A more inclusive con?
Stephen B: “I first noticed how unusually inclusive Nine Worlds was about two minutes after collecting my badge from the front desk. Wandering down the corridor I found myself in… a geek feminism session.
“I was greeted cheerfully and given a quick intro to what was going on, and then left to join the various groups sitting around the (very popular) room at tables and in small lively seated circles on the floor. The crowd in this room didn’t know my views or that I write for BadRep, and I’m a straight white male – generally not a famously marginalised group – but I felt immediately welcome.
“In the next room along, Bronies were playing guitar and handing out cupcakes. They also had a rave DJ. In that moment, I suspected this wasn’t going to be a typical SF convention.”
Safe space?
Viktoriya: “I went to Nine Worlds and I wasn’t groped, harassed, belittled or condescended to. I felt comfortable enough to walk around dressed in my own clothes, and not necessarily the elaborate armour of ballgowns, cosplay or similar I’d adopted when frequenting prior conventions.
“More to the point, I felt comfortable enough to go around ON MY OWN. I can’t stress this enough. I stopped going to conventions because it had become apparent to me that I was paying a great deal of money to attend an event where it was pretty much guaranteed that I would be assaulted in some way, whereas daily assault is something most women can have for free simply by walking down the street in London. Why pay for the privilege?”
“Not being groped, forcibly intoxicated, called a cocktease, an uppity feminist, a silly little girl, or asked to kiss someone for the amusement of male onlookers – it was like a whole new world.”
“Also, I managed to convince my work friend to come with me to Nine Worlds. You guys, you have no idea of the stress associated with this.
“What if someone was a dick to her? What if she was assaulted? What if she hated it? Then I would be the work friend who convinced her to spend money on the the thing that was dreadful.
“So not being groped, forcibly intoxicated, called a cocktease, an uppity feminist, a silly little girl, or asked to kiss someone for the amusement of male onlookers – it was like a whole new world.”
Stephen: “It seems that every big convention recently has had a wave of harassment and bad experiences for some attendees. NineWorlds appeared to do things right instead, with a kick-ass anti-harassment policy and some seriously great content.”
Running a content track
Hannah Chutzpah: “It was an honour and a privilege to be asked to run the creative writing track. I spent pretty much the whole run-up panicking and convinced my everything would be a huge disaster…. right up until the second session where my longtime frenemy – author Chris Farnell – gave a talk on ‘Working the Time Machine: writing time travel so it makes sense’.
“We had a packed out room, with people hanging out the doors. Then, as the crowds left and I patted Chris and myself on the back, starting to believe this whole thing might work – this toy car, sent by the Bronies (pictured) whirred through the door full of cupcakes.”
Fandom and atmosphere
Stephen: “Nine Worlds is set up to include a wide range of fandoms and geekery, and all the different fans are welcome in the same space. There was so much going on, I barely saw the other Team BadRep folks.”
“It wasn’t just ‘here’s the gay corner’, so it felt much more open to (say) the B and the T and the Q of ‘LGBTQ*’. Which – as a bi girl – I found very, very refreshing.”
Hannah: “I didn’t get out to as much of the rest of the fest as you two, but the main thing which spilled across every room, hallway, lobby, breakfast bar and so on was the extremely friendly and welcoming nature of the whole conference.
“The only other geek con I’ve been to was the SFX weekender, which wasn’t unfriendly , but I also can’t remember half as much mingling (or half as many reasons to mingle) as there were here.”
Stephen: “I’m not a convention-goer. The friendly atmosphere and lack of judging at Nine Worlds was the kind of pleasant, safe space I’d assume any good con would try for, but from everything I’ve heard in recent years this one got it unusually right.
“I saw tweets from people saying that having dedicated LGBTQ* content made such a difference to their time there. Even the Bronies didn’t seem to get the usual derision, mostly because they were just unrelentingly happy and frequently gave you cake.”
Faves?
Hannah: The two standout workshops for me, personally, were fantasy novelist Tom Pollock’s creative writing workshop on Making Monsters – which generated at least one idea I’m going to be writing into a short story.
“Also, Emma Newman ran a workshop on ‘Fear and Writing’ – drawing on her own experiences as an author.
“Two takeaway things for me were her describing procrastination as a fear-based behaviour, and
that perfectionism is fear’s favourite coat. Emma – thank you. That stuff really spoke to me. Like, more than my shrink does.”
Viktoriya: “It was wonderful to have so many different tracks, and to NOT have diversity and inclusiveness be shunted off to the side with, “oh, well, we’re covering that in X track” – rather, you had panels on inclusiveness and discrimination across all the different tracks.
Hannah: “And since it wasn’t ‘here’s the gay corner’ it felt much more open to (say) the B and the T and the Q sections. Which – as a bi girl – I found very, very refreshing.”
Stephen: “On the Friday night I went to a swordfighting workshop with Miltos Yerolemou, the actor who played Syrio Forel in Game of Thrones.
“It was a lot of fun, and at least two thirds of the attendees were women (one of whom was you, Viktoriya, and I totally clocked your expression of demonic glee when you got to swing a very large wooden sword, which suggested you enjoyed the session!).”
Viktoriya: “I loved that there was a knitting track, and a My Little Pony track, and a board games track. It stressed the diversity of interests that are brought together under the fandom and geek umbrellas in a way that cannot be present in any single-show or single-theme convention.
“The fact that the ‘celebrity guests’ were actually there for panels, activities and workshops primarily, with singing autographs very much a secondary activity, was even better. I despair of the autograph factories modern conventions have become. Queueing for eight hours is not my idea of fun.”
Could-do-betters?
Viktoriya: “Well, OK, let me argue with myself for a little bit. I’m going to nitpick here, not out of anger but because the organisers have shown a genuine interest in learning from their mistakes and in improving the experience in coming years.
“So, accessibility. I don’t know what the experience was for those attendees with limited mobility, but I am relatively able-bodied and even I found it a bit cumbersome navigating the stairs in two hotels with only the few lifts.
“Ultimately, that’s what I’m looking for in a convention: committing to doing better next time when mistakes are made.”
“Some of the multimedia was a little difficult to engage with without risking pain – strobe lighting, very loud soundscape, and so on.
“Bringing in a general warning system (a sign on the door?) of strobe lighting for those affected by it, and doing a soundcheck before launching the sound and leaving it at whatever level, would be good.”
Stephen: “I went to the board games hotel only briefly, and there were lots of steep stairs, but then that’s the one used for loads of much bigger cons, so I’m sure they must have a solution in place?”
Viktoriya: “Well, big cons tend to have a like it or lump it policy. They have priority queuing for fans with mobility issues, but that’s about it as far as I’m aware. Individual cons may have a better provision, but I don’t know.”
“Then there’s the issue of diversity in organisers and session leads. Part of this is maybe due to the fact that it was the first Nine Worlds, but the organisers, session leads and attendees were overwhelmingly white.
“Take the panel on Problematic Issues – some odd things were said during this sessions, and it was also an entirely white panel (so discussing representations of race was rather awkward). I think it was trying to cover too many fandom issues: racism in fanfic and fandom, fetishing gay sex, writing male characters and ignoring female ones, reaffirming heteronormative norms, etc. In an hour.
“Contrast this with the Racefail 101 panel in the Books track, which brought together awesome writers of colour to focus on writing characters of colour, and seeking out writers of colour.
“Given the number of tracks and the number of organisers required, I’d suggest that the lead organisers work on diversifying the track leads.”
“With accessibility, big cons tend to have a like-it-or-lump-it policy. They have priority queuing for fans with mobility issues, but often that’s about it.”
“Finally, I disagree with Steve on the inclusiveness extended to the Bronies, mostly because in the sessions I was present at, they were frequently the butt of the joke.
“Fundamentally, I think it’s uncool to include something as a track (and therefore give implicit approval of its existence) and then spend the weekend being a bit weirded out by it. I don’t claim to be part of the MLP fandom, but I thought it was a bit harsh.”
Stephen: “I didn’t see the panels where Bronies were mocked, but I did see a lot of people commenting out loud that this was their first experience of them and they thought Bronies were awesome.”
Viktoriya: “I wonder if part of it isn’t a reflexive ‘let’s build a hierarchy’ instinct. Certainly there was that feeling at times at the fanfic panels, and some of the comments re: board gaming from attendees. The Bronies were the only ones where I heard panellists commenting on it, though, and there is some evidence that attendees felt a bit singled out.”
“What I do think is great is that the organisers of the Problematic Issues panel realised what had gone wrong, and have publically acknowledged it and committed to doing better next time.
“Ultimately, that’s what I’m looking for in a convention. There were a few tweeted mentions of positive and negative feedback (which, to their credit, the Nine Worlds twitter feed retweeted).”
Let’s wrap this up…
Hannah: “I think everyone involved understands it was a first attempt at a huge thing and the learning curve was, and will continue to be, pretty damn steep – but I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of it or more excited about next year.”
Viktoriya: “Since there’s a year until the next Nine Worlds I guess I’ll conclude with some general links on the inclusion and harassment issues – if you’re thinking of going to a convention and are concerned about safety, or if you have been harassed at a convention and want to know how to report it, have a look at these resources:
- Elise Mathesen’s experience of reporting sexual harassment here, including a contact and resource list for reporting it here.
- Carrie Cuinn’s experiences and guide for reporting are here and here
- Finally, the odious Ted Beale was recently finally expelled from SFWA. NK Jemisin has written a blisteringy on-point post on racism and misogyny in SFF, Beale’s expulsion, and the behaviour which led to it.
“Most of all, I loved the fact that I enjoyed Nine Worlds so much, I have already decided I’m going next year. No uncertainty, no hmm-maybe and oh-yes-perhaps. I’m going next year because it was wonderful. How can you argue with that?”
]]>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.
This post was mostly inspired by the complaint of my fellow BadRep member Sarah J that, when the subject of Elastica comes up, the band are frequently dismissed outright as flagrant copyists led by Britpop’s version of Lady Macbeth. In fairness, I spent most of the 90s thinking the same thing. God, I used to hate Elastica. Wilfully amateur slack-jawed rip-off merchants whose over-privileged frontwoman seemed to exist only as a drawly amalgam of her indie boyfriends (hair by Brett, boots by Damon), whose competency in snagging the catchiest bits of post-punk couldn’t disguise how irritatingly thick and bland they were in all other respects. Right? Right. Now that I’m no longer a chippy thirteen-year-old convinced that people with trust-funds can’t make good music, I’ve been reassessing Elastica.
Elastica are a band it’s probably easier to appreciate in retrospect and in isolation from their era, especially if you weren’t actually around for it. They weren’t a great fit with Britpop, their music drawing more on the punk revivalism of New Wave of New Wave, one of several burgeoning movements which Britpop left steamrollered in its wake. This 70s-rooted recycling was also ahead of its time, being more of a piece with the early-2000s bands also inspired by post-punk: like Karen O, or Jack White, Justine Frischmann now just looks like a cool-as-fuck frontperson. I mean, she was posh, of course. If she called her dad, not only could he stop it all but in 1989 he could also buy her a Kensington townhouse. Not that she ever tried to hide this, or to claim any kind of gritty authenticity. (Given that the British music press, and music in general, was and remains riddled with posh girls and boys, I do wonder how much of the media focus on this aspect was some kind of overdefensive deflection on their part, back in the insulting and appropriative days of poor-is-cool.)
Elastica’s potted biography reads like a Britpop potboiler – or, in accounts like John Harris’, an ‘indie soap opera’. Frischmann founded Suede with her fellow UCL student Brett Anderson in 1989, hawking the embryonic group around Camden as their de facto manager before leaving both Suede and Anderson for her iconic power-coupling with chancer extraordinaire, Blur’s Damon Albarn. In 1992 she formed her own group with former Suede drummer Justin Welch, adding enigmatic Brightonian bassist Annie Holland (who ended up with her own theme song) and south Welsh urchin Donna Matthews as Frischmann’s musical foil on guitar. In 1993 they released Stutter, a crushingly cool eyeroll of a single that, having something to do with male sexual dysfunction and something to do with female sexual frustration, was one of the most playfully frank songs I’d heard since Orgasm Addict. The next year, as Britpop was decisively yanked into the mainstream, Frischmann’s relationship with Blur’s lead singer gained her lasting notoriety in the music press and beyond as a kind of Britpop Dr Girlfriend.
I’ll come to the fuss made over Justine’s sex life later. The other Thing That Everyone Knows About Elastica is that they stole all their best riffs. Well, yes, Elastica settled out of court with both Wire (Line Up, a song I’m still happy to hate, rips off the chorus of Wire’s I Am the Fly; the synth in Connection rips off the guitar in Three Girl Rhumba) and the Stranglers (Waking Up rips off No More Heroes pretty much wholesale) – but let’s think about this. Britpop itself was incredibly derivative, backwards-looking, insular and self-referential, as were its exponents. The entire exercise was a cultural and aesthetic rip-off of the late 1960s, and more particularly of the Beatles-Kinks-Jam tradition of white-boy guitar rock. Musical, lyrical and sartorial rip-offs (or ‘tributes’, or ‘homages’, or ‘cheeky nods to’) abounded, as indeed they do in any period and genre. In music as in any art form, it’s what one does with it that counts. I still rate Cigarettes and Alcohol, for instance, despite its massive musical debt to T-Rex’s Get It On, and despite Oasis’ massive debt in general to, oh, let’s start with the Beatles, Status Quo, Slade and the Glitter Band.
If it were simply a case of, to misquote an unknown wit, ‘Your album is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good’, that would be one thing. But there is a reason why 1995’s Elastica became the fastest-selling debut in UK history at the time. Even in the throes of my irritation with Frischmann herself, I found the music slickly derivative, sure, but also annoyingly listenable. The songs on the debut – which it took me about three years to grudgingly buy and listen to in full – are sharp, snarky and unadorned gems strung together by that snide, campy Sprechgesang that was probably Justine’s best musical asset. The songs range from little flash-bangs of sex-positive brilliance (Stutter, All-Nighter, Blue, Vaseline), to vaguely sinister languor (S.O.F.T, 2:1, Waking Up), to the archly anthemic (Car Song, Line Up, Connection). The album’s stripped-down, angular art-punk, its odd, listless mix of sleaze and melancholy, and the band’s Last Gang In Town fronting in photographs and on record sleeves, anticipated the revival (or the ripping-off, perhaps?) of such stylings almost a decade later by the Strokes/Libertines axis of hipster. And when thinking back to the bands who came to be regarded as luminaries towards the tail-end of Britpop – The Bluetones, Shed 7, Northern Uproar, and no doubt I’ve repressed many more – you can only wish they’d ripped off something half as interesting themselves.
At a point in the 90s where the dominant female aesthetic revolved around ladette football shirts or twee tea-dresses, Elastica adopted an atypical New Wave uniform: black leather, drainpipe jeans, hair boyishly cropped or bobbed. For Frischmann at least, her androgynous aesthetic was a deliberate choice linked to self-consciousness, a protective effacing or subsuming of femininity which will make sense to anyone who’s tried to negotiate the disputed territory of being socially independent while aware of one’s relative vulnerability. In an interview with Simon Reynolds in 1995, Justine referred to her choice of look as ‘Nineties urban camouflage’, and, interestingly, associated the process of growing up with learning to step away from a conventionally feminine presentation rather than accepting it:
[JF]…When you’re in your twenties you feel more confident about what you are, you don’t feel like you necessarily have to dress up for boys. When I was a teenager I had really long hair and felt like I had to wear make-up. But now I feel a lot more comfortable with short hair. It’s something I discovered with leaving home and going to college. In a way, it’s Nineties urban camoflage. It came about when I was coming back from college really late, getting on the last tube. If you’re wearing long hair and make-up, you’re gonna feel a lot more vulnerable than if you’ve got short hair and big boots…
[SR] So there’s a sense that you sartorially avoid the things that signify vulnerability or ‘availability’?
[JF] It’s just expecting to be treated as one of the lads. You don’t want to deliberately remove yourself from being able to be a good bloke.
– Source.
NB I like Reynolds’ idea, in this interview, of women artists in the 90s ‘taking on played-out male traditions, tweaking and reinventing them’, but I’m not altogether sure how helpful it is to dub it ‘stylistic transvestism’ as he does, rather than simply problematising ‘feminine’ identity itself. (He’s on steadier ground when he mentions Buzzcocks, who Elastica remind me of especially in songs like Stutter and All-Nighter, with Justine’s nonchalantly transgressive blurring of gender norms suggesting a southern female mirror-image of Pete Shelley, but maybe that’s just me.)
On ‘stylistic transvestism’, she seemed similarly doubtful:
[SR] Drag kings rule: Polly Jean Harvey with her hoary blues-man posturings; Courtney Love as Henry Rollins if he’d only remove his ‘Iron Man’ emotional armature and let his ‘feminine side’ splurge’n’splatter; Liz Phair and her feminised/feminist take on the geeky garage punk of Paul Westerberg of the Replacements. And there’s Justine Frischmann, who’s somehow miraculously found imaginative space for herself in the Stranglers’ gruff, fake-prole belligerence and ‘who wants the world?’ cynicism. That said, Justine’s pretty phazed when I ask if she ever feels like she’s in drag onstage.
[JF] Well, I sometimes feel like Meatloaf, when I’ve got hair all over my face and I’m really sweaty. Which is a bit depressing. But no, I don’t ever feel like a woman in drag, to be honest.
[SR] So there’s no sense in which you play-act a tough-guy?
[JF] I think lots of women do that these days. And there’s always been girly girls and non-girly girls. There’s girls who have really high voices and like wearing dresses, and others who don’t. I don’t think I’m exceptional, it’s just that most of my mates haven’t been very girly. There’s lots of young women in London who look and dress like I do.
– Source.
Even when I was forcing myself to dislike her on grounds of class chippiness, one of the things I couldn’t help liking about Justine was the casual confidence, the superiority even, in so much of her lyrics and delivery, and their emphasis on female sexual agency. All-Nighter is, like Stutter, a self-assured and playful song about sexual frustration, and there’s an archly objective approach to sex in Car Song and Vaseline and many more. There’s ‘just’ sex in these songs – little sentiment and less romance – but equally there’s little angst, no judgement and no self-reproach. Never Here is a heartfelt, simple and incisive anatomy of a defunct relationship, just as well-crafted and moving as, say, Blur’s Tender, but terse and economic where the latter is overblown. Frischmann’s protagonists are thinly drawn but invariably assertive and self-possessed, frustrated or impatient with their hapless, thoughtless or less self-assured partners, sure of what they want and feeling no guilt about taking it. They never make a point of being Bad Girls, they just happen to be girls.
Like her fellow Stranglers aficionado Gaye Advert twenty years previously, Frischmann’s drop-dead charisma got in the way of her stated intention to be ‘one of the lads’. Her sexually confident persona and Elastica’s pleasure-centred, borderline-selfish lyrics, despite their matter-of-fact delivery, tended to be treated as ‘naughtily’ deviant departures from feminine convention rather than just another way in which women might happen to view themselves and their sex lives. That the music press and wider media insistently framed Justine in relation to the men she chose to sleep with was part of a wider sexualisation where, in the post-Britpop 90s, female sexual agency had increasingly to be presented within a Lad frame of reference. I remember, specifically, there being a weird concentration by the music press on whether she would or wouldn’t pose for Playboy. It’s tempting to conclude that Frischmann’s ostensibly aloof and independent approach, her chilled assertiveness, her androgyny, and perhaps her background, attracted a reductive emphasis on her sexuality and sex life as a way of rendering her comprehensible, less of a threat and more of a ‘regular’ girl.
Women weren’t absent from 90s indie, but as I’ve written elsewhere, there is a sense in which they were squeezed to the margins by the elevation of ‘lad bands’, the testosterone-heavy dominance (with some honourable and dishonourable exceptions) of the music press and mens’ magazines, and the focus on male key players and kingmakers, from Anderson, Albarn and the Gallaghers to Alan McGee. The received wisdom of Britpop as a male concern and male preserve obscures how highly-rated Elastica were at the time – notably, they came closer than either Oasis or Blur to cracking the lucrative US market – and it also overlooks the contribution made by Frischmann to Britpop’s originating impulse. Love or hate it, Frischmann’s influence on and creative partnerships with (or, if we’re going with the Lady Macbeth angle, her bewitching and manipulation of) Britpop’s main men was instrumental to the movement but goes more or less unsung. Instead she now gets frequently relegated to a minor player, an accessory or at best a ‘muse’ to the more famous and credible men in her life, and her band are remembered as, in Sarah J’s words, a ‘Blurgirlfriend novelty act’. Her break-up with Albarn in 1997 was partly the result of a reluctance to accept what she perceived as the restrictions of domesticity and motherhood:
“Damon was saying to me, ‘You’ve given me a run for my money, you’ve proved that you’re just as good as I am, you’ve had a hit in America – now settle down and let’s have kids.’ He wanted me to stop being in a group, stop touring and have children. I wasn’t very happy, and he kept saying, ‘The reason you’re unhappy is because you really want children but you don’t know it.’ It did throw me: I thought about it quite seriously.” – Source.
After 1996 Elastica were gradually subsumed by smack, angst and inter-band acrimony, with an endless parade of members leaving, being replaced and returning. Their second album, 2000’s The Menace, was more firmly anchored in post-punk experimentalism, but lacklustre, anticlimactic and accordingly less than commercial – although I had by this point got over myself enough to admit that I liked it, an epiphany which I’m sure was a source of extraordinary comfort for the band, who announced their amicable break-up the following year. Since then, Frischmann has been a bit of a Renaissance woman: collaborating with M.I.A. on songs including 2003’s Galang; moving to Colorado to study visual arts and psychology; dipping into abstract painting; and, as shown here, fronting a BBC series on modern architecture.
Justine Frischmann’s rise against a Britpop backdrop, and her subsequent infamy or dismissal, raises several issues relevant to feminism: the denial or marginalizing of women’s contributions to artistic and creative moments; the relegation of women to the accessory of whichever man they happen to have slept with; the idea that women in bands are automatically amateur or derivative, or just not as good at being amateur and derivative as the boys are. However short-lived Elastica’s fame and drawn-out their dissipated demise, their career remains more edifying than watching the Oasis juggernaut run slowly and embarrassingly out of steam, or indeed whatever Alex James is currently up to.
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“Hello, my name is Hannah… and I am a poet.”
“Hi, Hannah.”
“It started with just scribbling the odd rhyme by myself in my teens. Then I went away to university and learned you can have poetry slams, but even then I didn’t really take to it. Then, in 2009, I moved back to London. Not many of my friends had moved back yet and I didn’t know many people and then one night I just fell into the wrong crowd… you know how it goes.”
OK, not quite, but from the way many people respond when the subject comes up…. you’d think it was something at least a bit distasteful. And when it’s not great, it’s not great, but when it’s good: holy shit, you have no idea.
See Exhibit A:
When it’s done right, performance poetry (or ‘spoken word’ as it’s often coyly referred to) is a thrilling, visceral, hilarious and beautiful experience, going everywhere from music-backed comedy to rap to beat and sonnets. Most nights have an open mic section, too, so the opportunity to try your hand and get involved is always there.
This is one of the first pieces I saw performed live, and I was hooked:
Three gigs and a couple of glasses of wine later and I was on stage trying my hand in the Hammer & Tongue slam. I came second. No going back. Though I’ve been a writer for years, there’s something incomparable about seeing your work hit an audience – getting gasps and laughs right where you hoped they’d be. And – when it doesn’t quite hit the mark – you’ve just had a room full of feedback. OK, back to the drawing board – cut the third stanza, up the ending, sort the rhythm in the third line and try again next week.
And now – wonder of wonders – I’m part of Other Voices, a poetry show that’s going up to the Edinburgh Fringe and is organised by the ‘Welsh whisperer’ Fay Roberts. The shows are (according to an audience member on Sunday:
“A heady blend of rhythms – poems that catch you in the throat, stories so compelling that you realise you haven’t taken a breath in minutes, and if you start to take yourself too seriously, then surely someone will tell life in words so true you wonder if they are reading your diary.”
So, yeah. I’m pretty stoked. The vibe is big, vampy and bold. Red drapes, candles, and did I meantion the bowls of heart-shaped sweeties? The booked acts are an array of outspoken women weaving words about whatever we damn like. We have a London premier this Thursday 26 July at the wonderful Hackney Attic (Facebook event here) featuring Fay Roberts, Sophia Blackwell, Fran Isherwood, Isadora Vibes, and yours truly – Hannah Eiseman-Renyard.
If you read BadRep, there’s a strong chance this is relevant to your interests.
Here’s my own contribution (dressed like a goth glitterball because showbiz):
- Other Voices: Alternative Spoken Word Cabaret, at the Hackney Attic tomorrow, and then the Edinburgh Fringe. Book tickets for tomorrow here or see above for Edinburgh.
‘I like your shoes!’ she said. ‘They have red bits at the back!’
‘Thanks,’ I said, beating a swift retreat before she noticed that the ‘red bits’ were in fact open wounds filled with my encrusted blood, patching the backs of my ankles like some kind of visceral rash.
I should have said ‘They’re Christian Louboutin’.
Christian Louboutin's 'Ballerina' slippers, with an 8-inch heel
Vertigo
The shoe designer beloved by female celebrities everywhere (Jennifer Lopez has a whole song about them) is so proud of his trademark ‘red sole’ that he recently took erstwhile collaborator Yves Saint-Laurent to court over red sole copyright infringement. He’s also currently the subject of a career retrospective at London’s Design Museum.
He’s notorious for being one of the first designers to insist, in the early 90s, on a heel that truly towers – his shoes average at about 4 1/2 inches; the highest peak at dizzying 6 (‘but mostly only dancers can wear them‘) and if you’re looking for someone to blame when you survey the heights on the high-street and sigh, you could be more unjust than to point your finger at this foot-obsessed Frenchman.
As a teenager, Louboutin’s eye was caught by a ‘No Stilettos’ sign at the Museum of Oceanic Art, Paris: ‘I wanted to defy that,’ he said. ‘I wanted to create something that broke rules and made women feel confident and empowered.’ He’s stuck to this original image for most of his career: there are very few wedges or block heels in his collections; instead, his heels are thin, vertiginously high and splattered with those red soles.
Earthbound
Where such heights can lead is well illustrated by the fate that meets Little Women‘s sixteen-year-old Meg, who wears high heels to a ball – ‘The stupid high heel turned… It aches so, I can hardly stand, and I don’t know how I’m ever going to get home’.
The sign Louboutin recalls inspiring him as a child
Yet this is the sort of height we’re talking about, for the 1860s. Poor Meg was rather dowdily earth-bound compared to Louboutin’s fantastical ‘ballerina’, whose eight-inch high ‘slippers’ are displayed above left. ‘Isn’t the classical dancing ballet slipper the ultimate heel? The heel which makes dancers closer than any other women to the sky, closer to heaven..’ waves Louboutin, airily, in explanation.
Elevation
He’s predictably fascinated with elevation – the exhibition is full of ‘pedestals’ and ‘birds’. But he’s gone a lot further than previous designers: Meg may have been dowdy in comparison, but even the flappers of the Twenties had modest block heels, and the Fifties heel looks almost mumsy nowadays.
One of the pairs exhibited here is accompanied by an apologia from Louboutin, thus: ‘This shoe is not suitable for walking in. You can only walk from the taxi to the nightclub, and back, on the arm of a man’. When asked about the point that women can’t run in his heels, intended for his ‘confident and empowered’ working women (apparently) Louboutin was incredulous: ‘Who runs at work?‘.
Yet he’s also fascinated by showgirls and ‘classic’ vintage-style women (such as his great admirer, Dita Von Teese, who makes a holographic appearance in this exhibition morphing into a Louboutin pump, in a rather literal appropriation of the fetish we’ll come to presently). Such women, he says, can dance and gyrate for hours at a stretch from atop dizzying heels – Louboutin learned all about this during an early career stint at the Folies Bergere, where showgirls used to put cuts of bloodless meat inside their heels to make them more comfortable.
Perhaps this is echoed in the sexualised red Louboutin sole (originally hastily-applied Chanel nail varnish) – a flash of red as easily representing the raw and bloodied foot itself as the raw and (un)bridled sexuality of the wearer.
Venus in Furs
Helmut Newton's Self Portrait With Wife and Models
‘A good shoe is one that doesn’t dress you but undresses you’, Christian reckons – a statement with which Helmut Newton (left) would undoubtedly have agreed. The short David Lynch / Louboutin collaboration film Fetish (2007), extracts from which are on display here, shows sequences of otherwise naked women wearing a series of ‘unwearable’ Louboutin shoes – following Louboutin’s conviction that the part of the female body most naturally fetishised is (you guessed it) the foot.
He’s even got a mini foot anatomy: one of the pumps on display here has a very low vamp, which was initially unpopular. ‘Then I realised, it’s because of the slit‘, he recalls – an unfortunate word, given that he means ‘toe cleavage’. Too much ‘slit’ apparently makes women feel ‘dirty’, but Louboutin’s well into it, although the instep is his favourite part of the foot, perhaps because of his famous belief that the appeal of the high heel is its approximation of the shape a woman’s foot assumes during orgasm.
The fetish
Of course, Sigmund Freud uses the shoe and foot as an illustration for his writings on the fetish – the mother’s shoe, says Sigmund, represents the penis the child originally assumed she has, and to fixate on it assuages castration anxiety. But symbolic castration via the foot pops up in Louboutin’s favourite fairy tale (whose centrepiece shoes he’s working on for an upcoming film):
‘[The eldest step-sister] could not get her big toe into it, and the shoe was too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said: “Cut the toe off; when you are Queen you will have no more need to go on foot.”
The maiden cut the toe off, forced the foot into the shoe, swallowed the pain, and went out to the King’s son […] He looked down at her foot and saw how the blood was running out of her shoe, and how it had stained her white stocking quite red.’
– Cinderella, The Brothers Grimm
The mad but occasionally insightful Bruno Bettleheim sees the stepsisters here attempting to make their big feet more dainty, ‘and therefore prove their femininity’ through a symbolic castration (with a literal twist in stage versions, where they are usually in drag). The problem of the shoe being too dainty is one surprisingly near to Louboutin’s methods: although the average female foot size is a 5, he designs and constructs his shoes in size 4 ‘because I prefer to work on a small thing’.
‘He understands women and makes them feel like Cinderellas’ purrs Diane von Furstenberg on the designer. Indeed, it feels appropriate that stilettos, whose c20th renaissance is credited primarily to the 1950s couturier Roger Vivier (for Dior) owe their name to the Italian ‘dagger’ (hence their unpopularity with parquet flooring).
Domination
For me, the images in Fetish of these women crawling and sidling about in painfully unwearable shoes sums up this retrospective rather well: a fascination with immobility, and a craving for Fabulous Female Domination that suggests more power than it would actually have were it being negotiated from atop a pair of Louboutin pigalles.
But you look like you could walk down the treacherously lumpy terrain of my naked back, make me lick your Louboutin boots…
‘I declare, it really seems like being a fine young lady, to come home from the party in a carriage, and sit in my dressing-gown with a maid to wait on me,’ said Meg, as Jo bound up her foot with arnica.
– Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
- Christian Louboutin, Retrospective at The Design Museum, London SE1. Until 9 July 2012.
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In particular, I have been interested to see how the ideologies and assumptions of the real-life, modern-day gym contrast with the 80s fantasy world to which, until now, my side-bends and sit-ups have been largely confined.
Ain’t got a motor in the back of her Honda
I wanted to start with a class. My local facility was offering a number of options for my preferred time of day: Spinning, Yoga, Body Attack and Body Pump. Spinning, of course, has long been a Cosmo-favourite, but it sounded a bit too terrifying for my tentative post-Christmas explorations, so I went for Body Pump because it’s on a Tuesday, and Tuesdays are good for me.
Like Body Attack, Body Pump originates with the New Zealand-based Les Mills workout group. I suppose I’d always known, objectively, that someone must make up these workouts, but I’d always vaguely assumed it was the class instructor, or the gym, or something. I certainly hadn’t realised there are whole organisations dedicated to churning them out – of which Les Mills is one. Body Pump was the first of their workouts to make it out of New Zealand and into Europe, which it did in the early-to-mid-90s. It’s now pretty much a young professional gym standard, along with the emerging new trend, PowerPlate (which claims to deal with cellulite, although what doesn’t [and what does?], frankly).
Never stray too far from the sidewalk
In addition to a kind of Cartesian ‘body/soul’ dualism in their choice of workout titles, Les Mills also has about them something of the cultish air that also characterises Jane Fonda’s seminal 1980s oeuvre. Seriously. They refer to ‘the Tribe’. They’ve declared ‘war on sedentary lifestyles’. And more:
We pride ourselves on being brave – the ones who turn up their sleeves when it comes to hard work. The ones that scream ‘hell yeah’ when the instructor barks ‘ten more’. Those who view sweat on their brows like a crown of achievement. The ones who don’t just step up, they turn it up, because they want results.
– Les Mills website
This is not what it is like.
Scary stuff. The almost-militarism of the Les Mills style plays out into the actual Body Pump workout, which is a weight training class accompanied by ‘chart-topping hits’ (well… ‘Because of You’). Its use of zeitgeisty-kinda music to drive you along aligns it with aerobics more generally, but with the 80s fitness craze in particular, which was similarly interwoven with pop culture, including the emergent disco culture (the seminal Saturday Night Fever, with its all-dancing star John Travolta, came out in 1977).
But Body Pump is no leotard-wearing 80s-style ‘jazzercise’ with instructors whose hair flows wild and impractically free (my school gym teacher used to make us use elastic bands as a punishment for forgetting proper hair ties) – and, unlike the films Jane Fonda made for housewives everywhere, Body Pump’s not, primarily, about women. Indeed, it was originally designed to ‘bring men into the aerobics room’, after the female-focused group exercise trends that preceded it. Whether former female dominance in said room was because women are known to prefer exercising in nice social groups (cos, you know, that’s how we go to the toilet and choose our clothes, isn’t it?), or because instructors were targeting women as particularly vulnerable to body fascism, is too big a question to address in whole here.
Godlike Odysseus
But certainly, the class I attend has a lot of Homeric-level male muscle in it (with added grunts). And indeed, the ‘tracks’ we listen to (officially chosen by the Les Mills group themselves, who rule over ALL THINGS, and presumably have some kind of Council of Trent-style semi-regular meeting to discuss such questions) – are generally of the ‘man-rock’ ilk (well, Kelly Clarkson aside). So sometimes we do staggered bicep curls in time to that bit in Eye of the Tiger. There’s even this bit where you lie on your back on the ‘bench’ (see, I’m down with the lingo) and do some ‘chest-reps’ with ‘barbells’ while listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit. [This is a bit I’m quite fond of because I like to pretend I’m in prison or something].
This is Sparta.
What I think is interesting here is that, while dear Jane made me feel like I was sharing in an essential female, slightly body-fascist sort of camaraderie (‘this is for the wibble-wobbles on the inner thighs… gonna burn them right off!’) – with a sense of shared understanding much akin to what you might experience in the disco toilets at 2am with mascara running down your face, only with more brutalist physical pain – Body Pump is more like that bit in Mulan where that guy who never wears a shirt trains the Chinese army (including the cross-dressing Mulan) in three minutes flat.
Indeed, whereas the 80s fitness dream was one of self-improvement and the drive for the Body Beautiful, Body Pump and the Les Mills ideology is actually more like a War on Fat, with concomitantly refigured notions of gender – men and women exercise side by side, with parallel physical goals.
The Eighties’ ‘woman’s world’ of VCR, suburban living room and dance-fitness (sexualised to an often ludicrous degree for the benefit of men) has changed to a kind of militant A-team dream. This probably has a lot to do with rising obesity levels in the population at large, making pursuit of exercise rather more of a general health priority than it once was, but since the original 80s fitness craze rose at much the same time as the rise of the disco one, I wonder if our exercise trends are still tangentially following our terpsichorean ones.
Indeed, one of the things I find particularly interesting is how this class – and actually the gym itself come to that – constructs itself around the idea of maenadic levels of adrenaline, but in a kind of nightclub context. I have to NB here that I go to a rather Executive gym chain, which to be honest is probably actually constructed in the 80s power-professional mould – there’s coloured strip-lighting and everyone’s wearing matchy-matchy black lycra …and thongs. (I mean, seriously, think about the physics of that. There will be squats.). In Spinning it goes literal, as the room is darkened and there’s pounding rave music (at 7am on a Monday morning).
So where does this leave us? Much of this may seem largely irrelevant, since the numbers of women who attend the gym (indeed, the numbers who can even afford it) are relatively small compared to the population at large. And yet! What happens in those harrowing halls may reflect some curious external trends.
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If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that BadRep Towers generally posts updates every day of the working week.
This can be a lot of work, and lately Real Life has… gotten very real? There’s been an unexpected bereavement, a house move, and family members who for various reasons have needed caring for, and I’m also about to go on an evening course which will be pretty intensive. And then there’s my paid job, public sector, full time. So I’m a bit knackered at the moment. Busy is an understatement.
Several of the team are also, bless them, bloody busy. Therefore, for now BadRep will be updated only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Join the good ship BadRep
However! I’d like this to be a temporary move, ideally! We’ve had some lovely feedback in the last few months and we don’t want to stop now! Help us steer the HMS BadRep into new territory.
We’re looking to get more pop culture adventurers on board. We are sticklers for exciting, often-quirkily-original, well-written stuff, and for inclusive feminisms which take account of the variety of identities contained on our existing team (and more besides). We aim to be bouncy and accessible and occasionally irreverent – but we want to make your brain tick, not start a fight.
Here’s how you can be part of the adventure:
- Pitch us a guest article! Send a paragraph to [email protected]describing what you’d like to write about, and a little bit about you (and if you have one, a link to your own site so we can plug it for you).
- Or if you’d like to join our band of adventurers long-term, send an email to the same address telling us a little bit about you, your feminism, and why you’d like to join us. Include some examples of your writing, too. We’re looking for a commitment of two posts a month, ideally. If it looks like your writing is a good fit for what we’re trying to do, we might well be in touch.
- More information is on this page here – please do read and share!
PROTIP: Because of the Real Life outlined above, it sometimes takes me a while to answer emails to [email protected]. Your patience is mahoosively appreciated.
Also? Thank YOU.
We’re hoping with your help that we’ll come back bigger and better than ever, but in the meantime thank you for reading and sharing what you read, and for all your comments and support!
– Miranda and the rest of Team BR
]]>Hannah
“I would say I was raised very feminist. The family has a double-barreled surname because my folks hyphenated their names to negotiate the whole names and marriage thing. (Pro tip: don’t hyphenate – people will assume you’re really posh, and if both names are unusual you’ll spend the rest of your life spelling it out to people.)
“I always identified with feminism and was never scared of the word. I was brought up to believe I could do anything I wanted and my mom made a point of giving me and my brother equal access to all types of toys – like having boy dolls as well as girl dolls. She also always named sexism where she saw it. This was a real gift because growing up I saw sexism as a bad thing and a lazy assumption, rather than just the status quo.
“As I’ve grown up I’ve realised retrospectively just how rad my mom was – she went to Greenham Common, she bought Spare Rib magazine, she had rainbow shoelaces (which I’ve stolen) – but also I’m profoundly grateful that she never ever let me become fucked up about food and body image, or to correlate body-image with self-worth. I really feel like I’ve dodged a massive bullet with that one and am a lot better off than many women because of it.
Love you, Mom (now quit pestering me about grandkids).”
Rai
“My Mum didn’t really raise me in a ‘feminist way’, but the cumulative actions of my parents together has helped to shape my views on the world and, more specifically the concept of equality. As I understand it, my Mum took time off work to look after me when I was very little and after my brother was born too, but when he was old enough, Mum and Dad essentially swapped. Mum went back to working in the City and Dad became a househusband right up until I was 12 years old. Having a mother who worked full time in London and a stay-at-home dad is bound to have an effect (insert some philosophical/psychological insight into strong independent female figures and role models), but that wasn’t the only thing.
“My parents told me once that before they had me (their first child) they sat down and made the time to discuss and agree that there would be no greater importance placed on one parent or the other based on their gender. So if Mum was looking after us and we did something naughty, there would be no ‘just you wait until your Father gets home!’ threat of punishment… you just got punished by whichever parent was there. Or, indeed, my Grandma when we lived with her for a while (who is also a huge influence on my feminist tendencies).”
Viktoriya
“Let’s be clear on one thing: my mother (who is Bulgarian) is a farmer’s daughter. Whatever else she became later on, she can still kill and pluck a chicken, cure many common ailments with mysterious herbs, and pick tobacco leaves with her bare hands (no lie: she still has the scars). Of course, that’s not all she is. For one thing, when the local doctor decided to try bloodletting to cure my infant aunt’s colic, my mother snatched her from the doctor’s hands and ran away with her, reasoning that the doctor was a fool and that at nine years old she was clearly more qualified to treat her sister. (Who was fine, by the way, due in no small measure to my mother’s interference.) By the time my mother was thirteen, she had outgrown her local village school, and so she simply packed her bags and moved out of the family home to a nearby city to continue her education.
“At eighteen, when the rest of her friends were getting married and having children, she stayed resolutely single and enrolled at a university instead. A few years later she scandalised polite society by taking up with an older divorcee who – shockingly – was both Armenian and a dissident. When he set off to sea in that dreadfully romantic way that makes sense only in films, she ran the household, raised two children, led the local community group and dealt with the persistent interest of the secret police. She taught me to cook, and to sew, and to knit, and explained that while it was nice to see my father every once in a while, fundamentally I’d have to be prepared to run a household – a community – a country – all by myself.
(The one thing she ever forbade me to do was to become an accountant. Her reason? “Boring.”)
“In this different country, with Communism a fading memory from far away, my mother blends into the background, no different from any of the millions of women in our cities and villages. But when the light is right, and if you know how to look, she is still the twenty-year-old in the pictures: the one with the long hair and the wide smile, who shimmied down the side of a building to sneak away from the secret police and escape, laughing, on the back of her dissident lover’s motorcycle.
I think we can all be grateful she decided to be a mother, rather than an Evil Overlady.
As for the accountancy? I hate to say it, but I should have listened to my mother.”
]]>I hate bra shopping. Generally I’m not a massive fan of shopping per se; it usually feels like a massive waste of time I could spend doing something actually relaxing, like having a cup of tea, or wandering around a museum. Or sleeping. Anything, really. But I digress.
Bras. I hate them. Where to begin my hatred? A little history, perhaps. I do like a little historical context to flavour a problem. Makes me feel like a proper academic. Except one who uses wikpedia entries a lot – like this one here.
To summarise: basically there was nothing for quite a while (when literally people didn’t wear much at all), then there were togas (or for the ladies, stolas) and people didn’t really care, then all of a sudden there were all kinds of things dedicated to “dealing with breasts”. There were bits of cloth in various arrangements with and without padding, corsets, bodices, and finally something that resembled the modern bra.
Which was never burned, incidently, except possibly in awful household fires. And we had the Madonna cone bra, of course.
Then came the Wonderbra with its rallying cry of Hello Boys, and to be honest I was never 100% clear on whether she was advertising her mammaries to boys, or addressing them as boys, and it all got all a bit confusing so I tried not to think about it. Plus it arrived when I was 14, which is a Bad Time for bosom-related upset.
Skip forward a bit further and we get Shakira declaring in 2002 that it’s:
Lucky that my breasts are small and humble
So you don’t confuse them with mountains
… which I’m still not really sure about, because, again, we’re getting all obsessed over size. Small or big? Which is better? (And why do we have to have better bodies anyway?)
My own ‘humble’ beginnings: for me, the bra was a graduation from the pre-teen crop top and the childish vest into the world of being a Real Woman. Periods were also involved in this uncomfortable phase (and they are also rubbish and make your breasts sore, but you do not have to go to the shop and pay money for them). This was not a good start for the bra and I, and it didn’t get any better.
The portion of my adult life that I’ve spent around bras has always involved the fickle inconsistency of measurements. As an experiment, on my shopping trip I got measured in three different shops and tried on more bloody bras than I have done in my entire life. I am, for the record a 34, 36 or 32 A, B or C. So that’s not really a good start. Furthermore, none of these bras, in any of those official sizes, actually fit my chest. Some do better than others, but there is no general indicator of agreed size.
Let’s talk about what they look like. They’re mostly quite ‘girly’, except where they’re meant to be ‘sexy’. Ah, that old problem again. I can have a virgin bra or a whore bra. Great. They contain a lot of extraneous stuff like lace and bows and other frou-frou items that my bosom really doesn’t need, so I spend a lot of time snipping things off bras whilst hoping that the sheer volume of stuff I’m lopping off isn’t in some way structurally vital.
And what about underwire, while we’re at it? No item of clothing aimed at men, designed to sit on sensitive, soft flesh, would include metal wire within a flimsy silk and lace contraption, frequently destined to poke out and puncture your poor, unsuspecting skin. Underwire, together with its evil cousin Padding, is the great illusionist of the bra world. This is not a world in which the bra is only there to clothe, support or protect you. No, it is not a knight in shining armour: the bra is a churl and a pimp. It exists to make your tits look nice. And by “nice” I mean bigger and with cleavage. As opposed to, say, the way they actually look.
Being realistic, since my breasts are not large: I don’t have a cleavage without serious amounts of bra-mirage work, without which any “revealing” top tends to reveal a lot of… sternum. It’s nice sternum, but it’s not the look I’m “supposed” to have. And even when I’m wearing the damn thing, it doesn’t fit. The cups leave gaps where my breasts are not. The straps are too tight or too loose, leaving red marks in my ribs and creating weird bumps of flesh around the sides or under my arms that an anxious person might negatively label “fat”. In the panic room of the changing cubicle, it’s easy to get worried. Especially when one’s chest appears to be both “fat” and “small” at the same time.
Simply put, bras aren’t designed for my body shape. The fact that the bra is a quintessentially “feminine” object makes me feel unfeminine. Sometimes I’m okay with that. Sometimes I’m not. And all of this creates the sneaking suspicion that my own breasts are not socially adequate by themselves. It isn’t nice to feel like your body is inadequate. And for the most part nowadays, I don’t. But I used to. A lot. Especially as an unhappy teenager. Various problems with food ensued. It was not a good time, and it is a not good time that many women (and men) go through.
But bras are not solely the enemy of “small” women. Curvy ladies also loathe bras, and perhaps with even more reason. For them, the bra is often essential. The larger the bra required, the more expensive it is. Also – so I’m told – the more complicated the re-arranging of weight around the body, creating more lines of soreness across the shoulders and an additional aesthetic difficulty of ‘too much’ cleavage at inappropriate times.
Seriously, fuck bras.
But what to do about it all?
- Stop wearing them altogether? Easy for me to say, as long as the weather isn’t cold and it doesn’t rain, but this won’t do for the larger-breasted, for whom some element of mammary management is essential to personal comfort. Similarly, I can’t go bra-less all the time – even for someone my size a trip to the gym requires something to stop the painful bouncing.
- Buy other bras? I keep being told that if I was only measured “correctly” I would be fine. I’m disputing this, because I’ve been measured a lot, and measuring me doesn’t seem to alter the sizes of bras which persist in being made for a particular shape of wearer who is not my shape. A lot of women’s clothes are like this. I shop around for those. Perhaps there are magical bra shops where one can purchase perfect fitting, soft and comfortable bras for around a tenner. I doubt it, though.
- Wear a corset instead! … no.
- Strap them down? Um. Well, whilst I have been known to do this, I don’t want to flatten my breasts all the time any more than I want to inflate them.
- Buy a vest! I do like vests, and there are lots of places that do vests with a bit of extra fabric at the top in case of sudden cold, or rain.
So I’ve bought loads.
And they’re great.
]]>This year I asked some of the team to give a shout-out to a relevant project, organisation or intiative.
Image via dryicons.com
Sarah J: I’m being a bit cheeky and flagging up something that the charity I work for are doing for International Women’s Day. Womankind Worldwide is hosting a virtual march around the globe to celebrate the international women’s movement, raise awareness of the incredible work our partners do and remind feminists in the UK that we’re part of a powerful, global force for change.
We’ve added an interactive map of the world to our website, with a counter showing how far the march has travelled around the world and how many people have taken part. For everyone that signs up the marker moves 10 miles forward. We need about 2,500 people to get all the way round!
Please stop by www.womankind.org.uk/world to join the march, and show our partners working for women’s rights in Africa, Asia and Latin America that you are with them. You can also leave a message of support for the activists we work with on our Facebook page or by sending us a tweet (@woman_kind) – we will pass all of them on.
Sarah C: JOIN ME ON THE BRIDGE! On 8th March, Women for Women International are asking you to join them on the bridge. All kinds of bridges. All around the UK (there’s a list of events here). Why bridges? Well, it’s about building bridges – geddit? – and proclaiming messages of peace. They are inviting everyone to come and participate or register their own event. I love events like this that reach out across the whole world and make connections. As well as events structured around a good pun.
The key thing for me here is that S word, solidarity. I often rail against the idea that all women need to do such-and-such a thing because they are women or assigned-female-bodied, cos that’s, you know, sexist. But that people – of whatever shape or gender – could get together and show support for women around the world, for a couple of hours, at least? That’s drawing attention to inequality. And as they’ve put it on their Mission Statement: “On International Women’s Day, 8 March, thousands of people will show that they are with the women of Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan and other war-torn countries.”.
Hannah: The organisation I’d like to give a big shout-out to is Southall Black Sisters, an organisation by and for Black and Asian women which began in 1979 in the aftermath of the death of Blair Peach (an anti-facist protestor who died from police violence). Since then SBS has changed and expanded its remit to fit the needs of those around it – specifically as advocates of womens’ rights, supporting women suffering from domestic violence and campaigning against religious fundamentalism. The role of SBS as a support group especially for ethnic minority women is especially important as women of colour often face different pressures (see their forced marriages campaign) and specialised services are needed.
Southall Black Sisters first came to my attention at a London Feminist Network meeting in 2010 and they’re regulars at Fawcett Society gatherings and marches, too. Their speakers have always been bright, warm, engaging and utterly unwavering in their points, unfazed by the battles they have ahead. Working at grassroots level, the SBS have their fingers on the pulse and report to people in power – they have been invited to speak at the Home Office and the UN.
In 2007 SBS faced funding cuts from Ealing Council which would have closed all SBS’s operations. The council claimed argued that their services were no longer necessary due to ‘Social Cohesion’ – SBS fought this in the high court citing the Race Relations Act and their victory has set a legal precedent for other ethnic minority support groups facing cuts – an especially important victory as so many charities and support networks are squeezed and so many women and ethnic minorities feel the force of the cuts deeper them others.
Me (Miranda): Following on from that, I’m gonna get on my political crate for a moment here too and mention that International Women’s Day has its roots in socialism. It was founded by Clara Zetkin under the name International Working Women’s Day. It came from the labour movements at the turn of the twentieth century, and in a year when government cuts have put women at a twenty-five year high for unemployment figures, I think this is something that it pays to bear in mind. Opposing these cuts – to our NHS, to our jobs, to our libraries, to our working lives – is vital as far as I’m concerned because they enforce and underline systemic inequalities and limit our power to do something about them. Denise Marshall handed back her OBE just over a year ago on this very point.
All of which is to say: nope, Dave, SHAN’T “calm down, dear” and my recommended Thing I Am Doing is probably “yelling at Parliament about these cuts at every possible opportunity” because I believe that absolutely is a feminist issue – the NHS for example is a major employer of women, of whom I am one, aside from the obvious issue of service cuts! In terms of being more specifically-IWD, there’s also the Women’s Resource Centre, and as has been well documented, I really dig the Red Pump Project over in the USA.
- What are you doing this IWD?