Battle Angel Alita and Cyborg Feminism
What’s the story?
Copyright Yukito Kushiro, 1996
Genderfun
Yes, I know she has a gun in this one. She just doesn't use them *all the time*, ok? Copyright Yukito Kushiro 1996
Cyborg Feminism
There is nothing about teeing ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.
An Alphabet of Feminism #5: E is for Emancipate
E
EMANCIPATE
She bared her right arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power. ‘I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern, and seen ’em mos’ all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?’
-Sojourner Truth speaking in 1851, as recalled by Matilda Gage in History of Woman Suffrage
Well in hand
Alas and alack, I have no Latin language linked tea-towel (or indeed any other lexical kitchenware). So I had to do some trans-linguistic dictionary groping (oh ho) to reveal that the verb ’emancipate’ can be broken down into not one but three etymological building blocks (oh, alright pedant, two words and one suffix).
Ahem. These are: ‘e-‘ (out of), ‘manus’ (hand), ‘capere’ (to capture, to seize). So to emancipate is, etymologically speaking, something like ‘to release something captured from your hand’. Its first meaning in the OED is ‘to release or set free (a child or a wife) from the patria potestas, the power of the pater familias‘. Most of those Latin words come back to the same idea: Big Daddy and his eternal potency, and it is here that, presumably, the ‘Emancipation of Women’ has its phrasal origins. To emancipate someone is to relinquish the (legal) power that you hold over them, and it is thus that, in its association with women’s rights, the word has come to be associated with first wave feminism and its fight for property rights, women’s suffrage and basic legal equality. It is presumably for this reason that it is no longer widely considered technically applicable to gender issues, as a quick look at Wikipedia will confirm.
Clemens in horto laborat
But emancipate also has a definitional cousin in the word ‘manumit’ (‘to set forth from one’s hand’), which means ‘to release from slavery’, and indeed, slavery – and emancipate‘s second definition – is where we must next turn. Of course the Romans who bandy these manii around were, if not exactly pioneers, at least great practitioners of the flesh trade. But, perhaps unexpectedly, they did have a sort of ‘liberal’ edge to their way of doing things: slaves could be legally freed, and, as ‘freedmen’, often enjoyed considerable socio-political power (the Vettii brothers in Pompeii were famous for having a rather rockin’ house).
Thus, emancipate‘s second meaning, ‘to set free from control; to release from legal, social or political restraint’, which, as the dictionary points out, has in modern use acquired a primary application to slavery, with ‘other uses felt to be transferred from this’. In ancient Rome, female slaves (‘libertae’), of course, had less options, and generally ended up marrying their former masters (oh, the liberalism), suggesting that they might need emancipation in the third sense – ‘to set free from intellectual or moral restraint’, and in fact getting into its fourth and final meaning, ‘to enslave’, via the explanatory quotation, ‘a wiues emancipating herself to another husband’. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
America, America
Here you are, love.
In the years following the Emancipation Proclamation of the early 1860s, which of course challenged the slavery widely practised by a more modern empire, emancipate starts to gain something of its modern sense, as the dictionary puts it, ‘primarily suggesting the liberation of slaves’. Turning briefly to said Emancipation Proclamation, it was an ambiguous document, widely criticized for freeing only those slaves its authors had no authority over and shying away from declaring slavery itself to be illegal. The more-than-hundred years of struggle leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prove the limits of technical ’emancipation’, and the battle that had to be fought over every remnant of restraint in American law, not least the abolition of slavery as a concept.
But where does this history take us, as followers of a gynocentric lexical trail? Well, one of emancipate‘s most interesting side-effects as a word-journey is to take us into the realms of historical figures who stood up for freedom in women’s rights as part of a wider struggle for racial – human – equality. These include Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth C. Stanton, alongside Sojourner Truth, ex-slave, abolitionist and women’s rights activist (reported to have an ‘Amazonian’ form, for those following the progress of this series intently).
Whilst technically ’emancipated’ herself (although in practice anything but, forced due to a contextually ironic hand injury to continue working for her master after New York had finished emancipating slaves in 1827), Truth set about challenging the sexism and misogyny rife in white society alongside the need to abolish slavery. She highlighted in her most famous speech, ‘Ain’t I A Woman?’ (1851) how plantation owners would savagely beat their female slaves while simultaneously offering white women a hand into their carriages and over ditches. Ideally positioned to turn upon both injustices, Truth herself expressed the frying pan-fire of emancipate‘s fourth meaning when she said that “Man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.”
It is one of the recurring criticisms of modern feminism that it leaves groups behind. Emancipate is a word fraught with definitional hooks and barbs that the escapee can catch on – from legal to moral and social restraint, to, finally, re-enslaving. I chose the verbal sense for a reason.
NEXT: F is for … Female, actually. After the curveball of C Is For Crinoline, we’re going Obvious.
Take Back Halloween!
By Andy Marlette (http://www.andymarlette.com)
I love this cartoon. I sent it to nearly all the women I know last year. Do I need to say why I love it? It so clearly outlines the choices for young girls these days, not just at Halloween. You can be anything you want to be, as long as you’re sexy. You can be anything, as long as you look good doing it. Anything!! As long as some man somewhere thinks it’s sexy…
I mean, the first thing people say about women they’re trying to insult is usually that they’re ugly/fat/too old. That they don’t possess or inspire this all-important male approval. Just think about some of the things you’ve heard said, by the left and the right, about female politicians. Think about some of the things you might have said.
When men shout or whistle at me in the street and I walk away, what do they shout? They shout “You fat cow!” “You ugly bitch!” They’re not alone, every five year-old kid starting school learns that they can upset little girls by calling them fat.
Of course you can also be too sexy, because hey, you wouldn’t want those people you’re trying to get the approval of thinking you’re easy now, would ya? That could interfere with your appeal. But it’s all related. Be just sexy enough, show just the right amount of skin, look just submissive enough, just powerful enough, don’t look like you’re ‘asking for it’ (whatever the fuck that means), give that camera just the right look, and you too can be anything you want to be.
To get off the soapbox and back to the subject, Halloween, this day which just highlights something that’s already going on in our culture, here are a couple of seasonal links for you to enjoy:-
Website Take Back Halloween has got a hella load of costumes for you to pick from, and you won’t find the tagline ‘sexy’ on any of them. They’ve got warrior queens, goddesses and legends, and other famous women to pick from, poets, writers, saints, activists, movie stars and serial killers! They say: “Why be a fairy princess when you can be a queen?”
The bloggers at Geek Feminism, with a nod to Take Back Halloween, pick a few geekier costumes which also ignore the male gaze… they’ve got robots, rubiks cubes and Lovecraftian horrors… They say: “There’s no reason that a squid monster can’t have a feminine touch.”
Comics Alliance take a funny look at some of the most ridiculous and just plain unnecessary ‘sexy’ costumes on sale this Halloween, like the cringe-making Transformers costume below. They’ve very helpfully provided an illustration of what that character is supposed to look like – can you spot the difference? They’ve got wildly inaccurate superhero costumes, (and of course, there’s nothing that upsets this BadRep blogger more than people Doing Comics Wrong!), and they’ve got sexed-up characters from your other favourite childhood TV shows. There’s sexy Elmo, a sexy Ninja Turtle and a sexy Lone Ranger! They say: “A sexy version of Elmo is the kind of thing that when you see it, you have to tell someone else, or it’ll just sit there in your brain slowly driving you insane as you try to figure out why it exists.”
Cracked.com also has a feature on 26 ‘Sexy’ Halloween Costumes That Shouldn’t Exist.
I think I need to step away from the internet now. When you see a sexy Transfromers costume that’s the Internet gods’ way of telling you you’ve been online for too long.
Happy Halloween, folks! I solemnly swear to leave your precious childhood memories alone next time we meet.
If Undelivered, Please Return To BadRep Towers
Dear Mr. Fry,
We regret to inform you that you have been stripped of the title of the Nation’s Wise and Cuddly Favourite Grandfather. This is due to comments that you made in your interview with Attitude, published yesterday, Tuesday 25th October.
The position of the Nation’s Sexist, Least Favourite Grandfather Who Makes Christmas Dinner Uncomfortable for Everyone and Insists that Girls do the Washing Up is currently open, if you would like to send us your application.
Yours sincerely,
The People of Britain
At The Movies: Made In Dagenham
“A film that calls itself feminist?” I said, looking up from my morning internet. “Well, that makes me suspicious from the START.” I said this, because it did. I’m always a bit cautious about Feminist Films. For every one that’s dead on, intelligent and insightful, there’s one that’s the embarassing uncle at the party who asks you all about your love life in inappropriate detail and then tries on all your shoes.
Anyway, I watched the trailer, and my heart sank even further. No, really! It literally did. I became extremely afraid that, with a film made, all feelgood and by the same people who did Calendar Girls, it’d fictionalise the ongoing struggle for equality in the workplace and make it seem, well, like the battle was fought and won, and like we have nothing left to strive for. Which, of course, we do.
So you see my trouble here.
But, as with all films when I can feel my rage glands engorging with fluid before I’ve even laid eyeball to celluloid, I chastised myself for being a judgemental prick, and went to see it anyway. I trotted into the darkness, full of hope and tea. The cinema was full of middle-aged women all talking about exciting and intelligent things (the couple next to me were discussing Wagner) so I felt, as a 20-something bleach-blond chap in skin-tight jeans, somewhat out of place.
On came the film, and dear god, I wished that there could have been more people my age watching in that audience. I mean, I totally get it. I understand why all the ladies of that generation were there – that was their time and their history. But it’s our history too, and a very vicious and triumphant reminder of the battles fought and the ground yet to be covered. The dynamics shown there, right there on the screen, are things we still have to deal with every day. There are still men who think that they’re meant to be the prime breadwinners. There are still women who won’t speak up about what they think or believe because they assume that they’re wrong because a man will know better. That shit still happens.
So yeah, basically all my fears were allayed with one toss of Miranda Richardson’s head. This is not a film about feminism – this is a film about gender politics that has feminism firmly in mind. It is not merely observant of its subject matter, it understands it. And that’s a delicious and refreshing thing in a time of Sarah Palin’s “Pro-Life Feminism” and other such horrors.
Let me give you an example. I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s an argument in the film between a married couple, and the man extols his virtues as a “good husband” by saying that he’s never hit his wife or children, and that he gets involved with his kids and looks after them. The wife stares and hisses, “And that’s as it should be. It’s not privilege, it’s simple, basic rights.”
And then I cried! Burst into tears right there in the cinema. It doesn’t take much to make me get the waterworks out at a film, but that got me right there. Basic fucking rights. And people still don’t understand that. Still! And this is 2010!
The characters in this are sublime – immediately engaging and empathic – and Connie (Geraldine James) is by far my favourite. You’ll understand if you’ve seen it, or when you do see it – she’s so viscerally human, her torment and psyche so completely, perfectly explicable that I felt like I knew her, like she lived round the corner from me and I saw her for tea every Saturday afternoon. These are real stories about real women, and it’s a lovely touch that they get the actual Dagenham strikers talking about their own experiences at the credits. It feels very concrete and real – which, of course, it is – but it certainly doesn’t feel saccarine or fictional, which is what I’d feared.
I’m now trying to think of The Stand-Out Moment of this film, but there’s so many, I don’t know where to start! A good thing, right? Well, from a personal bent, the stand-out holy-shit-I-identify-with-this moment for me was the best-ever male-ally speech (you’ll know it when you see it!) from a man who said that he was raised by his mother, who was the prime breadwinner, but on so much less than her male counterparts despite doing the same work, if not more.
Let me tell you a little personal thing: I was raised primarily by my absolute saint of a mother, who is paid two-thirds of what her male counterparts get, despite actually doing more than them. She is labelled a “part-time worker”, because she may at any point become pregnant and leave her job to have babies, because she’s a woman. My mum is 50. AND THIS IS 2010. This struggle is current! This is happening right now! Equal Pay Act or no Equal Pay Act, there is still inequality in the workplace and in society at large that makes it seem okay and “normal” to treat women like they’re second class goddamn citizens.
So there I was, steaming in my seat, tumescent and tremulous with the wrath of social injustice, but really having an amazing cinematic experience. Oh – another cool thing: the film is colour-treated so that it resembles vintage Sixties film. It’s not overdone – just a little desaturation and colour work – but just enough to evoke the televisual “feel” of the era. It really works. Loved it.
Naturally, as a nit-picking little bastard who isn’t happy until he’s poked seventeen holes in a thing, I found something to grumble about after all. Hooray! Okay – get this: at the end of the film, you’ve got vintage footage of the actual strikers. They’re all middle-aged and big. Well, certainly bigger than the younger, sexy ladies they’ve got to play their roles in the actual film. They’ve been sexed up. Oh god. What’s right about that? Are the Lords and Ladies Cinema esquire really saying that we, as audience members, cannot possibly empathise with our lead characters unless they’re stereotypically easy on the eye?
I raised this point through a mouthful of curry at my friends after the film. One of them suggested that this could be a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers to combat the stereotype that women who fight for women’s rights are unattractive craggy battleaxes, and I think I’m okay with that. Well, okay-er with that. Chewing out that horrible stereotype is always a win in my book. That said, I’m a big fan of craggy old battleaxes. Long live the battleaxe!
Overall, it’s a good film. It’s inspiring, it’s moving, and it’s satisfying like when you add an entire pot of double cream to a pasta sauce. Super.
YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:
- It cares about its subject matter
- The acting is superb
- The characterisation is believable, genuine and engaging
- It’s gorgeous
- The speeches given make you want to go out and fight the world in the face
-
YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE: - There is an abominable pair of hotpants in it
Laser Guns Can Save Us From The Anti-PC Brigade
SF authors: Not clones. - photo by David Kitchenham, taken from morguefile.com
There’s been a lot of controversy in the world of Sci-fi books recently, over attitudes to both women and minorities.
A blogger for Apex Books called Gustavo Bondoni wrote this piece of trolling, misogynist racefail horseshit, ranting against positive discrimination and the “PC” police, etc. He was referring to those people who voiced an opinion on The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF being a mammoth book of only white male authors. No women, no minorities… all white, all men.
One of the people he’s complaining about is the glorious Catherynne M Valente, a fantasy and sci-fi author and editor, whose writing I love a whole lot. (I’ll get the recs out of the way: her World Fantasy Award nominated, Mythopoeic Award winning The Orphan’s Tales and Hugo nominated Palimpsest for starters). The small snag here being that Apex is the company she edits a magazine for, so people asked her opinions of his blogpost.
Now, there’s the old argument that if you’re pulling from the Golden Age of sci-fi, most authors WERE men. But this book isn’t only about that period, and the list of superb female SFF authors is long and mighty. CL Moore, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy… (believe me, I could add 20 more names here with no effort). Much more if you include Fantasy as a genre alongside it. There are 3 female SF Grandmasters, and truly great female SF writing goes back a long way (it’s traditional to cite Mary Shelley for Frankenstein).
Besides, you shouldn’t mess with sci-fi nerds, they know math: one commenter on the Mammoth book post worked out that even if 3 out of 4 authors were white males, and the other 1 in 4 category contained *everyone* else, there was still only a 0.2% chance of all 21 stories being written by white guys. This wasn’t a case of “but it’s representative of there being genuinely no minorities in SF writing”. The chance of that being true is something like 0.2% depending on the actual ratios (you have to get up to 95% white males before it even hits 50/50).
So Bondoni wrote his deliberately baiting blogpost, trying to raise some controversy, and Cat Valente posted what she thought of it.
It turns out she’s tired and bored, but with more swearing:
I’m not saying “ignore the bully and he’ll go away.” Nope. Shred away. It’s what he wants, so he can continue to feel persecuted, and very likely keep believing that the mythical PC harpies are why he’s not a star of page and screen. It’s fun to feel persecuted – if you’re persecuted, it usually means you’re right, and at the mercy of wicked souls. It’s not actually fun to be persecuted, but if you can get that feeling while sitting at home with no one oppressing you? Profit.
He’s using us – because he knows he can’t get the internet crowds to look at him any other way, he simply calls us playground names. And that’s what the phrase PC is these days – name calling. No one who actually believes in not intentionally hurting other humans uses that phrase anymore. It’s pretty much solely used to insist that mobs of people who don’t look like the user are constantly beating down his door to force him to be nice. Poor f***ing baby. My heart bleeds for you, sweetheart.
I just wanted to give a little cheer, because I think her whole post is excellent.
Next time, Mr Bondoni, don’t pick a fight with the woman who responded to Elizabeth Moon’s astonishing anti-Muslim rant by dedicating the entire next issue of Apex magazine to only contain stories from Arab and Muslim writers. (That issue comes out soon, and I can’t wait).
Now, we could say that picking arguments over statistics and always demanding equal representation is too aggressive a behaviour, that it doesn’t help feminism or that we’d be better off just leaving losers like Bondoni alone. Cat’s point is that we’re all tired of it, we’ve all seen it before, and the arguments against positive discrimination (if that even applied here, which I don’t think it does) will keep coming from the poor oppressed traditional majority.
But when the comments to the original announcement of the ‘Mammoth book…’ themselves prove precisely why the fight isn’t over yet, I think I can find the energy to keep opposing.
Sci-fi should be a field where we can leave prejudices behind, especially those based on tradition and culture. It is the greatest genre for wiping away the assumptions that the ratio of power between genders should be the same as in the modern day, or that race or religion (or even money) have to divide people the way they do. I love sci-fi for this.
But it also contains its share of famously right-wing intolerant viewpoints, and that’s a reminder that even in this free and imaginative literary space we can’t stop pushing to improve things. I think Cat is right: hearing Bondoni’s arguments yet again is boring, and providing him with the drama he wants is pointless… but taking a stance against his views isn’t. We still hear people complaining about things being “too PC” daily, that fight is a long way from over yet.
An Alphabet of Feminism #4: D is for Doll
D
DOLL
What fascinated Ermengarde the most was [Sara’s] fancy about the dolls who walked and talked, and who could do anything they chose when the human beings were out of the room, but who must keep their powers a secret and so flew back to their places ‘like lightening’ when people returned to the room.
– Francis Hodgson Burnett, ‘A Little Princess’
Were he not Romeo called…
Barbara Millicent Roberts is actually, it turns out, called Dorothy. At least, a ‘Barbie doll’ is a tautology, since the word ‘doll’ itself was originally a nickname. (Rs and Ls are colloquially interchangeable, donchaknow – see also Harry/Hal, Mary/Moll.)
‘Doll’ as a name makes an early debut in renaissance drama: first as Doll Tearsheet in Shakespeare’s Henry IV and then as Doll Common in Jonson’s The Alchemist. These two draw in ‘Doll’s’ second meaning, which assumes a ‘Dorothy’ is so common a species as to be generic. Thus, ‘Doll’ as a pet name is quickly expanded to indicate any female ‘pet’, or indeed any female ‘mistress’ (drawing confused attention to the potentially infantalising properties of nicknames in general). Additionally, as of 1560, it could also be used to mean ‘the smallest or pet pig in the litter’ (like Wilbur). But clearly there is a double edge to Dorothy’s common-ness, since ‘common’ means ‘for the use of everyone’ (tee hee) as well as ‘numerous’ – something Doll Common’s character demonstrates nominally. ENTER THE PROSTITUTE.
Work and Play
It is only in 1700 that ‘Doll’ loses its capital letter and acquires something of its modern sense. The dictionary defines this as ‘an image of a human being (commonly of a child or lady) used as a plaything; a girl’s toy-baby’. It is no longer a name, but it still stands in for something else, with a more spiritual implication in dear Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (that name-obsessed play). Here, Old Capulet refers to his daughter as a ‘whining Mammet’, a deviant form of ‘Maumet’ which, deriving ultimately from ‘Mohammed’, was a term used in medieval England to mean ‘a puppet, an idol, a doll’. Here lurks the second commandment, in all its thorny glory, giving an added layer to Barbie’s iconicism, not to mention the groom’s pledge to his bride in the traditional Marriage Service, ‘With my body I thee worship’. (I hear the clatter of toppling pedestals.)
clatterty clank
It is, I must NB, definitionally girls who play with dolls, and there is a pleasing juxtaposition of frivolous and stern in the dictionary’s reference to ‘playthings’ … but I cannot help but suspect that, in their initial incarnation, these ‘doll-babies’ were occasionally also educational tools, teaching the virtues of maternal care for something smaller and weaker, sartorial elegance and grooming and presumably also some degree of etiquette – these dolls could, after all, represent all ages, and I suspect that the comparative decline of the over 18s represented in modern doll-land may also signal a movement from dolls as work to dolls as play. (Incidentally, Londoners: for more on toys’ super-seriousness, go have a look at the Maritime Museum’s Toy Boats exhibition for examples of boys’ toys serving to illustrate German naval supremacy). But onwards.
From play to work, there’s a beautiful reference in the dictionary to ‘doll’ used in the more modern sense when, in 1860, the journal All Year Round talks about the ‘laborious class Who earn painful bread by fashioning dolls’ eyes’, which tellingly hints at the expanded manufacturing operations doll-craft represented by the mid-Victorian industrialised era – a far cry from what would presumably have been an ad-hoc domestic craft when ‘doll-babies’ first became popular. A Little Princess, quoted above, is a story obsessed with the power of make-believe and dolls as synecdoches for real-life figures. It features multiple references to the late-Victorian doll and the materialism she represents, including the disapproval of Sara Crewe’s family solicitor, who, on seeing what Sara dubs ‘The Last Doll’ says sternly ‘A hundred pounds […] All expensive material, and made at a Parisian modiste’s. He spent money lavishly enough, that young man’. Fans of Victorian women’s studies may think of Dickens’ Mr Merdle (Little Dorrit) and his search, not for a wife, but for ‘a bosom to hang jewels upon’.
Living Dolls
It has taken more time than usual, but finally the leximobile screeches up outside definition number three, another Victorian usage, ‘doll’ as ‘a pretty, but unintelligent or empty person’, especially, the dictionary adds, ‘when dressed up; also, a pretty but silly or frivolous woman’. Hence we have ‘a doll’s face’, which is one ‘conventionally pretty, but without life or expression’. Pleasingly, in this instance, it is the lifeless image of womanhood that inspires the pejorative reference to the real thing, rather than the other way round, although it gives rise to a disturbing number of aspirations in the sentient race to be ‘living dolls’ (a quick google, and you’ll see what I mean). The dictionary even has names for this sort of thing, giving a delightful number of compound terms: thus the (tautological) worship of dolls – dollatry, dollhood – the state or condition of being like a doll, dollship – the personality of a doll, although it also points out that these relate primarily to ‘doll’s’ fifth meaning, via a re-emerging ‘Doll Common’, as ‘a prostitute’. ‘Living dolls’ may in fact also be real-life Ladies Of Easy Virtue.
‘There is much for her to do, her whole sex to deliver from the bondage of frivolity, dolldom and imbecility.’
-Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), ‘Letters’, (undated)
So, from ‘Dorothy’ onwards, a ‘doll’ always represents something bigger, be it a name whose full gravity cannot yet be properly appropriated, a world of humans made more comprehensible for a small child, or even a religious figure incarnated in sacrilegious form. It is the idolatry of such a representation that I find most fascinating: it gives a whole new irony to Sara Crewe’s repeated assertion that, as her father has always told her, ‘All women are princesses.’
NEXT WEEK: E is for Emancipate
Making Laws Count, Together
An article was published in today’s Guardian on the importance of connecting three things: being able to add up, an appreciation for consequences and understanding the laws that govern this country. A decision, which I personally support, was taken by the Fawcett Society to take the government to court over the gender inequality in the budget cuts announced this week. Cuts will affect women more than men, and on the back of a recession in which the only reason that more women held on to their jobs than men was because we are over-represented in the public sector. See the problem here?
Cuts for women - image by degilbo via Flickr
To head off any arguments at the pass, I believe that these cuts are more a political decision rather then an economic one and that the government has taken over a country in a time of perceived crisis and confusion, using the “chaos” as a convenient smokescreen to push through its own agenda without the appropriate debate, safeguards or reference to GCSE economics textbooks. But the wrong-headedness of the budget is better discussed by Liberal Conspiracy and Red Pepper. Direct arguments over the necessity of the cuts there.
I’ve been thinking specifically about the gulf of difference between what is legally allowable and what is morally correct, and more importantly what we can do to bridge the divide. I’m not going to back down on my assertion that morality is the right word to use here – a budget which is demonstrably more unfair (it’s a generally unfair budget) to women than to men is an immoral budget. So far, so philosophical.
This is where it gets better. This is where we get practical. The valuable question posed by the Fawcett Society is whether it is also an illegal budget, because if so, then there are grounds for actual change. Not only in this instance but for the future. If they succeed then there will be precedent for further challenges to unequal, unacceptable political decisions.
…we are all in this together.
– George Osborne, Conservative Conference Speech, 4 October 2010
Good point George, but not in the way you think we are. A man who wants us to pay whilst large companies don’t , who grew up on a fat trust fund and is the heir apparent to the Osborne Baronetcy of Ballentaylor is probably only dimly aware of the Real World Implications of the “this” that “we” appear to be “in”. Nonetheless, he has one bit right. The key word is “together”. We – the actual, genuine we – who are going to bear the brunt of these cuts must use the laws that we have to protect the rights that we need. Laws do not stand up for themselves. We need to make the system work for us. The tools for change are there. We need the knowledge to wield them and we must show solidarity with those who do.
Yes, I used the “s” word. It’s an old fashioned word but so are “honour” and “truth” and “love” and I like them all.
Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.
– Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories (1998)
We must work together, and use whatever means are at our disposal to ensure that the laws that should protect us are enforced. Otherwise they are literally worth nothing. Just words and empty promises. Rather like a group of politicians I could mention. So yes, it’s absolutely time to pull together and muck in and all those other buzz words that seem to have echoes of the Blitz, trying to soft-soap us into accepting being short changed for some nebulous “greater good”. Don’t be fooled.
Challenge the cuts. Because we’re all in this together.