As a Welsh expatriate, I was surprised but interested to discover that there are now more women in leadership positions in the Welsh Nationalist party Plaid Cymru than there are in the UK Cabinet.

After September’s reshuffle, Theresa May remains as Home Secretary, a role in which she has occasionally talked a good game but done little materially to endear herself to women. Maria Miller’s appointment as Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, as well as Minister for Women and Equalities, got off to a flying start when an unexacting series of anti-equality accusations against her went viral; even if the list was badly and disingenuously worded, the facts behind it still don’t exactly fill one with confidence in her. The high-profile irritant Louise Mensch, meanwhile, has given up on a parliamentary career after serving just over two years of her term. So much for ‘Tory feminism’.

The UK is currently ranked 57th here, and has never been spectacular at getting women into government. As of early 2012, women represented only 16% of Conservative MPs and 31% of Labour MPs – but what does the number of women in government mean?

Gender parity is obviously not synonymous with strategic influence or decision-making power, and, particularly after Exhibit M, it’s slightly preposterous to think that a particular demographic will vote or make policy according to gender rather than ideology.

The current government itself has provided examples of this, with some of its most prominent and media-friendly female MPs – step forward Nadine Dorries – also pushing the harshest lines on reproductive or employment rights. All of which strengthens the argument for viewing and judging the actions of female politicians on an individual basis, rather than viewing them all as an undifferentiated flash of eye candy whose political presence is considered automatically progressive. This last trope reached its probable peak, as did so much bland but deeply damaging smuggery, under Tony Blair and his insipid cohort of ‘Blair’s Babes’. In France, this year’s slightly more optimistic victory for the Socialist Party under Francois Hollande has nevertheless drawn comparisons with New Labour’s use of women MPs as relatively powerless tokens of progressiveness:

In an article entitled “The irritating photo”, Isabelle Germain asks why these highly qualified women are being treated like Hollande’s trophies. Just like the ‘Blair Babes’, Hollande’s female ministers have their own twee media nickname; the ‘Hollandettes’. Linguistically, the ‘Hollandettes’ are to Hollande what ‘Beliebers’ are to the pop star Justin Beiber – relative to their male leader and their roles determined by his authority. – Source.

Even for a place so historically rife with sniggering male privilege and suspended adolescence as the House of Commons, the language and attitudes recently faced by female MPs has been some of the most patronising for years – not least the current Prime Minister instructing Labour MP Angela Eagle to ‘Calm down, dear’ and not even bothering to acknowledge a question from the admittedly objectionable Nadine Dorries, instead dismissing her with the snide innuendo ‘I realise the honourable lady is frustrated’. Not that female parliamentarians should automatically be given an easy ride (hur hur), but neither should their opponents draw so instinctively and with quite so much entitled relish on lazy and reactionary stereotypes of hysteria and frustration as a means of avoiding the issues they wish to raise.

Perhaps of a piece with the deeply retrograde, public school and debating club roots of the present government, we seem to be seeing a renewed emphasis on the idea of politics as an adversarial, point-scoring arena in which women are ill-equipped to spar. This kind of thing is part of what The Thick Of It subverts and satirises so well. For all the show’s scattergun profanity, and the ‘violent sexual imagery’ and Freudian nightmares in its characters’ verbal volleys, the majority of humour in The Thick Of Itis derived not from the successful exercise of power but from impotence and frustration.

In addition, as Jem Bloomfield has noted elsewhere, there’s the extent to which the Lib-Dem avatars’ try-hard laddishness and awkward stabs at dick-swinging plays into their dislikeability – Roger Allam’s shire-tastic Peter Mannion MP, for all his downtrodden One Nation Tory-out-of-time woes, manages to exude more patrician authority than either of them. Overtly chauvinist or patronising attitudes are the preserve of characters, like the awkwardly overfamiliar Steve Fleming, whom the viewer is invited to regard with contempt.

Like The League of Gentlemen before it, The Thick Of It’s female grotesques are no less venal or useless or dim or inane than their male counterparts. Besides giving as good as they get, the show’s women, in the current series in particular, tend to crop up as self-possessed and efficient centres of competence within a given episode’s crisis and clusterfuck, whether it’s Terri’s brisk and matronly, almost instinctive civil servant’s professionalism, or Emma’s ruthless and steely slither up her party’s ladder of opportunity.

The exception to this is of course Rebecca Front’s portrayal of the well-meaning but hapless Nicola Murray MP, first introduced as a Minister put out to grass and now floundering as Leader of the Opposition. Chronically lacking in self-belief, ideas or ideology, beset by power-hungry underlings and colleagues, and unsupported by her offscreen husband, Murray is almost painfully unsuited for the environment in which she finds herself having to operate – but so, crucially, is Peter Mannion, and so was Murray’s forerunner, the spectacularly hangdog Hugh Abbott.

She has the odd display of offhand feminist snark (‘I love the division of labour in here – how the women do the heavy lifting and the men do the heavy sarcasm’), and the occasional pointedly gender-aware exchange with the show’s alpha male antihero Malcolm Tucker, but Murray’s incompetence and ineffectualness is never presented as a function of her being that well-worn cliché, a woman in a man’s world. It is simply the tragedy of several characters that they exist in a political and media world in which those who flourish are flavourless post-Blair clones like the largely unseen Dan Miller.

I haven’t seen a great deal written about The Thick Of It’s sexual politics – if there is any out there, do let us know in a comment. Returning to reality, it remains to be seen what effect the predominance of women in Plaid Cymru’s leadership is likely to have. Leanne Woods, Plaid’s first female leader, is refreshing enough for her unabashed socialist and republican ideals – although these principles are very much not common to the whole party.

Woods has attracted the always-dubious label of ‘outspoken’; like ‘feisty’ or the old favourite ‘pushy’, when I hear the word ‘outspoken’ used of a woman in public life I don’t exactly reach for my revolver but I certainly roll my eyes. in 2004 she was, mildly ridiculously, ordered to leave the Welsh Assembly’s debating chamber for referring to the Queen as ‘Mrs Windsor’. Even if you find a constitutional route to socialism more implausible than the idea of impending Welsh independence, Plaid are at least providing an example of how commitment to social justice can be combined with a commitment to gender representation, with both intertwined as strands of the same progressive goal.

Images © BBC

If you’ve got a guest post brewing in your brain, pitch us at [email protected].

Last night, I was drawing away at my desk with Radio 4 on in the background and idly chatting to my boyfriend, who is in Poland at the moment.

A Moral Maze came on the radio, aiming to address the moral challenges around the government’s Troubled Families initiative, in the wake of the government’s ‘Broken Britain Tsar’, Louise Casey, suggesting that women in these families should be financially discouraged from having more children if they are struggling to cope at present. This comes off the back of Eric Pickles saying we’re too politically correct to lay blame where it belongs, which is with the troubled families where recidivistic criminality and truancy endures across several generations.

It is, they suggest, a moral failure of the families who languish on benefits that they do not lift themselves out of antisocial behaviour and state dependency.

In this Moral Maze, it was said more than once “we all know who these families are” when panel members asked for clarification on whether they were discussing troubled or troublesome families.

The criteria for being regarded as a Troubled Family are that a family has five or more of the following seven traits:

• Having a low income
• No one in the family who is working
• Poor housing
• Parents who have no qualifications
• The mother has a mental health problem
• One parent has a longstanding illness or disability
• The family is unable to afford basics, including food and clothes

Source: they’re outlined in this Independent piece.

However, the Moral Maze‘s panel also discussed some very loaded terms like “serial fatherlessness” which seemed to point quite firmly to where they apportion the blame for this supposed crisis.

Of course, like most government statistics, the figure of 120,000 families in the UK meeting this definition is disputed, with most attempts to replicate the research finding far, far fewer families than in the initial research.

The panel didn’t seem to pick up on what seems to be glaringly obvious to me as a major issue with the defining traits, focusing instead on whether poverty caused families to struggle to the point where adhering to social norms was difficult or whether the families themselves were essentially lazy or immoral enough to drive themselves into this situation. There are obvious echoes to the description of “feral youths” we had a year ago when the country was ablaze with rioting.

To me, the most pernicious aspect of the definition is the bias against disabled people, particularly against disabled women. Since it’s far harder for disabled people to find decent education or well-paid employment, and since depression and other mental health challenges are incredibly common among disabled people (perhaps because we’re being told that our problems are our own moral inadequacies?), it seems like a given that most families where one or both parents are disabled are automatically well on the way to being labelled as problematic.

In fact, if you examine a family where neither parent is ill, disabled or has mental health problems, they must meet all five of the remaining criteria, but a disabled family where the mother has mental health issues need only meet three of the five non-health-related factors to be labelled as problematic.

If you then add in the idea that the mothers in troubled families should be discouraged, perhaps financially, from having more children than they can afford or cope with, we’re worryingly close to a programme of eugenics that disproportionately targets disabled and mentally ill women.

The discussion on Moral Maze didn’t pick up on this point, seemingly assuming that it should be taken as read that ill-health and impairment, whether physical or mental, constitutes a problem for society.

It’s a disturbingly regressive idea that in order to end poverty, you end the poor, and one that should be challenged with passion at every turn.

Reading through earlier government documents relating to this, however, paints a different picture to the one now being presented by ministers. The definition there ran:

• First, examine families where either there is proof of the child having committed a crime or where a member of the family has an ASBO or similar charge around social conduct.
• Secondly, identify families where a child has been regularly excluded from school, has 15% or higher unauthorised absence or where the child is regularly truanting.
• If families meet one of the two, then examine if no-one in the family works or is in post-compulsory education (one of those NEETs – Not in Employment, Education or Training).
• After examining these identifying factors, local considerations may be applied where families meet two or three of the above factors exist and there is cause for concern.

These local considerations can include:

• Where a family member has been in prison in the last year, where the police have been called out regularly, where the family is involved in a gang or where they are prolific offenders.
• Where a child is on the child protection register or where the local authority is considering taking the child into care.
• Where a family member has long-term health problems, particularly:

  Emotional and mental health problems
  Drug and alcohol misuse
  Long term health conditions
  Health problems caused by domestic abuse
  Under 18 conceptions

Now, this list of issues seems problematic, but less so when you take into account the idea that these should only be considered once it’s established that there are problems with criminality or where the child is not attending school often enough. Worklessness is given less priority than these and health problems such as alchoholism are even less relevant.

Source: this Troubled Families Programme PDF from March 2012.

I think that the shift from what this document describes to the seven traits of unsuccessful people defined above and communicated by ministers more recently is incredibly telling in determining the underlying ideology at play here. Rather than say that criminality and absence from school or the structure of employment, education or training are the main challenges facing families and requiring intervention, we’re left with the impression that there are wickedly immoral, lazy people, primarily the poor, disabled people and single mothers, who are tearing apart the fabric of the country.

The original notion – that families who are troubled and troubling through antisocial or criminal behaviour, where children are being denied the life chances that education provides, could do with additional support and intervention to assist them in re-introducing structure to what can often be a chaotic and fraught existence – seems sound. To turn this into yet another attack on poor people, disabled people and women just seems like a moral failure of government, and that, I think, is far more likely to tear the country apart.

• Described as ‘suave’ by Simply Knitting Magazine, Howard Hardiman is a writer and artist who makes comic books about lonely badgers, dog-headed escorts and disabled superheroines. He lives on the Isle of Wight and collects jigsaw puzzle pieces he finds in the street.

www.howardhardiman.com
www.thelengths.com
www.thepeckhaminvalids.com

Humble Bundle V

The Humble Bundle is a nice little concept: a collection of indie titles for you to pay what you want for and then decide how much of that fee goes to a) the developers, b) Humble Bundle themselves, or c) charity.

I got it on the first day (and, sorry, but by the time this post goes live I suspect the window will have closed) so I only got the first five games that were included.  Since then there’ve been three more titles added if you paid over the average.  These were added in light of this bundle making over $1.8 million in the first 15 hours.

Included in the Bundle were:

• Psychonauts
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent
• LIMBO
• Superbrothers: Sword & Sorcery EP
• Bastion*
• Braid*+
• Lone Survivor*+
• Super Meat Boy*+

* denotes games that were unlocked if you paid over the average; + denotes those titles added at a later stage.

Like I say, I only got the first five, but I’m not too sore as I already have Braid (not a big fan) and I’m not overly interested in the other two.  I’m not going to discuss the games themselves here because that’ll be coming in a “Playing…” post later on.

I thought it would be nice show you that sometimes, somewhere out there, someone does something good.  A lot of money has been raised for charity through this: not least through Big Names of Gaming competing to be the top contributors (Notch and HumbleBrony Bundle have been vying for the top spot: when I bought the bundle they were dueling around the $3000 mark, now they’re on $12,345.67 and £11,111.11 respectively).

Taken from Humblebundle.com at 10:40am GMT, 13/06/2012

Of course, as the popularity of indie games continues to rise, it’s nice to be able to have the choice to decide how much of your cash goes to the developers as opposed to not really knowing for sure how much just gets kept by various third parties.

Sigh, Misogyny

From that nice little snippet of camaraderie, I regret that I must now depress the tone somewhat and talk about InternetFail, and more specifically, how it’s been discussed recently with regard to the world of gaming.

At the start of June BBC News Magazine ran an article highlighting the constant, abhorrent abuse that female gamers get in online play: here.  It mostly focusses on the experiences of one Wisconsin gamer called Jenny, of the CoD ilk, and the abuse she gets daily on voice chats.  She records them and uploads them to her website, Not in the Kitchen Anymore, and I gotta say, she handles this shit pretty well but the point is she shouldn’t have to.  Especially, as the article points out, 42% of US gamers are women, and adult women outnumber teenage boys quite considerably.

There’s also a BBC World Service programme based on her experiences and those of other female gamers.  If you read the article or listen to the programme you might hear some charming young fellows claiming “freedom of speech”, but here’s a point of interest for any such time someone tries to use this smokescreen of an excuse if you call them out as misogynists (or racists, homophobes, etc… the list, depressingly, goes on).  In both American and European (incl. British) law the “freedom of speech” excuse doesn’t fly.

Why’s that?  Well, if you actually read the laws you’ll see there are exclusions to what the precious First Amendment protects: look here.  What’s that?  Obscenity?  Threats?  Defamation?  Intentional infliction of emotional distress?  They’re all excluded from protection by the First Amendment?  OHGAWDNO!  It’s like living in a world where people treat each other with respect!  How horrible.

And, Euro law?  Just for starters you can consult Article 10 and Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights.  Yeah.  Human rights.  But be careful out there: trying to educate these fools in the error of their ways and the legal flaws in their defence might offend them.  The fact you’ve done some learnings (that aren’t centred around how to make tasty lunchtime treats) is clearly a work of pure evil!

Although Jenny of Wisconsin might be able to deal with it, there are a lot of people out there who can’t or don’t want to.  It takes a lot of effort, seriously.  I’m an antisocial gamer – we know this – I like playing games on my own, I hate chat and I hate voice-chats even more.  I don’t want to listen to somebody’s inane drivel while I shoot stuff, regardless of the content.  I ditched the one MMO I played a long time ago because of the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic crap that occurred on a daily basis.  Not directed at me, just there – and no one really ever objected (if you did, you got the abuse turned on you).

My solution is not one that everyone can adopt.  I just avoid the social elements, even if it’s online team-based play like TF2, and I refuse to disclose any information about myself.  Generally, I am the wallpaper: I keep quiet and ignore chat.  This is mostly because I’m a misanthrope and do not care for being social, but partly it’s also because I know that a lot of people on chat are going to be dicks.  I just don’t understand why banter has to be offensive, even if it doesn’t go near questions of gender.

Taken from Kickstarter.com at 11:30am GMT, on 13/06/2012

But back to the specific point of misogyny in the gamingverse.  I mentioned the KickStarter from Feminist Frequency in May’s “Playing…” post and the woman behind it, Anita Sarkeesian, has been yet another figurehead victim of abuse.  She put her head over that parapet, so to speak, and has had it all but shot to smithereens.  Gladly, however, this isn’t going to stop her making those videos, nor has it stopped people pledging (when I last checked, she was on $87,000+ with 68 hours left to go).  But this sort of thing does make me want to adopt a superhero persona, fly all over the world, and stand in defence of these women.

I was going to say “brave women” just ther, but that, to me, gives too much credit to these scum-sucking parasites of the internet.  It shouldn’t have to be brave just to identify as female and like games.  FFS.

At least – if we’re to take anything positive away from this – this all-too-common abuse is being given more and more of a public face.  A site that BBC article mentions is Fat,  Ugly or Slutty (because that’s pretty much all you are if you’re a female gamer, apparently) where you can upload screengrabs of sexist abuse/harrasment.  So, if you can catch the abuse you receive, or see, in a screen grab or a recording, make it known!

Emilia Fox as Dr. Nikki Alexander doing a brilliant representation of my Unimpressed Face

She’s a great actress who I think does a lot for Women In Telly, so I was a bit disappointed with the way Dr Nikki Alexander (Fox’s character) has been portrayed in this series of Silent Witness.

***Quick spoiler warning goes here.***

I’ll get to Nikki, but I also wanted to mention that I’ve been a bit dismayed at the BBC’s dumbing-down of the series with woeful stereotypes akin to Channel 4’s recent “Let’s just cause a hoohah to get viewers” strategy. Every episode of Silent Witness this series has pretty much screamed ‘The Police are incompetent and corrupt and evil!’. Topical? You could argue that, but the way they’ve tackled it has been very clumsy and unsophisticated – not like the Silent Witness of previous years. Plus I haven’t heard of any police violently sexually assaulting pimps in public toilets with long wooden implements to death and then covering it up recently – have you?

They’ve also thrown in the old ‘people who play violent video games are all psychopathic killers’ trope – in the first episode no less – which left me with a well defined Unimpressed Face. Really, BBC? You want to play with such obvious, ill-informed, stereotypes? Disappointing.

They certainly haven’t done much for the female figures in this series either, with three suicides, all colleagues or friends of Leo, two of which were women and neither of which were portrayed very well. One also apparently found the draw of Leo’s soft gaze too hard to resist and snogged his face off in a lab despite, her being married and him in a long-term relationship.

The second was a pathologist who challenged a post mortem conclusion of Shaken Baby syndrome (also, quite topical) who Leo took personal action against to make her look like an illogical, flustered fool by using his influence as Head of the Royal Society of Pathologists to say “nah, she’s wrong.”

Nikki studied under this particular LadyPatho and was quick to defend her, but the script made both women look as if they’d been stranded in swathes of stereotypically female overemotionality. It felt like the Beeb had attempted to suggest science is Man’s Domain, what with the way they aired Nikki’s protests that LadyPatho was being purposefully railroaded by a patriarchal pathologist hierarchy, whom she had dared to go against by suggesting something other than their fave shaken baby triad might exist as a cause of infant death.

The potential of this, however, is totally undermined by the acting instructions Fox seems to have followed. By making an accomplished, strong, independent female pathologist who we know – from many years of her gracing our screens – to be a sensible, balanced and intelligent individual, behave in a disorientated, desperate, hysterical, conspiracy-theory, ‘the men are out to get us’ way sort of undermines the whole attempt at a feminists-in-the-mainstream angle. Or just, y’know, that whole taking women seriously thing.

It is difficult for me to accept Emilia Fox’s performance as a betrayal of Nikki, but realistically I don’t see how she could have agreed to play the scene that way without going against Nikki’s intrinsic character. That is certainly disappointing. The series’ new obsession with Lowest Common Denominator dross (probably ordered down through the BBC management levels in order to win some more viewers in these austere times) is also highly disappointing. Though the stories have been, generally, interesting enough, Silent Witness still feels like it’s strayed from its path.

I hope that, for next year’s series, the BBC drop this new Ch4-esque manifesto for just being offensive and shallow in order to viewer-grab away from whatever reality talent show rubbish is on elsewhere. If needs be, just move it to BBC4 and make it a clever criminal show again – it’ll fit in nicely alongside The Bridge and other similarly intelligent drama that treats women with a little bit more respect. There’s no excuse now that analogue TV no longer exists: we’ve all got the digital channels and there’s always iPlayer (even on your Xbox now)!

This CD was part of the Kerrang! Hometaping series, in which various leading lights of the hard rock scene, invariably men (do shout me if this has changed, as I have since given up on K!, but my optimism’s economy-size) compiled mixtapes of their favourite tracks past and present. This one, compiled by Casey Chaos of parental-guidance-sticker-collecting Cali-punk-metal outfit Amen, wasn’t a bad mix, looking at it now. For the most part.

But it was the presence of I Am A Cliché on the tracklist that put the CD on regular rotation on my Discman. That track stood out, sparking nicely off The Distillers and The Adverts (the sum total of female input, there) and kicking defiantly against the roll-your-eyes-or-lose-your-lunch misogyny of Let’s Fuck by the Murderdolls (at least the CD had range). And the more I listened to Poly Styrene‘s life-affirming shouts, the more alert I felt to the complete shit that passed (passes!) for acceptable attitudes to gender in some of the rest of the bands on the CD, in the mag, in my music collection, in general. (For that jarringly educational juxtaposition, Casey’s at least to be thanked.)

From there it was a short leap to the rest of Germ Free Adolescents. Nobody forgets the first time they hear the crisp, sing-song pronouncement that opens Oh Bondage, Up Yours! : Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard, but I think… (when I set up this blog, I entered it as the mousefloat text description for the Music Box category on the sidebar). Every time I hear it, I feel that emphasis on but I think… reverb through me: powerful, unabashed and instantly compelling. And funny. “Playing with words and ideas, having a laugh about everything, sending it up”, as Poly herself put it to the Independent in 1998 (this approach was arguably worlds away from Amen’s bloodied-up on-stage histrionics, so it’s perhaps faintly ironic she made Casey’s list of hometaped heroes, but anyway).

Poly passed away this morning, having, as her site team have aptly put it, “won her battle to go to higher places”. For me, it’s the loss of a personal hero – she formed the Spex in 1978 by throwing an ad in Melody Maker with a header demanding the attention of YOUNG PUNX WHO WANT TO STICK IT TOGETHER.

She’s on record, in a recent interview with 6Music quoted in her BBC obituary, as saying, “I know I’ll probably be remembered for Oh Bondage Up Yours!… I’d like to be remembered for something a bit more spiritual.”

For me, the impact of X-Ray Spex actually was akin to something spiritual. Poly threw into stark, uncompromising relief the lack of female voices normally in play in mainstream rock, in Kerrang!, and so on. She made me wonder, for the first time, what I thought about that. (Clue: it ends in “up yours”.) So I think in a way, although the Spex’s one album probably will always be her most famous music, that’s okay.

Cheers, Poly. Here’s to you. Rest in peace. (Say hi to Ari Up for us.) The world’s a little bit less day-glo now, and much the worse for it.

• Listen to Germ Free Adolescents on last.fm
• Visit Poly’s official site and find out about her solo projects – her newest album Generation Indigo came out last month
• Poly Styrene Remembered: a photo set on NME.com





Team BadRep is currently on holiday and will return to the usual posting schedule next week

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