Unsung Heroes: Isabelle Eberhardt
When your mother is a Russian aristocrat convalescing in Switzerland and your father is an Armenian anarchist ex-priest you have to do some pretty special things with your life just to balance out the sheer coolness of your own birth. Isabelle Eberhardt does not disappoint, living a life that seemed straight from the pages of Adventure and its pulp ilk.
In 1901, aged 24, Eberhardt was attacked by a sabre-wielding assassin whilst praying at an Algerian mosque. She survived, but her left arm was almost severed. A reasonable response to this might be to get quite upset, feel somewhat hostile towards the man who just attempted to murder you, and ask for him to be punished to the full extent of the law. Eberhardt however had reached a stage in her life where she was quite simply too badass to be upset by little things like assassination attempts. Instead she chose to forgive her assailant and later represented him in court, successfully arguing for his life to be spared.
How did the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, born in Geneva, end up facing assassination attempts in Algeria? It started with her anarchist tutor father, who taught her Arabic and other languages, horse-riding, theology, and literature. The interest in literature in turn led her to the work of Julien Viaud, a French lieutenant serving in North Africa and writing under the pen name Pierre Loti. Loti’s writing sparked a fascination with North Africa, which coupled with a weariness of Geneva’s formal society and hostility from her older step-siblings, who disliked her father, convinced Eberhardt that she needed to do some travelling of her own.
Travelling to Algiers with her mother in 1897, both of them quickly converted to Islam. They began to travel North Africa but Eberhardt’s mother passed away, as did her father back in Europe shortly afterwards. With her family ties severed, Eberhardt was free to fully devote herself to her travels. To this end she adopted the identity of a young man, taking the name Si Mahmoud Essadi. Having apparently developed a knack for the art of disguise, and being fluent in Arabic, she had little trouble blending in and taking advantage of the greater freedoms her new identity allowed her.
Travelling around North Africa under the guise of Si Mahmoud, Eberhardt became involved with the Qadiriyya, a secretive and radical Sufi brotherhood. The Qadiriyya were strongly opposed to colonial rule of Algeria and struggled against it, whilst also attempting to help the poor. Eberhardt, who by this point had begun writing journals and perhaps attempting to follow the path of Loti, threw herself into the Qadiryya cause, penning articles and works of prose railing against the French rule and celebrating the local culture. This is most likely what led to the assassination attempt against her, described earlier.
One very graceful impression is that of sunset over the port and the terraces of the upper town, and the gay Algerian women; a whole playful world in pink and green on the slightly blue-tinted white of the uneven and disorderly terraces. It’s from the little lattice window of Madame Ben Aben that you discover all this.
– Isabelle Eberhardt, Journals
Later that same year, having survived the near-severing of her arm, Eberhardt married an Algerian soldier, Slimane Ehnni. This didn’t slow her down though, as she continued to travel and write, acting as a war correspondent in the South of Oran for the French press. She also continued to push social boundaries, writing in her journals about adventures with alcohol and other intoxicants. Alongside her devotion to her adopted faith, her anarchist upbringing and free spirit kept her bending and breaking rules to experience every possible moment of her new country.
I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way.
– Isabelle Eberhardt, Journals
How does Eberhardt’s tale end? In a manner entirely suited to the general badass themes of Eberhardt’s life as a whole. In 1904, after another extended journey of exploration and writing, Eberhardt reunited with her husband in Aïn Séfra, an area remarkable for its dryness even by Algerian standards. The pair had barely settled in when a flash flood struck the area and their house – made of clay – collapsed on them.
Eberhardt escaped, but swam back in to pull her husband out. She managed to get him to safety but lost her own life in the process. Drowning in a flood in the middle of a desert, giving her own life to save someone she’d spent a long period estranged from, aged only 27. Arguably Eberhardt achieved her wish, fitting in one last act of boldness in a thoroughly unusual incident.
Following her death, Eberhardt’s journals were rescued from the flood. They document the last four years of her life and her adventures around North Africa. Along with a novel and several articles written for French newspapers these have cemented Eberhardt as one of the 20th century’s most bold and fascinating of wanderers.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
Deeds Not Words: Emily Wilding Davison
This year, as many of us fill in the census, it’s also 100 years since the 1911 census, which women’s suffrage activists saw as another campaigning opportunity.
One of the best and oddest moments in the Disney canon is the appearance, halfway through Mary Poppins, of an all-singing all-dancing campaign for civil liberties. ‘Sister Suffragette’ isn’t without its problems – the song is half-pisstake, half-pastiche, and the film makes Mrs Banks’ dizzy preoccupation with Votes for Women another instance of parental neglect – but come on, it’s a subversively fluffy aside that puts a smile on the face, and it’s sometimes the first encounter with that fabulous creature, a suffragette, that people remember having.
The campaign for women’s suffrage in this country is such a great story that I’m surprised it’s never been the subject of its own Disney film. Apart from its narrative of struggle towards a goal undeniably justified in modern eyes, it’s got a whole array of glamorous heroines in petticoats and picture-hats and, eventually – after the false dawn of the 1918 Representation of the People Act which only included women property-owners aged over thirty – a happy ending. In particular, the Suffragette taste for militantly iconoclastic protest would lend itself to iconic on-screen moments: women chained to the Downing Street railings, smashing windows, occupying civic buildings, enduring imprisonment and force-feeding and, not least, Emily Wilding Davison’s much-disputed martyrdom at the social event of the season, which actually was captured on film at the time.
Contrary to the Pathé News intertitle, Davison was not killed by her collision with George V’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby, but died four days later of the injuries sustained. She was forty. When people say women died for your right to vote, a fair proportion of them will be thinking of her.
Davison’s intentions on the day of the Derby are lost to history. Some historians believe her to have been intent on martyrdom, pointing to a previous incident during her imprisonment in Strangeways where she threw herself off a balcony. On the other hand, the fact that she had purchased a return train ticket – and also a ticket to a suffragette dance later that day – suggests that she intended to return having only interrupted or disrupted the race – possibly by attaching a suffragette flag to the King’s horse. This would have been one more instance of Davison’s dedication to gaining attention for her chosen cause through publicity stunt and spectacle.
Davison was born at Blackheath on 11th October, 1872. Sylvia Pankhurst recalled her as ‘tall and slender… Her illusive, whimsical green eyes and thin, half-smiling mouth, bore often the mocking expression of the Mona Lisa’. She performed well at school, and defying many of the social orthodoxies imposed by Victorian society, won a place at Royal Holloway College, funding her own education through teaching work. In 1895 she studied for a term at Oxford, gaining First Class Honours in Modern Languages – despite, Oxford degrees being closed to women, having no opportunity to graduate. Having resumed her teaching career, Davison joined the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906, quickly becoming its head steward as well as an active member of the socialist Workers’ Educational Association and the Central Labour College.
Davison was one of around a thousand women imprisoned for political activities between 1903 and the outbreak of WWI. In March 1909, she was arrested for disturbance while attempting to hand a petition to the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and sentenced to one month in prison. Four months later, she attempted to gain access to a hall where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, was giving a speech, and was imprisoned for two months. Later in the same year, she and two other women were arrested for throwing stones at Lloyd George’s car, and sentenced to a month’s hard labour at Strangeways prison. The stones were wrapped in paper bearing Emily’s favourite saying: Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.
While inside Strangeways, Davison went on hunger-strike. The prison authorities, in line with government policy, responded by force-feeding her and, when she barricaded herself inside her cell to avoid this, came close to causing her death by flooding the cell with ice-cold water. This treatment appalled the public and was discussed in Parliament, with Labour leader James Keir Hardie advocating her release. Undaunted, Davison spent the next few years in and out of prison for setting fire to London post boxes, attacking a vicar she mistook for Lloyd George, and planting a bomb which severely damaged Lloyd George’s house in Surrey.
The Davison family monument in Morpeth, Northumberland. You might *just* see Deeds Not Words if you click to enlarge. Nearest Creative Commons shot we could locate... Photo from Flickr, shared under Creative Commons, taken by Daniel Weir (user danielweiresq).
The public response to Davison’s death at the Epsom Derby was not immediately sympathetic: more information was printed about the health of the King’s horse and jockey (the latter making a full recovery and the former ‘suffering bruised shins’) than about the suffragettes’ cause, and the Daily Herald went on to print a cartoon in dubious taste showing ‘Miss Davison’ as a skeleton holding a Votes For Women placard. Posterity has been scarcely kinder, dismissing Davison as a mentally ill fanatic and proto-terrorist whose actions horrified both supporters and opponents of her cause, and which enabled the persistence of old arguments founded on the idea that women’s intrinsically irrational nature made them unsuited to political discourse and decision-making. Populist historian George Dangerfield’s depiction of the suffragettes as a frivolous frilly edge to the fall of Liberal England was a cue picked up by succeeding historians, who viewed the majority of women involved as playing at politics, succumbing to a fashionably edgy craze, indulging their innate feminine tendency to hysteria, and even masochistically courting the treatment they received from police and prison authorities. Not until the advent of women’s history in the 1970s were they treated more seriously and their struggle linked to that for wider suffrage in earlier decades: the first Woman’s Suffrage Bill was presented to Parliament in 1832, as part of the general struggle for reform and extension of the franchise to non-property-holding and working men. (It’s worth pointing out that the King’s jockey at the 1913 Derby, Herbert Jones, was not entitled to the vote either.)
The census sit-in commemorative plaque at the House of Commons, with the three suffragette colours shown as stripes on the corner of Emily's portrait
Davison is buried at Morpeth Church with the WSPU motto ‘Deeds Not Words’ engraved on her headstone. Memorials to her are hard to find – like the suffragette monument tucked away in Victoria – but one is in the House of Commons crypt, placed there by the Labour MP Tony Benn. It commemorates the night of the 1911 census when Davison hid in a cupboard in the Palace of Westminster overnight so that on the census form she could legitimately give ‘the House of Commons’ as her place of residence that night. (Ironically enough, other suffragettes were spending the night evading the census in protest at their exclusion from the franchise.) The census documents from 2nd April 1911 state that Davison was found ‘hiding in the crypt’ in the Houses of Parliament. Whatever the suffragettes’ brand of protest represents today – a reckless eye for spectacle, a disregard for personal safety and security in pursuit of political goals, and a willingness to draw attention to oneself, all of which are valid weapons in the arsenal of political activists – escapades like that of Emily Davison on census night are the kind of minor gems that make the historical record sparkle.
- Publications by suffrage historian Jill Liddington.
- Two IMDB searches bring up some hilarious-to-horrifying-sounding works from the time of the movement itself.
- Contemporary news reports on the suffrage movement.
- Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s 2008 play Her Naked Skin, the first to be performed on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage by a living female playwright.
- Shoulder to Shoulder, a BBC series from 1974.
And of course Mrs Banks.
(I could say something on how the temporary alliance of Mrs Banks and her domestics with the chimney-sweeps at the end of ‘Step in Time’, and their consequent disruption of the bourgeois patriarchal hegemony of the Banks household through dance, is a commendable representation of a socialist-feminist popular front, but that’s a whole other post.)
Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine
Scott Adams tells it like it isn’t.
Oh dear. On the 7th of March, Dilbert creator Scott Adams wrote this post on his blog. He then deleted it later.
Photo by Flickr user Ol.v!er, shared under a creative commons licence.
Much has been said about his words, but a lot of the online discussion focuses on “I now think he’s a douche” and not on why the post should be regarded as offensive. Well, I’m pretty clear on why I find it offensive.
In my posts for BadRep I have often expressed the sentiment that men have unique problems in society, and that those problems are just as invisible as some feminist issues. I believe it’s true. I’ve also recently written a post which stated my feelings on the constant cry of “but what about the men?” in response to feminist discussion. Short answer: if you look at the world and don’t see massive gender inequality harming women a lot more than men, and don’t think that reducing the gap (and aiming to eliminate these issues for everyone) would be a good thing, then I don’t want to know you.
Scott Adams didn’t say that feminism was no longer needed, or that men have bigger problems than women. His post can be summed up in two parts:
“Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:
Get over it, you bunch of pussies.”
Why would he say that – because he sees women’s rights as far more under attack? Er… no. He has this advice instead:
“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.”
Scott states that he’s not comparing ‘women’ directly to ‘people with disabilities’ or children, but does advise his (male) audience to treat them all the same way – to take into account the “emotional realities of other people”.
And this is where most online discussion is only just starting to get it. It doesn’t MATTER if he’s right, or if he’s a realist. Either way this is shitty, inhumane advice.
It puts the reader in the group taking action, and puts women (and other humans with inconvenient ’emotional realities’) in a group marked “Other”. And as we all know, that’s classic 101 to dehumanising your target and making it easier to see them as objects who don’t need to be considered. It’s also bollocks. He’s giving instructions for how to manipulate others for your own success, without looking at any possibility of finding any common ground, sharing boundaries, or viewing them as real people who could be talked to. They’re just there to be made to go away with the least stress to him. Adams is dismissing the idea that his current views could be wrong and that he might learn something from women, because dialogue is not an option. He’d rather choose the path of least resistance. That’s a pretty closed mind right there.
It’s not easier for “everyone”, Scott. Just you.
It’s not easier for women, for example. Also: women, children and “the mentally handicapped”(!) are together a majority, which makes you sitting inside your privileged minority and dismissing them like this all the more craptastic. The majority of the human race are more emotional than you, Scott, and as you’ve just demonstrated probably have more empathy too.
Towards the end of the post he says:
“Fairness is an illusion. It’s unobtainable in the real world.”
For someone who has spent decades writing about the inhumanity of big business, that’s a surprising quote. And my inner Hopeless Idealist rejects it totally. Yes, men face different inequalities: in the divorce courts, in countries with a military draft, in society’s ancient ideas of what ‘masculine’ behaviour is. But even if I felt that these somehow matched the towering mountain of (frequently lethal) inequality facing women (which I don’t by several miles), I would never give up on seeking fairness. It’s an instinctive, empathic, humane response which shows that you’re a decent human being.
So yeah, I now think Scott Adams is a douche as well. Several additional words spring to mind (the lovely Miranda put in a vote for “ableist asshat” at this juncture). If you want to read his justifications (that he often takes the point of view on his blog which is most difficult to defend, that his readers know he often doesn’t even believe the argument he’s making, that we’re all devoid of “reading comprehension”) then you can wander over to where he’s currently trolling the comment thread at Feministe. Yes, seriously. At no time does he back down from the opinion he stated, or acknowledge how the act of grouping 51% of the planet and more into an ‘overly emotional’ box to be safely ignored for his own mental peace of mind is in any way douche-worthy.
We are better than his exclusionary, patronising bullshit, people. There’s an alternative where we keep talking, and learning, and looking for ways to make a society we can be proud of. Together. Because women are human beings, and the fact that this still needs saying means that all men should be jumping aboard the feminism boat for joint rock n’ roll pirate adventures. The alternative is a land run by people as ignorant, reactionary and self-absorbed as the boss in the Dilbert comics, and no-one wins when that happens.
– Steve B.
White, mid-thirties cis male who used to work for a giant American corporation and buy Dilbert calendars.
An Alphabet of Feminism #23: W is for Widow
W
WIDOW
I’ll say one thing: the war makes the most peculiar widows.
Rhett Butler, Gone With The Wind (1939)
Bootylicious
Widow is another Old English word, widewe (= widow…), which connects via the Indo-European vidhava, with the Latin viduus, meaning ‘bereft’ or (its other lexical descendent) ‘void’. This ‘vacancy’ at the etymological heart of the word seems perfect, if rather sad, since (as we all know) a widow is ‘a woman who has lost her husband by death and has not married again’.
'The Widow at Windsor' - Queen Victoria in 1863, after Albert's death in 1861
Anyway, the emptiness immanent in the word widow is materially rather ironic, since, in European history at least, a lucky woman whose family had thrashed out a good dower-deal at her marriage was, in theory, entitled to most of the death-booty – as long as she didn’t marry Shakespeare and end up with the ‘second best bed‘, or fall foul of anti-female legalities (as in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility).
But if we assume all has gone right and your wealthy husband has obligingly shuffled off this mortal coil and done nothing unexpected with his will, widowhood comes with a golden handshake. Even a little bit of money leaves you with a degree of important independence, and historical widows have frequently exploited this, becoming, in some instances, iconic political figures. Notable widows of history have included: Jiang Qing, wife of Chairman Mao and leader of the Gang of Four; the dowager Catherine de Medici, who machinated throughout the French Wars of Religion; Agrippina the Younger, super-Freudian mother of Nero; late-period Queen Victoria (dubbed ‘The Widow at Windsor’); Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife (and the most married queen in English history), whose main distinction is that she ‘survived’ … and even Jackie Kennedy Onassis, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Scottish Widows
On a more casual note, the independent widow was a culturally significant figure throughout European history, often dubbed the Merry Widow, as was the eponymous heroine of Franz Lehár’s operetta (1905). Not only does Lehár’s widow have her own theme tune, she also sparked a self-titled hat-craze, and attentive readers will note that this ‘ornate or wide-brimmed hat’ is worn at a rakish angle that rather suits Merry Widow‘s dictionary definition as a bereaved woman who is ‘amorous or designing’.
This idea goes back to the medieval age: the Scottish William Dunbar’s brilliantly phonetic poem ‘The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo’ features a widow who sits in a field telling two married women she’s found from somewhere about the comparative excellence of her own state:
With him died all my dole and my dreary thoughts;
Now done is my duly night, my day is upsprungen,
Adieu dolour, adieu! My dainty now begins:
Now am I a widow, i-wis, and well am at ease…William Dunbar, The Two Married Women and the Widow c.1490s
Anyone familiar with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath may recognise something of Alysoun’s archness here – unlike the other Older Woman, the old maid, the widow is a legitimately sexually experienced woman, often with a bit of money, who has, in consequence, less to lose than the young maiden. With this licence, the medieval widow is frequently presented as a bawdy sexual facilitator, and she is also free herself to run riot, cause scandals, wander around unchaperoned and facilitate other people’s sexual encounters with relative impunity.
The Wife of Bath, as imagined by William Blake
Staring at the Sea
Of course, it’s not all sitting in fields and enjoying your inheritance: the widow‘s independent fortune certainly makes her a target for gold-diggers – as is the case with every Margaret Dumont character in every Marx Brothers film ever. There are also lots of interesting cases in literature where you know the absent husband’s in trouble because the vultures are circling round his wife – Odysseus’ Penelope is for a time a widow in the word’s second sense: ‘a wife separated from (or deserted by) her husband’. In addition to this, she also has to contend with house full of Suitors drinking her out of house and home on the (misguided) assumption that Odysseus is dead, rather than simply shagging Calypso on an island far, far away.
Penelope’s widowhood also lurks at the back of the North American term Widow’s Walk, ‘a railed or balustraded platform built on the roof, originally in early New England, for providing an unimpeded view of the sea’, and a highly evocative phrase suggestive of young Scarlett O’Hara-style sea-widows, whose British equivalents would probably have been provided for by the financial services company Scottish Widows, first set up in 1815 as a way to provide for (sexy) widows, sisters and daughters whose husbands were lost in the Napoleonic Wars.
The Penelopean widow doesn’t really exist any more, but widow‘s second meaning has a more modern significance first spotted in Late Middle English – ‘a wife whose husband devotes most of his time to a specified activity and is rarely at home’. Some readers may have heard the term ‘World Cup Widow‘ bandied about last year – other examples the dictionary gives include ‘golf widow‘ (sweet jeebus, get out of that one sistah…) and ‘business widow‘. There’s also the more niche example of the ‘Secret Society Widow’ – the Museum of Freemasonry in Covent Garden has a rather nice clock on display that was presented to the wife of a member ‘in gratitude for her allowing her husband his Lodge nights’. Here there is a sense of these women as being passive blocks on enjoyment for someone else – the World Cup Widow is basically me moaning about having a sudden dip in loving attentions because there are men in ridiculous shorts running around on a screen in a noisy pub… Ahem. I digress.
Kiss me in the shadow of a doubt
Anyway, here we reach the flip-side of the Merry Widow, best exemplified in Alfred Hitchcock’s personal favourite of his own films, Shadow of a Doubt (1943). This features Joseph Cotton as the ‘Merry Widow Murderer’ with a venomous attitude towards these ‘horrible, faded, fat, greedy women’ that may be extreme, but nonetheless exemplifies the idea that a widow‘s financial independence actually renders her ‘useless’ and a hindrance to earthly happiness (read: money) for everyone else. On this, there’s an interesting little typographic significance of widow first recorded in the mid-twentieth century – she is ‘a short last line of a page or column considered undesirable’. That is, the widow represents a kind of hangover, something that is surplus to requirement, and no longer neatly slotted into a clear, neat unit.
A Black Widow spider.
As well as being targets for Hitchcockian serial killers, widows can also adopt this role themselves of course – the black widow is a criminal female whose widowhood is assumed to have been – shall we say – voluntary. This phrase originates from the black widow spider, a venomous North American spider, especially Latrodectus mactons, ‘the female of which usually devours its mate’. A fear of female power and often source of grim fascination, this term works rather interestingly with notable Rock Widows – Courtney Love, whom many genuinely accuse of having murdered Kurt Cobain; Yoko Ono, who was never really a popular fave to begin with; Priscilla Presley and even Faith Evans, widow of The Notorious B.I.G. and the brains behind a dodgy reworking of The Police.
These inevitably take on an important role as mediator of their husbands’ glory, and living blocks on libel, speculation and marketing opportunities. Courtney Love famously ‘released’ her husband’s suicide note to Nirvana fans and Yoko Ono wasted no time in putting together a posthumous Lennon album after his murder (reportedly showing up in the studio the very next day). The vitriol these women have variously attracted presumably relates to a sense of the widow as a figure standing between fan and artist, with a hefty inheritance and a team of lawyers. It also compares curiously with the hatred or suspicion directed at many of the Political Widows with which this post began.
But ultimately there are as many different types of widow as there are widows. This post has attempted not so much to categorise them as to suggest a few ways people have regarded them: Jackie O (tragically graceful); political dowager (devious and suspect); the rich survivor draped in Chanel and gullibility – and a middle-aged Scottish woman sitting in a field, really quite content with her lot.
Next week: X is for X
I’ve been reading a lot of Young Adult fiction lately. There’s some serious talent in that market that can’t be summed up by glibly taping a Vampire Books: the Section Formerly Known as Young Adult sign to the shelves. Nice one Anonymous, but you’ve obviously never read The Hunger Games.
“Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favour!”
– Effie Trinket, The Hunger Games
Occasionally billed as the ‘anti-Twilight’, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins tells the story of Katniss Everdeen, ‘the girl from District 12,’ who has to fight for her life when she takes her sister’s place in the Games.
Basic plot: a long time ago, a series of wars brought humanity to the brink of extinction. The Capitol won out, and to remind the surrounding poorer Districts it rules over of the horrors of war and their allegiance to the Capitol, the Districts must send ‘tributes’ each year, one boy and one girl, chosen by lottery, to fight to the death in games shown on national television. For one winner comes fame, a life of guaranteed luxury, and food for their district for one year; for the losers, nothing save the knowledge that their last breath, every wound, every blow has been broadcast live to their loved ones back home.
The Districts work to provide food and goods for the ruling class in the Capitol; they’re poor, underfunded places where poverty and starvation are rife. Kids can take tesserae, meaning their names are in the lottery more than once, to get extra grain for their family for the year. Katniss Everdeen supports her mother and younger sister with tesserae, and through hunting illegally on Capitol lands, but when her sister’s name comes up on Reaping Day, the whole world watches Katniss step up on stage to take her place.
Journeying to the arena, Katniss is taken to the Capitol, where rich sponsors compete to back her and she gets to know Peeta Mellark, the boy from District 12. But when the Games begin, will she be able to shoot arrows not at rabbits and deer, but at other tributes?
Alliances will be made and broken in the arena, but there can only be one winner.
You can read the first two chapters for free on the official website, and I really recommend you do. If you like it, buy it, read it, and share it with the teenagers in your family, if you’ve got them. The first novel, The Hunger Games, is followed by Catching Fire, and the trilogy concluded late last year with Mockingjay.
“If I can shoot rabbits, I can shoot fascists… If you tolerate this, then your children will be next.”
– The Manic Street Preachers
Why would I recommend The Hunger Games to BadRep readers? Well, they’re great books, and I like you guys. Oh, you mean to a feminist website specifically? Well, in a genre that often seems to think it needs to write about boys to get boys and girls to read it, this series features a brilliant, central female character, and other great, varied female characters besides, including soldiers and powerful politicians.
It’s a successful book by a female author, in a genre where female authors are often dismissed as (paranormal) romance writers or feel the need to hide their gender by writing under their initials. Katniss is neither always a victim, nor a sexualised Lara Croft-alike, and while she is in some ways a role model for young readers, she’s not perfect, she does make mistakes, which make her all the more believable.
While she’s protective of her family, she’s uncaring, paranoid and mean when dealing with people who fall outside her circle. She’s not a dyed-in-the-wool Joan of Arc figure; the first chapters show her arguing against her hunting partner’s politically rebellious comments. She’s clueless when it comes to other people’s feelings, terrible at realising her own, selfish, dangerously impulsive, completely a product of the dystopian society she lives in, and yet…
… I am trying hard, very hard, not to say too much about Katniss, her actions, her choices throughout the trilogy, what happens to her, and the dark places Collins goes with this character, just because I don’t want to make this review too spoilery. Suffice to say, she had me by the heartstrings the moment she stepped up to save her sister, and it is this complex and unique character who makes the series for me.
Collins avoided easy stereotypes and did not write a setting where boys have the advantage in violent situations because of “higher testosterone levels than girls”, or “slightly larger body mass”, or any of those excuses that usually get used when someone is telling you that they Don’t Watch Women’s Football Because [insert reason here].
Girls have won the Hunger Games, and won often. Winning isn’t just about brute strength, it’s about courage, smarts, a certain unsqueamish, unthinking approach to violence and your own survival. It’s also about the skills learned in your District, (some contenders can fish, some know which plants will poison you) the advantages of your District (were you starving before you left for the Games?), and social skill: can you charm the cameras enough so that rich sponsors will pity you, or perhaps bet money on you, and therefore send you gifts of weapons or medicine during the Games?
Skillfully, Collins has included almost ironic echoes of other fiction aimed at this age-group. In another life, the ‘Careers’ in the arena (kids from richer, better-fed Districts who train and actually volunteer for the games, in a bid for wealth and glory) would be the ‘jocks’ of any high-school drama.
The beautiful dresses made for Katniss for her pre-game appearances – every tribute has an image consultant, make-up artists, their own fashion designer – would be the ‘prom dress scene’ in another work, were not for the fact that everyone attending these parties is quite looking forward to watching her fight for her life in the Games, her fashion designer has put more thought into her outfits than one might expect, and that oh, she better fill up on those party favours, because she won’t be eating properly for a while…
It’s refreshing to read about a heroine who’s actually thankful for what she has, and who would find the concept of dieting absolutely ridiculous.
Katniss’s potential romances, Peeta and Gale – and there are two of them, as is traditional – would be the Jacob and Edward, the Stefan and Damon, that this story revolved around, were it not that the reader, and Katniss herself, is far more invested in whether characters live or die than who they sleep with! Though I’m Team Joanna I’m Team Gale, if you’re asking.
“I really can’t think about kissing when I’ve got a rebellion to incite.”
– Katniss Everdeen
Er, sorry Katniss.
Did I have any problems with the series? Well, the final book kind of went against my own sense of who should live, who should die and how, and to be honest, it felt a little like it was rushed to hit the release date in the shops. However, in much the same way that a dedicated Harry Potter fan wouldn’t recommend that you skip the series just because they didn’t like the infamous epilogue and thought that JKR needed a better editor after book three (oh she really did), my problems with Mockingjay don’t stop me wanting to recommend The Hunger Games to every book-lover I know.
I’m feeling nervous about the upcoming movie. Considering the Hollywood treatment given to the last kid’s franchise I loved, I hope Katniss is cast with dark hair, with olive skin, the way she’s described – I hope Thresh and Rue aren’t white. On a more speculative note, I’d jump up and down in the cinema if we see Cinna flirting with men. I really hope the real message of the books comes across: that political complacency is the real enemy, that if we’re duped by ‘bread and circuses’ then we’re all culpable for what is done in our names.
But however the movie turns out, Hollywood adaptations always mean more book sales, and more kids reading a series that teaches them to question authority, to question the media, that teaches them that rebellious actions can lead to change… well, that can only be a good thing.
I’ve written previously for BadRep on how the cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender is very feminist-friendly in its treatment of female characters. Women have important roles, the prejudices they face are explored and ridiculed, and they are counted as the most effective and capable warriors. There are equal numbers of them compared to the men in the group, and while the lead character is male that fact becomes almost unimportant in the weave of personal stories from the whole team.
A new 12-part miniseries is being made, this time with a female character in the title role. This image of her has been released and is doing the rounds on fan blogs and so on, and some of the comments which have greeted it are very interesting.
Here are some of the initial replies I’ve seen (not exact wording):
- “Why does she look like a boy?”
- “She looks well butch.”
- “Take the pigtails out and you have a dude.”
All of which might arguably be true, but that’s firmly in the tradition of Avatar playing with gender in awesome ways. For a start, the character of the Avatar is a holy person who has reincarnated as male and female over the centuries. They have a long line of both to call on for wisdom during meditation.
Aang, the boy monk who is the lead character of the original Avatar: TLA series. Image copyright Nickelodeon.
In the original series, the Avatar is a boy named Aang, who presents as relatively gender-neutral: his young age and upbringing as a monk make him quite androgynous, his head has no hair or facial hair and he wears mainly shapeless robes. While physical power and combat are key measures of success for the world he lives in, Aang refuses to take the hyper-masculine pose which is constantly encouraged. He is instead always flying out of reach and using his enemies’ aggression to quickly slip behind them to safety (a key technique of the Ba Gua martial art which his tribe learn). He doesn’t judge or take sides, but is laughingly delighted to meet anyone. He has been away from the world, and society’s restrictions on gender simply make no sense to him compared to love for your fellow beings. Expectations of male and female conduct are explored (and often refuted) by everyone around him, but he stands alone in the centre. He is a pacifist trickster, unique in the world.
Tricksters in mythology are often linked to exploration of gender roles. They can be shapeshifters, disguise themselves as anyone, and try out, or even master, traditional women’s or men’s skills. Shamans in some communities (who can in many ways embody the trickster role) may not consider themselves to be male or female: some cross-dress, or adopt the conventions of different gender roles at different times. Tricksters are also usually Outsiders. They all know loneliness and derision, and can only succeed in their task if they do NOT fit the safe confines of known social roles. Aang is definitely an Outsider, and the lonely last of his kind.
The fact that the series can do all this while still being a genuinely thrilling, hilarious and entertaining children’s show is just one of its strengths (do you get the impression I like it quite a lot?) The attitude of neutrality with regard to gender isn’t laboured, and as the episodes progress Aang develops a hetero attraction towards a female character, but by that point it doesn’t feel like it was inevitable in a Hollywood kind of way.
When we look at who the commenters expected Korra to be like, the closest fit is probably the main female of the original group – Katara, a teenage girl who, like Korra, also comes from the Water Tribe. Katara has complete agency over her actions and repeatedly refuses to fit into everyone’s expectations for what ‘a girl’ should be able to do. She does take on the familiar female roles of healer and nurturer, but only after proving she is as strong and determined as the men around her and choosing the additional activities for herself. Demanding them, in fact, when there is so much which she rejects and fights against as well. But at the end of the day… she is also very conventionally pretty.
Korra doesn’t give the studios that reassurance. You can usually be as liberal as you like in a new show – provided you have a white male lead. I think Avatar: TLA did the minimum it had to in order to be made, and took great risks after it had snuck in under the radar. Avatar: TLK isn’t putting up with that nonsense at all, has a teenage young woman of colour as the protagonist and (if the previous writers were anything to go by) will not be taking any crap about it.
I can’t wait to see what Nickelodeon do with Korra, and in many ways “she’s not feminine-looking enough!” is a wonderful comment to have provoked. Television for children is SO important in terms of teaching norms to a new generation. The original depicts the heroes observing the world around them, choosing for themselves which parts to take into their life, and being treated with honour and respect no matter who they feel they are. I just wish we were getting more than a 12-part miniseries this time!
But what about TEH MENZ?!!!
Most people who read feminist blogs won’t even need me to explain this title. We see it every day.
International Women’s Day on the 8th of March turned Twitter into an amazing parade of support for women, delight in their progress towards equality and celebration of the women in each of our lives.
Elsewhere, it was business as usual. If you could have hashtagged “Why don’t men get a day, EH?” then it’d have been the global number one tag all over the internet. (They do get a day – November 19th – but that’s not my point here.) I’m writing this post so that next year I can just link it every time someone tells me feminism “isn’t needed” or is unfair to men in some way.
To the people (all of whom were men) who had to ask me what the title of this post meant: look at almost any online article about women’s rights or feminism. Chances are within the first few comments you will have a man asking “What about men’s rights?”
As the James Bond clip which did the rounds quotes: “Women perform 66% of the world’s work, earn 10% of world’s income and own 1% of the world’s property.” What about the men? Fine. Let’s reverse that for a new quote:
Men perform 33% of the world’s work, earn 90% of world’s income and own 99% of the world’s property.
They also suffer much less domestic violence, rape, genital mutilation, sexual shame, sex trafficking, and have far more control over their lives and bodies. Their options for work aren’t limited, they are not considered to automatically have a duty to represent their whole gender if they reach the top of a profession or political office, and aren’t scrutinised as mercilessly if their partner does.
They don’t face becoming part of the epidemic of rape during war, having their testimony count for half a man’s in court, legal challenges on precisely how much they are allowed to be beaten before it’s not acceptable, they’re far less likely to face being property, victims of honour killings and acid attacks, or living under social or legal pressure to hide their bodies from sight (or the more familiar pressure in the UK to expose them, provided they’re the ‘correct’ shape, if they want to be successful).
Speaking as a white cis male in a first world country, if you can’t see why feminism ‘is still needed’ globally then you haven’t tried looking for even a second. We may have a different set of inequalities at home, but that doesn’t mean they’re not just as pervasive and damaging in society. Is the UK some amazing bastion of freedom where women have no problems anymore? The Equality and Human Rights Commission says a BIG no.
Other people raised a much more valid secondary point during International Women’s Day, which was the hesitation a lot of men have about the word ‘feminism’. Even though the movement is about seeking equality, the term suggests seeking female superiority to a lot of people. It’s been debated constantly in feminist circles, but we sometimes forget that this instinctive mis-definition hasn’t changed in the minds of many of the mainstream. The argument about reclaiming it (and then making the version we want actually take root in the general public) is a whole post on its own, and not what I want to do here. We know that feminism has an image problem.
For our readers (of any gender) who may be in doubt, here is my personal definition: feminism is about womens’ right to live as human beings. To make choices about their own lives and bodies. Things which we would consider imprisonment or torture on ‘a person’ are inflicted on women every day, and equality is not going to happen without a lot of effort to fight that status quo. Reaching equality doesn’t take anything away from men that we should not be ashamed of and glad to lose anyway.
We haven’t gained this balance yet in the UK, and we’re catastrophically nowhere near it internationally.
This is an Otter eating Snowflakes. It has nothing to do with men or women, but Steve needed a calming picture at this point. Image from http://unizoo.exblog.jp/12102064
It’s not just the men who need to learn this. I have several stories from female friends where it is women who are enforcing the partriachal norms on other women most harshly. Everyone has a long way to go before we get a situation which is more equal.
Can you seriously ask “What about the men?” Get the depressing stats on inequality: that 92% of our judges in the UK are white men from Oxford / Cambridge, that… look, this could go on forever.
In Egypt (where they recently had a revolution, with women very much involved at the front of it) they had the parades for International Women’s Day which have become traditional in many parts of the world. The women in the parade were heckled and threatened by men chanting anti-female slogans.
Men chanting against us were very furious. It offended them that we were calling for equal rights. … They were chanting “Down with Women”.
– @Egyptocracy on twitter
There are reports of violence, including sexual assaults. A comment from Equality Now‘s Facebook page: “That Egyptian women … grow up *expecting* to be fondled in public as a form of intimidation is just gut-wrenching.”
The main direction of this post will not be new to most feminists, and every area I’ve mentioned deserves a huge amount of debate, but I wanted to write something specifically for those people who can in all seriousness still ask “What about the men?”
Forget that question. There are very valid problems which are uniquely facing men in modern society, and I think some of them must be solved if we are to make progress in feminism, but really, my response to the people who seriously typed that line on International Women’s Day: stop hijacking every single goddamn thread about real issues with this inane question, there’s work to do!
At the Movies: True Grit
Internet, I’m sorry. I’m not a Coen Brothers fan. The last film I saw by them was O Brother, Where Art Thou? which I primarily watched because it’s based loosely on the Odyssey, and I’m nothing if not an epic poetry nerd. People told me to hold my trousers and undergarments close about me lest I laughed them off. All leg-coverings, I’m afraid to say, remained steadfastly, unamusedly attached. I didn’t like it. I was ostracised from the film-loving community for six months. It was a sad time.
So when people were piping delirious at me that there was oh my god, a new Coen Brothers film out! – I wasn’t massively over-excited. I also heard it was a remake, and I’m not vastly excited about those, either. And then I heard it was a Western; the film genre I’m least excited about. So please understand, then, the genial ambivalence that coursed, skin-tone-knuckled, through my laid-back veins as I sauntered casually to see True Grit last Thursday.
*** For those who’ve not seen it, the SPOILER WARNING goes here.***
I went to see it at my local Picturehouse cinema, which is my favourite cinema in the world (except for the old Odeon in Pwllheli, Wales, which has honest-to-god curtains and an usherette – or at least it did last time I went, which was in the 90s!) because of its serene, sociable atmosphere and gorgeous staff. It’s nothing like Vue, which – despite having equally beautiful staff – stresses me out with its up-selling and chemical-weapon nachos. By the time I’d got to my seat, I was practically horizontal with how much chillaxing was going down Chez Moi, and even the beautiful car advert with the people tangoing barely got my blood pressure above a whisper.
The film began. A young girl’s voice proclaiming her story and the death of her father. Something flickered deep in the back of my mellow mind as my feminism gland quivered, detecting an atypical female lead character. Sure enough, hypnotically well-written sentence followed well-spoken phrase, and there she was: 14-year-old Mattie Ross (the hilariously under-championed-on-the-poster-credits Hailee Steinfeld), out to avenge her father’s death in a backbiting, injust world dominated by grizzled old men whose extensive facial hair is only out-done by their bastardliness.
She is sharp, intelligent and scheming – easily either the equal or superior of the men she takes on – with an unshakeable sense of duty and justice which tides her actions along throughout the film. She will see the man who killed her father hanged, damnit, and he will be hanged in her state, in full knowledge of the reason for his hanging. She takes on scurrilous scoundrels at their own game and betters them, taking advantage of their constant underestimating her powers of perception and reason, and her stalwart determination.
But this is a man’s world – specifically, an old man’s world. Every character other than Mattie is weather-beaten and dog-eared regardless of how long they’ve been on the earth. They’re as ancient and savage as the wilderness around them and they’re a lot more worldly-wise. Mattie isn’t naive, and has a strong sense of the way things should work, but she isn’t as jaded as the men whose company she keeps, and this throws up great, gaping chasms of inexperienced vulnerability for her to bridge every once in a while. She is genuinely shocked and outraged when, for example, Matt Damon‘s (surprisingly well-acted – it is Matt “Puzzled Indifference” Damon we’ve got here, after all…) Texan ranger, LaBoeuf, expresses a desire to capture the same man that she pursues, and have him hanged in his own state for his own reasons.
The society Mattie finds herself having to navigate for the honour of her father cannot even countenance her being their equal. She is constantly belittled and spoken down to, even though she proves herself a formidable adversary. The men she encounters infantilise her, call her “baby sister” and regularly denounce her as “ugly”, as though the only expected worth she is meant to have in the world is her beauty. She easily proves that she has more than looks to offer – but that’s not what she’s meant to offer.
I am thoroughly depressed to admit that I was expecting a rape, having not read the book and given the common trope of “Strong Female Character Ends Up Raped” in films. Now, I don’t know how this pans out, therefore, in the book the film is based on, but Mattie is grossly manhandled and spanked in the film by LaBoeuf after she follows he and his rival Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) out into the wilderness. He trivially overpowers her – as a barely pubescent 14-year-old – and the whole scene feels like a total violation, despite such abuse being common in the historical context of the setting. It’s awful, and culminates in one of the times that Cogburn steps in to save her.
That’s the other thing – Mattie does end up getting rescued quite a bit. All things considered, I can actually get behind this. All the situations in which she finds herself in need of rescue are situations that either come about as a direct result of, or are exacerbated by, her stature. She’s bloody tiny! Comments on her size are manifold – she’s a “fleabite”, “skin and bone”, and a “horsefly”. She’s more determined and courageous than either of the great big chaps she takes with her on her quest, but she’s knocked off her feet by the recoil of a rifle, and is thrown about like a doll when LaBoeuf spanks her. She isn’t powerless, but she is young – and female – and with that comes an inescapable physical vulnerability which comes up time and time again in the film.
But she wins. Oh yes. She completes her revenge cycle, and she wins. The film closes on her several years later, describing herself as “never having time enough for family” of her own. She out-survives all the members of her family – and, tragically, Cogburn, who saved her life – and is unassailably strong for it. You get the strong impression that the story the film tells is only one of her many stories, and it was certainly not the last time she went off adventuring. That’s what I like to think, anyway. I loved her.
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES. Coming to a cinema near you! IN MY MIND.
Oh, did I mention how fucking hilarious the whole thing is? It’s weird, dry, creaky, strange humour and I love it. The dialogue is solid and glittering as polished brass, and the characters are all highly engaging, and it’s a pleasure to hear them speak. The film’s also a joy to look at – it’s all in Gritty Realistic Brown, but in a golden, glowing way, rather than a used-coffee-filter way. Machinery, horses and scenery are fetished to roughly the same amount, and I derived a great deal of pleasure comparing Mattie’s smooth, young face to the craggy old men, rocks and steam trains that surround her, because I’m a freak with no life and a grand love of textures.
ONE MORE THING. There is, as is only correct and proper for the time, racism in this film that’s just casually there and not even questioned and it’s horrific. There’s a pretty brutal hanging scene, and the Native American fellow isn’t even allowed to say his final words before the sack is tugged over his head, cutting him off mid-flow. I am disappointed to say that the audience I found myself with laughed at that, though I’d like to believe that it was a nervous laugh out of shock and disgust, rather than amusement. Black humour is one thing, and it’s clearly quite an extreme situation, but it’s deeply uncomfortable nevertheless, because horrendous attitudes towards indigenous American people still exist.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- Mattie is one of the finest and most likeable lead characters I have ever seen
- It’s well-written and genuinely hilarious (like, shout-with-laughter-disturbing-the-other-cinema-goers-hilarious)
- The characters are engaging, really well-scripted, and engrossing to watch
- It is exceedingly good to look at in a visual sense
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- You know, I have absolutely no idea what would unrecommend this film to you. Perhaps if you’re really, really allergic to Westerns? And hate panoramic shots of mountains with a passion rivalled only by that of my hatred for toesocks?
Found Feminism: Amazon users and feminist tags
This week it’s a somewhat snarky – but no less amusing for it – Found Feminism picked up by our very own Stephen B.
tags: not just for titles and authors!
Clicky here to see the explosive tag cloud on Amazon for a pseudo-science book about “the private activities of millions of men and women around the world”.1
I like that a selection of predominantly internet-based feminist thought (can haz meme plz?) is being used to kick up a righteous fuss over what is by all accounts a pile of terrible tosh not worth the paper it’s printed on. It’s a great example of theory-into-action: the fact that tagging is used on Amazon to organise and categorise books means that these tags help users identify and avoid anti-feminist writing.
My personal favourites in the tag cloud include mansplaining, gender essentialism, and transphobia.
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!
- *One of many exciting non-facts on the back cover alone. Rather than data gathered from actual people, they used “a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads”. By the same “methodology” I would have concluded that planet earth was dominated by cats with funny captions and spambots for viagra. [↩]
World Down Syndrome Awareness Week
Hello, BadRep.
Today is World Down Syndrome Day 2011.
I don’t know how much you know about Down Syndrome as an individual reader. Don’t know much about it? Go and find out more about it. Think you know about it? Take some time to read and listen a bit more. Don’t be the person who scrolls on, eh?
I learned about Down Syndrome Day because I have a younger sister with Down Syndrome whom I lived with for sixteen years (I only moved out about two years ago) and so my family have lifetime membership of the Down Syndrome Association. I’d like everyone to know about it, though.
I’m not going to tell you a great deal about my family here because this is a short post – and because I haven’t asked what my sister thinks either about blogging on here, or being blogged about, yet, and not to do so would be at the least a bit cheeky. And also missing the point massively, in that “raising awareness” doesn’t mean I (an able-bodied person) get to trot out my non-consenting family on the internet in the name of Issues, or decide that me posting is better than actually getting they themselves on here to speak.
But here are some things to look at and read:
- Why disability is a feminist issue, from Feminists With Disabilities for a Way Forward. It’s a US-based perspective, but really, you should read it. Edit: this post too.
- A recent case of completely shitty education-based discrimination against a young woman with Down Syndrome. The words of her parents on this one struck a depressingly familiar chord with mine. They’ve had to navigate this sort of bullshit far too often, too.
- Mencap: find out more about what a learning disability is. Over 1.5 million people in the UK have a learning disability, so if you really care about activism and intersectionality of any kind, it’s worth your time. Seriously.
Will you let us in? A five minute film, covering 45 countries.
Read, think, share links around, and have a good week.