Kinda like that issue of Time Magazine where they said "the person of the year is everyone", only less cheesy. (photo via Flickr, taken by user Jessica E Sideways. Shared under a Creative Commons license.)

This post, then, is about those people; people who are getting on with the everyday business of making change happen. That ranges from people who work in charities, NGOs, and support organisations; people who lobby and campaign; and people who are acting on the change they’d like to see in their interactions with the people around them.

So here, then, are just some of the many organisations run by awesome people, doing awesome things on a daily basis.

• African Feminist Forum – They run biennial conferences for feminist activists in Africa, and make efforts to include the voices of groups often marginalised within African feminism (and arguably feminist movements in many countries) – commercial sex workers, women with disabilities, and bisexual rights activists.
• Central American Women’s Network – They’re working to improve the political, social and cultural rights of women in Central America through advocacy and campaigning, and raising awareness in the UK and US. Freedoms in Honduras have been a particular issue since the coup d’etat of 2009.
• Women’s Budget Group  – Based in the UK, they’re bringing gender analysis to economic policy, because it’s hard to work for an equal society when the vast impact of government expenditure is skewed in favour of one portion of the population.
• British Insitute of Human Rights – Because human rights for everyone is very much a feminist issue, and the BIHR are one of several fantastic groups supporting that. (See also: Liberty, Amnesty International)
• Race On The Agenda – Too often the history of feminist discussion has been marred by an unfortunate exclusion of the voices from often-marginalised groups such as the Black and Asian communities. ROTA are one of the organisations helping to keep things more inclusive.
• Powerhouse – Women with disabilities are another group that’s been too often pushed to one side or rendered invisible. Run “by and for women with learning disabilities”, Powerhouse bring focus to this.
• The Feminist Library – Libraries are basically the most awesome things ever, and this one carries a huge stock of feminist literature. It should hardly need explaining why this is an entire industrial-sized vat of pure brilliance.
• The Survivor Project – I want to include these folk, because judging from what I’ve read they’re awesome, but unfortunately they seem to be without a website currently, so, er, you’ll have to find them yourselves later. They’re a non-profit working against domestic and sexual violence against anyone, but with a particular focus on trans* and intersex survivors. It’s an issue that’s all too often ignored in the mainstream. (If in the future a website becomes available, hopefully we’ll be able to draw attention to it.)

This list isn’t even remotely exhaustive, and couldn’t possibly hope to be. There are more people out there working to support good ideas than I have any chance of adequately enumerating here. The fact that I can only post a tiny, miniscule example of some of the many groups and organisations involved in this is, honestly, brilliant. It’d be a worrying sign if every beneficial organisation could be summed up in the space of one post. For more comprehensive overviews of the groups out there though, do check the members list for the Women’s Resource Centre and the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations. (Of course, that only covers groups based at least partially in the UK. The list gets even longer when we go global.)

And then of course there’s the fact that the above list has only covered organisations, groups, and charities. We’ve yet to even touch on the vast array of feminist bloggers, writers, artists, and others out there making their ideas visible. Or the yet wider group who don’t have a public podium from which to spread their message but are engaged in thinking about, discussing and living with this as a part of their daily world view.

What I’m saying is that there’s a lot of us, and the collective weight behind this set of ideas is formidable. And that’s seven shades of kickass.

• Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

Metafilter user blue_beetle in the thread User-driven discontent

The above is a particularly trenchant quote that it is increasingly important to bear in mind, when using online services.

With any luck, most people reading this will already have read Facebook is a feminist issue, and a lot of what’s being talking about here will be redundant. In case you haven’t, though, and in case your clicking finger is suffering from temporary paralysis, the broad point it is making is that on-line privacy is a very, very real concern for feminists, since it affects any number of vulnerable classes of people, and particuarly those who are victims of abuse, and that Facebook is quite staggeringly bad when it comes to online privacy – it’s another path by which people can abuse one another, and more importantly, it makes it increasingly easy for abusers to track down and/or monitor the activity of their victims – even if their victims block their abuser from their profile, the abuser may still have friends in common with their victim, and therefore be able to see their victim’s activities where they intersect with friends via Facebook photo albums and similar.

Considered in the light of the above quote, it’s very easy to see why this is the case. Facebook’s business model absolutely relies on sharing the personal information of its users with as wide an audience as possible, for marketing purposes – its user-base is the product that it sells. But what’s worse is that even if you yourself choose not to share certain information, that’s no guarantee that it will not be available.

Project Gaydar is a research project by some students at MIT, who built some software that analysed Facebook profiles. They found that even if a person’s Facebook profile did not mention their sexual orientation, they could predict it to 85% accuracy, simply by analysing the profile data of the people they are Facebook friends with. It’s important to stress that there’s no evidence of this research being used outside of the project, or with any sort of malicious intent – it’s simply a demonstration of the possibility.

It’s worth noting that the problem presented by Project Gaydar is actually not Facebook’s fault. It’s simply an emergent property of any social network, on-line or off – one is judged by the company one keeps. And one cannot fault the companies that provide these services, and make us into the products they sell (without getting into anti-capitalist theory, a topic for another time and another place) – the companies are simply behaving as the market dictates.

And this sort of thing in only going to get worse – companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook’s new “Places” feature make their users real-time location information available to their friends, on-line. At time of writing, there hasn’t been a high-profile case of this sort of sensitive data being abused or leaked, but it’s surely only a matter of time.

Even beyond the sphere of social networking, there are, of course, other sorts of privacy concerns on-line, relating to anonymity – witness the outing in the press of Zoe Margolis on the publication of her first book. The issue of privacy management on-line is not going to go away any time soon, and as line between the online and the offline increasingly blurs away into nothing it’s a conversation that feminists should be gearing up to be part of.

So, what can you do?

If you’re concerned about your Facebook privacy settings, then you can look at Reclaimprivacy.org – it’s a volunteer-run site that does its best to stay on top of the ever-shifting goalposts of Facebook privacy.

If you’d like to do further reading on this issue surrounding social networks, privacy and vulnerable people, then searching the brilliant danah boyd’s archive is likely to yield a lot of further reading – it’s not always her primary concern, but the nature of her research into social media means she comes up against it a lot.

You might also like to consider volunteering with, or donating to organisations like the EFF or the ACLU both of which regularly deal with privacy issues as part of their broader remit, and whose blogs are good sources of information on current events in this area.

Cuts for women - image by degilbo via Flickr

To head off any arguments at the pass, I believe that these cuts are more a political decision rather then an economic one and that the government has taken over a country in a time of perceived crisis and confusion, using the “chaos” as a convenient smokescreen to push through its own agenda without the appropriate debate, safeguards or reference to GCSE economics textbooks. But the wrong-headedness of the budget is better discussed by Liberal Conspiracy and Red Pepper. Direct arguments over the necessity of the cuts there.

I’ve been thinking specifically about the gulf of difference between what is legally allowable and what is morally correct, and more importantly what we can do to bridge the divide. I’m not going to back down on my assertion that morality is the right word to use here – a budget which is demonstrably more unfair (it’s a generally unfair budget) to women than to men is an immoral budget. So far, so philosophical.

This is where it gets better. This is where we get practical. The valuable question posed by the Fawcett Society is whether it is also an illegal budget, because if so, then there are grounds for actual change. Not only in this instance but for the future. If they succeed then there will be precedent for further challenges to unequal, unacceptable political decisions.

…we are all in this together.

– George Osborne, Conservative Conference Speech, 4 October 2010

Good point George, but not in the way you think we are.  A man who wants us to pay whilst large companies don’t , who grew up on a fat trust fund and is the heir apparent to the Osborne Baronetcy of Ballentaylor is probably only dimly aware of the Real World Implications of the “this” that “we” appear to be “in”. Nonetheless, he has one bit right. The key word is “together”. We – the actual, genuine we – who are going to bear the brunt of these cuts must use the laws that we have to protect the rights that we need. Laws do not stand up for themselves. We need to make the system work for us. The tools for change are there. We need the knowledge to wield them and we must show solidarity with those who do.

Yes, I used the “s” word. It’s an old fashioned word but so are “honour” and “truth” and “love” and I like them all.

Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in the oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.
– Aurora Levins Morales, Medicine Stories (1998)

We must work together, and use whatever means are at our disposal to ensure that the laws that should protect us are enforced. Otherwise they are literally worth nothing. Just words and empty promises. Rather like a group of politicians I could mention. So yes, it’s absolutely time to pull together and muck in and all those other buzz words that seem to have echoes of the Blitz, trying to soft-soap us into accepting being short changed for some nebulous “greater good”. Don’t be fooled.

Challenge the cuts. Because we’re all in this together.

We not only have to survive, we have to deserve to survive.
– Joss Whedon

Whedon was talking about how characters make hard decisions in Battlestar Galactica, but the same sentiment is reflected in lines from his “Equality Now” speech:

Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and women – and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it.

These two quotes sum up why I’m a feminist. Equality is not optional. I’m intelligent enough, and live in a society educated enough, that there is no excuse for me not to aim for it. Without equality, we fail as human beings.

From Planet of the Apes, 1968. (Stop complaining about spoilers, you've had 40 years.)

This type of “equality” is not some iron-clad regulation of behaviour, but an equal chance to live as you choose to: not to be disadvantaged because assumptions are made about one of two categories (which don’t match the multiple physical or mental possibilities anyway). Not pressured to act a certain way, or locked out from having power over your life. And it’s not some unimportant dream of abstract perfection but the most fundamental part of the lives of millions.

Reaching this fabled Equality won’t solve many problems. Those people lucky enough to escape poverty will still need to work every day, death is still inevitable, resources are still finite. If we had a much-reduced need for feminism, we’d only be starting on the struggle for a better society – but we wouldn’t be dooming over half our population to lesser chances and consideration because they don’t have man-parts.

Of course, aiming for true equality and overcoming the prejudices which are deeply ingrained in our (somewhat twisted) upbringings is difficult even for feminists. I wonder whether giving up my seat on the train for a woman is deeply offensive and sexist, because it’s based on the idea that women are weak creatures to be treasured and looked after by big strong men. I start to examine every single decision I make that is based on the line “because she’s a woman”. In a society where equality was real, that reason would virtually never apply.

For most roles, if gender is the only difference between two people then they should be interchangeable. A decision should immediately be about the positives and negatives of the individual instead. By having true equality, you would be free to see the person for who they are – at the very least, THEY would be free to choose who they are without having it dictated because of what society thinks “women” are/deserve this year.

But instead girls still get pink dolls and boys get blue trucks.

It’s not unrealistic to have true equality as the eventual aim. In fact, it makes identifying the current inequality all the easier: endless shelves of women’s magazines full of airbrushed anorexics, and also full shelves of men’s mags featuring topless women all with identical body shapes… if we were surrounded by constant images of perfectly-toned half naked men with impossible airbrushed bodies on every second billboard and magazine cover instead, you have to wonder how long this shit would last.

Mark Thomas (the political comedian) released a “People’s Manifesto” earlier this year. It was made by his audiences volunteering their ideas for new British laws. My favourite reads:“Models to be selected at random from the electoral register”.

Male, female, young, old. Large, small. All races, all shoes sizes, glasses-wearing NORMAL PEOPLE modelling clothes for normal people.

Of course, his show is supposed to be a comedy.

Going this far into the idea of a culture where we truly don’t dictate gender roles is not Joss Whedon’s point at all, and not really my main one either. We’re not there. We’re not even 10% of the way there. We’re in a world where we still have to campaign to stop female genital mutilation in England. Where large parts of the planet treat over 50% of human beings as property, or as unclean, dangerous sexual objects.

A feminist, yesterday. (Photo of Bill Bailey from http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk)

The term ‘Feminism’ has a bad rep with a lot of men. When I linked to this site from my blog, one of the commenters said they found the idea of male feminists “somewhat absurd”. That’s light compared to the reception they receive in some places online.

Bad Rep believes that we’re not going to make much change by refusing to engage with 49% of the population on principle, so this last bit is aimed at male readers:

Men! Do not be afraid! Not only are you welcome here, but you probably already agree with everything feminism stands for:

A feminist is a person who answers “yes” to the question, “Are women human?” Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. … It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, the “family,” men.
– Katha Pollitt

Or more succinctly:

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
– Cheris Kramarae, Paula A. Treichler, Ann Russo: A Feminist Dictionary.

Equality is not optional. It is the only way we can get to the very first step of the ladder that creates a society to be proud of, and leave a record of the human race which doesn’t mark us as worse than the apes we came from. It’s not ‘absurd’ to have everyone involved – men need female equality to be in place before we can truthfully call ourselves men.

“Feminism? Does that mean you hate men now?” My father is a master of both dry wit and directness, you can’t foil him with flannel, so what I say next can’t be fluffy or theory-wanking.

“No, it’s more about equality.” At this point I have to pause, because realistically my dad does not need to know the entire history of the feminist movement over tea and scones at the South Bank. He is taking an interest in my interests. Which means I should at least have the grace to be interesting.

“We’ve theoretically got legal equality, but there’s still a lot of inequality in society. A lack of respect for women as people…” He’s still got his eyes open and therefore so far, so good. “Like when men call out to women on the streets if they are wearing dresses. Makes me feel uncomfortable to wear a dress, and that’s not on.”

I can tell that I’ve got him right there. He starts to tell me about a time he was out with my brother and two men were “effing and blinding” (my father rarely swears) at a young woman across the street.

“I might read up on this, on the internet, when I get home to your mum.”

We return to our cups of tea, but internally, ideas are brewing.

Why aren’t more fathers involved in the feminist movement? On the surface, it seems an obvious partnership. Surely no father would want his daughter to grow up in a world where she had less respect, less equality and less room to succeed than her brothers? Yet the link between “feminism” and “making life better for your daughter” seems to be feeble to the point of invisibility. Instead, there is a jump to the fear of the unfamiliar, the media-generated whispers of what evil feminists are like – man-haters to quote my dad, who is neither a sexist nor easily swayed by the opinions of the papers. He was just recounting what he understood the term to mean.

I want to take a little time to unpick the relationship between feminism and fatherhood, with the hope of encouraging more people to think about feminism in a more positive light, to give them the tools to talk to their parents about feminism, and to (finally) get our dads on board.

There is a lot of prejudice surrounding feminism and the family. This can range from the (in)famous Pat Robinson quote that “feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” to the somewhat outre thinking (not to mention strange definitions) of a divorce campaigner in America. A quick google for references to “feminism and the family” or “fathers and feminism” reveals heartbreaking commonalities mostly centered around the idea that the feminist movement is somehow trying to extract men from the entire family process.

You can see how a wrong-headed reading of women’s rights might have picked up that impression. The longstanding assumption that an increase in freedom for women must naturally lead to a decrease in freedom for men (as if there were only a certain amount of freedom in the world). Changes in legislation over the past eighty years or so, from the vote, through to divorce laws, inheritance, mortgage rights (yesterday I was talking to a lady who told me when she was my age women couldn’t apply for a mortgage by herself) and so on have all enabled women to move from being reliant on men to being more self-reliant. However, this move is all too often read as a move away from men rather than being a move toward engaging with men on equal, independent terms.

The stock figures often quoted as examples of how feminism is destroying the family unit are the rising divorce rate. Personally I take issue with the idea that relationship status is indicative of a strong family unit – I would much rather that parents were happy with each other and unwed than unhappily married. However, that aside it’s important to note that  it is almost impossible to gauge what, if any, influence feminism has had on these numbers. Frankly, if feminists could somehow cause such vast social change, then it’s unclear why we still have such crappy rape prevention or why little girls are forever dressed in pink. More is at issue here – starting with the lessening of religious influence in our daily lives (if marriage is not a sacrament, then divorce is no longer a sin), the decline in different social status for married versus unmarried people (there is less incentive to remain within an unhappy marriage) and the lowering stigma of the single parent (although I would argue that single mums are still pilloried by society whilst single dads put on pedestals, but that’s another article). This is social change, perhaps influenced in part by feminism, but just as equally influenced by all the changes that have occured in the last century. The world has changed.

It is easy to sneer at those who think that feminism is damaging to the family.

But before we sneer, we must understand what we are looking at. The truth is that what feminism wants is deeply challenging to a traditionalist and parts of what feminism is hoping to achieve can also be somewhat difficult to swallow by almost anyone raised in the modern UK: it involves a complete step change in our understanding of the family unit which has massive knock-on effects in most areas of society – work, education, retirement, marriage and relationships. If we wanted a truly equal setting for the family, in which neither gender is assumed to have a “natural” role in parenting – and I think we do – then all of these things must change both in theory and practice.  And that is mindblowing. Here’s how: try and think about it. Picture, in your mind, if you can (and I find it quite hard), a world in which mums and dads are given exactly the same weight and priority by society. Have exactly the same expectations placed upon them. Are communicated to by the media and advertising in the same fashion.

In other words, that parents are treated as parents, rather than isolated and grouped according to gender. And we aren’t surprised by it. Dads change nappies. Mums go out to work. Dads do the dishes. Mums do the school run. Parents Evening is exactly that. There’s no assumption or hierarchy in who might be better at doing what beyond what each individual is able and willing to do. People with ovaries teach children to throw and kick balls in the playground. People with Y chromosomes make chocolate crispy cakes (and mostly mess) in the kitchen. Maternity and paternity leave cease to exist and we have parental leave. No-one bats an eyelid.

It’s a strange place, isn’t it? But wonderful.

And it’s a place I think we can get to, if we try to break down the barriers that exist between perceptions of what feminism could really mean to fatherhood.

In the UK there are a number of dad centered internet institutions (nowhere near as many as for mothers – mumsnet, for example, is  a huge and generally positive and useful resource, but despite the claims to be “by parents for parents” is still in name and deed more focused on women than men). These include Fathers 4 Justice and other similarly named organisations that fight for changes in family law, including the website Dads UK which again focuses on access, divorce and children. As far as I’m aware, neither of these organisations have strong links to UK feminists, and in some cases a scan of their pages reveals the same sort of prejudices that are repeated over and over and over again – that the feminist movement took their children away. It’s a little bit like 21st century witchhunting. Scapegoating is easier than finding the real solution – especially when the real solution involves complicated individuals and their lives rather than a nice easy public target.

So how do we change this for the better?

There has never been a better, more exciting time to be a feminist.

–Zoe Margolis, reviewing Cath Redfern’s Reclaiming the F Word

Hi there, internet! This is a feminist blog-

Quit gurning at the back already. EYES FRONT, PEOPLE. Just for a moment.

This is a feminist blog.

Feminism has a bad old rep at the moment. My search results for the word, as I write this, are a predictable molotov of very established feminist sites and an obligatory dollop of “this stuff destroys homes”-type bile.  So far, so expected.

But increasingly, there’s a lot of mainstream cringing about the f-word going on, with words like “irrelevant”, “exclusive” and “outdated” on constant rotation.  Call yourself a feminist in conversation, and you will very likely be handed the Invisible Awkward Balloon.

You know what I’m talking about.  Suddenly everyone’s looking at you funny. They’ve decided you’re “a bit quirky”. You have to hold the Awkward Balloon for the rest of the conversation. No matter what you do, it will not just float away. You think, “Ack. I am so not mentioning this aspect of my socio-political views out loud ever again”.  Sad times, people.

That Whole Knotty ‘What Is Feminism Anyway’ Business

For us, putting it simply, feminism is the recognition that in many areas both close to home and internationally, women and men do not receive equal rights and privileges.  It goes further than that, too – it’s the stance of owning the opinion that this should change for the better, and not in a way in which one gender supercedes another, whatever the “fem” bit at the beginning might imply. A great deal of progress has been made with this in many countries, but the fact remains that attitudes change slowly, even after legislation has been passed.

The Dreaded F-Word, You Say?

There are a lot of people out there who would support the above stance.  But they’re wary of using the dreaded f-word, or of connecting with people who use it.  Some of them, however it happened – and we’re not bothered about blaming anybody –  seem to have ended up feeling that their activism might not be welcome if they did either of these things.  We think this is a shame.

Ladies And Gentlemen And Everybody Else

The six individuals who make up this blog at the time of writing – and we are a mixed-gender group – are friends. We didn’t meet through feminism, though we have it in common as a label we agree works well. This blog is our shared platform – and we don’t always agree with each other, either. Sometimes we’re angry, but we also have a sense of humour. We’re all featured briefly on our About page, but we hope that we’ll emerge, over time, as distinct voices.

Our strapline is a feminist pop culture adventure. We’re named after a Joan Jett song for a reason – we want to be a good first route in for people just starting to become interested in feminist and gender-related issues, and we also want to reclaim some of the inspiring, rock ‘n’ roll energy that characterised the feminist movement in previous generations. (Also, c’mon. Joan Jett is freaking badass.)

Jett leaps into action. Kinda like we want to. We named our site after Bad Reputation for a reason...

Angry All The Time?

This site is about looking for positives as much as shouting out a problem – if we don’t like something, we’ll  try and point at something else we think does get it right, or something that you, at grassroots level, can do about it.  We’re about simple, practical activism.

So it’s not all anger and humourless ranting, though anger rightly has its place as long as there’s still a gender gap.

But it is about moving, about thinking about what’s going on around you, every day, and pushing – even in small ways –  for change.

And it’s about enjoying how far we have come, acknowledging the good stuff, and connecting with people who feel the same.

Let’s Go!

A movement is defined by who’s on board. It is what you make it. We like this bandwagon fine. It may have a Bad Rep, but we’re okay with that. It’s our bandwagon, too. It’s achieved good things, and we believe it isn’t done yet.

Welcome aboard.