At The Movies: RED
There are two things I want to get out of the way before I start telling you about the film today. Firstly:
*** There are spoilers in this!***
Oh man. Three things, then. Three things. Second thing is, I am a dangerously massive fanboy for Warren Ellis. I don’t really like going into a film already biased either for or against its artistic merits, but I was practically eating my own face with anticipation for this one.
And thirdly, I am also madly in love with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman. Helen Mirren is so badass I don’t know if I want to be her best friend or be her. Morgan Freeman’s voice alone turns me into a glowing pillar of delight. The mere fact that they are near each other, in the same shot sometimes, in RED (they’re on the poster! Both of them! Simultaneously!) is like cinematographical manna from heaven being fed directly into my brain through a glee tube.
So please remember that this film was seen through the eyes of what was basically a person fully transformed into a ziggurat of pure fandom; an obelisk of moist-eyed admiration. Consequently, any words that have issued from my fingers as I type this have been vetted for inappropriate levels of fanboy, but I can’t promise that I’ll have caught all of them. I can promise, however, that I have done my best.
But first off – and I’d really like to get this out of the way, because I think we all noticed it, didn’t we – there’s one scene that made me actually shout “NO!” in the cinema and made people look at me in disgust (sorry, Vue Cambridge!).
Okay. The scene is this: Helen Mirren’s character, Victoria, gets shot in the abdomen in such a way that she genuinely thinks her life is at stake, and she prepares for a final showdown, unarmed and bleeding from the gut, and then! a man saves her. He literally sweeps her off her combat-booted feet and whisks her off to safety.
This is a cliché that we have ingrained into our social consciousness as thoroughly and as needlessly fictionally as “frogs turn into princes when adequately tongued.” “Woman cannot save self; man saves woman.” At least the frog-kissing trope doesn’t then translate across into how people commonly regard frogs. But this “women are crap and need saving” bollocks translates, doesn’t it? You get it everywhere, from fairytales to adverts; this pointless, condescending infantilism. This is a point at which I would like to refer you to Bill Bailey’s magnificent “Beautiful Ladies” song, which tears the piss out of this trope perfectly.
Beautiful ladies, in emergency situations!
Beautiful ladies are lovely, but sometimes they don’t take care
They’re too busy with their makeup, or combing their lovely hair
To take basic safety precautions.
The most aggravating thing about it is that – well, okay, some viewers may find that it made the re-emergence of this cliché less annoying – Helen Mirren kicks fourteen types of arse in this. She has a free-mounted machine gun. She blasts her way through waves of drones with John Malkovich meekly in the background handing her more guns. She explicitly changes out of her heels into a nice pair of combat boots to handle the violence. She knows surgery and hides guns under flower-arranging. So, for me, to have her punctured and enlimpened like a party balloon just made me want to cry.
And then she SMASHED STUFF
That said, I was so delighted by her character that I was genuinely pleased that she’d been saved, rather than sacrificed. So the getting-saved-by-a-man was more pleasing to me than if she hadn’t, and been left to die, but she’s an epic-level character! She shouldn’t be shot down by a faceless NPC1 in the first place!
So there’s that.
On the whole, though, RED absolutely delighted me. The dialogue is hilarious, the action sequences beautifully shot and choreographed, and the whole thing is a visual feast. The characters are chunky and believable – yes, including The Girl, the love interest, the object of obsession – and while they’re all deeply flawed in some critical respect, they’re likeable.
Let’s take Bruce Willis’s character, Frank. He’s the hero. He’s badass in pretty much every respect, but his treatment of The Love Interest, Sarah (Mary Louise Parker), at the beginning is absolutely repulsive. We are right by her side when she makes a bid for escape – it doesn’t matter if what he says is best for her and that we’ve seen his house shot to pieces, the fact of the matter is that he has BROKEN INTO HER HOUSE AND KIDNAPPED HER. As she says, “You can’t just go around duct-taping people”. And we can absolutely sympathise with her. She’s just an ordinary person. And you can’t just go around duct-taping people.
I actually loved her to bits. She felt like someone I knew, and the scene where she brazens her way out of a Situation In A Lift is a spectacular testament to how ordinary people can rise to a challenge. She’s great. Also, that’s a very gratifying example of her saving Frank.
Interestingly, this film was given an opportunity to pass the Bechdel Test. Sarah and Victoria are left alone in the snow, while Victoria takes aim at some kneecaps with a sniper rifle. They discuss Frank. And then Victoria threatens to kill Sarah and hide the body. So it had this whole assenting-to-trope/subversion thing going on. The opportunity was there! But sadly missed! But I think it also does just go to show that a film doesn’t have to pass the Bechdel Test to also have brilliant female characters in (and visa versa: Sex And The City 2 springs to mind…).
Because it does, you know. It’s not just Sarah and Victoria (HELENNNN) that are brilliant in this; a tiny bit-part background character with no name gets held at gunpoint by John Malkovich’s marvellously paranoid Marvin. He declaims her as following them, and having a gun in her handbag. This is awful; she is terrified and shaking, and Marvin is the bad guy. And then, it is revealed that yes, she was following them, and yes, she does have a gun. It is a rocket launcher. And if that’s not brilliant, I don’t know what is. The gun-wielding grunt role isn’t just restricted to the men in this film. And that’s good. I’m up for that. Let us have equal opportunities in both our heroes AND our villains.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- The dialogue is hewn from purest diamond genius
- The characters make sense and are, despite their flaws, readily engageable-with
- There is a real estate agent with a rocket launcher
- It looks edibly good
- HELEN MIRREN.
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- Helen Mirren gets shot and has to be rescued by a man and that is boring
- Helen Mirren doesn’t play all the roles
- Non-player Character for the non-nerds. I’m sorry, everyone. [↩]
An Alphabet of Feminism #8: H is for Hysteria
H
HYSTERIA
O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.
– King Lear, II.ii.246
No Reason To Get Excited
In its purest sense, hysteria simply refers to the womb, no more, no less; like all those other lovely hy- words, it comes from the Greeks, and specifically from their word hysterikos – hystera (= yes, ‘womb’. Think ‘hysterectomy’). There may be little trace of its origin in modern usage, but its ‘female’ signification is perfectly in line with the word’s association with legions of Anna Os, Doras and Victorian virgins, eyes rolling, bodies attractively prone.
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, c. 1781
But here we must pause, and take an exciting medical-historical diversion. The Latin equivalent of hysterikos is the homonymic ancestor of our modern term ‘uterus’, and means ‘womb’ or ‘belly’; and this last strangely ambiguous definition seems less odd when you realise that ‘womb’ itself, in its Old English form, refers not to the generative organ but to a ‘belly’ or ‘paunch’ and that history is full of scientists arguing that this now-feminized organ was gender-neutral, with the ‘female’ womb simply some kind of equivalent to the ‘male’ stomach. Well? It does have some kind of logic: both are cavernous places where you, er, store stuff, but the female of the species may be more creative than the male.
Oh, Mother.
So, grasping this information in our sweaty little palms, to Shakespeare. When King Lear complains of ‘this mother’ he is referring to, as he says, ‘Passio Hysterica’, or ‘the suffocation of the mother’ – mother here used as a synonym for ‘womb’, as in Edward Jorden’s Treatise on the subject. Contemporary medical belief held that there were circumstances (Jorden specifies ‘of a wind in the bottom of the belly’, but refuses to elaborate on whether this is indigestion or some meterological force) in which this sexless womb-stomach could physically wander round the body, where ‘it causeth a very painfull collicke in the stomack, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head’. Uh, yeah: ouch. Or, in Lear’s terms: ‘O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!’
She’s Lost Control.
The development of the female-specific womb may be a topic for another day, but hysteria meaning what we would understand by the term, ‘hysteric fits or convulsions, a convulsive fit of laughter or weeping’ was in use as early as 1727. In 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote what is arguably the first attempt to put hysteria into musical form – with The Magic Flute‘s Queen of the Night, also a ‘mother’ – spectacular as the music is (and her arias in particular), its driving purpose is to contrast the hysterical irrationality of women with the enlightened forces of Men and Freemasonry (gendering hysteria explicitly female in the process).
One to be taken each night with a mug of cocoa
There is then a gap in the word’s lexical development until the medical issue resurfaces: hysteria as a diagnosable condition was first officially used in 1801, where, as the dictionary points out, it was in reference to a seeming epidemic of women Going Crazy – or, specifically, experiencing ‘a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by anaesthesia, hyperaesthesia, convulsions, etc., and usually attended with emotional disturbances or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties’. Covering all its bases, you could either have no sensation at all, or hyper-sensation. Brilliant. That’s exactly what today needed.
It’s Not Easy Being Green.
One explanation for its seeming explosion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is its use as a catch-all term for Generic Women’s Troubles (hence calling it, essentially, ‘womb-problem’), and indeed, it does seem to have been partially conflated with chlorosis (a type of anaemia), which is perhaps better known to Renaissance drama fans as ‘green sickness’. Thus, in John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (you’d think you couldn’t top that title, wouldn’t you?) Annabella is thought to be suffering from ‘an overflux of youth’, in which case ‘there is no such present remedy as present marriage’. Translation: get a willy in her, quick.
Something along these lines, dubbed ‘pelvic massage’, was indeed considered to be a helpful course of action for hysterical women of later years, and this, bizarrely, is where the vibrator makes its entrance on the historical stage. Helped along in its retail life by widespread use of electricity in the home, this particular modern gadget was originally a time-saving device for hard-pressed, fee-jealous doctors with hundreds of hysterical women to bring to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ before lunch. It was a young medical man named Sigmund Freud who decided that the ‘talking cure’ might be more helpful, and his early work in hysteria underscored much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis.
Pervert Doc Caged
In its post-medical life (unsurprisingly, it is no longer considered a valid diagnosis), hysteria continues to rejoice in its second definition, a figurative use, meaning ‘unhealthy emotion or excitement’ (1839). Its most common modern usage would probably be in reference to media hysteria, which does, alas, tend to be aimed at women: the Daily Mail, the archetypal screeching tabloid, was, from its initiation in 1896, a newspaper aimed at women, and to this day its readership is over 50% female. As such, it tends to focus on condemning threats to ‘traditional family values’ – primarily immigrants and those on benefits, but it also simmers with barely suppressed homophobia (‘Abortion hope after “gay genes” finding’ was a headline from 1993, and Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately more recently attracted justified ire from all corners).
This, sadly, does tend to suggest that in the eyes of People Trying To Sell Us Stuff, women are still very much the hysterical creatures they were considered in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this does not stop legions of women actually buying what they sell.
NEXT WEEK: I is for Infant.
Women Need Not Apply
The government assures us that we are sure to have huge swathes of newly-enfranchised workers entering the economy. A significant number of these new job-hunters will be women either newly made redundant or having to re-enter the workforce due to benefit cuts, and of course the coalition is expecting them all to find gainful employment, a task any woman would struggle with in a recession. But why specifically women, I hear you cry (sounding uncannily like my high school English teacher)? Surely men and women will struggle equally with high unemployment and a lower number of vacancies? The problem is the recruitment process and the tendency of female candidates to de-select themselves from consideration.
As a third sector worker, I have spent the last two years trying to recruit high-flying management positions. Of course, before I could recruit anyone, I first had to be trained in the very latest in interviewing techniques. Recruitment specialists took me through the entire process, from sitting down with the applications to sending out the offer letter. One tangent in the discussion – as usual, initiated by me, because I can’t quite let go of my responsibility to be Outraged By EverythingTM – was about job adverts, especially ones designed to attract more female candidates (something we had specifically tried to do for the shiniest, most well-paying jobs, with limited success). There were two issues that quickly reared their ugly heads:
- Job adverts that want to attract more female candidates will usually include something to the effect of, “Organisation X is committed to diversity and equality, and particularly welcomes applications from women and members of ethnic minorities for this position.” These words tend to be included only on some ads for that organisation, and not on all ads for all vacancies.
- Those ads also tend to stress the maternity leave, childcare vouchers and other family-friendly policies of the organisation, whereas your typical ad will focus more on performance-related pay and the opportunity of overseas travel.
“Women candidates are highly encouraged to apply.”
UNDP, vacancy notice for Liberia Project Assistant position
So, where does that leave the female candidate?
When a candidate first decides to job-hunt, the desired salary level is one of the main factors influencing their choice of whether or not they should bother applying. If you feel that you’re at about £35K, for instance, you’ll feel over-qualified for jobs at £20K and under-qualified for jobs at £60K in the same field. The trouble is, according to investigations such as this one, women have a self-assessment of their worth that is considerably lower than men’s. Recent studies looking at the wage gap have also shown that women tend to submit bids for lower wages when bargaining, and also tend to self-promote a lot less than men. What these two studies indicate is that where salary negotiations are in place, this means women end up with lower salaries than their male counterparts. They also indicate that, anticipating a lower salary as a result of negotiations, women are more likely to turn to fixed-salary jobs, rather than highly competetive, negotiable ones.
Even in the fixed-salary (or salary bracket jobs) there are complications. If a women self-promotes a lot less than her male counterpart, and if her self-assessment of her worth is lower than his, then she would have a reasonable expectation of being paid less than he is. When looking for a job to match both her skills and her salary expectations, she will look for a job that requires her skillset, but has a lower salary than the one a qualified male candidate would expect. For fixed salary brackets, then, the issue is at the application stage rather than the negotiation stage: qualified women are simply not applying for well-paying jobs in their respective industries.
Take a hypothetical female applicant on a salary of £30k, which we have already established is likely to be at least a little below her equally qualified male counterpart, who receives £35k, for the sake of argument. This female candidate would therefore reasonably expect to look for positions offering £30k-£35k, whereas her male counterpart would be looking for £35k-£40k. Both of these candidates are equally qualified, and they are looking at the same job advert – but if the studies above are correct, a woman looking at two identical ads for two identical jobs,one of which matches the male applicant’s expectation of salary (the higher) and one of which matches hers (the lower), she will be more likely to apply for the job ad with the lower salary.
I’m going to pause here for a second and let you think about how perverse that is. Internalising a lower value for their work, women will actively look for the lower-paying jobs that require their skills, on the assumption that the higher-paying jobs are somehow out of their reach. “It’s too big a jump in salary” is a frequent one I’ve heard among my friends when discussing why they can’t apply for a managerial position, as if extra money is in some way a barrier to applying. When reviewing candidates, I’ve found it helpful to ignore previous salary details (especially for internal candidates, where salary is tied in to a ‘grade’ that is somehow supposed to be linked to the complexity and skill requirements of the role) as they can give you a biased impression of whether the candidate is pitching ‘at the right level’.
This tendency by women to self-deselect based on salary expectations is somewhat lowered by ads that include the words ‘women are especially encouraged to apply’. Positive discrimination is illegal in the UK; no-one is going to be more likely to hire you just because you are a woman. However, what this tendency highlights is the understanding that negative discrimination is still alive and well: that a woman is less likely to be hired for a position that does not include the words ‘women are especially encouraged to apply’ relative to one that does.
The practical implications of this are:
- Within a single organisation, the understanding therefore becomes that if the organisation would particularly like female applicants, it will add the words. If it would not particularly like female applicants, it will say nothing. In essence, the use of those words singles out some jobs as suitable for women, and other jobs as suitable for a default candidate – and the default, of course, is always male. Career progression for potentially sterling female candidates is therefore implicitly discouraged.
- This notion is reinforced by the sorts of packages offered to women to attract them to some points, conflating ‘woman candidate’ with ‘future mother’. Therefore a female job-hunter primarily interested in a high-flying job with overseas travel and performance-related pay finds herself in what seems to be very hostile territory. If female-friendly=mother-friendly, and this job isn’t very mother-friendly, then it must follow that it isn’t very female-friendly. (And neither are you, you harlot; why are you looking for a job with a bonus instead of one with a good maternity package?)
- In the third sector at large, organisations tend to find a large number of women applying for entry-level jobs, and practically none for the high-placed positions. This is partly because many women have taken the economic ‘hit’ of having a family, which means they take longer to accrue seniority, but partly because the ads for the top jobs never highlight maternity leave etc (the shorthand identified in b) as referring to female candidates), but instead focus on bonuses – which, from many years in the workforce, a working woman comes to understand as the default code for ‘male, white, middle-class’. Therefore many good candidates never bother applying, anticipating discrimination even where none might exist in the selection process.
Putting pen to paper, captured by gtmcknight on Flickr.
So what should organisations do?
- Stop using those words for some adverts. You want to diversity your workforce? Good for you. Either change the nature of the ad to include common concerns (and this can be done in more neutral ways by highlighting paternal and maternal leave, travel opportunities, a commitment to equality, a particular interest in people with language skills or overseas experience, etc) and skip the words entirely, or add the words to every ad. If you want to increase the number of female candidates, surely you want them to apply for all jobs, rather than just one or two? Add them to every ad, and see the applications for your jobs increase relative to those received by your competitors.
- In my experience, women tend to be put off requirements that sound vague, such as ‘experience in…’ rather than the more specific ‘5 years of experience in…’, as many will assume they do not have the required experience. Such age-specific requirements, however, are discriminatory for different reasons. So what can be done? Well, identifying what precisely you are looking for (such as through competency-based criteria) helps considerably, as does tightening up the other specifications. It will assist people in mapping across their skill sets on to the job profile.
- As for women being less likely to apply for jobs that pay more? Well, that one’s easy – all you need to do is pay them more! A woman on £35k pa is a lot less likely to go for a job that pays £30k than a woman who has the same job but earns £25k pa. I appreciate that this is a chicken and egg scenario, but an organisation that identifies internal talent and promotes from within is more likely to foster confidence and ambition in all its workes, instead of just the male ones.
And, you know, not penalising a woman if she does decide to have a child (and in this way help the economy and pay your pension twenty years down the line) wouldn’t kill you either.
Ladies’ Room
I’ve finally found it. The one thing that will make an actual, concrete (and porcelain) difference to the lives of women everywhere – or at least everywhere with indoor plumbing. Women in many other countries have more pressing problems, but meanwhile in the First World there is pressure on our bladders.
Toilet door sign captured in Glasgow by lastyearsgirl on Flickr
The queue for the ladies toilets has become an institutional joke. But it’s really not funny. At gigs, clubs, pubs and anywhere where you might prefer to enjoy yourself rather than stand in line there are never, ever enough toilets for women. So this means a lot of hanging around and generally wasted time; possibly even some pain and irritation if you are unfortunate enough to have one of the very common urinary infections that many women are prone to suffer from.
Is it discrimination, though? Well, yes.
Biology has made it difficult – though not impossible – for cisgender women to urinate standing up. But issues of modesty and tradition and all those things that make up society have created a situation where letting it flow without sitting down is generally regarded as more freakish than acceptable. So, here in the UK we need lavatories, which means cubicles, which means space. And that generally means that in most places, there are a lot less places-per-area-of-loos for women to relieve themselves than for men.
A good start on the road to urinary equality is a cunning little device rather like this which is going in my bag for my next camping trip, but I doubt I can use it as an access all areas pass for the queue-free mens’ toilets at my local. Because I still look like a woman, and this will cause arguments, no matter how much I brandish my Amazing Whizzing Contraption. There will be a row and when I’m out for a nice pint I do not want to get engaged in that kind of pissing contest. Or any other, come to think of it.
In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.
Nancy Banks Smith
Toilets are more than just the butt (I’m sorry about the puns, I really can’t help it) of jokes. Thinking about it, I’m beginning to question why we have to be segregated from our fellow man – literally – at all? This division down binary gender lines for the bathroom has long perplexed me, and for those who are genderqueer or trans this division is a genuine and very personal problem. After all, I don’t need to select “gay” or “straight” before I pee, and we’re thankfully long past facilities segregated by skin colour; however, I do need to pick male or female – or rather, I need to pass the commonly accepted social signifiers for being recognisably one or the other.
From a toilet door in Thailand, source BBC
Many places do have shared facilities, and not just in other countries or those funky overpriced bars in trendy Hoxton. Little shops, small cafes, trains, most people’s houses, in fact, anywhere with room for only one toilet are able to shed the requirement for boy/girl signage and accept that deep down, under all our differences, we all need to go “pay a visit”. It might be the great equaliser we have been looking for, and it was under our noses all the time. Admittedly a little far down under our noses, but you get my point.
Some people might consider this as only a wee issue (there I go again), amongst many others far worthier of my attention. But it is one that causes me annoyance at least once a week. So, architects, when you are designing your next building, add more toilets. Please. And don’t bother about the signs. Just put a lock on the door and we’ll figure it out.
An Alphabet of Feminism #7: G is for Girl
G
GIRL
And alone in the midst of all this lumber and decay, and ugly age, the beautiful child in her gentle slumber, smiling through her light and sunny dreams.
– Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
‘Twas brillig
Picture the linguistic landscape of the thirteenth century. Full of bastard Latin, Anglo-Norman, smatterings of Anglo-Saxon crudities, and a few words whose origins nobody knows. Sometime around 1290, the word girl appeared, used to signify ‘a child or young person of either sex’, alongside clarifying compounds knave girl and gay girl (‘boy’ and, er, ‘girl’ respectively). Like some tantalisingly similar words – lad, lass, boy – its provenance is unclear, although some cunning linguists would have it derive ultimately (via some torturous and dark history) from the Greek ‘parthenos’ (=’virgin’). But yes, uh huh, you read right: in its earliest incarnation, girl was ungendered. In fact, it was not until the 1530s that its more specific application to XX chromosomes surfaced, with girl meaning ‘a female child’ – and even then, it still had its enduring reference to ‘a roebuck in its second year’, with roebuck being, naturally, the male equivalent of roe (a deer, a female deer).
Dear, dear
John Ruskin aged three and a half, by James Northcote (1882), National Portrait Gallery, London (In storage: clamour for its return!)
So the Sylvanian Deer Family would be made up of a roebuck, a roedeer, and, perhaps a (male) girl. Not actually that uncommon: after all, we classify animals via male, female and child (calf, cow, bull; pup, bitch, dog) with a third, genderless young’un alongside their sexually mature parents all the time.
Here comes an art history aside to girl’s ambiguous beginnings: glancing, for example at Queen Victoria with her family, a young prince of Spain, or even an English merchant family of the 1740s, the gender identities of the under-6s seem, well, fluid at best. I should add that, in the case of the Spanish Royal Family, the eldest prince (Baltasar Carlos) leaps straight from painterly petticoats to politically potent riding gear and full armour with apparently no mid-point whatsoever. Another prince, the young Charles II, appears in full armour aged twelve, although in his case there were excellent practical reasons for the switchover (lol revolution). There is also James Northcote’s portrait (right) of John Ruskin, art historian, antiquarian, arguable founder of the National Trust, patron of the Pre-Raphaelites and sometime author – aged three and a half. Manly indeed.
This could speak of a reluctance to bother gendering the child until that gender could be of socio-political relevance (something infant mortality could only have encouraged), but that is not to say it went un-bemoaned by the children themselves. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke complained bitterly of his mother’s reign of sartorial terror: ‘I had to wear beautiful long dresses, and until I started school I went about like a little girl. I think my mother played with me as though I were a big doll.’ I am also reminded of the story that hit headlines in Sweden about a couple who refused to gender their two-year-old at all, for fear of falling into gender’s traps.
Not yet a woman
Beggar children are in. Alice Liddell, photographed by Lewis Carroll.
But, as we may ask of this Swedish child, what happens to girl once its gender has been set? Well, one of its first gender-specific definitions is, as of 1668, ‘a maid of all work’; sweetheart or mistress makes its appearance towards the end of the eighteenth century (as in the popular song ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me’); and it appears in compound reference to prostitution – a kind girl, girl about town. These are all potentially belittling terms for female-orientated stations in life, which can nonetheless retain a flattering appeal – think Patsy Stone and her insistence on being referred to as ‘mademoiselle’; or, more psychotically, think Bette Davis in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?
So, actually, as girl grows up, it sexes up: indeed, once gendered firmly female, its sexual identity becomes more complicated, and this is something that seems to go alongside a developing idea of what early youth actually is. It is only really with the Victorians that the ‘cult of childhood’ really came into being, upheld by luminaries such as J. M. Barrie, Ruskin himself, Charles Dickens and, of course, Lewis Carroll.
This is where whispers start snaking around history, and it feels fitting that the term paedophilia erotica did not come into diagnostic existence until 1886, for this was arguably the first time childhood was regarded with fetishism (as later underlines the actions of ‘poet and pervert’ Humbert Humbert, in Nabokov’s now-notorious Lolita). Girls suddenly become not simply small genderless adults, but (feminine) symbols of what adulthood is seen to lack: innocence, purity and beauty, as in Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, whose Little Nell loves to say her prayers. Dickens’ adult females fare little better, of course, and the Victorian infantalisation of women proves girl in grown-up action, and a topic for another day.
This, then, is the context for Carroll’s photography, but it is important to note that, whatever their evidence for something darker, their subject matter was by no means original: Carroll’s contemporary, Julia Margaret Cameron, produced many similar images (worksafety check: mild nudity) that played on girlish simplicity for typically Victorian effect.
[She was] the most beautiful little girl that Tom had ever seen. Her cheeks were almost as white as the pillow and her hair was like threads of gold spread all about over the bed.
He wondered if she was a real live person, or one of the wax dolls he had seen in the shops.
– Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1862-3)
A strange journey, then: a word that commences genderless and ends sexualised and technically belittling (‘the checkout girl’), but without much perceptible backlash from the female population. Are we not all Patsy Stones?
NEXT WEEK: H is for Hysteria
Madam President (about time)
“Equal opportunities for men and women are an essential principle of democracy.”
– Dilma Rousseff, the new President of Brazil.
On Sunday 31st October, Brazil got a female President. And she said things like this:
“I would like for fathers and mothers to look into their daughters’ eyes today and tell them: ‘Yes, women can.’ I would like to register my first post-election commitment: to honour Brazilian women so that this unprecedented fact becomes a natural event.”
We in the UK have not had the best role models when it comes to female politicians. They’ve tended to be massively conservative (even when in the Labour party). There was Margaret Thatcher, who was certainly female and Prime Minister. Feminists seem to be split on whether that fact alone makes her an icon, or whether the illiberal policies her Conservative party enacted set us back decades. I won’t argue that here.
Since then we’ve had some really appalling female politicians. In 2004, Ruth Kelly became the youngest woman to ever sit in the Cabinet as the ‘Secretary of State for Education and Skills’. Unfortunately, the National Union of Teachers gave her an F. She then became both ‘Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government’ and ‘Minister for Women and Equality’. These posts included being the government’s liason to the Muslim community, which was an odd choice for a woman who belonged to the ultra-strict Catholic sect called Opus Dei. It also involved fighting for equality for women, which was an odd choice for… you get the idea. (Opus Dei’s record on women’s rights wasn’t exactly spectacular, even before you get to questions on abortion or contraception.)
Jacqui Smith did a much better job with Education, but then became one of the most hardline Home Secretaries we’ve ever seen, introducing all kinds of laws which removed civil liberties and sparked protests – ID cards, email snooping, holding without charge, tougher laws on drugs and prostitution (against official scientists’ and social advisers’ advice) that did nothing to solve the problems, etc.
Harriet Harman is held as a hero by some, although she’s not without her share of conservative or illiberal voting either. She proposed a rule change to hide MP’s expenses from the public, voted for the war, and nearly always kept in line with whatever the government position on anything was. (You can’t do this and be very liberal, at least not in the UK in the past 30 years).
Hazel Blears… next.
Without going down the full list, the trend has definitely been that while we’ve had women in positions of power (Deputy leader of the Labour Party, senior posts) there haven’t been any big shining examples of female politicians bringing about social equality.
In the US we have such amazing liberal heroines as Hillary Clinton (my personal opinion here, but I reckon we’d have invaded Iran already if she was in) and the now-famous ‘feminist’ Sarah… Palin… *hides*
Which is why Dilma Rousseff saying these things as the new President of Brazil is so brilliant. “Equal opportunities for men and women are an essential principle of democracy.” That’s fantastic. The UK Labour party is meant to be about reducing inequality, and the Lib Dems have it written specifically on their membership cards, but so far their records when they get into power have been of massively increasing inequality (especially financial).
President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica (Copyright Syfy channel)
There is a lot of scrutiny on the numbers of women in political positions, but I think higher numbers become less important if they’re just as aggressive, reactionary and conservative as the men. What we need as feminists is someone who will move forward not back, move away from the traditional and do new things, and put the support in place to enable women to have a clear chance at equality. In my opinion, that person would by definition have to be a liberal, not conservative. And probably a lefty one.
It’s a sad fact that when they hear the words “Madam President”, a lot of people immediately think of Battlestar Galactica. Laura Roslin might have been forced to become extremely ruthless due to the plot of the show, but she started off as a bleeding-heart liberal – and we don’t have many of those to choose from. More often, women in power have to prove themselves as more traditionally masculine than the men just to not be considered ‘weak’.
President Rousseff seems to be ready to take on anything her political enemies can throw at her (which will likely be a lot, given the dirty media campaign against her in the election) but she has come out with the absolutely clear message that equality is a priority. BadRep wishes her every success in her new post!
A Look At The Panopticon
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
Metafilter user blue_beetle in the thread User-driven discontent
The above is a particularly trenchant quote that it is increasingly important to bear in mind, when using online services.
With any luck, most people reading this will already have read Facebook is a feminist issue, and a lot of what’s being talking about here will be redundant. In case you haven’t, though, and in case your clicking finger is suffering from temporary paralysis, the broad point it is making is that on-line privacy is a very, very real concern for feminists, since it affects any number of vulnerable classes of people, and particuarly those who are victims of abuse, and that Facebook is quite staggeringly bad when it comes to online privacy – it’s another path by which people can abuse one another, and more importantly, it makes it increasingly easy for abusers to track down and/or monitor the activity of their victims – even if their victims block their abuser from their profile, the abuser may still have friends in common with their victim, and therefore be able to see their victim’s activities where they intersect with friends via Facebook photo albums and similar.
Considered in the light of the above quote, it’s very easy to see why this is the case. Facebook’s business model absolutely relies on sharing the personal information of its users with as wide an audience as possible, for marketing purposes – its user-base is the product that it sells. But what’s worse is that even if you yourself choose not to share certain information, that’s no guarantee that it will not be available.
Project Gaydar is a research project by some students at MIT, who built some software that analysed Facebook profiles. They found that even if a person’s Facebook profile did not mention their sexual orientation, they could predict it to 85% accuracy, simply by analysing the profile data of the people they are Facebook friends with. It’s important to stress that there’s no evidence of this research being used outside of the project, or with any sort of malicious intent – it’s simply a demonstration of the possibility.
It’s worth noting that the problem presented by Project Gaydar is actually not Facebook’s fault. It’s simply an emergent property of any social network, on-line or off – one is judged by the company one keeps. And one cannot fault the companies that provide these services, and make us into the products they sell (without getting into anti-capitalist theory, a topic for another time and another place) – the companies are simply behaving as the market dictates.
And this sort of thing in only going to get worse – companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook’s new “Places” feature make their users real-time location information available to their friends, on-line. At time of writing, there hasn’t been a high-profile case of this sort of sensitive data being abused or leaked, but it’s surely only a matter of time.
Even beyond the sphere of social networking, there are, of course, other sorts of privacy concerns on-line, relating to anonymity – witness the outing in the press of Zoe Margolis on the publication of her first book. The issue of privacy management on-line is not going to go away any time soon, and as line between the online and the offline increasingly blurs away into nothing it’s a conversation that feminists should be gearing up to be part of.
So, what can you do?
If you’re concerned about your Facebook privacy settings, then you can look at Reclaimprivacy.org – it’s a volunteer-run site that does its best to stay on top of the ever-shifting goalposts of Facebook privacy.
If you’d like to do further reading on this issue surrounding social networks, privacy and vulnerable people, then searching the brilliant danah boyd’s archive is likely to yield a lot of further reading – it’s not always her primary concern, but the nature of her research into social media means she comes up against it a lot.
You might also like to consider volunteering with, or donating to organisations like the EFF or the ACLU both of which regularly deal with privacy issues as part of their broader remit, and whose blogs are good sources of information on current events in this area.
An Alphabet of Feminism #6: F is for Female
F
FEMALE
Are you all sitting comfortably?
‘Well, well,’ I thought, as I cast my eye over the (now somewhat bedraggled) series of scrawled lists of letters for the Alphabet shoved into my pockets, bursting out of purses and sketchbooks and rotating in scarcely less tatty form in my head. For the question was obvious: What am I going to do for F? Because, you see, Z, Y, X, all those, they’re not actually that hard. They don’t have that much riding on them. But F … well, from the various incarnations of the F-word onwards … a headache.
Because, you see, the word feminism just isn’t that interesting.
Or rather, its interest lies in its power to evoke wide-ranging, frequently violent reactions while remaining semantically straightforward. Feminism gets precisely a centimetre of a three-column page in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Because it means two very simple and uncontentious things: in rare form, ‘the qualities of women’, and as it is more commonly understood today, ‘advocacy of the claims and rights of women’, first used sometime around 1895. All those extra things, the bad reputation … those are add-ons, and not linguistically valid ones, either. So I turned my attention away from feminism, and thought that perhaps I would go back to basics. After all, how often do we think about what female means?
Hey ho, let’s go.
From http://www.edbatista.com/. Used with permission.
Well, it derives from the Middle English ‘femelle’ via the Latin ‘femella’ which is in turn a diminutive of ‘femina’ (= ‘woman’ – yes, another diminutive. They keep popping up, don’t they?) In its most basic incarnation, female simply means ‘belonging to the sex which bears offspring’. This does not have to involve birthing: let me tell you of the seahorses.
Despite his undisputed ‘masculine’ role, the male seahorse receives a parcel of eggs from the female. Upon doing this, he sets out on an aqueous pregnancy-journey, bearing his unborn sea-foals in a pouch specially evolved for the purpose. During incubation, the female what knocked him up visits him each day for a brief catch-up (approximately six minutes), during which time they revisit the rituals of their courtship (holding tails, doing a little pre-dawn dance, smoking that bud and chillin’).
[Here, you must listen to The Sea Horse by Flanders & Swann. I’ll wait here.]
Unlike words like woman and lady, female therefore has a very precise biological meaning that underscores its subsequent development: it is unsurprising that the next place it shows up in the dictionary is in botany (1791), where it refers to the parts of the plant that bear fruit, or, in reference to ‘a blossom or flower’, ‘having a pistil and no stamens; pistillate; fruit bearing’ (slightly later: 1796). Of course, ‘perfect’ plants are ‘bisexual’ in that they possess both male and female parts (this latter, the ‘gynoecium’, literally meaning ‘woman house’). GCSE Biology ftw.
Alongside this specific development is an extremely general one: ‘consisting of females’, ‘pertaining to women’ (the dictionary quotes Pope on ‘the force of female lungs’), and then ‘characteristic of womankind’ in the seventeenth century and ‘womanish’ in the eighteenth. It is curious that the usage here should be ‘womankind‘ rather than ‘femality’ (of which more presently), since woman seems pretty clearly human, and therefore arguably more subjective, than a simple reference to the egg-bearing species.
How low can you go?
It is exactly this sort of little shift that leads to female‘s seventh meaning, as an epithet of ‘various material and immaterial things, denoting simplicity, inferiority, weakness, or the like’ (one wonders with alarm what ‘the like’ might be). Here, of course, we have the realms of the ‘feminine rhyme’, which, while often weaker, are nonetheless much harder to pull off (and more effective, when successful) than any number of the old Moon and June. And mechanics also gets a shout out: female is there applied (as of 1669) to ‘that part of an instrument or contrivance which receives the corresponding male part’. (I love the dry non-specifics of ‘instrument or contrivance’.) However, it should come as no surprise to find that female eventually passes into apparently exclusively negative use: ‘as a synonym for ‘woman’ now only contemptuous’.
They are no ladies. The only word good enough for them is the word of opprobrium – females.
– Anonymous (1889)
‘Female’ … A circular hole or socket having a spiral thread adapted to receive the thread of the male screw.
– Anonymous (1669)
By way of a postscript: some now rare variants on the word. Femality can be both ‘female nature’ and ‘unmanliness’; feminality refers to ‘a knick-knack such as women like’, and Feminie is ‘Womankind; especially the Amazons‘. We like it when things stay self-referential.
NEXT WEEK: G is for Girl
Queen and Country
I first met Tara Chace in early 2001. When I met her, she was in Kosovo, looking down the scope of a sniper rifle at the head of a rogue Russian general. I watched her use that sniper rifle to liberally redistribute the man’s brains over the surrounding area, and then I watched her get shot as she escaped. With a bullet wound in her leg, I watched her get past a military checkpoint without arousing suspicion and then drive 62 kilometres before seeking medical attention.
You might say that she got my attention.
I’ve followed Tara’s exploits for almost ten years now, through the Queen and Country comics and novels, all written by Greg Rucka, so it was with my heart in my mouth that I opened the most recent novel Queen and Country: The Last Run, because if reading Queen and Country has taught me anything, it’s that absolutely no-one in it is safe. The novel opens with her realising that she’s getting a bit too old, and a step too slow, and tendering her resignation. And then, shortly thereafter, she is forced by political circumstance back into the field for the titular last run, a mission that she and her superiors know is almost certainly a trap. And this novel marks an end of sorts to Queen and Country, anything could happen, and indeed, everything does.
Back in 2001, Tara Chace’s job title was Minder Two in the Special Section at the UK’s Special Intelligence Service (you’d know it as MI6) – the Special Section being composed of three “minders” – intelligence agents with the skills to be dispatched all over the world on highly dangerous short-term espionage assignments. She was, if you like, the female James Bond, except that to describe her as such is to sell her, and Queen and Country, short. Very short.
James Bond presents a macho fantasy – a ludicrous, over the top cartoon of a man, who contends with threats entirely absent from the real world – megalomaniacal super villains with absurd doomsday devices with which they hold entire countries to ransom. Queen and Country presents the reality: squalid deeds done in alleyways, a world where the greatest threat comes from bureaucrats in Whitehall who are only too willing to disavow Tara and her colleagues when things go bad. And they do go bad, all the time.
The story described above would be the end of a Bond movie – the rogue general is defeated, and we watch Bond float off into the sunset. For a Queen and Country story, it’s only the beginning – the rest of the story sees MI6 attacked in their home in reprisal, and Tara being hunted on the streets of London, while her own government deny her adequate means to defend herself, and leave her “protected” by men whose goal is not to keep her alive, but to use her as bait. Because that’s the reality that James Bond doesn’t show.
That’s the first Queen and Country story. The second one sees Tara back in the office, getting a psychological evaluation, because, after all, she has just killed a man in cold blood, then found herself more or less hung out to dry by the people who ordered her to do it, and there’s some concern that it might have affected her in some way. Of course it has, but not in a way that makes her unfit for duty, and she knows it.
And there’s a duty she really wants to be part of – the other Minders are being sent on a mission in Afghanistan. In a comic written in early 2001. Tara, is of course, incensed about the treatment of women under the Taliban, and would like to do something to bloody their nose. But, of course, she can’t go. It’s much easier to put together a cover identity for a male agent that will let them get the job done.
Just to make that as clear as I can for you: this is an espionage thriller with a female lead that was talking about the Taliban, and their treatment of women, before September the 11th 2001. Tell me that doesn’t pique your interest.
(An amusing aside: Queen and Country may be the only comic where, when a new artist rendered Tara as a typical-for-comics pneumatic blonde in a revealing wardrobe, the readers wrote in to complain. Happily, her new endowments did not have any effect on Tara’s level of competence, or any treatment she received, and the next artist on the book returned her to her usual proportions.)
Queen and Country is as much about the cost of espionage as it is about espionage itself. It’s about the damaged personalities of the people who engage in it, and the further damage the work piles on them. It does not flinch away from depicting Tara, or her friends, as damaged goods; it does not pretend that they are good people fighting for an always-just cause. It understands that the reality of their work is usually that they don’t get to defeat the bad guy and head off into the sunset for sex with an attractive young thing. When sex appears in these books, it is as real as the rest of the work, and appears in a number of different ways – a desperate seeking for a little human warmth, an act of self-hatred, and here and there, an act of love.
Queen and Country is among the very smartest thrillers you will get to read, and should be available in collected editions from any good comic shop. If for some reason you don’t like comics, then I promise you, each of the three novels – A Gentlemen’s Game, Private Wars, and now The Last Run, is perfectly rewarding in its own right.
And no, I’m not going to tell you if Tara Chace survives the end of her own series. I haven’t even told you about the friends and lovers she loses along the way. Read the books and find out about her life.
Alasdair Watson can be found blogging at http://www.black-ink.org.