But as I turned the pages, I found myself snarkless. There were no relationship advice pieces, or sex tips. No weight loss articles, or sly ‘how many lovers is too many?’ slut-shaming. No soul-searching cod psychology telling you to be yourself by following a set of detailed instructions. Instead, there were an impressive number of successful, independent, creative women featured, and none of them were asked if they have a boyfriend.

Fashion Forecasts

But I knew, I knew this radical refit  wouldn’t part with that ageless women’s magazine staple, the horoscopes page. And there it was, tucked in at the back amongst the plastic surgery ads. However this is astrology with what I suspect Company‘s writers would refer to as ‘a twist’ (or perhaps a ‘twiso’). You can find out what the fates have in store for your fashion sense as well as your career and love life with Company‘s Fashion Forecast: “Librans are very good at mixing up soft and hard trends and finding the right balance. A tip for Librans is to finish off a statement look with some equally statement eyes to match.”

Ah, the love between a woman and her giant cosmic crab. (Free wallpaper from Styledip.com)

Balance! Like scales! I see what you’ve done there, clever astrology lady. Must have missed the bit about Libran’s skill with hard and soft trends in the Dendera zodiac.

There’s a snippet of fashion fortune for every sign, of which myself and other Scorpios get the short straw (again – our ruling planet Pluto isn’t even a planet any more) via being warned to “choose clothing in lemon and lime.” Gee, thanks. Hopefully my typical Scorpio charisma and piercing gaze will get me through a month dressed as a Starburst.

These suggestions sit a bit oddly beside the commanding tone of the usual astrological edicts to “be patient with those around you” or “make sure you keep an open diary” or “rain vengeance upon your enemies until the fields run with blood” (I made one of those up). The Fashion Forecast assumes a little of the same mystical authority. When my boyfriend (a Virgo) is advised to “don some trinket style jewellery” I hear an unspoken “Or else…”.

Women and astrology

You can probably sense that I’m not a true believer in the influence of the stars on our daily lives. But I think for the most part it does no harm. It gives people a symbolic system which helps them make sense of the baffling experience of being alive. I don’t believe in fate, and there are plenty of people I’d like to take more responsibility for their decisions and choices, but I can also see that lots of people just aren’t equipped to shoulder that burden. In short: life is hard, any port in a storm.

I can’t remember ever reading a fashion / beauty / shit psychology magazine aimed at women which didn’t have horoscopes, and astrology is generally held to be a feminine pursuit. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 30% of women in Britain claimed to ‘believe in’ astrology compared to 14% of men. But then 13% of both men and women said they believed in witches so the common argument that women are more susceptible to believe in magic and the paranormal is hardly watertight. Alarmingly 20% of men in the USA said they believe in witches. Guys. C’mon.

While researching this post I had an interesting exchange with @stfumisogynists on twitter who suggested that women’s interest in astrology might be linked to a wider belief in fate or destiny arising from social conditioning.

@stfumisogynists @sajarina maybe appeals due to a sense of lacking agency? Or at least did, but it now just standard practice. Plus there is something about ideas of women/girls somehow getting ‘saved’ by fate or whatever (often delivering a man), cf. pretty much every fairytale ever.

There’s also something to be said for women claiming and reclaiming a symbolic language and ideas of the sacred separate to the patriarchal power of organised religion. There is a long, proud history of women’s mysticism or participation in magical or occult societies, often bringing women a freedom and license denied to them in traditional belief systems.

Feminism and astrology?

I also happened upon this bizarre ‘Sisterhood and the Stars‘ article by Ophira Edut, one half of the Astro Twins. A feminist former writer for Ms. magazine and horoscope writer for Elle and Teen People. Credit it to her, despite the incredibly irritating habit of dropping people’s starsigns into the piece whenever they’re mentioned, she clearly has a sense of humour and seems to genuinely see astrology as having the potential to empower women and help them to succeed.

She writes “When you know yourself, you can make quick, clear decisions instead of wasting time second-guessing yourself, a huge psychic burden” which I find difficult to argue with. And given that my starting point is that the movement of the planets has no effect on our behaviour or personality whatsoever (until they start exploding or crashing into the sun of course) perhaps astrology can offer an indirect route to self knowledge or at least self improvement. The language makes me feel a bit queasy (“There was so much I could teach them about unity and self esteem from the stars”) but where’s the harm?

Well, I don’t think astrology deserves to be at the top of any feminist’s hit list, but it’s not all fluff. Edut approvingly quotes J.P. Morgan saying that “millionaires don’t use astrology; billionaires do”, a quote which I initially read as negative – because they’re so utterly detached from anything resembling a normal life they need to try and establish some sort of meaning to their existence no matter how absurd and implausible?

But Edut adds “How’s that for an antidote to the seventy cents women earn to each man’s dollar?” It’s a joke, but that’s where I think the harm is. Self knowledge and individual success is grand and I’d say the identification of astrology with the feminine isn’t any more damaging than the other qualities, interests and traits that stick to gender identities like old chewing gum. But women’s magazines peddle spiritual power alongside beauty and sexual power ,and none of them are a substitute for equal pay; bodily autonomy; freedom from violence; status, authority and representation. Reading your fate in the stars might be reassuring, but you might be missing a chance to change the world.

Amalgamating the shop worker, flight attendant and businessman, McDonald’s latest uniform incarnation is a far cry from Ronald McDonald’s red and yellow clown suit.

The working ‘uniform’ is ubiquitous to a huge number of professions, despite the possibility that many of us associate it first and foremost with the service industries. By service industries, I don’t mean simply McDonald’s workers, Tesco employees or the like; service means serving you (the consumer) through labour. Retail fashion workers are a prime example, where the ‘uniform’ may not be a classic sweatshirt-and-trousers combo, but rather items picked solely from the collection of garments that the shop provides – living mannequins, in a sense. But this is getting way ahead of myself; let’s go back a bit.

Wearing a uniform, as so many sixth form debates have pointed out, has both positive and negative effects on the individual and the group in any given institution. School uniform has the apparent benefit of making everyone equal (at least, visually) while at the same time ensuring creative idiosyncratic fashion choices are made in the smallest details; how many buttons are done up, how the tie is tied, what badges you wear and the jewellery you sneak in. Even in a photo that has been posed for this Guardian piece, the same uniform turns up in many different styles. So what about the uniform at work? I’ve worked in enough poorly-paid retail jobs to realise what the proposed function of a uniform is, and what actually happens when you wear it.

Just like at school, a uniform is meant to show that all the wearers are equal – visually. For the consumer, workers are identified by what they are wearing; many a time I have been asked in various shops where the changing rooms are, because my particular garb is close enough to the ‘uniform’ of a retail fashion worker to confuse the consumer (although mostly this happens in charity shops. I’m down with that). Workers are set apart from consumers and grouped together as labour through their uniform.

However, looking the same and being the same are (duh) different. My manager and I wear the same uniform: shirt, trousers, and name badge – but are we the same? No. She’s the manager; she’s my boss. Confusing messages of similarity (and potential solidarity?) and hidden hierarchies abound with the working uniform, especially in retail sectors where more than one hierarchy is on the ‘working floor’. You might be able to argue that those industries in which workers are physically grouped by hierarchy – like the factory floor, where the manager is not as physically ‘present’ as on the shop floor – are able to recognise the uniform’s messages of similarity and solidarity more effectively than those where workers of disparate hierarchies are bundled in together.

From Bobby Pin, these are 1950s beauty salon uniforms:

From a 1950s magazine, uniforms that couldn’t be any more ‘feminine’: accentuating waist, hips, drawing attention to face and hairstyle. For this author, they’re utterly beautiful. But then I am a total sucker for ‘the giant coachman collar’.

As well as hierarchy being hidden (but strangely elaborated too, I suppose, by its hiddenness), gender too, is at least under an attempted disguise through the wearing of uniforms. Gone are the days of Mad Men, where women wore skirts and men wore trousers – now we all have to wear trousers, and horrible polo shirts too. An apparently gender-neutral uniform is provided in a number of sectors (mine was previously white shirt and black trousers – or skirt) that never really successfully disguises gender to the consumer in the same way that it conceals hierarchy to some extent. One-size-fits-all doesn’t work, especially if the size is designed for someone who doesn’t have breasts.

And that, my friends, neatly brings me onto those workplaces where you don’t have a uniform. Or, at least, they don’t tell you that you have a uniform. Explicitly, the dress code might be not much more than ‘no shorts or clogs’, but implicitly, the dress code will be bending and morphing round the individuals who are adhering to and working against it. This dress code will tie in gender and authority hierarchies, as illustrated by the business suit and its female equivalent.

From my employment experience (and others who have agreed with me), men wear business suits, but women do not wear business suits, despite this (again) apparently gender-neutral ‘uniform’ being available. A number of women working in offices might wear the female equivalent of the business suit (Next surely embodies this look), which more often than not includes a) skirt b) something frilly c) front-cover-flawless makeup. So it’s the business suit, plus a) traditional emblem of femininity b) annoying and impractical emblem of femininity c) emblem of femininity that is often perceived to be caused by heavy external pressures to look good at all times. The visual ‘uniform’ of the business suit is not gender-neutral, because it is adapted to become gender-specific; whether this is due to individual taste or workplace culture, I’m unsure, but it does inform the hierarchy of the office.

I. Love. Her.

Rather than looking at personal comments regarding taste that may be made about office workwear, my interest instead lies in how this implicit dress code dramatically affects the hierarchical makeup of a working environment, potentially without many of the individuals involved even being fully aware of how it is being shaped around them. If I arrive tomorrow at work with a ‘male’ business suit on, will I be taken more seriously? Or, as a woman, if I arrive in a simulated version of that ‘male’ business suit, will I be declined respect because I appear too much like one of the boys? Am I feminine enough for the office if I don’t wear flawless makeup – or any makeup? If I start dressing like the big boys, will they still know it’s me on the inside? I believe there is a definite question of sexuality and sexual preference here that comes into play with ‘levels’ of femininity in the workplace, although I don’t feel able to tackle this in great detail here (or just yet).

Workplace hierarchies are constituted through a vast number of factors, but the role of dress and dress codes is one that can’t be ignored. From traditional environments where gender and authority hierarchies may have been distinguished and designated by an explicit uniform placed upon the workers, contemporary working environments – especially those in the creative industries – now have to juggle with an implicit dress code that is created and defined by the workers themselves (across all hierarchies) in their clothing choices. Plus, there is the added element of workers’ perception of the importance of that dress code or, conversely, the desire to play with it and break some boundaries, in designating what you can, or can’t, wear to work.

• EB Snare is a full time writer who also writes freelance, makes and sells her own jewellery, drinks, smokes and listens almost exclusively to 80s electropop music. She completed her Masters in 2011, with a dissertation on fashion blogging as a contemporary labour form that included some sweet diagrams. Her blog, The Magic Square Foundation, covers fashion, culture and general life, or you can talk to her on Twitter: @ebsnare. And, yeah, we’ve snapped her up for Team BadRep too. Woo!

“Oh no, no, it’s OK, don’t get offended, it’s not your fault. You can’t help it, I understand that. Your genitals are disgusting and they stink, especially when they’re bleeding and there’s nothing you can do about it. You didn’t ask to be born with such a terrible curse, and nobody expects you to take responsibility for it. Help is at hand, though! If you give me lots of money every month for forty years of your life, we can help! Because believe us, you need it…”

I will admit up front that I am not a trained marketer, but it’s plain to see that the above isn’t the most convincing of sales pitches. Unfortunately, it’s a far more honest pitch than the current campaign for Always sanitary towels, which proudly declare the addition of “odour neutralising ActiPearls” as the next step in the evolution of “feminine hygiene” products. What the ads coyly decline to mention is that they’ve taken lessons in odour neutralisation from the Lynx school of “synthetic chemical stench and hygiene are THE SAME THING.”

This is straight-up vagina-shaming. It’s insulting and inexcusable. And giving me yet another reason to be pissed off when I’m already simmering with ire about the massacre going on between my legs is inadvisable. So congratulations, P&G: you’ve lost my custom for the next thirty years.

The packaging claims to “neutralise odours rather than just masking them”. This is at best a delicate glossing over of the truth. It’s impossible to tell whether “odours” (those vaginal FIENDS!) are neutralised or not because of the perfume.

Oh God, the perfume.

I appreciate that scent perception can be a highly subjective thing, so I’ll attempt to keep the description as general as possible. Cloying, synthetic, sweet florals with an undertone of disinfectant, false and stereotypically feminine. It hits you as soon as you open the packaging, before even unwrapping the first towel. A scent that lingers for hours even if you switch to an unscented brand immediately after using one of these. A scent that does not mask menstrual blood, but mingles with it into a nauseating aberration.

What I Expected

A thoughtful free gift from Always!

What I Got

OH.

The problems presented by this are manifold, but there are three main ones that leapt out at me. Bullet point list time? Bullet point list time!

• The obvious implication that people who have vaginas are utterly clueless about personal hygiene and how to take care of themselves, plus the completely ignoring the fact that vaginas are self cleansing and look after themselves without much intervention from their owners beyond showering/bathing regularly. The idea that menstruation makes a person malodorous or otherwise “dirty” is an outdated and misogynistic notion. If a vagina IS smelling bad, whether through illness or neglect, adding an unpleasant artificial scent to the crotch is only going to make the problem worse.
• Following on from this, people who are at least vaguely aware of their sexual health can tell from changes in vaginal scent if something untoward or unusual is going on. Trying to cover that up with perfumes isn’t going to help anybody stay in touch with their genitalia.
• The choice of such a blatantly “overt femininity-pink-and-flowers-BECAUSE-THIS-PRODUCT-IS-FOR-GIRLLLSSS” fragrance risks alienating trans* men and genderqueer customers who choose to use these products. As if the patronising “have a happy period, always” slogan weren’t bad enough. Not only are Always trying to insist that a reminder of nature not necessarily assigning the genitalia that most closely match an individual’s gender identity should be a matter for celebration, but also that everybody should smell like a field full of artificial blossoms when their loins are creating underpant carnage. Way to consider the needs of your whole customer base, there.

Now, at the risk of incurring violent flames, I’ll admit that I am not the biggest fan of my vagina. I appreciate the vast capacity for pleasure that it and its associated physiological paraphernalia provide, but for the most part our relationship is one of tacit acknowledgement and grudging acceptance. This does not mean, however, that I do not appreciate the inherent beauty and wonder of such genitalia.

A vagina should smell like a vagina. A vagina should not smell of roses or perfumes or any number of artificial masking agents. Every healthy vagina has a personality and life all of its own and scent to match.

At a time where in the USA, the wealthy, middle-aged, cis-male elitists running the country seem determined to drive women’s bodily autonomy and sexual rights back into the Victorian era, now seems a very prudent time to turn our eyes to our genitals and send a clear message to politicians and megabucks sanitary product manufacturers alike that our bodies belong to nobody but ourselves. Their efforts to undermine and deny our sexuality will be met with the resistance and fight it deserves, until they back the hell off what’s between our legs.

If we really must accept defeat and acknowledge that we are no longer capable of keeping our own vaginas spring-fresh, then our next step is clear: begin a campaign to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab to produce their own range of sanitary towels impregnated with their gorgeous scents. Because if my vagina isn’t allowed to smell like a vagina any more, it can do a hell of a lot better than Procter and Gamble’s sickly synthetic flower bleach.

I was excited when she gave a follow-up talk in March, but I didn’t imagine I’d be posting about it on BadRep. The reason I am is that at 15.00 minutes, it became ALL about gender. (I strongly recommend you check it out – both videos are excellent):

[We’re having trouble with embedding! Click this handy link instead!]

Shame is often strongly gendered; we are intended to feel it when we don’t live up to our society’s imposed, sexist expectations. She cites a study from Boston College which got women to answer the question:

What do women need to do to conform to female norms?

The answers were: be Nice, Thin, Modest… and ‘Use all available resources for appearance’.

For men, they were: Always show emotional control, Work should be your priority, Pursue status… and ‘Violence’.

That they’re different answers for men and women should be enough to prove the need for some real changes in our society by itself, but that the actual points are also so disgusting just seals it for me. Nice. Thin. Don’t make a fuss. Physical appearance is everything. Emotionally cut off. Violent. Competitive. Judged hugely by job and status. Not one of these things is good for society. We could lose them all and it would only improve everyone’s lives. (Well, ‘nice’ could be okay, if it were applied to the more powerful groups in society, but in terms of gender you’ve then still got the ‘chivalry’ problem – that men can forget about power differences if they treat women ‘nicely’ while giving up nothing.)

Brown’s previous point had been that successful and happy people have to allow themselves the risk of being seen as weak, or to fail. However, in reaching that conclusion (and it’s definitely true), she only interviewed women. In this second talk she relates how a male fan pointed out to her that men often feel unable to choose this route.

Shame feels the same for men and women, but it is organised by gender…

For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations [as it is for women], shame is one: Do Not Be Perceived As Weak.

– Brené Brown

The fan claims that it’s the women in his family who reinforce this for him. In terms of how strictly the two sets of ‘norms-to-conform-to’ listed above are enforced, I often see that men have a lot more leeway in dropping one or two of them… but only if they replace them with ‘money’.

So the next time I’m looking for a shorthand example for why feminism is important, I’ll reference what people perceive as the biggest demands by society on who they are allowed to be. It’s a flawed, gender-binary test, but the fact that the public returned those answers counts for a lot. That a list so gendered and outrightly harmful to society should be the TOP pressures many of us seem to be facing is something we just don’t need. It may not be set in law, but this stuff is a strong daily message.

…Which makes me want to find a solution. Well, first to scream F*** THAT and opt out, and then find a solution. Equality means removing this heinous bullshit for everyone. The goals listed as the top answers in that survey are both unattainable in size and harmful in practice, but what choice do we have? It’s fine for me to urge people to stop conforming, but for many if they do the reality is they’ll never pass a job interview again. (Although not shaving your armpits or legs sometimes works out just fine).

I refuse to give up. Reducing inequality towards any gender is so fundamental to everyone’s happiness that stuff like this just makes me more determined to keep fighting: we’ve all got to keep educating each other, pushing for change and making the issues visible. Whether it’s about who they marry, if they have sex, issues of consent, or who their political leaders are, women have a lot less freedom than men internationally. That’s not in dispute. Gender inequality is measurable. If you really can’t see it, you haven’t spent two seconds looking. Yes, I’m also concerned with the pressures sexism places on men, and I think these ‘norm lists’ showcase exactly why there’s so much still to do for everybody.

Having as I do firsthand experience of the impact of Thatcher’s thirteen years, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death – although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass – is something to which I’ll be largely indifferent. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.

Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, and to consider the effect of her gender on her role as a woman in power. Quick, before the next bus goes past.

The Icon Lady

Meanings of all kinds flow through the figures of women, and they often do not include who she herself is.

– Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens

Thatcher’s visual staying power in political and pop culture is as great as her impact on oppositional music. The face of Thatcher most often called to mind is that of what Angela Carter termed her ‘balefully iconic’ post-1983 premiership: encased in true-blue power suits, wielding a handbag, her hair lacquered into immobile submission, her earlier style solidified into a heavily stylized femininity bordering on drag. Paul Flynn, in a fairly tortured discussion of Thatcher’s status as a gay icon, put it down to her ‘ability to carry a strong, identifiable, signature look… an intrinsic and steely power to self-transform’, and a ‘camp, easily cartooned presence’. The startling evocative power of this look, its ability to summon up its host of contemporary social, cultural and political associations, is why I jump when Streep’s replication of it intrudes into my vision. It’s like being repeatedly sideswiped by the 1980s, which is something the last UK election had already made me thoroughly sick of.

The iconic capacity of Thatcher’s image has been compared in articles and actual mash-ups with that of Marilyn Monroe and Che Guevara. The artist Alison Jackson observes that all three ‘had what it takes to become a modern icon: big hair, high foreheads and a face that would allow you to project your own fears and desires on to it.’ Conversely, subsequent political leaders – including both Blair and Cameron – have had their own faces conflated with Thatcher’s, usually as part of left-wing critiques meant to signify the closeness of their policies to hers. Thatcher’s image is here used as an instantly recognisable political signifier, communicating a set of ideological ideas in a single package, as well as a self-contained political warning sign.

Although the kind of passive objectification associated with Monroe might seem at odds with the idea of Thatcher as a great historical actor with narrative agency in her own right, the images of both women are used in a cultural tradition in which the female figure in particular becomes a canvas for the expression of abstract ideas (think justice, liberty, victory). The abstract embodiment of multiple meanings, and the strategic performance of traditional ideas of femininity, constitute sources of power which Thatcher and her political and media allies exploited to the hilt in their harnessing of support for the policies she promoted.

Iron Maidens

Thatcher’s image, rather than appealing solely to a particular aspect of femininity, was a tense mixture of conflicting and mutually reinforcing signifiers. Angela Carter identified it as a composite of feminine archetypes, including Dynasty’s Alexis Carrington, Elizabeth I as Gloriana, Countess Dracula, and one of PG Wodehouse’s aunts – tropes sharing a certain type of burlesqued and grotesque dragon-femininity. The 1981 Falklands conflict allowed the discourse around Thatcher to reference the precedents of both Queen Victoria and Churchill, and she was photographed on a tank in an image that the Daily Telegraph described as ‘a cross between Isadora Duncan and Lawrence of Arabia’.

Justine Picardie, in a grimly fascinating read, roots Thatcher’s style in the rigid grooming of well-turned-out 1950s femininity in general and her sartorially plain Methodist upbringing in particular:

Interviewed by Dr Miriam Stoppard for Yorkshire Television in 1985, she gave a glimpse of a childhood desire for the luxury of colour, and shop-bought extravagance, whether a new dress or sofa cover: ‘that was a great expenditure and a great event. So you went out to choose them, and you chose something that looked really rather lovely, something light with flowers on it. My mother: “That’s not serviceable.” And how I longed for the time when I could buy things that were not serviceable.’

Even at the height of her political power, she chose to retain the ‘pretty’ and ‘softening’ effects of her trademark horrible bows. Alongside this tendency towards aspirational frivolity, she cultivated connotations of the provincial housewife – a ‘Housewife Superstar’ – wearing an apron while on the campaign trail and being shown washing dishes while contesting the party leadership.

Her ‘Iron Lady’ speech distinctly echoed the ‘body of a weak and feeble woman… heart and stomach of a king’ construction associated with Elizabeth I in its drawing on the tension between conflicting signifiers:

I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up and my fair hair gently waved, the Iron Lady of the Western World. A cold war warrior, an Amazon philistine, even a Peking plotter. Well, am I any of those things? Yes… Yes, I am an iron lady, after all it wasn’t a bad thing to be an iron duke.

Not a Man to Match Her?

Thatcher’s courting of various feminine roles did not prevent the assigning of masculine attributes to her – notably in oppositional parodies and satire. Her iconic Spitting Image puppet was shown wearing a suit and tie and smoking a cigar, addressed as ‘Sir’, and given a more or less explicit emasculating effect upon male colleagues and political opponents:

Outside satire, the 1984 Miners’ Strike has been conceptualised both as a mass emasculation of ordinary male miners and an overt bout of cock-duelling between Thatcher and miners’ leader Arthur Scargill, each of whom were criticised for an absolutist and stubbornly Napoleonic approach to the conflict rather than a more ‘feminine’ openness to negotiation and compromise.

As Dawn Fowler notes in her consideration of dramatic treatments of the Falklands War, a problem with such portrayals of Thatcher is that she ‘can be represented as simply denying her true feminine self in favour of a crazed fascist agenda.’ The Comic Strip’s satirical take on Thatcher’s battles with Ken Livingstone and the Greater London Council presented her as the victim of alien or demonic possession, the ending of which left her soft and passive – restored to her presumably appropriate, natural form. Both applauding Thatcher for her ability to overcome ‘traditional’ feminine weakness and irrationality and behave symbolically as a man, and castigating her for her failure or suppression of a ‘true’ soft and accommodating female nature, are equally dubious in the qualities they seek to assign to ‘real’ women.

Thatcher was repeatedly likened to a female impersonator, a man in blue dresses. The reason for this is simple, and apparently shatterproof: we have so firmly linked power and masculinity that we think a powerful woman is a category error. Instead of changing our ideas about power, we change the sex of a powerful woman.

– Sarah Churchwell

No Job for a Lady?

While Thatcher’s election to Prime Minister was of course a landmark for women in politics, her much-vaunted ‘grocer’s daughter’ outsider status was mediated through an Oxford education and marriage into wealth. The number of prominent women serving as MPs and Cabinet ministers prior to or alongside Thatcher – Nancy Astor, Margaret Bondfield, Betty Harvie Anderson, Jenny Lee, Barbara Castle to name a few – make her ascension exceptional but not unique. Nor should Thatcher’s progress in the male-dominated world of British politics obscure how little she actually did for women once in office: the lack of women appointed to ministerial positions; her disparaging of ‘strident Women’s Libbers’; her invariably male ideological protégés. Historian Helen Castor, discussing the ‘extraordinary’ parallels between the iconography of Thatcher and that of Elizabeth I, points out that both women emphasised themselves as the exception to a rule:

…what those two women both did was not say, Women can rule, women can hold power. They both said, Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.

At a point where Thatcher’s chosen ideology is resulting in falling standards of living for women – and men – across Britain; where the dim and insubstantial Louise Mensch can manage to position herself as a rising star, and where the Home Secretary’s political decisions make fewer headlines than her choice of shoe, I’m relieved to see that attempts to rehabilitate Thatcher as any kind of feminist icon are largely being resisted. It remains to be seen whether The Iron Lady, and its fallout in the form of frankly offensive Thatcher-inspired fashion shoots, means that her image is now undergoing a further transcendence into the realms of irony and kitsch (as has happened with both Marilyn and Che), or whether this is part of a conscious revival of the political associations her image originally carried and to which we are being returned – conditions profoundly unfriendly to female independence and agency despite the women occasionally employed as their shock troops.

Calamity Jane (played by Doris Day) starts off the 1953 musical film of the same name as a tomboy, gets humiliated and learns to be a girl, then gets married. In a dress and everything.

Despite this, it’s one of my very favourite films.

Proud and tomboyish ‘Calam’ is a popular and respected figure in the town of Deadwood. Not just one of the boys, but determined to outshoot, outdrink, outswagger them all. But she’s met her match in Wild Bill Hickok whom she admires and who grudgingly admires her, although they get into one of those “ooh I hate you and don’t fancy you at all, nope” oneupmanship songs. Calam and Bill are comrades, but Calam’s in love with the local Lieutenant Danny, and saves his life, but he’s not interested in her. Because he’s a dick, basically.

Doris Day as Calamity and Howard Keel as Bill Hickock

Anyway, a Proper Lady (Katie) comes to town and becomes friends with Calam, helping her discover her feminine side (I know, I know, just bear with me) and Bill falls unconvincingly in love with her. But when Danny and Katie are discovered KISSING, Calam loses it and threatens to run Katie out of town. She makes a right fool of herself, and Danny is mean about her, but Bill Hickok defends her and goes to console/talk some sense into a bereft Calam. On a still summer night, in a wood, under a silvery moon, etc… they kiss, and conveniently enough it turns out they’ve been in love all along! Everyone makes friends again, Calam marries Bill and Katie marries Danny, even though he’s a knob.

Okay. So there are some tough bits, most notably the repeated references to “female thinking”, and the godawful A Woman’s Touch song. I get through this by donning slash goggles, through which it all becomes rather charming and ironic.

There’s even a symbolic castration of Calam at the end when she and Bill get married – they’re just getting on the stagecoach and he finds she has her gun tucked into her wedding dress. They all laugh and he hands it to some random in the crowd. Then they ride off singing etc.

BUT. There is a lot that is loveable about this film, and it’s not as bad as the details above might suggest.

Firstly, Doris Day’s Calam is a wonderful character. Brave, kind, funny and bursting with energy, she leaps about all over the place, and has a habit of firing at the ceiling to get people’s attention. She’s a tomboy but she’s no freak – everyone in the town is fond of her, respects her and humours her habit of exaggerating her own exploits. She’s accepted, not just tolerated. Her flaw is her pride, and the real point of the story is that it’s her pride which is ‘corrected’ and not her masculine habits.

Secondly, although she is engirlied, she doesn’t become a 50s fembot. She wears a few dresses, but mostly she’s out of her buckskins yet still in trousers. There’s no sign at all she’s going to give up riding the stage (or violently oppressing the indigenous population). I think my favourite bit in the whole film is near the end when she’s racing after Katie’s coach to bring her back to Deadwood, and she passes Bill and his mate on her horse. She thunders past, then stops, turns, rides back, kisses him, and rides off again without a word.

His friend says “I don’t know what kind of life you’ll have living with that catamount… but it ain’t gonna be dull.”

Bill replies: “That’s for dang sure.” He looks delighted.

Thirdly, although it arrives at a supremely convenient time in that way that musicals have, the relationship between Calam and Bill is a convincing one. Throughout the film there are references to their friendship and campaigns together, and they are clearly fond of each other. He sticks up for her when Danny is being disparaging, and tells her early on he thinks she’d be pretty (if she was a Proper Lady, natch). So when Calamity ‘takes off her glasses’ at the Ball (in fact she’s been covered up in a coat she claims was given to her by General Custer) it isn’t as if he’s only just noticed her. And crucially, rather than trying to put her down or get her to act in a more feminine way, his efforts are about bringing her down to earth from her flights of fancy and towering pride.

It’s not a feminist film. It’s not even close. But Calamity is wonderful, and I think better a film with her in it than not at all.

PS. The title is a reference to the most famous song in the film, Secret Love, which has become a bit of a gay anthem. My favourite is The Black Hills Of Dakota, although it has a lot less subtext.

PPS. Don’t come to this film looking for historical accuracy. Here’s some info on the actual Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok.

I think I want it on my bedroom wall, maybe a metre or two high.

'What Science Fiction Means' - copyright Egypt Urnash

Fantastic artist Egypt Urnash drew this for free, as a “t-shirt design for a college SF club”. It was then linked to by Major Internet Deity Warren Ellis, who knows groovy stuff when he sees it, and subsequently the design is now selling as framed art prints and t-shirts.

Why do I love this so much?

Possibly because it could have been titled “What I want to be when I grow up” (and still apply to me and most of Team BadRep now, if we’re honest). It has a shark with a frickin’ laser on its head, which is always good for +10 points, but it’s got to be the sheer joy on the girl’s face. I think I just have an innate love of anything which could legitimately have the caption “YEAH BABY, YEAH!”

At a time when women seem to be shockingly under-represented in Sci-fi (way beyond the ratio of actual female authors to male) and hearty debate on whether that’s because of sexism or other factors, I’m delighted at anything which tells young women they have a central place in SF. (The first link references Joanna Russ’ “How to suppress women’s writing”, which we mentioned ourselves recently.)

Women of all ages should be holding the rayguns and riding the space-sharks, dammit. After all, WisCon (‘the World’s leading feminist science fiction convention’) has just finished, and once again shows the potential of the genre not only to excite and speak to everyone, but to be a blank slate where current prejudices don’t have to be brought along. SF could be a feminist’s best friend.

Egypt’s site here contains the full-size original, as well as other Awesome Art which you should go and look at.

• Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

NASA doll

…in a Fox News shop of all places.

It’s a female astronaut doll.

Now, no doubt you’re still reeling from that the shock that Fox News – bastion of feminism-hating, Sarah Palin-supporting, “family values” madness – is fielding a toy for girls that encourages them to study science and quite literally reach for the stars.

Here’s another doozy.

Look closer and you will see that – pink casing aside – there’s almost no other “girlification” going on with this toy. Sure, she’s standard issue doll shaped, but wearing a very functional, non-revealing, blue and black NASA jumpsuit. Even the tagline reads as pleasingly gender neutral: “Space Crew”.

And to cap it all off, she’s not even blonde.

Unlike Barbie.

Who when she went to space looked like The Invasion of The Ghastly Metallic Pink Shoulder Pads (clicky the link, but don’t say I didn’t warn you).

I can’t believe I’m typing this, but looks like we’ve got a genuine Found Feminism from Fox News. Wonders will never cease. Feeling pretty chuffed about that, actually – it’s one thing that you can see progress being made from friends, quite another from enemies.

Feminism: to infinity, and beyond!

• Found Feminism: an ongoing series of images, videos, photos, comics, posters or excerpts – anything really, which shows feminist ideas at work in the everyday world. What’s brightened your day? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

A new 12-part miniseries is being made, this time with a female character in the title role. This image of her has been released and is doing the rounds on fan blogs and so on, and some of the comments which have greeted it are very interesting.

Here are some of the initial replies I’ve seen (not exact wording):

• “Why does she look like a boy?”
• “She looks well butch.”
• “Take the pigtails out and you have a dude.”

All of which might arguably be true, but that’s firmly in the tradition of Avatar playing with gender in awesome ways. For a start, the character of the Avatar is a holy person who has reincarnated as male and female over the centuries. They have a long line of both to call on for wisdom during meditation.

Aang, the boy monk who is the lead character of the original Avatar: TLA series. Image copyright Nickelodeon.

In the original series, the Avatar is a boy named Aang, who presents as relatively gender-neutral: his young age and upbringing as a monk make him quite androgynous, his head has no hair or facial hair and he wears mainly shapeless robes. While physical power and combat are key measures of success for the world he lives in, Aang refuses to take the hyper-masculine pose which is constantly encouraged. He is instead always flying out of reach and using his enemies’ aggression to quickly slip behind them to safety (a key technique of the Ba Gua martial art which his tribe learn). He doesn’t judge or take sides, but is laughingly delighted to meet anyone. He has been away from the world, and society’s restrictions on gender simply make no sense to him compared to love for your fellow beings. Expectations of male and female conduct are explored (and often refuted) by everyone around him, but he stands alone in the centre. He is a pacifist trickster, unique in the world.

Tricksters in mythology are often linked to exploration of gender roles. They can be shapeshifters, disguise themselves as anyone, and try out, or even master, traditional women’s or men’s skills. Shamans in some communities (who can in many ways embody the trickster role) may not consider themselves to be male or female: some cross-dress, or adopt the conventions of different gender roles at different times. Tricksters are also usually Outsiders. They all know loneliness and derision, and can only succeed in their task if they do NOT fit the safe confines of known social roles. Aang is definitely an Outsider, and the lonely last of his kind.

The fact that the series can do all this while still being a genuinely thrilling, hilarious and entertaining children’s show is just one of its strengths (do you get the impression I like it quite a lot?) The attitude of neutrality with regard to gender isn’t laboured, and as the episodes progress Aang develops a hetero attraction towards a female character, but by that point it doesn’t feel like it was inevitable in a Hollywood kind of way.

When we look at who the commenters expected Korra to be like, the closest fit is probably the main female of the original group – Katara, a teenage girl who, like Korra, also comes from the Water Tribe. Katara has complete agency over her actions and repeatedly refuses to fit into everyone’s expectations for what ‘a girl’ should be able to do. She does take on the familiar female roles of healer and nurturer, but only after proving she is as strong and determined as the men around her and choosing the additional activities for herself. Demanding them, in fact, when there is so much which she rejects and fights against as well. But at the end of the day… she is also very conventionally pretty.

Korra doesn’t give the studios that reassurance. You can usually be as liberal as you like in a new show – provided you have a white male lead. I think Avatar: TLA did the minimum it had to in order to be made, and took great risks after it had snuck in under the radar. Avatar: TLK isn’t putting up with that nonsense at all, has a teenage young woman of colour as the protagonist and (if the previous writers were anything to go by) will not be taking any crap about it.

I can’t wait to see what Nickelodeon do with Korra, and in many ways “she’s not feminine-looking enough!” is a wonderful comment to have provoked. Television for children is SO important in terms of teaching norms to a new generation. The original depicts the heroes observing the world around them, choosing for themselves which parts to take into their life, and being treated with honour and respect no matter who they feel they are. I just wish we were getting more than a 12-part miniseries this time!

TEA

Make tea, child, said my kind mamma. Sit by me, love, and make tea.

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1747)

Ah, the Joke Post comes upon us at last. T is for ‘t’… very droll. I lift a cup to that. But fie! Have we learned nothing on this lexical journey? First and foremost, tea was not always pronounced as we currently say it: when it first appeared in English in 1601 it was ‘taaaaay‘ and often written tay (like the modern French thé, a bit). It is not quite clear when and why the shift to ‘ti’ happened, but, then, few things are as easy to lose sight of as pronunciation (how many people remember that Keats was a Cockney?)

Shall I be mother? Catherine of Braganza, painted by Jacob Huysmans.

Tea, of course, has the additional complication that it is not an English word (although what is?) – it came from the Dutch thee, in turn from Malay and, eventually, Chinese Amoy dialect: t’e, or the Mandarin ch’a. Woven into the geographical etymology, then, is a legacy of import history: around the mid-seventeenth century we procured our tea from the Dutch, who imported it from Malaysia and, ultimately, China. What exactly were they importing? Why, tea‘s first definition, of course: ‘the leaves of the tea-plant, usually in a dried and prepared state for making the drink’. In this form, tea began with a queen, and quickly became every eighteenth-century Cosmo girl’s first route of seduction.

Brew and Thunder.

But first – the drink. ‘Made by infusing these leaves in boiling water, having a somewhat bitter and aromatic flavour, and acting as a moderate stimulant’ – in this sense, the word tea is first recorded around 1601, so some trendsetters must have been aware of it before the widespread importing of the later seventeenth century, when tea really came into its own: Samuel Pepys tried it in 1660, and a couple of years later it found a celebrity backer in the be-farthingaled shape of the Portuguese queen consort to Charles II, Catherine of Braganza (remember her?). So, in England at least, tea was from the beginning tending towards the female of the species.

Catherine’s tea-drinking was partly to do with Portugal’s colonial links with Asia, but also with her temperament: solemn and pious, she initially had trouble fitting into the Protestant English court and her preference for a ‘moderate stimulant’ over the ales and beers otherwise drunk marked one of many departures. But tea was quickly owning its stimulating qualities and being marketed as a ‘tonic’, a civilized alternative to alcohol capable of soothing aches’n’pains and spurring on mental capacities: a zeitgeist for the intellectual impetus of the early Enlightenment – as against Charles II’s well-known debauchery – and, in fact, a ‘panacea‘:

Hail, Queen of Plants, Pride of Elysian Bow’rs!
How shall we speak thy complicated Powr’s?
Thou wondrous Panacea, to asswage
The Calentures of Youth’s fermenting rage,
And animate the freezing veins of age.

Nahum Tate, from Panacea: A Poem Upon Tea (1700)

But what started out as a Portuguese import became a matter of English national identity, and by the next century London’s East India Company had established a monopoly on trade, controlling imports into Britain (and thus, prices), using its extensive trade links with Queen Catherine’s dowry –then-Bombay – and the East Indies, and Asia. It was thus that the English turned not into a nation of coffee drinkers, but to devotees of the ‘Queen of Plants’. And a queen she certainly was, and not entirely distinct from the maternal and oft-secluded Queen Anne, who dramatically reduced the size of the English court and inspired a new fashion for calm domesticity and politeness. Thus, the bustling male-dominated coffee-houses, but also a more feminine fix at home…

Five Leaves Left.

So in 1738 tea came to mean not just some withered leaf, but also an opportunity for socialising! Hurrah! To be precise, tea became ‘a meal or social entertainment at which tea is served; especially an ordinary afternoon or evening meal, at which the usual beverage is tea’. The fact that it could connote an ‘ordinary afternoon meal’ made tea a convenient beverage to offer casual social callers, although it was also, of course, a beverage that demanded a whole host of conspicuous purchases: a full tea-set and the crucial Other Element – sugar. Thus your tea-table represented Britain’s colonial interests off in China and India to the tea-side, and Africa and the East Indies to the sugar-side, with all the attendant horrors of the emergent slave trade conveniently swept under the (Persian) rug.

Tea. Photo par Hodge.

The conspicuous consumption tea represented was exacerbated by its price: before mass importation in the mid-century had driven costs down, the leaf itself was fixed at so extortionate a price (a bargain in 1680 was 30s a pound) as to necessitate the purchase of a lockable tea-chest, which would become the responsibility first of the lady of the house, and, when age-appropriate, of her daughter. The woman who held the key to the tea-chest was, naturally, also the woman who made the tea – thus ‘Shall I be mother?’, a phrase of uncertain origin. One theory I came across was that it is a Victorian idiom related to the phenomenon of women unable to breastfeed naturally using teapot spouts to convey milk to their infant instead. OH THE SYMBOLISM.

Whatever the phrase’s specific origins, it’s certainly true that from tea‘s domestic beginnings onwards whole family power structures could hang on which woman this ‘mother’ was. Alas, London’s major galleries forbid image reproduction (WAAH), but if you turn to your handouts,  you will see this in action. This is the Tyers family: that’s Mr Tyers on the left, and his son just down from one of the universities. His daughter, on the far right, is about to be married (she’s putting her gloves on to go out – out of the door and out of the family). Her role as tea-maker has, in consequence, passed onto her younger sister, who now sits as squarely in the middle of the family portrait as she does in the family sphere. Conversely, in Clarissa, when the heroine angers her parents they sack her from her tea-task and grotesquely divide it up among other family members (“My heart was up at my mouth. I did not know what to do with myself”, she recalls, distraught. I WANTED TO MAKE TEA!).

And she feeds you tea and oranges…

Of course, while assigning the tea-making to your daughter could be a loving gesture of trust, it also pimped her marriageability: it requires a cool head and calm demeanour to remember five-plus milk’n’sugar preferences, judge the strength of the tea and pour it, all the while making small-talk and remaining attentive to your guests. Add to this the weighty responsibility of locking the tea away from thieving servants and you have the management skills of housewifery in miniature. It also showed off physical charms: poise, posture, the elegant turn of a wrist, a beautifully framed bosom. To take this momentarily out of the salon, no respectable punter would get down in an eighteenth-century brothel without first taking tea with the girls: Fanny Hill spends at least as much time drinking tea as (That’s enough – Ed), and, of course, this kind of performative tea-ritual femininity is a mainstay in the professional life of the Japanese geisha.

So, along with its identity as a colonial mainstay in Britain’s trading life, tea in its origins is also something specifically feminine: a kind of Muse inspiring intellectual greatness, a Queen to be worshipped as a symbol of Britain’s health and power, and a key element in the women’s domestic lives. It could be stimulating, relaxing and seductive, but, as would become disastrously clear, it was always political.

NEXT WEEK: U is for Uterus