An Alphabet of Feminism #22: V is for Vitriol
V
VITRIOL
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (1697)
This Corrosion.
Vitriol is more properly known by its scientific name: sulphuric acid. Or additionally, ‘Any of various sulphates of metallic elements, especially ferrous sulphate.’ The only reason I get to do it for V is because the late c13th had a rather fanciful approach to science (no offence guys), and dubbed this chemical vitriol, from the Latin vitreus (= ‘of glass, glassy’). Cos, in certain states, sulphuric acid looks ‘glassy’. Geddit?? Ahem. Actually, there’s nothing whimsical about vitriol in its everyday life: it’s extremely corrosive (hi, GCSE Chemistry), and has an exothermic reaction with water, basically meaning it dehydrates anything it comes into contact with… but then liberates extra heat through the very process of reacting with water, causing more burns. Nasty.
Catherine de Medici, attributed to Francois Clouet, c.1555
Of course, like its sibling term acid, vitriol is also a lovely little example of a word whose literal and figurative meanings have almost equal prominence in modern English. Thus, around 1769, vitriol started meaning ‘Acrimonious, caustic or scathing speech, criticism or feeling’ and – naturally – this sense was in figurative relation to sulphuric acid’s ‘corrosive’ qualities. These are the same corrosive properties that made sulphuric acid every murderer’s friend throughout criminal history – every Wikipedia fan given to perverse procrastination knows about John George Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer, who dissolved the bodies of his victims in a bath full of acid (but was eventually dobbed in by a couple of stray gallstones and part of a denture)… Shudder.
My pain, your thrill.
Anyway, vitriol has apparently been around since ancient times, but came into prominence during the late c19th, owing to its use as a cleaning product. Of course, since it was suddenly considered fine for trying at home, it was easily purchased at your local chemist by every housewife on her weekly shop.
In this context, I’ve always thought of vitriol as a pendant to arsenic, a household poison used for pest-control, cosmetics and suicide (if you’re French, bourgeois and in a Flaubert novel). Particularly suggestible Victorian women would mix this one with chalk and vinegar to improve their complexion, with occasionally fatal consequences for their hapless spouses. History is correspondingly full of tales of malevolent arsenic-armed females, including the eighteenth-century Mary Blandy, who put it in her father’s tea so she could marry her lover. (In a little pendant of my own: she continued to take tea herself in prison – and to receive visitors for tea – apparently unencumbered by squeamishness, or the leg-irons she had to wear as a murderess on death row).
Vitriol throwing in Le Petit Journal - image from http://theatredamned.blogspot.com/
These cases are part of a long tradition of female poisoners going back to Catherine de Medici and the Emperor Augustus’ wife Livia, both politically powerful women who were the subject of (probably apocryphal) rumours of poisonous ingenuity. Livia supposedly killed Augustus by poisoning figs that were still on the tree (the last in a line of such crimes, if you like a bit of I, Claudius. As everyone should.) and that old gossip-monger Alexandre Dumas describes how Catherine de Medici used to poison casual household objects – ranging from books and gloves to lipsticks – to relieve herself of Inconveniences who just happened to be breathing.
The logic behind this tradition seems clear enough: unaccustomed to the brutalities of war and macho posturing, the female murderer is nonetheless skilled in the arts of household management, food preparation and cosmetics. Her arsenal is correspondingly domestic, and widespread reporting of female poisoners presumably relates to a kind of fear of the unknowably deadly potential of the home (and all it represents), not to mention the oft-observed ‘fact’ that the female of the species will tend towards silent attack, backstabbing and general wiliness when settling her battles. The bitch! Thus, like vitriol, poison too has a transferred sense: to be poisonous is to be ‘deeply malicious, malevolent’ – ‘sly’ – in a way which is almost antonymic to simple ‘brutality’.
Don’t look back in anger.
But in the late 1800s something changed, and there was an apparent epidemic of vitriol throwing in addition to arsenic poisoning – so much so, that it got its own verb: to vitriolize was to ‘throw sulphuric acid at a person with intent to injure’. Thankfully, this verb is now ‘rare’ (although on this, see more below), but its usage was overwhelmingly nineteenth-century. Moreover, a cursory look at newspaper records reveals these were overwhelmingly perceived to be female crimes against an erstwhile lover or a rival. A ‘crime of passion’, in fact, in a way that poisoning (slow and subtle) is not. My pal Stewart has recently started resurrecting the Parisian Grand Guignol, a Parisian theatre of horror whose depiction of acid-throwing was only one of many acts of mutilation presented onstage between 1897-1962, and I’m quoting him quoting Anne-Louise Shapiro:
In the 1880s, vitriol began to acquire the symbolic associations traditionally linked to poison; l’empoisonneuse was joined by a new rhetorical (and actual) figure, the vitrioleuse. […] Women who were dangerous through their very domesticity – who transformed the ordinary and the womanly into the menacing – underscored not only female duplicity but male dependency.
Anne-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in fin-de-siecle Paris
The Grand Guignol play La Baisir dans la Nuit hinges around a disfigured acid victim exercising (literal) eye-for-an-eye revenge on the lover responsible for his wretched state. This sort of thing is perhaps to be expected in a ‘theatre of horror’, but vitriol throwing also appears in the broadly passion-free Sherlock Holmes stories, most fully in the Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924) where the crime in question is perpetrated by a Fallen Woman on her Base Seducer – over ten years after the frequency of cases had prompted calls to make the purchase of vitriol more difficult.
Anyway, this ‘Kitty Winter’ is full of vitriol of both kinds: as Watson puts it, ‘there was an intensity of hatred in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and man never can attain’, and her hysterical ranting and raving against the ‘instrument of her demise’ is – throughout the story – placed in opposition to the calm and aristocratic air of her Don Juan’s next victim. Throughout the story it is made clear that vitriol throwing is the sort of thing possible only for a woman full of a special kind of fury – and, as Watson makes clear, that fury is something ‘man never can attain’. The lambs.
The interesting thing here, of course, is the transition from silent, wily domestic poisons to public acid attacks that hinge around the old adage that ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’ (a misquote from Congreve that endures to this day). This, of course, is a woman armed with vitriol of one kind or another, and the idea was clearly much-repeated, because by the mid-century we also had the word vitriolic, meaning… well… ‘like vitriol’. That said, it is frequently unclear whether this is vitriol in a literal or figurative sense: in 1919 the Sarah Palin of the nineteenth century, Mary Kilbreth (President of the American National Association to Oppose Woman Suffrage), questioned Emmeline Pankhurst’s patriotism on the grounds that Pankhurst and the Suffragettes had led a ‘reign of terror’ that involved ‘bombs, kerosene and vitriol throwing‘, but whether she meant words or household cleaner remains tantalisingly unclear.
Unfortunately, for many around the world today vitriol is all too literal. This article has been interested in exploring the criminal female in history but – in the UK and abroad – acid attacks are still common, particularly (but not exclusively) as part of a culture of ‘honour violence’ directed against women. While it would be disingenuous to suggest exclusivity on either side, it does seem that these are increasingly male-on-female attacks in contrast to the apparent gender-split in the nineteenth century. This article has a rather good summary of the current situation, and recommends places you can find out more, including the Acid Survivors Trust.
NEXT WEEK: W is for Widow
Explain to me about supercars.
No, seriously. If anyone out there has a clue, please write in and explain to me how anyone can consider them ‘cool’. Now, I like a supercar as much as the next person. Wait, scratch that. How can I say I like it? I’ve never driven a supercar. I’ve never touched one. I’ve never even seen one in real life close up. (I will obviously have to make an effort at the next motorshow.) So how can I categorically state: yup, that one there, that’s the one for me, the one with the bright orange paintjob and the rotating guns mounted on the spoiler?
I realise I’ve just finished telling you that I am really quite partial to the Zonda R, but that’s more of an abstract sort of love. I love it like I love Dali – I’ve no idea what’s going on with it, and would feel vaguely disturbed if I did. But to stand up and say, yup, I’d love to own one? No.
And then it melted.
And yet, despite that, I’m having to wage battles over whether or not the Exige – or the Agera, or the One-77 – is cool, uncool or just too uncool for words. My logic, for anyone who is interested, is this: if it looks like it’s something a City banker would drive without a hint of irony, there are no words for how uncool it is. Give it up now.
Actually, I don’t see why I should be having this argument at all, because it’s my fridge, and my fridge magnets, and if I decide to have the Exige in the Uncool section, on my own head be it. And still, out it came – “but look at it! It looks like the Batmobile!”
There is, I suspect, a significant difference between engine enthusiasts and car enthusiasts. Both care about what the car has under the bonnet, but the car enthusiasts also care about whether or not it looks like a Batmobile. Whereas I actively gravitate towards non-Batmobile cars (they don’t go with my handbag).
Anyway, the point is, I’ve now had a few driving lessons, and have therefore been thinking about what car I would hypothetically buy once I pass my driving test (and before I move to my castle, complete with moat). Meanwhile, my instructor was telling me to stop giving way to people (why? They were busy and going somewhere, whereas I was driving in circles!) and hold my ground. I had to stop being so cooperative, otherwise I would be ‘forever taken advantage of’.
While I was thinking about being less cooperative, I was cut up by a bloke driving a royal blue Ferrari. I can’t swear as to the model, due to the extreme speed at which he almost ran me off the road, but its sloping front looked rather like a Ferrari Daytona. Suffice to say I was rather surprised to see one in Clapham, and even more surprised to nearly have it embed itself in the side of the Fiat 500 I was desperately trying not to stall.
Ah, I thought. That is what I’m supposed to do. That raw, unbridled aggre-
“Was that the same Ferrari I saw on the roundabout a few minutes ago?” my instructor asked. I wouldn’t know, since at the time I was trying to remember which turn I was meant to be taking. But if so –
“Why is that bloke driving around pointlessly?”
As several Very Busy Persons behind me decided to improve my driving skills by honking their horns and pointing out that I should have allowed the Daytona-alike and my little Fiat to merge rather than braking and therefore delaying them by 3.4 seconds, I pondered the problem of the supercar. Even a Ferrari seemed a little pointless in South London. Surely anyone who drove one would either have to buy their own corner of Monte Carlo, or would otherwise have to face running for a pint of milk in something that looks like it should ram other cars for daring to share road space.
There’s a reason I’m going to have to learn to rebuild an engine. (Image via alfaromeowallpaper.info)
I’m going to have to decline. I’d much rather drive something that didn’t automatically make people hate me from miles away.
I’ve settled on an Alfa 166. No, it’s not a supercar.
It’s better.
HPV Vaccines: Cervarix vs Gardasil
Before launching into this I want to preface what I say with this: Public health is a complex issue; there is a finite amount of money to be allocated and the long term cost/benefit analyses are by no means straightforward. Organisations like NICE have to make some occasionally very tough decisions, and sometimes good treatments have to be left out of guidelines because they would deprive other areas of resources judged to have a greater beneficial impact. With that said, on to an issue of current importance, in which NHS guidelines may well be letting a lot of people down.
Gardasil vial, via Wikimedia Commons. This is what we
Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections. HPV symptoms include outbreaks of genital warts, and several of the strains (primarily types 16 and 18, which account for roughly 1 in 20 infections according to CDC statistic) are responsible for the majority of cervical cancer cases. Cervical cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths amongst women worldwide, particularly in developing nations.
So when vaccines that protect against the high-risk strains of HPV became available in 2008 it was a good thing, yes? A concerted vaccination program would reduce new infections, see a decrease in cervical cancer diagnoses over the next 15-20 years, and save millions of pounds in public health spending on pap smears, right? Well, sort of. The issue here is that there are two vaccines available, Gardasil from Merck and Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline. Whilst both protect against strains 16 and 18, Cervarix does not provide any protection against the non-cancerous strains responsible for genital warts. Gardasil, by contrast, also protects against strains 6 and 11, which cause 90% of genital wart cases. Gardasil also has a rather high list price of £240 per person, whereas the makers of Cervarix have significantly undercut their list price in an unreleased contract with the NHS.
In countries such as Australia, that have taken up Gardasil, there has been a 75% decrease in new cases of genital warts over the last three years; the UK, over the same period, has seen no difference in the number of new cases. Whilst women aged 16-19 are the group most affected by this, the issue is one that matters to everybody: greater uptake of the vaccine increases herd immunity, protecting those who haven’t been vaccinated as well (for the same time period cases in unvaccinated heterosexual males fell by one third in countries using Gardasil).
So, and this is the problem, we’re now offered a vaccine that provides no protection against genital warts, and almost no information about the alternative (I could find just one mention of Gardasil on the NHS’s HPV vaccination page here ). Those in the know are seeking out Gardasil through private clinics, whilst the majority, arguably including those most at risk of infection, are left in the dark.
“We, as consultants in sexual health, have been told to say nothing publicly that would damage the current vaccine programme, as the Cervarix vaccine has already been purchased. We have had to be circumspect in public but in private we have all purchased Gardasil for our own children and advised colleagues to do the same.” – Dr. Colm O’Mahony and Dr. Steve Taylor
This is leading us into a split system whereby those who can are taking the greater protection of Gardasil, and everyone else is getting Cervarix. This is, I think, neither a reasonable nor efficient use of NHS funding, and somewhat gives the lie to health secretary Andrew Lansley’s promise of “no decision about you without you.”
Treatment of genital warts costs the NHS £31 million annually and takes trained staff away from time that could be spent on other serious conditions. It is difficult to gauge how this balances against the savings from sticking with the cheaper Cervarix, because the NHS will not release the details of their contract with GSK. With the contract coming up for renewal now is the time when Lansley needs to reveal the details of the contract, involve the public in the decision, and provide more accessible information regarding Gardasil.
Why is this relevant on a feminist blog? Fair access to this information (and related sexual health matters) is vitally important to women (and indeed to men). We all need to be equipped to not only make the best decisions for our own sexual health but also to campaign for those in the most at risk groups — who are currently being let down by the lack of information provided by the NHS. The choice of vaccine is an important issue that will effect tens of thousands of lives every year, and it is one the public needs to be involved in.
(Here’s the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV’s press release on the issue, which has links to some relevant papers.)
(Re)Branding Feminism
CC picture by Gerard Stolk, 2011
“Great brands tell stories. They’re a mix of truth and symbols.” Brand strategist Alison Camps kicked off the (Re)Branding Feminism conference on 1st March with an introduction to the concept of branding, and some examples from her career. The one she selected as a case study with particular relevance for feminism was Skoda in the early 1990s: the “brand from hell.”
The conference was very firmly about considering representations of modern feminism and not making plans about how best to ‘sell’ feminism to the masses. I’m a persuader by trade, so I have a practical interest in how best to present feminism to an indifferent, sceptical or rabidly hostile audience. But I also love my gender theory, so a spot of academic inquiry made a nice change from activism, and I was sad I could only attend the first day.
Mothers and daughters and sisters, oh my!
My favourite paper was Jean Owen’s ‘Of feminism born’, which looked at the prevalence and problems of using familial metaphors in the feminist movement. The political concept of sisterhood began as a strategy of resistance to masculine structures of patriarchy and ‘brotherhood’. It is undeniably powerful, especially for women that have experienced the isolation of being the lone feminist voice in their community. But sisterhood has become a “universalising metaphor” that “implies an all-encompassing, somewhat stifling organisation”. And now that feminism is intergenerational, parental hierarchies have re-emerged – we are not only sisters but cultural mothers and daughters of feminism.
Through this way of talking about ourselves, Owen argued, we risk “pandering to fantasies of a matriarchy” and create a falsely cosy, sentimentalised idea of what is in reality a diverse and radical movement. In my experience, contemporary feminism already has tremendous respect for previous generations, but by formalising it in this way we undermine our own project of equality and put in place privileged feminist ‘bloodlines’. Owen advises that “we need to remove ourselves from the trap of family” and predicate our movement on a “more involved social model”.
I agree with all of this. In fact, my main problems with ‘sisterhood’ are that this language pretty definitively excludes men and reinforces the gender binary that I want to dismantle. That’s a long-term goal, by the way. Short-term is sorting out some of the urgent problems in the current system.
Selling feminism
Catherine Redfern (of Reclaiming the F Word, and, um, The F Word fame) spoke about the cyclical nature of calls to rebrand feminism, which can be measured in women’s magazine features. The call makes a couple of big assumptions: that feminism is in crisis and that applying marketing principles will help.
Redfern calmly exploded the first theory by referencing the research for her book with Kristin Aune which showed that feminism is a growing, thriving movement, and questioned the second. Mainstream representations of feminism are too narrow, and don’t reflect the pluralism of the movement. But the F Word survey showed that women became feminists when they learned about feminism, and not when it was packaged with a free lipgloss. Who is a feminist because it’s fashionable? Surely we are insulting young women somewhat by trying to package it as something ‘cool’.
The other papers were very interesting, and included a brief history of the stiletto heel, a smart analysis of those Suit Supply ads and the ‘desire of indifference’ and an introduction to the Brinkley Girl. But the only one which directly commented on the idea of ‘branding’ feminism was from Catherine Maffioletti, who made some good points about the tension between the “wild and divided” nature of feminism and the patriarchal (and capitalist) project of naming and fixing its meaning in a saleable product. As Maffioletti said, “branding difference is an impossible project”. Feminism is “emergent”, “a mobilising force”, something alive and oppositional that can’t be pinned down, boxed up and sold.
I’m not a marketer, but…
As the day went on I started to feel the burden of pragmatism weighing on my shoulders and spoiling the fun, as it often does. There’s a little voice inside me always wanting to know: what are we going to do about this? What’s the plan? That’s not what the conference was about, but I started wondering about practical applications.
I think a serious attempt to ‘rebrand’ feminism would be madness, because it is “wild and divided”; it’s plural and adaptable, and means too many different things to too many people, and I’m nearly ready to argue that’s one of its strengths. As Catherine Redfern pointed out, feminism is a leaderless grassroots movement; who would have the audacity to try and redefine it?
But I reckon that as individual feminists and as groups of feminists, we could do a lot more to broaden representations of feminism, to counter the negative stereotypes, to make the case more effectively without letting the end run away with the means.
You don’t have to call it marketing. It’s as simple as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, understanding their criticisms and concerns and addressing them, learning what they want, and showing them how you can help.
Or if that sounds too cuddly, you can call it propaganda.
A two-for-the-price-of-one music-inspired Found Feminism, from our ed Miranda.
Image source: www.towntalk.co.uk
We like it when people we think are cool come out as feminists, or even just express views broadly in line with feminist ideas. It makes us feel cool. And if we can’t feel cool, we don’t wanna be part of the revolution. More seriously, it’s important to celebrate that folk come to feminism through all sorts of different routes and in their own time.
Whenever a person has a feminist revelation of the sort that we might think is obvious (such as the lack of good female role models in certain music genres), instead of going “well, duh?!” and getting cross, here at BR Towers we go “hey, yeah! Grab a drink and join the party.”
First up, Jade Puget, guitarist for chart-topping emo-punksters AFI and one half of EBM/dance project Blaqk Audio, realises there are barely any women in his beloved electronica.
I was reading one of my computer/electronic music nerd alert magazines today and I noticed that every one of these acclaimed electronic producers is male. I realized that the electronic music scene is almost completely male-dominated. …. we need a lady-led revolution in the scene, girls making ill breakbeat hardcore, wobbly dubstep basslines, 20 minute psybient epics.
Next, Hayley Williams, lead singer in chart-topping emo-pop-rockers Paramore, declares that she’s researching Riot Grrrl.
After finishing “Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story”.. I’m currently reading this book. Mostly to satisfy my thirst for knowledge on the Riot Grrrl Movement in the 90’s and bands such as Bikini Kill and Bratmobile. But I’m finding more and more that I wish my 13 year old self could’ve read it. Girls, women, ladies: check it out!
Both posts may have been up a little while, but finding them at the same time brought a smile. I love that both of these excerpts reveal the demand for women past and present in the music business, and that rather than merely noting absences they are positive calls for action, alongside ways to get involved.
- 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. Send your finds to [email protected]!
An Alphabet of Feminism #21: U is for Uterus
U
UTERUS
There are some letters in the dictionary that are more Latinate than others. In consequence, u, v and, to an extent, o are largely dominated by medical terminology (because doctors, bless ’em, love a bit of Caecilius est in horto).
In Utero
Sexy tudors. Henry VIII, after Holbein.
Uterus derives from a Latin homonym meaning ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, with reference to the proto-Indo European udero (= ‘abdomen’), and, possibly, a Slavic usage, vedro, meaning ‘bucket’. Much like the ‘bucket’ (and indeed the shape of the letter u with which the word commences), the first sense of uterus is as a vessel – ‘the organ in which the young are conceived, developed and protected till birth; the female organ of gestation; the womb’.
Much has been made of this ‘protective’ element – it has been frequently observed that the ‘fetal’ position babies adopt to fill the uterus endures into adulthood as a comforting or even instinctual reaction to anxiety, pain, distress or cold – a kind of retrospective communion with the mother’s body. This sort of thing, it seems, is not above a bit of marketing, and the uterus is often invoked as a place of calm, darkness and peace.
Opposed to this, we have the sort of ambiguity nowhere better demonstrated than through tanks. (yes, tanks). The Mark I tank, the world’s first combat tank, was renamed from ‘Big Willie’ to ‘Mother’ (…), and its successors were colloquially dubbed ‘Mother’ throughout both world wars. The reasons are obvious: the inside of a tank is small, hot and protective. Childlike, a crew could be forgiven for considering themselves invincible within it – yet once the fuel tank is hit, the men inside suffer a hideous, incestuous death, incinerated by their own machine. This sort of thing runs right the way through conceptions of the mother’s body, particularly in psychoanalysis, which is never tired of exposing the deeply conflictual nature of many mother-child relationships, and with mapping those onto the cisgendered female body – we might think particularly of Melanie Klein’s famous ‘good breast’ and ‘bad breast’. If we’re going there.
HOWEVER. BACK TO THE RENAISSANCE. In its early incarnations in English this ‘womb’ is rarely so clearly gendered (as you may remember, King Lear thinks he has one), and, true to its ambiguous etymology, early modern minds frequently considered the uterus to be a generic bodily pouch. Thus it was often conflated with the gender-neutral belly (ah, Isidore of Seville), and in this form it was thought to be proof of the body’s retentive faculties. So even when considered as a specifically reproductive organ, the thinking went, the uterus still resembles the digestive system in how long it takes to do its business, since it creates infants over a leisurely period of nine months. While I doubt it takes quite that long for your morning Alpen, digestion is certainly something of a gradual process – consider, if you will, the hangover.
Horn of Plenty
If you remember the Alphabet post on ovary (to which this is in many ways a companion), you may also remember that until the seventeenth century sex organs were considered to have analogues across the genders (penis = vagina, labia = foreskin and uterus = scrotum). Along with its reproductive and sack-like qualities – I am reminded of the beautifully named ‘Mermaid’s Purses‘ – in this model the uterus also matches the scrotum in its creative properties. After all, reproduction is six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.
But this was not just something tossed around in the Renaissance lab and subsequently ignored: the scrotum-uterus comparison actually spread into what we might consider a bizarre arena – fashion. I am, of course, talking about the codpiece, ‘a bagged appendage to the front of the breeches; often conspicuous’. This was a sartorial fave of Henry VIII (above, right), who clearly took his outfits very seriously – but I note that sexy Jonathan Rhys Meyers has avoided the sexy codpiece throughout the BBC’s Sexy Tudors. Too sexy?
Originally a modesty device to get round the, ahem, ‘shortcomings’ of the hose, this strange appendage quickly grew to a size that redefined it as a disturbing kind of hyper-masculine power-dressing. Yet the word derives from the Old English codd (+ piece), which came to mean ‘testicles’ in early Medieval times (quite possibly because of exactly this phenomenon) but originally meant simply ‘a bag, pouch or husk’. Indeed, the codpiece was frequently dubbed a belly, and, through fun with synonyms, the womb could become a cod: my good friend Thomas Laqueur highlights the Pardoner’s exclamation ‘O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod!’, in the Canterbury Tales, and also points out that the codpiece quickly started to resemble…(I like this bit)… ‘a finely embroidered and bejewelled horn of plenty’.
Horn.
So it seems that, while Henry VII might not thank you for it, we could observe that this most macho of garments is in fact drawing attention to the womb-like, generative, and retentive properties of what lurks within (which, of course, it also helped protect – gender-ambiguous Russian dolls, anyone?). Indeed, glancing at a couple of examples in portraiture, a lot of these men look rather like they have an artificially constructed uterus poised over their genitalia (love how he’s pointing, just in case we miss it). Less Blackadder, more… actually, I don’t know what that is.
Bag for Life
But, of course, eventually someone had to seize on anatomical differences to posit a definition of gender, and thus it that (around 1615) the uterus started to be considered something exclusively female – as regular readers will be aware, this was a chain that began with independent naming of the organ in question and eventually reached the pitches of hysteria in the nineteenth century. There is also a strange quasi-legal term, uterine, apparently first spotted in the seventeenth century but not dictionary-cited until 1816, meaning ‘related through the mother’. Thus, ‘the property devolves to his brothers or uterine uncles’, with the body of the mother here serving a dynastic link, since all these uncles can be proved to have shared a uterus. They could even be half-brothers, since an alternative meaning for uterine is ‘having the same mother, but not the same father’. Working on a similar premise, if you are particularly toolish, and your sister has a son, you would (in pre-paternity test times) have been best off leaving your money to your nephew: his link to you is purely uterine, unlike your link to your son, who could be anyone’s spawn.
As we draw near the end of the Alphabet series, threads begin to resolve themselves. Uterus has been the final word of three (hysteria and ovary were the other two) all of which address the issue of mapping the cisgendered female body. Following the three, we have seen a model of sex and gender that does not conform with what many experience as the current status quo. Conversely, the distinction between genders does not seem to have been primarily based on the body until the nineteenth century (or even later). Thus, we have seen women turning into men with comparatively little contemporary comment, the female orgasm (and in some cases her entire sexual appetite) vanish from the everyday realities of heterosexual sex, and now, and perhaps most bizarrely, an epidemic of hyper-masculine men apparently walking around with giant uteri affixed over their genitalia. (Yes, I did just say ‘uteri’). Perhaps this is worth thinking about…
NEXT WEEK: V is for Vitriol
The Census Says I Don’t Exist
Dear darling BadRep readers, I’m not happy. Let me avail your face of the reason why.
If you live in Britain, you’ll have noticed that you’ve had a census posted to you. As you should all be aware (but don’t worry if you’re not – I didn’t know about it until this year!) the census takes stock of all the citizens of the British Isles, their means, whats and wherefores, and then the government looks at it and goes, “Hmm! Based on the fact that we have this many of these people, we’ll spend our money this way.”
So it’s actually quite important that the data gathered is accurate.
Imagine my disgust, then, when I turned to page whatever-it-is where it asked me:
What is your sex?
[ ] Male [ ] Female
You read that right. There’s just the box to state your “sex”, and there’s only two boxes, and there’s no mention whatsoever of gender anywhere.
Now, anyone capable of thought will realise that sex is distinct and non-prescriptive of gender, and gender is not binary. Indeed, neither are binary. For the census to merely ask the (binary) “sex” of the British people is to erase the identities of the numerous trans* and Intersex Brits. What the fuck are we meant to put? Do we tick both? Do we add another box? Do we just shun the whole thing altogether? If there’s a define-own space for religion, why not for gender?
How are we ever meant to glean accurate data on how many trans* and Intersex people we have living here in the British Isles if there’s no room for them on the bloody census?!
Therefore, I have the following favour to ask of you: if you are living in Britain, have access to a telephone and some excess bile going, give the census helpline a call and complain. If no-one speaks up about this, they will never know. And if we can’t fix 2011’s census, it may well be fixed next time from our shouting this time around.
Edited to add: I’ve been informed that there’s a Facebook event to pass around right here, if you’re Facebookly-inclined, and a friend of mine, who has actually bled some sense from the person they were on the phone to, has reported that they really don’t know how to handle this, and that if you tick both “male” and “female”, you CANNOT be fined for not providing information, although you may get a phone call to check the data and see how it can be incorporated. Result! For best results, though, combine both – tick both boxes and call them to vent your spleen. The T is not silent, people.
Unsung Heroes: Jackie Cochran
DETERMINED STARE OF AWESOME, 1943
Flying is for many people an utterly terrifying prospect. The loss of control, the unshakable awareness of all that distance between you and the ground, the realisation that you’re strapped into a thin metal tube hurtling along at hundreds of miles an hour, and the knowledge that if something does go wrong you almost certainly won’t walk away from it. It’s no wonder a lot of people have a fear of flying.
Jacqueline Cochran, on the other hand, quite distinctly did not have any fears when it came to taking to the air. Even today, a full thirty years after her death, she still holds more aviation records and firsts than any other pilot, ever.
Born some time in the early 20th century (the details of her birth are somewhat unclear – she was raised by a foster family and didn’t know her own date of birth), Cochran lived at a time when aviation was vastly more dangerous than it is now. Radios? Safety precautions? Reliable engineering? Stuff and nonsense. Those were just the far-flung dreams of futurists. To illustrate the perils of early aviation, consider the first US Air Mail service, which during the first couple of years of operation, saw the death of fully half its 40 pilots.
Combine the expense and danger of flying with growing up in poverty and having minimal education, and it seems Jackie Cochran had little or no chance of ever taking to the air. This, however, is failing to account for her quite remarkable levels of determination, and refusal to take any nonsense from anyone. In one interview she recounts an experience working in a textile mill, aged perhaps 10 or 11.
I didn’t see him coming, but a foreman was suddenly over me and pinching me in a way that no little girl should ever be pinched. My reaction was immediate and not surprising. My fist flew up and I hit him squarely on the nose. Hard. He jumped back and then rushed away, shocked. He never touched me again.
– Jackie Cochran
Climbing out of her plane at the 1938 Bendix Air Race
Cochran applied this same attitude to her flying lessons. Having been told that learning to fly would take two to three months, she accepted a wager from her future husband, Floyd Odlum, that she couldn’t complete it in just six weeks. Three weeks later she finished flight school and got her wings. Within months she was entering some of the world’s most prestigious air races.
A decade later she took this same determination into the US military. Having previously worked with the British Air Transport Auxiliary and been the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic, Cochran proceeded to gather evidence to back her claim that female pilots were more than capable of filling all the domestic flight roles left empty during the war. With her experience training women to fly for the ATA, and drive to see them made a part of the Army Air Corps, Cochran eventually oversaw the creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of just over a thousand pilots who collectively would cover 60,000,000 miles in every kind of military aircraft.
Following the war, Cochran upgraded to piloting jet engined aircraft and set one of her many records, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier. Flying a modified Canadian jet up to over 45,000 feet, she made a dive towards the ground, not quite managing to break the barrier on her first attempt. When asked when she’d like to make a second attempt, Cochran reportedly responded “Let’s go right now!” The second attempt did the trick, a sonic boom echoing over the landscape as Cochran accelerated her jet towards the ground and passed Mach 1. Consider for a moment just how nerve-wracking an experience it has to be, accelerating a thin metal tube towards the ground from 45,000 feet, trying to get up faster than almost anyone had ever gone. Then consider just how badass you have to be to do that twice in one day, because the first time just wasn’t quite fast enough.
What other records and achievements did Cochran manage? Alongside a list of speed and altitude records long enough to keep us here for several days, she was also the first pilot to ever make a ‘blind’ landing using only instruments, and the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask. She was the first woman to enter the prestigious Bendix Trans-continental Air Race, and the first to win it, along with many other famously difficult air races throughout her career. Perhaps her most especially daring records were set during her flights of the F-104 Starfighter, in which she set no less than three speed records in the space of a month.
The F-104 was a staggeringly dangerous craft to fly. In the first 18 months of its use the German Air Force had 85 fatal incidents involving them, earning it the nickname ‘The Widowmaker’. When a plane is killing off pilots at a rate of almost two a week you have to be exceptionally brave to climb into the cockpit even once, and exceedingly skillful to survive the experience often enough to set a handful of world records. Jackie Cochran was both.
In addition to her contributions to aviation Cochran maintained a successful cosmetics business (indeed, it was to promote her ‘Wings’ line of cosmetics that she initially learned to fly). Following the war she poured a lot of her time and money into charitable causes, particularly those providing education and opportunity for those coming from impoverished backgrounds. Whilst she never gained the fame or attention of Amelia Earhart (whose organisation of female pilots, The Ninety-Nines, Cochran presided over between 1941 and 1943), Cochran left a legacy as a successful businesswoman and one of the most daring and important pilots to have lived.
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Too much badass to fit in the camera frame: Jackie (centre) and a load of trainee WASPs
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting awesome people we never learned about at school.
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Rob Mulligan blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes.
Want a sexy car? Buy a Volvo
According to X & Y Communications, an agency (apparently) specialising in the impact of gender differences on business, women ask themselves one fundamental question when contemplating the purchase of a car. Is it the price?, I hear you wonder. Is it the safety rating, or the fuel efficiency?
No. It’s: “Will it make me look hotter when I step out of it outside a bar or restaurant?”
Yes, the main thing that will make a woman decide on a particular car is how ‘hot’ she feels in it. Telegraph writer Neil Lyndon – bemoaning the fact that his wife’s friend opted for a car she liked and he deemed useless – goes on to tell us all about the new Citroën DS3, decorated by graphic artist Orla Kiely. Now you really will be able to match your car to your handbag. Isn’t that snazzy, girls? All your tricksy car decisions solved by this one simple, fashionable step!
The new Citroën DS3 - if I use the Orla Kiely design, can I have this racing version? Image (c) CarsRoute.com
According to Lyndon, his wife’s divorced friend ignored all sensible, practical considerations when making her car choice, and simply went for a pretty French hatchback. Because that’s what women do, of course: we go for the pretty option despite it possibly being on fire.
The thing is – and this will come as no surprise to those familiar with his prior work – Lyndon is talking complete twaddle. According to AutoEbid.com’s Help Me Choose a New Car function, you can choose from six factors when trying to find the perfect car for you. They are: Comfort, Styling, Handling, Depreciation, Economy, and Safety. The price is a liming criterion: the thing that helps you to narrow your choice, rather than the main principle of selection. In fact, unless you are going into the market with an extremely limited amount of money, the cost of the car will only ever help you to select a class, or possibly a financing option. Put it another way: no one will switch from a brand-new Fiat 500 to a second-hand Volvo XC90, even though both can be had for roughly £10k.
So how do people choose cars, then, if it’s not the price?
1. First and foremost, functionality. What are you going to use the car for? If you have five children that will need running to school every morning, you will probably end up with that Volvo. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for an urban runabout, something small and easy to park is probably better.
2. Up there as a consideration is styling: you want it to look good. In fact, certain TV shows have gone so far as to have an entire segment over whether a car is ‘cool’ or not. The guide there, by the way, is whether a cool person would drive it. Perhaps X & Y Communications neglected to canvas the Top Gear audience in their research.
3. The last, all encompassing question is: I live with it? This includes things like reliability, fuel economy, ability to park it in London, whether the suspension will destroy your spine the first time you drive over road-humps.
The ‘price’ question helps to narrow your options, and, on occasion, to disabuse you of the notion that you really could afford to buy a supercar if you sell the house and both kidneys.
The key question Lyndon ignored was what his wife’s friend wanted in a car: she wanted a cute little urban runabout that would cheer her up in the mornings. Put simply, she wanted that ‘new car’ feeling: you’ve chosen well, your car looks good, and you love it more than it is natural to love an inanimate object. If she was a man lovingly polishing his vintage (decrepit) Rolls, Lyndon would have smiled indulgently.
What Lyndon is bemoaning is not women’s tendency to pick cars that make them look good – we all do that. No one has ever looked at a car and thought, “sure, it’s beautiful, but given the choice I’d go for the ugly, uncomfortable one on the left.” Our budgets and priorities may vary, but the intent remains the same. You buy the thing that makes you feel happy when you’re inside it. Lyndon seems to have forgotten that, or have momentarily blanked out all car adverts, ever. It’s such an established cliché that car makers can now produce meta-tastic pastiches of previous ads and we lap it up. Check out this Volvo V60 “How to make a sexy car advert” clip:
When you sell a lifestyle, of course you’re going to sell a cool, stylish one. Only a fool would try to market a boring car for boring people.
I'm told it has great fuel economy. Image (c) NewCarNet
Of course, that’s really the thing Lyndon is taking an issue with. He wanted his wife’s friend to go away and make a list of her requirements, and bring back the top three cars that fulfilled them. He would then counsel her to make the reasoned, practical decision. She wanted to buy a cool hatchback following a messy divorce. The thing is, women going through messy divorces are not meant to want cool hatchbacks. They’re not meant to want anything funky or stylish. They should be worried about making ends meet, and where the rent is coming from, and how they’re going to get to work now that their ex-husband has custody of the car. No divorced woman should want to look or feel attractive, and she certainly shouldn’t be be gallivanting around bars or restaurants. I could choose this point to make a catty comment about how Lyndon left his wife for another woman, published a book railing against the “universal dominance of feminism” and has since been struggling to rebuild his career.
Lyndon’s article reveals nothing about gender or, indeed, about car choice (and I highly doubt the odious Mr Lyndon chose his own car based on a set of requirements and flowcharts). All it shows us is how deep his prejudices still lie: a woman who is hard up and urgently needs a car should not, in Lyndon’s world, get to make that sort of choice. Having asked his advice, she should have acknowledged his superiority and allowed him to select one for her. After all, her preference for a “chic little French-made hatchback” instantly indicated to him that she must not have the know-how to do it herself.
And as for the Citroën DS3, the target of Lyndon’s ire: well, it’s not doing too badly, despite Lyndon’s contempt. It’s just been named Top Gear Magazine‘s 2010 Car of the Year.
Bring Back the Parade
International Women's Day parade in traditional dress in Po, Burkina Faso, 8 March 2009. Photo writer's own
One of my oldest memories as a small child in Bulgaria is making a fuss over my mother on International Women’s Day. I remember making cards in school, and learning poems, and generally being really impatient to grow up so I would get to have a fuss made over me, too. Sure, there was Children’s Day, but it wasn’t a patch on Women’s Day. They got a bloody parade. A parade! Soon I, too, would grow up, and get to have a parade. Or possibly a statue. I hadn’t decided.
Of course, my innocent dreams of grandeur were all for nought. A few years later we moved to the UK, and Women’s Day was banished to a vague memory of communism and its weird ideas. I got Mothering Sunday instead. The first time I opted for Mothering Sunday flowers and brunch instead of the usual Women’s Day, my mother thought I’d forgotten and burst into tears. Explaining I’d switched allegiance to a movable feast instead of a fixed day didn’t seem to win me many fans. And my father seemed relieved that he didn’t have to observe it, since, he pointed out, she was his wife and not his mother.
Now, look. Those first tremulous years of transition were admittedly ropey, and it took a while for everyone to settle into their assigned roles. Mum yields to brunches and jewellery more easily now, and hasn’t demanded a formal poem or performative dance for the longest time. And my brother just signs his name next to mine on the card. But that’s not really the point.
I’m starting to think we shouldn’t have made the transition in the first place. International Women’s Day was a celebration of being female, and an acknowledgement of women’s roles and contributions to society. One of the famous women we learned about in school was Valentina Tereshkova (sans tragic end), and I remember presenting my school teacher with a carefully constructed posy to acknowledge her position as educator. Admittedly, this was all orchestrated and ultimately about the glory of communism, so there are problems with it. But despite all that, I took from those few years of observing Women’s Day a sense of pride at being female, and an impatience to be a woman.
So let’s look at Mothering Sunday. Where to start? It’s a familial observance – you’re nice to your own mother to make up for setting the kitchen on fire that one time, and 24 hours of labour et cetera – and I’m under no obligation to be nice to any mothers I meet on my way home. Especially if they’re pushing those 4×4 buggies. Also, it’s a presents-and-flowers day, where you buy gifts to show appreciation for being born and suckled and generally not dropped on your head. No one is actually expecting you to do anything differently the next day, your duties discharged with a pink book on frills and a wilted bouquet.
Finally – and perhaps damningly – it only acknowledges one aspect of femininity. Mothering Sunday elevates mothering to the pinnacle of womanhood. What happens if your mother – much as you love her – just isn’t very good at this mothering malarkey? She tries her best, but curing cancer or trekking across the Arctic takes up a lot of time. I’m betting she feels a little silly looking at that cat illustration now.
There are other problems. What about other women you owe great debts of gratitude to? What about the grandmothers, aunts, stepmothers, big sisters, best friends, teachers, mentors and supporters who cheerlead you throughout your life? Maybe we should have a separate day for each of them. I, for one, am looking forward to observing Second Cousin Twice Removed Day. They always threw the best parties.
I find it problematic to have motherhood as the only aspect of womanhood that is nationally acknowledged. I find it problematic to have motherhood as a system of gratitude predicated upon familial links, rather than as an acknowledgement by society as a whole. Finally, I find it bloody annoying that my own accomplishments will not be acknowledged or celebrated by anyone, least of all in a parade. Quite frankly, sometimes I think that I – and all the amazing women I see around me – deserve a parade. And why not? It happens elsewhere in the world. Two years ago I was in the small town of Po, in southern Burkina Faso, on 8th March. The reason I was wandering around the country and not busy with an abacus is because International Women’s Day is a Bank Holiday there. And not just there.
Here comes the parade... International Women's Day parade begins in Po, Burkina Faso, 8 March 2009. Photo writer's own
In China, Russia and large parts of Africa, International Women’s Day still flourishes. Even in places such as Iran there are still people eager to celebrate women’s contributions and to show solidarity. There are still parades, and recitals, and girls waiting impatiently to grow up and have a day to be proud of being female. You could argue that, in the UK, many women would feel proud of being female much more often than that. You could point towards exam results, or women’s achievements, or women’s contribution to UK society.
You’d be wrong, I think. Of course, women achieve all of these things in the UK, and more. But when are these achievements acknowledged or celebrated?
When they give birth – and, a few months later, get their first pink Mother’s Day card.
Keep your cards and glitter pens. Bring back the parades.
Carry your banner with pride: International Women's Day parade