.
See, here’s the thing: all alcoholic drinks are basically a chemical to make your brain go temporarily wonky plus some other stuff to hide the taste of this brain-wonking substance. That is all drinks, forever. So why is one flavour man-tastic and another not? It is a mystery. Someone fetch me a fruity colourful cocktail so I can make this point properly about how thoroughly ridiculous it is to gender one’s choice of alcohol.
For an added bonus, Miller throw in some token sexy female lifeguards (because maybe if you drink Miller Lite, you too will receive attention from professional models. That is how things work, right?) and some bonus “comedy” fear of people who are insufficiently attractive to meet beer advert norms. Careful, if you drink the wrong beer someone you don’t find appealing may try to force CPR on you. This is a thing that happens. Honest.
3. Fosters
To round out the trio of beverage related horrors, we have Fosters serving up a healthy heap of happy homophobia. Guys, don’t touch other guys! That’s how you get the gay. This is our third and final science fact of the day. Do you want to become gay? Of course not! That would be a massive social failing on your part. So drink Fosters, to ensure you receive your suggested daily dose of heterosexuality.
These are not values it is okay to espouse. This is not some lighthearted humour at a topic too ridiculous to be taken seriously, it is a marketing tool that helps establish harmful cultural norms.
For an added treat, it’s not just issues of gender and homophobia on which the advertising industry fails us here. Look back over those three adverts and tell me what you don’t see. Here’s a helpful hint: the answer is anyone who isn’t white. People from non-white backgrounds make up over one quarter of America’s population, but apparently 0% of its beverage-purchasing demographic.
Why I’m in the Tracy Turnblad Fan Club
I know we finished the surprising not-obviously-feminist-films-we-love series a while back, but I just watched Hairspray again and had such a familiar rush of affection I thought it was time to put pen to paper. Fingers to keyboard. You know what I mean.
I’ve never seen the more recent musical film version because I love the original so much, but I’d be interested to hear what BadReppers think of it. If you’ve not seen the real thing, here’s the trailer:
Made in 1988 by the incomparable John Waters, it’s set in 1962 Baltimore. IMDb says:
‘Pleasantly Plump’ teenager Tracy Turnblad achieves her dream of becoming a regular on the Corny Collins Dance Show. Now a teen hero, she starts using her fame to speak out for the causes she believes in, most of all integration. In doing so, she earns the wrath of the show’s former star, Amber Von Tussle, as well as Amber’s manipulative, pro-segregation parents. The rivalry comes to a head as Amber and Tracy vie for the title of Miss Auto Show 1963.
But that doesn’t really cover it. It’s a delirious, high-camp, queer, irreverent and satirical version of the early 60s that shows Dirty Dancing up as the insipid whitewashed pap that it is. (Sorry, but you know I’m speaking the truth.) Tracy Turnblad, played by Ricki Lake, is a heroine and a half. Big, happy, confident, working class Tracy has a lot of soul and a keen sense of justice. She wins the day, the guy, and the hearts of the town because she can dance, because she’s nice and because she stands up for what she believes in. In this case: civil rights.
What is so refreshing to see even now (perhaps especially now) is a large teenage female character who radiates energy and self-confidence. She’s not a sidekick, she’s the star through and through, and the Elvis-a-like heartthrob falls head over heels for her, as does everyone else. When she dances in triumph with her chain of friends at the end of the film I DEFY YOU not to be cheering her on.
I love her for some of the same reasons I love Mae West in, well, all her films (she basically plays the same character every time). She’s larger and older than her counterpart spindly 1930s starlets, but in every film the men follow her around with their jaws bumping on the floor. It simultaneously surprises me and makes me think ‘why the hell not?’ She wrote the scripts, anyway – why not cast herself as a sex symbol? She was a sex symbol. We’re faced with such a tidal wave of body propaganda it’s easy to internalise it. Here’s a gratuitous embed of the trailer to West’s 1933 film I’m No Angel:
Anyway, back to the 80s/60s/whatever planet John Waters comes from. Another thing I love about Hairspray is the fabulous supporting cast of characters. Divine as Tracy’s mother Edna steals every scene she’s in, but I also love Tracy’s best friend Penny (Leslie Ann Powers) who seems pretty drippy until she meets kind, dishy Seaweed, son of local soul queen Motormouth Mabel. It’s actually quiet Penny Pingleton that starts shouting ‘segregation never, integration now!’ outside the Corny Collins Show. Penny and Tracy are touchingly devoted to each other too, encouraging each other and enjoying each other’s happiness. Plus bitchy Amber von Tussle and her snobbish, racist parents (her mother is played by Debbie Harry) are deliciously hateable.
The film is not without its flaws and it definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I love it. It’s the only film (I think…) that I’ve ever watched and put on again straight away, though admittedly that’s partly because of the superb soundtrack, which features Lesley Gore’s irresistible anthem You Don’t Own Me. Here it is!