Tis the season to be… sexist?
There’s currently an ASDA advert doing the rounds of various websites (and the TV, I imagine, given that’s where adverts also exist) which has earned the ire of various commentators, including the mighty, mighty Mumsnet because they believe it to be sexist.
Before we go further, have you seen the advert? If not, here you go:
Opinions vary as to whether this is offensively sexist or whether such labels are merely the result of ‘political correctness gone mad.™’ However, what is being depicted is pretty unambiguous, especially thanks to the “behind every Great Christmas, there’s mum” tagline at the end: Christmas is the result of Mum working very hard and (by inference) Dad being generally useless, not up to scratch and oblivious of her efforts. It falls squarely into what The Mary Sue terms Dumb Man Commercials, whereby in order to appeal to the (presumed) female audience, the advertisers present men as foolish when compared to the power of womankind – if the power of womankind is limited to, say, cleaning an oven.
Now, lookit, there’s quite enough sexism going on at this time of year what with the pink aisle full of plastic dolls and retailers emblazoned with gender-segregated gifts without the whole of Christmas being laid firmly and squarely on the shoulders of women and negating the role of anyone else in the fulfilment of annual joy. No pressure, love.
This isn’t really a post about lambasting the ASDA advert – many people have done that, and more eloquently too. What it is about is advertisers’ perception of who we are as people, and whether that matches up to how we really are and how we think of ourselves.
Given the results of the recent census, we know that households such as the one depicted in the advert are not in the majority in the UK – far more people either live alone or are lone parents. So the assumption of “Mum” being the lynch pin for the “average” Christmas in the UK is not a reflection of reality.
There will be many families who rely on Dad, or another relative. There will be many Christmases spent amongst friends, or as a couple without children (like my own Yuletide will be). There will also be many Christmases in the UK that people spend alone – either through positive choice or sad circumstances. Lots of people don’t celebrate Christmas at all, of course. But I am absolutely not going to get into a discussion of religion as well as politics.
Well, not for this post.
Chivalry and a Found (Medieval Geek) Feminism
“Chivalry” is one of those words guaranteed to start an argument. In a newspaper column, a bar or an office, a discussion about chivalry tends to divide the participants into two energetically opposed groups: those who believe that ‘women should act like women and men should act like men’, and those who believe that the cavalry tactics of the thirteen century have little to offer modern conceptions of gender.
Of course, I’ve deliberately stacked the deck there, partly because I don’t think the chivalry debate is actually a debate; it’s a way of obscuring the real issues behind a warm, old-timey phrase.
“Chivalry” tends to enter the conversation when it is suggested that women might be treated as equals in the public space, that they might not be subjected to sexualised commentary for simply walking down the street, or might be paid an equal salary to men.
Then “chivalry” suddenly arrives as the benign, patronising face of patriarchy. Don’t women want men to open doors for them, to buy drinks for them, to arrange for them to be unable to support themselves economically and thus be dependent on the contingent goodwill of another person for their livelihood? That’s just plain mean, and almost certainly emotionally manipulative.
The reason this gambit interests me is not how ridiculous it sounds when spelled out (though that too) but how much explanatory force is attributed to such a vague and nebulous ideology.
Even more than evopsych, another gender-wrangle bugbear, “chivalry” offers so little specific justification. Even the debased version of evolutionary psychology one meets in the arguments of MRAs and redditors who have stumbled furiously into the comments section of Feministe (in the manner of a partygoer in Cancun who reaches for that Hawaiian shirt in the wardrobe and finds himself amid the snows of Narnia) purports to present an argument and a set of historical (well, mythical) explanations.
That’s why “chivalry” is so often a distraction, a way of blowing warm, nostalgic smoke across the debate until its not clear what we’re even arguing against.
The other reason it seems odd is the diametrically opposed way we use “medieval”. Like sixteenth-century humanists, we rush to brand anything barbarous, vicious or ignorant as “medieval”. The actions of Boko Haram, for example, or the conditions in an inner-city crackhouse, or Creationism. Somehow “chivalry” expresses a comfortable reactionary vision of gender relations, in which women simper and accept being corralled into particular spheres of activity away from real power, whereas “medieval” is backward and dumb. The bad kind of backward and dumb.
Between them these terms manage a bait and switch on our engagement with the past and its bearing on gender politics. A necessary one, given the preponderance of “princess” vocabulary which saturates the images offered to girls and young women. Narratives about dating, dress and men’s attention are full of language which assumes that the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages – all those castles, quests, damsels and princes – are the natural image of relations between genders.
At the same time, it’s necessary to decry the treatment of women in other countries as “medieval”, to maintain the fiction that women in our culture have nothing to trouble their heads about. The terminology carefully allots two meanings to the same collection of past events, and assigns our (rightly) divided feelings of shame, horror, belonging and heritage to whichever side is needed to keep gender norms in place.
The word “chivalry” has been particularly bothering me recently since I started rereading bits of Malory’s Morte Darthur. One of the most influential Arthurian works in the English language, this fifteenth-century version of the Camelot legends looms over almost all subsequent Arthurian works in some form or another, whether that be Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, or the recent BBC TV Merlin.
An examination of this romance also gives a bit of a lie to the myth of “chivalry”. It’s not that it debunks the soft-focus pageantry with a brutal expose of fifteenth-century repression and sexual violence (though an account of its author might do something of the sort). Rather, it undermines the “princess” paradigm by offering a very different kind of female character.
As Helen Cooper notes in her edition of Morte Darthur, women are often the characters who incite action:
Most of them, moreover, are active agents, not mere passive damosels.
The book also seems quite at home with women’s romantic agency: to quote Cooper again, Malory “takes it as natural and unthreatening…that women have sexual desires” and act upon them.
One particular passage struck me as illuminating this issue: when Dame Lyonet realizes her sister Lyonesse is in love with the knight Sir Gareth. The section doesn’t need much more prologue:
Then was Sir Gareth more gladder than he was more. And then they troth-plight, other to love and never to fail while their life lasteth.
And so they burnt both in hot love that they were accorded to abate their lusts secretly. And there Dame Lyonesses counselled Sir Gareth to sleep in no other place but in the hall, and there she promised him to come to his bed a little before midnight.
Their counsel was not so privily kept but it was understood, for they were but young both, and tender of age, and had not used such craft before.
Wherefore the damosel Lyonet was a little displeased, and she thought her sister Dame Lyonesse was a little over-hasty, that she might not abide the time of her marriage; and for saving of her worship [reputation] she thought to abate their hot lusts.
And she let ordain by her subtle crafts that they had no their intents either with other as in their delights, until they were married.
Unfortunately I haven’t got space to continue copying out the episode, but the way she decides to use her “subtle crafts” to frustrate her sister’s insufficiently crafty crafts involves creating an enchanted knight who comes charging in whenever Gareth and Lyonesse manage some alone-time, causing Gareth to have to battle it.
He defeats it each time, in increasingly final ways (eventually swiping its head off, and carefully chopping the head into a hundred pieces and dropping it out of a window into the moat) but each time Lyonet puts it back together with magic ointment. Because who doesn’t have space in their life for a moment-ruining sorcerous cyborg created by their older sister?
This passage also exhibits some surprising gender politics. On first reading it’s simply another fabulous (in both senses) tale of magic and love, but the framing is strikingly modern.
Firstly, the narrator seems to find nothing either surprising or blameworthy about the two young people wanting to have sex before marriage: that use of “lust” is, in context, simply denoting a particular emotional and physical state. It’s not the “lust” of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s more like the lust of a Magnum advert or a Cosmo special issue.1
Neither does Lyonet see anything wrong with her sister wanting to sleep with Sir Gareth – she simply realizes that everyone else knows what is going to happen, and that her own wish for her sister to be happy won’t stop people shaming Lyonesse. She creates the magical knight because she’s acutely aware of the gap between her own sympathetic understanding of her sister’s feelings and desires, and the hypocritical attitude of the society they have to live within.
Interesting that the word “craft” is used of both Lyonesse’s secrecy and Lyonet’s magic. I’m tempted to read this as suggesting they’re both sets of skills which the women have developed in order to survive in a difficult world – though Lyonesse’s is far less effective. The initiative Cooper identifies in Malory’s women is dramatically present here: Lyonesse instructs her lover where to be at night and comes to visit him, whilst her sister makes a counter-plan to foil her.
Sexual attraction is hardly an unusual motive for action in the fiction we see around us, but in this case it’s the young women who take action and negotiate their way between their feelings and the expectations of a broader community.
There’s also something meta-romance about Lyonet’s solution. I may be over-reading this brief passage, but Malory’s deliberately laconic style encourages us to interject motivations and connections to make sense of the narrative. So I think the form Lyonet’s obstruction takes – an enchanted bouncer – is also a symbol of her superior ability to understand heroic romance as a genre.
“Alright, little sister”, her choice of magical weapon seems to say, “You want to be the heroine of a chivalric romance? Because in all the romances I’ve read you don’t get the knight that easily…” She ironically goes along with Lyonet’s casting of herself as romantic damosel, and cranks up the volume, providing her sister with her very own enchanted nemesis to overcome before she can get what she wants.
If we wanted to translate this into a realist mode, this gestures towards the idea that love doesn’t end your story arc as a person, and that finding the person you want to spend “happily ever after with” doesn’t subsume your identity into a “game over” montage.
Lyonesse still has to deal with what Camelot will think of her, and she’ll do so whilst remaining Lyonesse and a member of her own society. The meta-romantic element, in which Lyonet goes to the spell-book to slow up her sister’s love life, seems to valorise young women who are symbolically and semantically competent, as well as active in the world.
Lyonet wins this episode because she is more capable than Lyonesse of taking the narratives which surround them in their culture, understanding and decoding them, and then redeploying those narratives to her own advantage, with a combination of critical analysis, sisterly compassion, and geeky in-joke wit.
So if nothing else, this chunk of Malory provides us with another reason to sneer at “chivalry” when used to argue that the world was better when women were (supposedly) passive, and to own up to our medieval heritage, whether it’s embarrassing, troubling or apparently irrelevant.
Because occasionally we may trip over moments like this, where Dame Lyonet is exercising her subtle crafts. Crafts which, as I read them over again, look more and more like medieval geek feminism.
- Images taken from Kate Beaton’s inspired ‘courtly love’ comics over at Hark! A Vagrant.
- Jem Bloomfield also blogs at Quite Irregular
- Not that either of those are anything but problematic, but my point here is the modernity of the word’s implications. [↩]
Men on Horses: C is for Chivalry (Alphabet b-sides and rarities)
Ed’s note: In the original Alphabet we did ‘C is for Crinoline’ – but here’s something we thought was topically worth coming back to.
C
CHIVALRY
Chivalry is dead, but you’re still kinda cute.
– Nelly Furtado, Promiscuous (2006)
Chivalry. Not one of feminism’s most pressing issues, but definitely one of its more genteel debates.
Do you, as an attractive female who also happens to be a feminist, deign to take the seat that dude offers you on the crowded tube or laugh hollowly and stick your head back in your neighbour’s armpit? Is chivalry OK?
Personally, my view on this debate is always affected by the point that 99% of the men I’ve met who talk about chivalry with misty-eyed fervour are also the kind of Nice Guys who Really Aren’t Very Nice At All.
But that’s not for here.
What I am interested in is looking at its complex linguistic heritage.
Horses
What’s that sound in the distance?
Why, it’s the sound of clopping hooves – and chivalry‘s etymological root come to join us. Neiiigh.
Animal instincts. Photo by Hodge.
For though chivalryin English means (first definition ahoy!) ‘the code of behaviour demonstrated by a perfect knight‘, were we French we’d replace ‘knight’ with ‘chevalier‘, or ‘horseman’ – from the root word cheval (= ‘horse’).
The knight, or chevalier, is in origin a nobleman on horseback who goes around rescuing maidens and fighting dragons. He is chivalrous in behaviour, displaying (the word’s second definition) ‘courage, honour, justice and readiness to help the weak’.
Key examples can be found in the legends of King Arthur and his horsebacked Knights of the Round Table – in particular Sir Gawain and the so-good-he-couldn’t-be-gooder Sir Percival (who later becomes Wagner’s Parsifal).
The chivalrous are those on horseback.
But it’s the secondary meaning of chivalry that we best recognise today: ‘courteous behaviour, especially towards women’ (that is, giving up your seat on the tube, which Percival would totally have done if he didn’t travel everywhere by cheval).
Courtly-powered lovin’
Chivalry – and the courtesy that defines it – is also the base idea behind courtly love, which the devoted may remember we addressed separately in the Alphabet Glory Days.
Charles I – Equestrian portrait by Anthony van Dyck
This is what the knights are doing when they’re not out fighting – sighing for love among rose bushes, swooning at the touch of a ‘lily-white hand’ and definitely giving up their seats for a woman on the medieval commute.
And it was said to have been invented by a woman, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Before she married Henry II and brought her French customs over to England, Eleanor had a period presiding alone over a predominantly male grouping in Poitiers.It seems inventing an elaborate code of chaste devotion to a single lady – courteous behaviour, if you will – was a good way for Eleanor to bring these bored and potentially restless knights into order – and, I assume, to block potential sexual aggression at the same time (cf. the court of Elizabeth I, which saw a resurgence of ‘courtly’ devotion to ‘Gloriana’, the ‘Virgin Queen‘).
Courtship
With these courtly roots, it’s appropriate that, during the English Civil War, the word chevalier should lend itself so enthusiastically to the Royalist cause in fighting for king (and court).
In this context, the Cavaliers were enemies to the Roundheads and cousins to chevaliers via the Latin source-word ‘cabellarius’ (also meaning ‘horseman’).
The origin of this term is actually pre-war, in the grouping of courtly ‘cavaliers’ at the original Carolingian court (a bit like the courtly lovers at Poitiers).
These included the ‘Cavalier poets‘, a conglomerate of literary courtiers formed by the King himself, including Robert Herrick and Edmund Waller.
The term in this usage is ambiguous, though. On the one hand, cavalier was often used in allusion to the King’s refined (indeed ‘knightly’) sensibilities, which, incidentally, included a famous love of horses – as the many magnificent equestrian portraits of him attest.
But, in a pejorative sense, the cavalier poets were so named because they were famously ‘roistering gallants’ and ‘libertines’. This is cavalier‘s other meaning: ‘haughty, disdainful or supercilious’ or ‘offhand and unceremonious’ (a bit like wearing your hat at a ‘rakish’ angle).
So cavalier is almost a contraction in terms.
The Don
This is the very ambiguity we find in Mozart’s great libertine opera, Don Giovanni, written about 100 years later. The ‘Don’ is a nobleman and serial womaniser. He’s a standard-issue rake, in fact: we learn in the Catalogue Song that he’s seduced 1,003 women in Spain alone.
Sir Charles Grandison
He is throughout referred to in the Italian as a ‘cavalier’, understood (and, for us English-speakers, translated) according to context variously as ‘gentleman’ (nobleman on horseback) and ‘rake’ (careless womaniser) – as in the opera’s subtitle, ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (‘the debauchee punished’).
Thus, when Don Giovanni takes the pretty peasant girl Zerlina away from her finance, Masetto, to show her his castle (no, really), Don Giovanni ‘reassures’ the jealous Masetto by saying he needn’t worry – his fiancee is ‘in the hands of a cavalier‘.Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Masetto is afraid of. “Let the cavaliere make a cavaliera out of you!” he trumpets at the departing Zerlina – he knows what’s going down (this).
Court to City
Back to English climes.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Queen Anne halved the size of the English court and moved it out of central London.
In so doing, she ultimately ended up transferring power from court to city – and courtesy became civility (from the Latin cives (= the city)).
The White Knight accompanies Alice through the forest
This is the age of opening doors, watching your language and standing up when a woman enters the room. Chivalry has gone domestic; men are civil now in Britain. Only the hot-headed Italian Don Giovannis are still cavaliers.
But when Samuel Richardson wanted to depict a perfect (but domestic) Englishman, he still made him an aristocratic knight (Sir Charles Grandison). Jane Austen did too: her paragon of virtue (himself based on Sir Charles), is pointedly named Mr Knightly (Emma).By this point it’s faded away to a name rather than a title, but the gentleman still has a vestigial horse (if you will).
White Knights
Strangely enough, the vestigial horse becomes more literal in the modern age, in the form of the ladies’ proverbial ‘ideal man’ – a chivalrous gentleman. Mr Right is also a ‘knight in shining armour’.
He’s even a Lewis Carroll-esque ‘White Knight’, a noble rescuer (as in the song ‘My White Knight’ from Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, where the knight in question will, her mother thinks, ‘save’ Marian the Librarian from Old Maidery).
Remember when Grace first meets Leo – the Great Romance – in Will and Grace? He’s on a horse in Central Park. That’s how you know he’s a Big Deal Romance.
Never trust a man on horseback
And, to conclude very crudely, I suppose this is what happened to chivalry .
It became the polite behaviour of the gentleman – enshrined in tradition and developed over a couple of hundred years to become our friend offering me a seat on the bustling 21st century commute and sitcom single girls dreaming of their ‘Mr Darcy’.
But I still hear the sound of clopping hooves. The fantasy may be more Sir Gawain than Don Giovanni, but you know what they say – the apple never falls far from the lexical tree.
- For more from the Alphabet of Feminism – a whole series of posts about language, gender and history – visit the Alphabet category. Contains lots of hand-drawn illustrations!
[Guest Post] Lego Friends Revisited
- Today we have a guest post from Ruth Coustick, who blogs at Origami Girl. If you have a guest post brewing in your brain, email us on [email protected].
“It’s all about the joy of creation…”
… is the song that Lego use on their website to showcase their Friends series.
Not what you were expecting? Perhaps you thought Stand By Your Man or some other such cringeworthy song might be more appropriate for a series so blatantly gendered. Well, so did I, but one happy little girl at a time, the Friends range has swayed my feelings.
Let me backtrack and give it some history.
The Lego Friends series was released earlier this year.
When the toys (and adverts) were unleashed, the internet seemingly exploded with outrage. (I am,
of course, referring to my internet – the one with feminist twitter feeds, blogs about toys and sexy pictures of Neil Gaiman. Your internet might be a bit different.)
In particular I watched Feminist Frequency’s videos on the series, but I also read blogposts from dads who want their girls to work in Silicon Valley and study at MIT.
The first few toys released were a bakery, a café, a beauty shop, a house and an inventor’s
workshop. These initial toys are made up of pastel pink and purple bricks, they only feature girls and
those roles present are mainly gendered home-keeping roles.
My blood was boiling, like many other people’s, at the narrow roles I could see girls being pushed into. At my local Toys R Us there is a vast collection of Lego from the Creator series to Cars. In fact I have never seen so much in one retailer.
However, the Friends series is not placed in their giant Lego selection. It is in a (very clearly labelled) ‘Girlz’ aisle,nowhere near the Lego corner, which has so much sparkle and glitter I thought cupcakes were
going to spontaneously erupt from the walls.
Friends is not like the rest of Lego: it’s for girls, and must be segregated.
So far, so sexist.
However, I’m slowly putting the guns down. Across the various worlds of Lego, equality is growing. As someone who has an obsessive love of toys, I frequently visit their website. Every time I find
myself riled up about Lego, I go on the site and find that a far greater balance of characters is presented there than we see in the shops.
For example, they have little character bios for nearly every mini-figure. I was angry about the lack of girl characters in Spinjitzu. But Nya (pictured right) has a token girl description which does include phrases like “she’s no damsel in distress” and “Nya is fed up with the ninjas’ boy’s club syndrome”.
Here, the minority female mini figures I have collected become role models. Still a token, but a valuable one at that, and the question remains why we don’t see more of this outside of the website.
I recently decided to explore the Friends section of the website and was pleasantly surprised and then genuinely excited about what it offers. I believe that Lego listened to the petition from Change.org (the one that got over 50,000 signatures, the one I signed) back in April 2012, and have turned something that was completely sexist into a city of steps toward empowerment.
First of all, they have toned down the overwhelming pink tones of the bricks, and gone for more brown tones, like the riding camp. There is also a greater range of sets, including a treehouse, design
studio, bedroom set with a drum kit and the Heartlake Flying Club.
This last set was definitely the swing vote for me. It has the least amount of pink; mere touches of it on the plane. Furthermore, the stereotyped role for women in a plane is Air Hostess, and Lego didn’t go there. Stephanie is the pilot of her own seaplane, looking more Amelia Earhart than Pan Am.
The Friends themselves might enjoy traditionally feminine roles, but they also have jobs, varied interests and detailed characters that allow for diverse roleplaying. The key with Lego is that it can be as many things as you can imagine. Emma’s Design Studio, for instance, has one piece which suggests this is for fashion – but with the large desk, the ruler and the laptop Emma could just as easily be an architect or an engineer.
We also shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that enjoying balloons or sweets makes you weak. It’s more that giving girls only that which is sugary-sweet which is the issue. Although Lego still have a long way to go, I think there are at least positive conversations being had at Lego HQ.
In her second Lego video Anita Sarkeseesian says that the emphasis with the Lego Friends series is on traditional home-keeping play. She cites the adverts, comparing the Friends advert slogan “Drive to the newly built café” to the “You can build the castle” of another Lego advert featuring some classic father-son bonding.
She draws the reasonable conclusion that boys are offered a more active play experience that encourages them to use maths and motor skills.
However, if we look on the Lego website the section for Friends has the theme song I quoted at the beginning of this post, which accompanies all their videos:
“We can do it, we can dream a whole new way
We can do it, you can build with me today
It’s all about the joy of creation”
I think this new emphasis on building which is subtly surrounding you the whole time you shop is part of a change that encourages girls to gain all the skills and experiences that Lego has to offer.
They may not have it all, but the newer Lego Friends sets and marketing are a step in the right direction, and with these steps being echoed in other areas of the Lego Universe… watch this space.
- Ruth Coustick has yet to understand the concept of ‘growing up’. She spends her hard-earned cash on Playmobil pirates and building Lego versions of Samus, and wants to see the childish books and toys she loves become more diverse and inclusive. She works in digital rights and has a host of other nerdy interests like comics, board games and First World War poetry. She blogs about her life and fashion at Origami Girl.
Hawkeye, introduced to many by the Avengers film but a Marvel character since his first appearance in Tales of Suspense all the way back in 1964, has struck a bit of a chord on Tumblr – particularly in his incarnation as Jeremy Renner in Avengers Assemble. Shipped mercilessly with the Hulk in the Hulkeye fandom – and particularly adorably by Noelle ‘gingerhaze’ Stevenson – not a day goes by without Hawkeye in some incarnation crossing my dash.
Lately, though, something has been stirring in the Tumblsphere (which is definitely a word shut up SHUT UP). Comic portrayals of female characters have been questioned, dissected, and found to be both objectification-tastic, and downright anatomically impossible.
Now, if there’s anything that Tumblr loves, it’s mixing up social justice with fandom.
Thus, The Hawkeye Initiative was born. The rules are simple: find a female character in comics being portrayed as an object and/or in a position that human anatomy would simply laugh at, then redraw Hawkeye in that pose, wearing the same outfit.
It is a thing of beauty. Let me show you what I mean. Click a thumbnail to open each image without leaving this page.
If you’re a Tumblr user, The Hawkeye Initiative is a Tumblr despite its domain, and can be followed like any other. If you have a sense of humour and an understanding workplace, I think it’s unlikely that you’ll regret doing so.
Found Feminism: Blue Plaque Bonanza
Somewhere in a little seaside town (Hastings) there is a very, very feminist street. Pelham Place, to be precise, with its pretty white fronted houses, looking out towards the sea.
Not a hotbed of radical political lady-times, and yet it’s been home to not one, but two awesome women. Briefly, it was also frequented by our editor Miranda this autumn, so technically that makes it three, and the temptation to create Bad Reputation plaques, possibly as stickers, is actually quite strong.
Anyway, here’s the street…
Pelham Place, Hastings. Most feminist street ever?
…and here are the plaques.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827-1891, Educational pioneer and campaigner for women’s rights and artist. Lived here 1830-1853.
Muriel Matters-Porter, 1877-1969, Adelaide born activist and first woman to ‘speak’ in the House of Commons. Lived in this house 1949-1969.
The two women in question, Barbara Bodichon and Muriel Matters, are not only pleasingly alliterative but also both very cool people in their own way.
Barbara was a formidable lady. Born out of wedlock to a reasonably wealthy and very forward-thinking father, she had an “unusual upbringing” by all accounts (well, here’s an account that says that).
Bodichon was an artist who travelled Europe, and she was heavily involved in women’s suffrage. She is credited with helping campaign for the Married Women’s Property Act, a step towards independant financial security for women which allowed them to own and control their own property.
She also set up the English Women’s Journal to discuss issues pertaining to womens’ rights, and founded Girton College, Cambridge.
As an aside, her family is related by marriage to the Bonham Carter family which contains both Florence Nightingale and, eventually, Helena Bonham Carter, a BadRep Towers favourite, so there’s clearly something going on in this family and they deserve watching.
Muriel Matters, meanwhile, was born in Australia, moving to the UK to participate in the suffrage movement, where she became known for being somewhat militant and outrageous in her attempts to gain publicity for the cause (including hiring a dirigible).
She was also a campaigner against slums and poverty and an early teacher of the Montessori Method. She stood as a candidate for the Labour Party in 1924.
Matters lived in the house on Pelham Street, which was a nursing home, until her death, the later part of her life focusing on what is coyly described by Wikipedia as “the local community”, and spending time being a pretty great lady of letters.
I can only imagine what it must have been like to campaign so ardently for change and to see it realised in your lifetime, then to go on and survive through the war, all the way to to the revolutions of the 1960s. It’s only when presented with those dates that I can begin to appreciate the scale and speed of the feminist project, that so much happened within these two overlapping lifetimes. It’s inspirational to think about what could be achieved within our lifetimes.
The two didn’t overlap when they lived at Pelham Place, sadly, and my Google-fu doesn’t reveal any evidence they actually ever met, but that’s certainly a Fantasy Dinner party guest list to think about.
I like the Blue Plaque project. I like any kind of history you can pick up just by looking up whilst you’re walking along. It’s nice to be able to put things in context and to see the past as places with real people rather than objects in a museum.
But this combination in particular strikes a chord with me, possibly because it is so unusual. And it’s the standout element here that makes this a Found Feminism.
Let’s face it, most commemorative plaques are about men – English Heritage is working to tackle this issue – and the coverage of women’s rights is often a late addition to the table. The Pankhursts didn’t get their plaque intil 2006, for example, so to have two together is impressive.
So here’s to Pelham Place, and to Hastings!
- Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day, or made you stop and think? Share it here, tweet us, or send your finds to [email protected]!
Street Harassment, or ‘How I Learned to Stop Loving Cat Noises When They Come from Creepy Dudes’
I was walking home recently, across a busy bit of central London, after dark, when some dude made kissy noises at me, like he was trying to tempt a cat. He was two feet away, staring straight at me and smirking like an icky weasel.
Without thinking, I responded in kind with a big, angry, I-will-slash-you hiss.
DESIST
He looked pretty taken aback.
I carried on my way and mused that I appear to speak feline like a mothertongue, but also I got to thinking: what the ever-loving crap?! Seriously, what on earth was he expecting from that encounter? What would a positive result have been? Surely that’s never worked for anyone, right?
Ah, street harassment. It’s been a few months. Usually my experience of you is relegated to when I’m wearing a summer dress (gender norms for the lose) but it sucks whenever it happens. It’s also antithetical to ever actually getting my interest because – no matter how many mad cat-lady vibes I’ve got going on – no one who thinks they can approach me like a pet is getting the time of day.
This particular encounter didn’t throw me much because I actually had a comeback – I walked away pleased with myself for thinking fast – but how you deflect it shouldn’t be the first point of call. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?
Far more often it’s crap shouted from cars – which I find rubbish twice over because they’ve gone before you can say or do anything in response. (Come back right now, dudebro. I have a LOT to say about what you just did.)
A friend of mine recently had some jerk shout “nice tits!” at her from a car. She was (understandably) angry and upset for the rest of the day, but the guy shouting it might have told himself it was a compliment – some interviews with street harassers have revealed what is either complete ignorance or willing ignorance of the effect it has on women. Many of the men, when asked why they do it, say it’s a compliment and it makes women feel nice.
Maybe it is a compliment for a very small percentage of people – I cannot claim to speak for everybody – but I am yet to meet or hear of one person who’s had a catcall, wolf-whistle or similar and felt good about it. The thing about street harassment is, it’s not flirting. Street harassment doesn’t make a person feel good because it isn’t about a person: it’s boiling them down to their physical attributes (‘nice tits’, ‘nice ass’) and funnily enough that doesn’t feel great.
“News of your interest in my ‘nice butt’ has not made my day in any way.”
The other thing is, it’s almost never a conversation: mostly ’cause the objects of the harassment aren’t interested and want to get on with their day, and also because often it’s at a remove – stuff shouted from cars, or (to use the cliché) from scaffolding. The people doing the shouting don’t actually expect a response. This isn’t a tool used to chat up women: it’s used to silence them. Under the guise of a compliment it’s a one-way street of objectification.
And Objectification Street is a crappy street. Seriously, I looked at a flat there once. There were rats all over the place and it smelled bad.
Of course, if people are physically closer to the harassers, it doesn’t exactly get better. The wonderful (and award-winning) Anti-Street Harassment UK campaign (ASH UK) was set up after its founder, Vicky, was harassed by a group of men who were initially shouting at her from a car, threatened to rape her, then got out of the car and followed her into a tube station where they assaulted her. The police (who did intervene) then blamed her for responding to them and said “boys will be boys.” SO. MUCH. FAIL.
Um… *cough* male readers – this is essentially Met officers saying your entire gender are all hopeless gropey asshats. Erm… *cough* I wouldn’t take that.
So, what can we do?
- Well, the first step is breaking down the idea that it’s either normal or OK. It’s neither, and we need to spread the word. Thou shalt not take shit, and (not that our readers should need telling) thou shalt not dish it out, either.
- Read up on it – from the likes of stopstreetharassment.org to this brilliant video on street harassment and women of colour:
- Check out Jezebel’s ongoing street harassment category, and call catcalling out for the asshattery it is.
- Those who want some background on why people are often hostile to approaches on the street would do very well to read this blog post ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’. (Heavy, but a thousand times worth it.)
- And in the meantime, don’t let that ‘compliment’ strawman argument derail you on your quest for gender justice.
On that note…
… since you’ve been such a good class of gender justice warriors today, I’m going to let you finish early with just one more video:
I absolutely love their line of questioning about “has that ever worked for you?” Also “sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchial dividend – it’s so over” should be on a t-shirt. I would buy that shirt.
And that’s a wrap. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to more important things – like buying cat food for my wonderful kitty – because some catcalls are nice. The ones that come from an actual cat.1
- All images of unimpressed cats in high dudgeon from Morguefile, the free image bank!
- Not Schrödinger’s cat. He is a meanie. [↩]
- Here’s Libby of the wonderful TreasuryIslands blog again with Part 2 of her post on American Horror Story. If you have a guest post a-brewing, email us on [email protected].
In my previous post yesterday, I talked about the first season of American Horror Story and its reliance on two female archetypes – the femme fatale and the overbearing mother – in its construction of the monstrous.
The spoiler warning, again, goes here!
Today, I’m going to talk about reproduction, so if you want to sing that song from Grease 2, you better get it out of your system now. Ready?
Mothers are, in the world of AHS, a danger not only to their children, but also to the others that touch their lives. Pregnancy, with its easy symbolism and suitably melodramatic and gory end bit, lends itself to Horror. But it is not just the obvious that is made an object of fear.
Vivien, the walking womb-ded
As I said in part one, Vivien and Ben are a married couple facing difficulties. She’s had a miscarriage, he’s had an affair, and their relationship is in tatters. I think, I think, that we’re meant to be engaged with this crumbling marriage.
But while Ben is a rounded character – full of hope and regret, sweetness and cruelty, passion and inertia – his wife is driven only by her desire to save her marriage, which in turn is driven by her maternal desire.
Like Nora, the basement abortionist’s wife, Hayden (Ben’s deeply sexual and manipulative mistress), and Constance, the terminally abusive and neglectful mother next door, Vivien simply has uterus, will procreate.1
Vivien is little more than a vessel, a womb with bouncy hair. She is Shroedinger’s Uterus, forever pregnant or not pregnant, host to a foetus that is alive or not alive, evil or not evil depending on the requirements of the plot in any given episode. Viven’s role as incubator is underlined when she dies in childbirth – her role is complete, so we need nothing more from her.
Vivien’s pregnancy is unusual. Hers is a product of heteropaternal superfecundation – she’s carrying twins with different fathers. One is her husband’s, the other is the result of her rape by a psychopathic ghost.2 Let’s not even go into the fact that her husband doesn’t believe she’s been raped – there’s something much worse than that on the horizon.The show’s mythology tells us that a child born of a ghost and a human will be the antichrist, and we all know what that means: apocalypse.
Just in case the implication of that isn’t clear, let me put it in slightly different terms: Vivien’s vagina is the muggletuppin’ Hellmouth.
Here’s where we get into the really juicy feminist theory
Much of what I’ve said so far owes a debt to Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous-feminine, and in particular the abject body; the demonisation, defilement and objectification of the female body in Horror.
Vivien’s labour and delivery is presented as particularly sanguinary; a festival of blood and sweat. It’s a burlesque of the natural; a grotesque, pantomimic affair attended entirely by a gorily deceased medical staff provided by the house.
With neither the clinical intervention of the modern birthing experience nor the cleanliness of the body innocent, the birth plays on both classically Freudian and modern germophobic fears. It is, from both perspectives, unclean.
The point of Horror, if there must be one, is to walk the line between desirable and undesirable; to cross or threaten the boundaries that separate stability and chaos. Childbirth, as a triumph of the primal over the civilised and the inner over the outer, is a natural exemplar of this. It’s naturally yukky and generally unstoppable, and that makes it pretty frightening. Here we’re treated to close ups of Vivien’s sweat covered forehead, wide overhead shots that emphasise the claustrophobic urgency of the scene, and heavy blood-loss.
Horror films that depict monstrous births play on the inside/outside distinction in order to point to the inherently monstrous nature of the womb as well as the impossibility of ever completely banishing the abject from the human domain. […] The womb represents the utmost in abjection for it contains a new life form which will pass from inside to outside bringing with it traces of contamination – blood, afterbirth, faeces.
– Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993)
Childbirth places us on the side of nature, outside of patriarchal order. Flesh is torn, blood is spilled, the sexual organs begin to resemble a wound. The imagery is graphic, base: abject. Vivien’s affinity with uncivilised, feral nature invoked, her threat to patriarchal law is cemented. The birth of Vivien’s twins is a threat fulfilled, a boundary crossed. From the abject comes the ruin of the world.
Vivien is threatened not just by the hell-spawn she’s carrying, but also by three of the ghosts that share her home. Nora and Hayden, who have lost their own children, and Chad, who has never had children, each desire ownership of Vivien’s child and conspire to steal the baby once it is born.
Baby-snatching is a common, well rooted trope in fantasy and horror, which usually points to the degeneracy of a group or being – a sign that they’re beyond redemption, truly inhuman. Infants are stolen for ingestion (as in Torchwood: Children of Earth), as revenge (like the Pied Piper of Hamlyn) or a sacrificial offering (the Buffy episode Band Candy) and occasionally, though rarely, to be raised as the kidnapper’s own. It is this which motivates the childless ghosts of AHS.
Each conspirator represents a different level of threat. Deceased interior designer Chad, constantly arguing with his (also dead) partner Patrick, is no threat at all. More concerned as he is with decorating than mending his broken relationship, he seems to think the baby will simply be handed to him. Nora, left to her own devices, is an unlikely threat – she’s narcissistic enough but ethereal and clueless.
But with Hayden, the picture is quite different. Hayden is wicked, determined and operating without fear of consequence – she’s dead, after all – and that’s precisely why she’s so dangerous.
The feminine is only established, however, if the wish for a penis is replaced by one for a baby.
– Freud, “Femininity”, New Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis (1933)
The problem here is one of motivation. Now, I’m not saying there’s something wrong with wanting children. But there’s something wrong with wanting children to the exclusion of everything else. Hayden is a formidable woman brimming with agency and audacity, and, in a stunning display of the roles women play in our diverse society, she’s pregnant too.
When she dies, she’s contributing all her energy to winning Ben back, and then, bam! One blunt-force trauma later, her whole reason for being has changed. Now, I get that dying is the sort of thing that might emotionally scar a person, but COME ON. The child in her belly, previously presented only as a tool of emotional blackmail, will never appear, so she’s obsessed with replacing it.
And that’s the key to understanding both Hayden and Nora. They both want to replace children they’ve lost. It is a narcissistic craving; a desire merely to possess. The possibility of motherhood has stripped them of rationality, maybe even sanity, and turned them into objects of dread. Here motherhood truly is ‘the most powerful feminine wish’ (Freud again, in 1933), and it is dangerous.
In the eyes of AHS, women are to be feared. Female sexuality is aberrant if not abhorrent, and represented by crude Freudian symbolism (if you aren’t yet convinced, check out the suckling infant literally devouring his mother’s breast).
I’m with Simone de Beauvoir when it comes to Freud, but not so Messrs. Murphy and Falchuck; it’s like they’ve tried to dramatise Introduction to Psychoanalysis.
The second season of American Horror Story recently began its run on UK television (on FX, new episodes Tuesday evening). So far it’s really pushing the boat out to hate women in a variety of new and exciting ways under the guise of a critical look at the pathologising of sexuality and historic attitudes to poor mental health.
It’s terrible. You’re going to love it.
- Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
- In a worrying conflation of hetero femininity and queer masculinity, one half of the gay couple who also haunt the house is also constantly yapping about having a child. [↩]
- Who, by the way, IS WEARING A LATEX FETISH SUIT because that isn’t sex negative, kink-shaming douchery AT ALL. [↩]
- We’re pleased to welcome Libby of the feminist-friendly TreasuryIslands blog back to our soapbox today. (She’s officially our most recurring guest!) If you have a guest post a-brewing, email us on [email protected].
American Horror Story is sexy.
No, let me rephrase that.
American Horror Story is SEXY. It emanates sweet tendrils of hotness, wisps of decadent, lustful sexual deviance and sultry taboo, while trotting apace through a veritable phalanx of horror tropes and borrowing heavily from the classics of the genre. I love it. It is also, in the words of the hilarious Is This Feminist? tumblr, PROBLEMATIC.
And who’s surprised, really? Ryan Murphy’s work is characterised by its casual misogyny (yo, Nip/Tuck, Glee, I’m looking at you) and so is horror as a genre. So not me, no. I’m not surprised, Mr Murphy, I’m not even angry. I’m just disappointed. Maybe you should go to your room and think about what you’ve done.
Now, don’t get me wrong. AHS is, by any critical standard, a terrible, terrible show. It’s fractured and bombastic and desperately wants to be, like, profound. But it’s not. It’s… y’know. Crap.
But luckily, I’m not a TV critic, so I bloody love it. And I’m allowed to love it because cognitive dissonance. This show is simply dripping with things that ought to make me hate it. And I do. I spit expletives at the screen. I rage against the covert anti-abortionism and the exploitative male gaze. And then I rewind and watch it again. Because, like I said. Cognitive dissonance.
I’m going to handle AHS in two parts. Today I’ll be examining the show’s representations of women as lovers and mothers, before looking at pregnancy, birth and maternal desire in the next exciting instalment.
Before I go on, beware. Here be SPOILERS.
Predatory Women in the Male Gaze
AHS is not much more than your typical haunted house story. It begins and ends with the house, designated ‘Murder House’ by local legend and built by Charles and Nora Montgomery decades before our protagonists – we’ll get to them later – were born.
The Montgomerys run an illegal abortion clinic from the basement, providing discreet help to women in trouble and fuelling the God complex which eventually sees the ether-addicted Charles sew together a Franken-baby – known as the Infanta – for his wife to care for. If we were looking for a symbolic representation of threat to the constructed (read: patriarchal) order of things, well, it doesn’t get any more obvious than that. Like Dr Frankenstein, Charles blurs the boundaries not just between God and man but also between male and female roles by creating life, upsetting the proper balance of the house and setting in motion the events which follow.
Nora and Charles’ lives end in a murder-suicide at Nora’s hand. Thus, they become the first to haunt the house.The third post-human (‘ghost’ is such an oppressive term, right?) resident of the house is Moira. Let’s start her story with a little pop quiz:
You, the lady of the house, enter your home to hear a woman being sexually assaulted. You pick up a gun – because they’re totally safe to have around when emotions are running high – and enter the master bedroom to find your husband raping the maid. You point the gun and fire. Who did you just kill? Was it –
a) your husband, because he’s a rapey scumbag?
b) Moira the maid, because, er… um… she’s there too?
If you said b) Moira the maid, congratulations! You hate women as much as American Horror Story does!
To be fair, this woman scorned does go on to shoot her husband too, but that maid, well. She was probably asking for it, wasn’t she, all walking around in clothes and getting on with her job and having breasts. What a slut.
Regardless of her intention or her consent, Moira is now a sexual predator, in death forced to play the role perceived as hers in life, and becomes a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure. The women she encounters see her as a sexless middle-aged woman, while the men (who, it seems, see only what they want to see) see a young, beautiful and carnivorously sexual temptress, seeking to undermine, manipulate or overthrow men through the power of her sexuality. She is the virgin/whore dichotomy made flesh.
I could get into how heterosexist this is, but frankly we’d be here for days. The height of Moira’s sexual power comes with the literal castration of the man who most poses a threat to her. Dr. Freud, you’re needed in the Literalisation of Symbolic Acts ward. Bring a towel.
The newest residents of Murder House are Vivien and Ben Harmon, a Bostonian couple intent on running away and leaving their marital problems behind them, because that always works. Moving into their suspiciously underpriced new home with their adolescent daughter is their first step towards repairing the damage done to the partnership by Ben’s affair with a student named Hayden in the aftermath of Vivien’s miscarriage.
Just as Moira ends up dead for having sex and getting above her station, so does Hayden. Hayden’s not above throwing herself at Ben, turning up at his home in an act of seduction and intimidation to rival the fatal-est of femmes.
We’re encouraged into this reading of women as wild by the show’s insistent male gaze.
A complex mythology that rules whether or not the ghosts age ensures that we get enough young female flesh to look at. There are lingering shots of gartered thighs and softly rising décolletée, there are those close, oppressive, slightly-from-above camera angles that make you feel like you dominate the subject – and there are straight-up no-holds-barred crotch shots. All of these things make sure we know where, and how, to look.
These women are women as men wish (or as gay men think straight/bi men wish) to see them: willing harbingers of sexual pleasure, built in the eye of the camera from tits and ass.
They’re supple-breasted and conveniently bisexual, with sexuality so magnetic that Ben must masturbate furiously – crying all the while – to stop himself from giving in to them. Where women are concerned, perceived sexual immorality is a barometer for bad. They are debased, and they will hurt you.
The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world
Motherhood comes in for a bad rap on AHS. From episode one (where Vivien’s longed for-pregnancy is spoken of in terms of an unwanted visitor violating the sacred space of the home) to the monstrous child-delivery at the end of the season, childbearing is painted as a threat to patriarchal social order. I’ll talk more about that next time, but for now I want to concentrate on what happens once you’ve got a bleating infant in your arms.
Another previous resident of Vivien and Ben’s home, and one of the few that is still living, is local Mommie Dearest Constance Langdon. She’s the self-appointed caretaker of the house, an amoral force of unfathomable intentions who appears to consider Mrs Bates and Margaret White her parenting role models.
Constance is a cruel, jealous single parent, abusing and using her children by turns. Unable to relinquish control of her brood as they age, and thus not allowing them autonomous identities, she ensures that dysfunction reins in the Langdon household.
She treats her daughter Addie, who has Down syndrome, as a sexual competitor. She imprisons both her daughter and her heavily-disfigured eldest son, the ironically-named Beauregard, in the home (sometimes resorting to shackles and chains as a demonstration of her sovereignty) and gleefully tells Addie that she’ll never be a ‘pretty girl’.1
Although all of her children are dead before they reach adulthood, the youngest remains as one of the fully corporeal phantoms haunting the Harmon household. Despite her treatment of her children, Constance is willing to kill to keep them together. The whole set-up screams narcissistic abuse.
Constance’s stranglehold over her youngest son, Tate, has prevented him from self-actualisation and produced an emotionally scarred adolescent, narcissistic and hypermasculine, who apes his mother in his desire for control over the bodies of others, raping and indiscriminately killing in order to exert his ownership. What a charmer.
Tate’s emotional state almost demands to be analysed as a reaction to Constance’s total control over the boy in the second stage of psychosexual development, which coincides with toilet training and in which autonomy is developed. Constance’s suppression of Tate’s self-actualisation has resulted in a rebellious, cruel, emotionally volatile adolescent who is so eager to please the woman he’s fixated on that he’ll commit terrible acts to gain her approval. It’s desperately clichéd.
Sexualised as it is, AHS’ regular female cast is not made up of victims in the great tradition of the genre: they don’t get cut up, and there’s no running through dark corridors in strategically torn clothing or fumbling ineffectually with locks that they could work perfectly well a minute ago.
This has caused some people to herald the show as a feminist buoy, bobbing about in the misogynist soup of Horror. Such is the jubilation at the thought that women might be allowed some agency, the flipside is missed. The show doesn’t victimise its women; it demonises them. In this world women are either maidens or mothers, either sexual or not.
And damn, they’ve got it in for you.
- You can now read Part 2!
- Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature. Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.
- Ed’s Tiny Note: For more on Addie and how she is portrayed and treated, there’s a critical look at her role at Fangs for the Fantasy. Down Syndrome Daily also has a roundup of US press reactions to the character, some of which I think betray ableist prejudice in themselves, and some of which make good points. [↩]