Luella Miller, illustration by Peter Newell (1903)

A while ago a friend lent me an excellent anthology: The Darker Sex: Tales of the Supernatural and Macabre by Victorian Women Writers. It sounded so far up my street I expected to find it waiting for me on the doorstep as I scurried home to read it.

As you might imagine, it includes a lot of creepy old mansions, brave governesses, and ghostly women wandering around in white gowns. I love that stuff. But towards the back I was delighted to discover something unusual: a Marxist Feminist vampire story.

The story was Luella Miller, published in Mary Wilkins Freeman‘s 1903 short story collection The Wind In The Rose Bush. While the events are definitely supernatural, Luella is more of a metaphorical than literal vampire, mesmerising and leeching the life force from her victims by draining their energy rather than their blood.

Her fellow townsfolk, men and women, old and young, literally work themselves to death in her service. One after another they become obsessed with caring for her, doing her washing and sewing, cooking her meals, making her coffee, working until they become ill and eventually die, when they are replaced by another willing servant.

The story is narrated several decades on by Lydia Anderson, the last person alive who knew Luella; she didn’t succumb to her mysterious power. As Lydia puts it: “There was somethin’ about Luella Miller seemed to draw the heart right out of you, but she didn’t draw it out of me.” She tells the story of all the people whom Luella drained of life, including her sister-in-law Lily:

This Lily Miller had been hardly past her first youth, and a most robust and blooming woman, rosy-cheeked, with curls of strong, black hair overshadowing round, candid temples and bright dark eyes. It was not six months after she had taken up her residence with her sister-in-law that her rosy colour faded and her pretty curves became wan hollows. White shadows began to show in the black rings of her hair, and the light died out of her eyes, her features sharpened, and there were pathetic lines at her mouth, which yet wore always an expression of utter sweetness and even happiness. She was devoted to her sister; there was no doubt that she loved her with her whole heart, and was perfectly content in her service. It was her sole anxiety lest she should die and leave her alone…

…all the time Luella wa’n’t liftin’ her finger and poor Lily didn’t get any care except what the neighbours gave her, and Luella eat up everythin’ that was carried in for Lily. I had it real straight that she did. Luella used to just sit and cry and do nothin’. She did act real fond of Lily, and she pined away considerable, too. There was those that thought she’d go into a decline herself. But after Lily died, her Aunt, Abby Mixter came, and then Luella picked up and grew as fat and rosy as ever.

Unlike many fictional vampires, Luella does not seem to intend any harm against her victims. She is indifferent, almost oblivious. Her supernatural ability to enslave her neighbours does not seem to be within her control; instead, it is more like a poisonous vapour that surrounds her, simultaneously enchanting and slowly destroying them.

Another interesting aspect of the story is the emphasis on Luella’s infantile need. It is not simply that she will not care for herself, forcing others to look after her, but that she cannot. She is entirely helpless, so that when the town finally begins to keep its distance, she herself begins to weaken.

In her article Dreadful Yet Irresistible Luella Miller: Horror in the Absence of Self (PDF), Chiho Nakagawa sees Luella Miller as a feminist parable about the suppression of agency and independence in the feminine ideal taken to it’s logical, monstrous, conclusion:

By spreading her dependency and helplessness into others, Luella makes others experience her dreadful state… Functioning as an addictive substance, Luella Miller lets us see how fearful it is to be a feminine woman without her own self.

Mary Wilkins Freeman

I think this is an interesting take, as if Luella exists only as an object of others’ self destructive love, with no subjective self, no agency or control. It is this that makes her state “dreadful”. She is parasitic, overwhelming and consuming her host, but unable to survive without them.

Without the contrasting courage, agency and practicality of “hale and hearty” 87 year old narrator Lydia Anderson, the story could seem to be a misogynist attack on wealthy women.

But  I agree with Lynda L. Hinkle and her paper Bloodsucking Structures: American Female Vampires as Class Structure Critique, when she describes the story as: “a stinging critique of a declining but still prevalent social class structure that churned out a large, useless upper class of women whose job it was to be beautiful and consume.”

I read the story as a comment on the economic and social structures which manufactured useless creatures like Luella, wealthy women who were prevented from acquiring ideas, skills, purpose or independence. The same structures, while fetishising helplessness as the supreme feminine virtue on the one hand, forced countless other women (and men) to work themselves into an early grave in the service of their betters.

Something long-awaited, occasionally hoaxed, but nobody was ever entirely sure would ever come to pass…THE SUN CAME OUT AND SPRING ARRIVED IN THE UK, FINALLY. And also there was the death of 87-year-old Margaret Thatcher of a stroke at the end of a protracted illness.

And lo, the internet did have a field day. Twitter was a maelstrom of popping corks, whitewashing of one of the darkest times post-war Britain has faced, and joyous choruses of that song from The Wizard of Oz, all alongside expressions of disgust for every aspect of the reaction. The 8^th of April 2013 will go down in Twitter history as a bona fide fustercluck.

Photo: Laura Forest (for more info, see link at end of this post)

The New Statesman ran a brief and to-the-point piece about whether or not Thatcher could or should be considered a feminist icon. In the words of the Iron Lady herself, “I hate feminism. It is poison.”

So far, so cut-and-dry. But her words have been niggling at me somewhat. She’s not the first woman to denounce and distance herself from feminism. Nor will she be the last. But I cannot help but wonder what would drive a woman who would never have reached her position without feminism to speak out against it with such contempt.

While we can now only speculate on why her personal views were what they were, I’m reminded of a few arguments I hear with disheartening frequency about why feminism isn’t needed and why feminists need to shut up.

Spoilers: I am neither moved nor convinced by any of them.

1. “I don’t need feminism. We have the vote. It’s done. Women are totes equal. Get over it.”

This line of reasoning barely dignifies a response beyond pointing out, somewhat wearily, that it’s demonstrably untrue. Whether we’re talking pay gaps, sexual abuse, street harassment, representation in politics, assumptions about childcare arrangements or anything else in an endless list of smaller inequalities adding up to a great big unequal world. Yes, women in the UK have it better than at any point in the past; no, that doesn’t mean that equality has happened.

2. “I’m just ‘one of the lads’ in my social group/place of work. Feminists are trying to drive a wedge between me and the men in my life by making a fuss over nothing.”

It is wonderful to be accepted as socially or professionally equal to men. Yet I felt bile rising in my throat as I typed that. Being “one of the lads”, while harmless on the face of it, is an argument that has some rather unpleasant meanings once you place it under scrutiny. It panders directly to the “man, rather than person, as default” rhetoric that pervades almost every corner of our society.

This line of reasoning erases feminine identities and elevates stereotypically masculine traits or interests as something one should aspire to and work towards, something essential for social acceptance. There is internalised misogyny afoot every time a self-proclaimed “ladette” crows about chugging pints of beer, watching a match, ogling boobs or besting her boyfriend at Modern Warfare 2. The heavily implied sentiment here is “these are all MAN things and I am more like a MAN for doing them and that puts me above all of you feminists trying to spoil my fun.”

None of these activities are inherently “gendered”, and the fact you behave like they are is sort-of-kind-of-rather undermining those of us genuinely striving for equality.

3. “Everybody should be judged on merit. Feminism is trying to give women a leg-up over men and that is unfair!”

Yes, the promotion of one group of people over another based on nothing but their attributes at birth is inherently unfair, and no, this is not what the majority of feminists want.

Feminists LIKE men. In fact, plenty of feminists ARE men. Feminism is about reaching equality, or parity, whatever you want to call it. It is a movement against the oppression of hundreds of years. In most fields of employment, and certainly at the highest levels, women are underrepresented. If you really believe that we already exist in a meritocracy, how else could you account for this disparity without the spurious notion that “men are just better at everything, LOL”?

Feminists are not seeking to take anything away from men: they are simply trying to level the still-slanted playing field so that the ball stops rolling into the men’s goal by default. Sure, it’s not the vertiginous cliff face it once was, but the angle of elevation still very much favours the dudes. If you want a meritocracy, you have to submit to its conditions. If you believe the only way you can succeed is by ensuring that the oppressive status quo is maintained, then you may need to revisit your understanding of the term “individual merit.

***

These are just three of the more common arguments I hear. From women with whom I am friends, it’s troubling, but can at least be the start of a constructive dialogue. From women in the public eye, however, from politician to pop star, these are toxic messages that reinforce oppression and can thwart the ambitions of girls and women.

The cognitive shift from “Hey, I can do that, and I happen to be a girl!” to “I would like to do that, but I’m a girl” may sound subtle, but its impact is potentially devastating. The dismissive words of a high-achieving female role model can make all the difference, so it’s vital that we understand that these women would not be where they are today without feminism and that their public declarations show a fundamental lack of understanding about the ongoing struggle for equality.

• Image from Laura Forest’s ‘Who Needs Feminism?’ album on Flickr.

May Sinclair in about 1916

Born in 1863 and a celebrated author in her lifetime, Sinclair has, like so many women writers, been largely forgotten, despite her close friendships with some of modernism’s poster boys: Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Frost, and others. She was an early champion of T.S. Eliot and the first critic to use the term “stream of consciousness” to describe a literary technique.

Rather brilliantly, Sinclair also campaigned for women to get the vote, and in 1912 wrote a pamphlet called ‘Feminism’ which argued for women’s equal potential for intellectual endeavour and political engagement. Her feminism seems to have been rather essentialist, but she was still a powerful voice for equality at a time when women were routinely denied the vote, an education, economic independence or sexual agency.

Sinclair had no formal education, although she read widely and developed an interest in psychoanalysis, philosophy and mysticism in particular. She attended Cheltenham Ladies College for a year before leaving to care for her four brothers who all had a hereditary heart defect. In spite of this, she wrote a dozen novels including bleak bildungsroman The Life and Death of Harriett Frean, essays, poems and short stories before the onset of Parkinson’s disease prevented her from writing.

She died in 1946, having already drifted into obscurity. However, her literary significance as a pioneer of feminism and modernism is starting to be recognised, as this great post points out: “Her work is good, even great, and it covers all the stops. It fits quite neatly in between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and she can serve well as a missing link.”

I stumbled upon Sinclair entirely by accident when I picked up her 1923 collection Uncanny Stories, which is where the horror connection comes in. There’s a near-complete copy available on Google Books if you want to check it out, although it’s missing one of my favourites.

Sinclair’s letters show that her idea for the title predates the publication of Freud’s essay The Uncanny by nearly a decade, but she seems to have welcomed the coincidence and it’s certainly fitting. Her stories are intensely psychological; there is no gore or ghouls, but instead a creeping horror and eerie imagery, and a sense of claustrophobia which lingers long after you’ve finished reading.

Some of the stories are intensely sad, such as ‘If The Dead Knew’, in which a son realises his dead mother has heard him tell others how he had secretly hated her:

Something compelled him to turn round and look towards his mother’s chair.

Then he saw her.

She stood between him and the chair, straight and thin, dressed in the clothes she had died in, the yellowish flannel nightgown and bed jacket.

The apparition maintained itself with difficulty. Already its hair had grown indistinct, a cap of white mist. Its face was an insubstantial framework for its mouth and eyes, and for the tears that fell in two shining tracks between. It was less a form than a visible emotion, an anguish.

Hollyer stood and stared at it. Through the glasses of its tears it gazed back at him with an intense, a terrible reproach and sorrow.

Then, slowly and stiffly, it began to recede from him, drawn back and back, without any movement of its feet, in an unearthly stillness, keeping up, to the last minute, its look of indestructible reproach.

And now it was a formless mass that drifted to the window and hung there a second, and passed, shrinking like a breath on the pane.

But other tales are comic. In ‘The Victim’, a ghostly visitation to a murderer isn’t full of reproach, but thanks – for freeing the victim from his debts.

Sinclair’s themes and imagery chime with many of the ideas popularised by Freud. Earlier in ‘If the Dead Knew’ the central character Hollyer is alarmed to discover he wishes his mother would die:

In the dark, secret places of the mind your thoughts ran loose beyond your knowing: they burrowed under the walls that shut off one self from another; they got through. It was as if his secret self had broken loose.

You are the unconscious mind and I claim my five pounds.

Founding a literary tradition which would later include Elizabeth Bowen and Margaret Atwood, Sinclair’s uncanny stories feature divided and dislocated selves, the dance of impulse and resistance and the hidden tracks and traces of memory and unspoken desire. And as Philippa Martindale explains, these stories are particularly concerned with feminine and feminist experience:

Sinclair’s uncanny fiction is a subtle tool for feminist expression, deconstructing patriarchal paradigms of power… Her uncanny stories serve as a forum for ‘deviant’ subjects, addressing cultural issues such as female desire, sexuality, and gender roles.

When I first read the collection, it reminded me of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories, and especially ‘The Apple Tree‘ – in part because most of the stories concern relationships between men and women. Martindale highlights the “sense of struggle for mastery between Sinclair’s male and female protagonists, typically played out in the sexual arena.” One of the best examples is ‘Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched’, which deals at once with the fantastic and the horrifically mundane as a former couple are compelled to eternally repeat their loveless affair in a shabby hotel room in the afterlife.

On the subject of ghost stories, Sinclair herself said:

Ghosts have their own atmospheres and their own reality, they also have their setting in the everyday reality we know; the story-teller is handling two realities at the same time.

For me it is this touching of two worlds which makes ghost stories so thrilling. The idea of something surfacing or reaching through, reaching back is unsettling and deeply uncanny. Sinclair’s protagonists find themselves at points where the membrane between the natural and supernatural, life and afterlife, the conscious and unconscious has grown thin.

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.

Gasp.

But you knew that already. It’s the least mysterious murder mystery ever. Even Hastings could have cracked it (well, maybe). Just google “chivalry is dead!” and you’ll find plenty of witnesses to testify to the fact that it was feminism what done it.

It is also, apparently, a tragic case of mistaken identity as countless Daily Fail and Torygraph writers assert that chivalry wasn’t even sexist. It’s just about being nice to women. Isn’t that what you want, slavering harpy hordes? For us to be nice to you?

Despite being fatally trampled under the feminist jackboot, chivalry is surprisingly pernicious. I spend quite a lot of time arguing about gender on the internet, as you might imagine. And recently the most inflammatory topic seems to be chivalry. Sparked by a call from Graham Linehan on Twitter for chivalry to be resurrected (see here and here) I’ve gotten into a number or heated discussions disputing the value of chivalry today. Sadly, I believe rumours of the death of chivalry to have been greatly exaggerated.

Some people I spoke to claimed that they were defending chivalry as a general approach, towards all genders. But isn’t that just ‘not being an arse’? Why does it need a special name? Especially one with such deeply gendered associations. However pure the intention, bringing chivalry back from the dead serves no one. It’s a problematic idea in any context because it fetishises an imbalance of power. It’s fairness as charity rather than right, in which a privileged group extend a superficial form of power to another group along highly formalised lines.

As it is most commonly understood, as a code of behaviour for men towards women, chivalry is sexist. As Amanda Marcotte says:

Chivalry is a set of behaviors where men feign servitude and humility towards women, but in practice they tend to actually reinforce men’s greater social status.

In my recent conversations I’ve been confirmed in my suspicion that there are a lot of Nice Guys out there who don’t want to hear this. I think the most common objections I’ve encountered go like this:

“But I believe in equality/I’m a feminist, how dare you tell me I’m sexist just for being nice to women? That doesn’t fit with my carefully constructed self-image *cries*”

Following codes of behaviour towards women forged hundreds of years ago isn’t really an act of gender resistance. Sorry. Try turning your deeply-held commitment to equality to use by being considerate and respectful to everybody. If you already are: great! Why not drop the silly name for it?

“But I’m only being nice. Would you rather I punched you in the face rather than opening the door for you?”

Are you nice in this way to everyone? If so, good for you! If not: lots of women find chivalric or ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour patronising or irritating at best, and creepy and coercive at worst.  Of course I prefer chivalry to brazen misogyny, but those aren’t the only choices, people. And both enshrine an archaic, damaging attitude toward women and reinforce the idea that women should be treated as women rather than as people.

You may have seen the pithy, ironic poems by suffragist Alice Duer Miller that Lili Loofbourow shared on the Hairpin the other day. Her meditation on chivalry is one of my favourites, and neatly captures the problems with the idea:

It’s treating a woman politely
As long as she isn’t a fright:
It’s guarding the girls who act rightly,
If you can be judge of what’s right;
It’s being—not just, but so pleasant;
It’s tipping while wages are low;
It’s making a beautiful present,
And failing to pay what you owe.

Exactly. Women are owed equality. In the context of hundreds of years of struggle to be taken seriously, for agency, autonomy, self-representation, and social, political and economic power, the feeble gift of a seat or a door held open can feel like a joke. Or even an insult. For me it acts as a reminder of the social expectation – even now – to be ladylike. Grateful, graceful, delicate. Powerless.

Epilogue

Besides, chivalry can quickly become desperately tedious, as Kate Beaton understands:

from http://www.harkavagrant.com - copyright Kate Beaton

Chav, n. British slang (derogatory).  In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.

– Oxford English Dictionary

Chav and other C-words

If ‘cunt’ is reportedly losing its power to shock or offend, don’t worry, other c-words are available. ‘Class’, for instance, appears to have become unsuitable for use in polite society these days, while ‘Chav’ has become commonplace in the respectable parlance of those who would never dream of using any other c-word so blithely. Owen Jones’s book Chavs, a welcome and necessary analysis of the latter phenomenon, identifies it as a culture “created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists”. Chavs examines the word’s place in current political and cultural discourse in the context of a simultaneous narrowing of socio-economic opportunity and an erasure of traditional working-class identity.

Before we begin, it’s worth heading off a few preconceptions at the pass. ‘Chav’ is a multivalent and unstable signifier, and the word’s origin and evolution shows it meaning different things to different people. It’s been around a relatively long time: a 2005 study described ‘chav’ as a strange subculture which, unlike its predecessors, lacked any association with a particular musical movement or political ideals. 2004 saw the rise of ‘chavertising’, a marketing strategy targeting ’chavs’ as a subculture with spending power, whose members ‘wore their wealth’ and prioritised consumption. At the tail-end of 2004, I attended a gig in Chatham by the former Libertine Carl Barat, whose dubious supergroup, in deference to the town’s history with the term, and with who knows what degree of irony or self-awareness, styled themselves ‘The Chavs’ for the evening. And the (working class and Welsh) novelty rap crew Goldie Lookin Chain were satirizing various aspects of ‘chav’ culture as far back as 2001.

Jones’s book, however, focuses on a particular and relatively recent variation in the word‘s meaning, one which is concentrated in political and media discourse and which is overwhelmingly used about the working class rather than by them. This hasn’t always been, and isn’t always the case – Lynsey Hanley’s review of the book locates the idea of ‘chavs’ within the complexities of working-class communities, where the word can be used to differentiate between ‘those who aim for “respectability” and those who disdain it’. Back in my 1990s comprehensive-schooled childhood, the latter group were certainly distinguishable, known with varying degrees of contempt, amusement or nervousness as ‘neds’ or ‘townies’. But these terms were localised, used within a community to delineate internal hierarchies, rather than to section off an entire community by those at one socio-economic remove from it.

Regardless of the tortuous relationship between the term and the demographic it describes, the use of the word in 21st century political discourse has developed a peculiar, specific and politically-loaded edge. Jones outlines how the word has been stripped of its previous meaning and reapplied in government and media rhetoric, almost invariably being conflated with ‘lower socio-economic group’ by those of a higher one, without reference to or cognisance of the lower socio-economic individuals being tarred with the same brush.

An equal-opportunity stereotype?

At first glance, ‘chav’ is a term tied to class rather than gender. Chav stereotypes are remarkably even-handed: for every lager-swilling lout there’s a single mother, for every Wayne Rooney a Waynetta Slob. The sports gear and leisurewear prominent in ‘chav’ uniform is a type of dress which makes it possible to efface one’s femininity with shapeless tracksuits and scraped-back hair. The baseball cap which graces the cover of Jones’ book is a gender-neutral accessory. Is the female ‘chav’ a recognisable figure? A google image search for ‘chavette’ brings up images of relative deprivation and degradation rather than the upwardly-mobile targets of ‘chavertising’ – the ubiquitous Croydon facelift, tracksuits, pregnant stomachs and yards of bare skin. Many of these are self-conscious or pastiche portrayals by those not identifying as a permanent part of the subculture – a kind of chav drag. There’s also a Newcastle fancy-dress company selling a ‘Super Chavette’ costume, as well as several ‘chav babe’ sites – the straight, and no less curious, counterpart of the numerous gay male chav-porn sites discussed here by Jack Cullen. And the ‘chav’ icon extraordinaire is of course female too – Little Britain‘s Vicky Pollard, one of the oddest fictional stereotypes to be fixed as a moral standard since George Bush Senior instructed America to be ‘more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons’.

The types of women stereotyped as ‘chavs’ make an interesting point about the particularly virulent strain of misogyny which chav-hatred can contain. Anti-chav commentators reveal a disquieting obsession with the presumed sexual precociousness and promiscuity of young working-class women, as well as their aggressive lack of deference and their status outside traditional family and community hierarchies. The behaviour for which ‘chavs’ are criticised includes being too loud, too flash, too drunk, too vulgar and too disrespectful towards their ‘betters‘. Is this particularly problematic behaviour when observed in women?

The tendency for anti-chav rhetoric to thinly veil both misogyny and class hatred reached an eyebrow-raising pitch with James Delingpole’s spittle-flecked rant that Vicky Pollard embodies:

… several of the great scourges of contemporary Britain: aggressive female gangs of embittered, hormonal, drunken teenagers; gym-slip mums who choose to get pregnant as a career option; pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers who’ll drop their knickers in the blink of an eye…

Here an anti-chav stance allows a thoroughly unpleasant perpetuation of damaging stereotypes of the working class female (sexual promiscuity, sexual precociousness, a thoughtless or scheming lack of protection resulting in pregnancy) as well as a proscribing of non-traditional behaviour (women existing outside traditional family roles, deriving financial support from the state rather than a husband). All this with barely a glance at context or circumstance. Imogen Tyler’s 2008 study ‘Chav Mum, Chav Scum’ found not only that the word ‘has become a ubiquitous term of abuse for the white poor’, but also that “the figure of the female chav, and the vilification of young white working-class mothers, embodies historically familiar and contemporary anxieties about female sexuality, reproduction, fertility, and ‘racial mixing.'”

This gendered and class-based disgust has become particularly prevalent in UK comedy, as identified in Barbara Ellen’s wrecking-ball swing at Little Britain:

Rewarding middle-class, educated, comedy workaholics for lampooning people without any of their advantages, struggling on the margins of society – was this where we’d come to, a boorish festival of exploitation and contempt? … Vicky Pollard alone gave certain sections of the media a label for the disgust they love to express towards young girls spiralling downwards, due to poverty, illiteracy and teen pregnancy…

While the comedies in question do not exclusively portray working class and female characters, the unedifying sight of Oxbridge-educated male comedians sticking it to underclass female grotesques does form part of a disconcerting trend in contemporary comedy towards punching downwards. Pace Kathy Burke as the proto-chav Waynetta Slob, the only recent mainstream female comedian to draw on this stereotype has been Catherine Tate as Lauren Cooper, a character who compared to Pollard is relatively nuanced and sympathetic. (One of Cooper’s appearances has as its pay-off her unsuspected and incongruous knowledge of Shakespeare, rather than a further display of the depths of her blissful ignorance.)

Are we bovvered, though?

Apart from the latent misogyny informing some chav-hatred, then, why is ‘chav’ a feminist issue? The ‘chav’ stereotypes which have gained media prominence and cultural currency are those which are politically useful, being amenable to adoption for narratives which draw on the idea of a semi-criminal, scrounging, feckless underclass to justify political attacks on all of us lower down the socio-economic scale. Many of these stereotypes are female, just as many of the targets of these attacks will be. The current government’s rhetoric repeatedly plays on the stereotype of the idle and recklessly promiscuous single mother, whose ‘irresponsibility’ must be punished, to validate the wider reduction or removal of state support from benefits claimants – even though over half of single parents are in paid employment, a figure rising to 71% for those with a child over the age of twelve. The Daily Mail, happily conflating fact and fiction, used a picture of Waynetta Slob to illustrate an article on the increased number of women claiming sickness benefit, accompanied by the headline ‘Rising toll of ‘Waynettas’. As the smoke cleared after last month’s riots over much of the UK, the single mother was again in the firing line, along with the moral decline, sexual depravity, and social disintegration she is held to represent.

There is still a frustrating lack of attention to class paid by mainstream feminism, whose academic and theoretical focus is often divorced from practical considerations of material inequality, with the result that feminist analysis can seem off-puttingly remote and attuned only to middle-class concerns. Far from having vanished as a vector of political identity, class remains a stubborn and strengthening line of social division. The concept of the stereotypical ‘chav’, and its expansion into a term covering an entire externally-defined and already disadvantaged group, can make socio-economic differences appear insurmountable barriers, erasing the potential for solidarity over the common problems we face. Acknowledging that the discourse around ‘chavs’ can be disingenuous, and can provide a cover for denigrating the social agency and sexual autonomy of working-class women, as well as for wider political attacks on the unemployed and working poor, would be a significant step forward.

• Chavs is available from Verso Books now

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Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

CC picture by Gerard Stolk, 2011

“Great brands tell stories. They’re a mix of truth and symbols.” Brand strategist Alison Camps kicked off the (Re)Branding Feminism conference on 1st March with an introduction to the concept of branding, and some examples from her career. The one she selected as a case study with particular relevance for feminism was Skoda in the early 1990s: the “brand from hell.”

The conference was very firmly about considering representations of modern feminism and not making plans about how best to ‘sell’ feminism to the masses. I’m a persuader by trade, so I have a practical interest in how best to present feminism to an indifferent, sceptical or rabidly hostile audience. But I also love my gender theory, so a spot of academic inquiry made a nice change from activism, and I was sad I could only attend the first day.

Mothers and daughters and sisters, oh my!

My favourite paper was Jean Owen’s ‘Of feminism born’, which looked at the prevalence and problems of using familial metaphors in the feminist movement. The political concept of sisterhood began as a strategy of resistance to masculine structures of patriarchy and ‘brotherhood’. It is undeniably powerful, especially for women that have experienced the isolation of being the lone feminist voice in their community. But sisterhood has become a “universalising metaphor” that “implies an all-encompassing, somewhat stifling organisation”. And now that feminism is intergenerational, parental hierarchies have re-emerged – we are not only sisters but cultural mothers and daughters of feminism.

Through this way of talking about ourselves, Owen argued, we risk “pandering to fantasies of a matriarchy” and create a falsely cosy, sentimentalised idea of what is in reality a diverse and radical movement. In my experience, contemporary feminism already has tremendous respect for previous generations, but by formalising it in this way we undermine our own project of equality and put in place privileged feminist ‘bloodlines’. Owen advises that “we need to remove ourselves from the trap of family” and predicate our movement on a “more involved social model”.

I agree with all of this. In fact, my main problems with ‘sisterhood’ are that this language pretty definitively excludes men and reinforces the gender binary that I want to dismantle. That’s a long-term goal, by the way. Short-term is sorting out some of the urgent problems in the current system.

Selling feminism

Catherine Redfern (of Reclaiming the F Word, and, um, The F Word fame) spoke about the cyclical nature of calls to rebrand feminism, which can be measured in women’s magazine features. The call makes a couple of big assumptions: that feminism is in crisis and that applying marketing principles will help.

Redfern calmly exploded the first theory by referencing the research for her book with Kristin Aune which showed that feminism is a growing, thriving movement, and questioned the second. Mainstream representations of feminism are too narrow, and don’t reflect the pluralism of the movement. But the F Word survey showed that women became feminists when they learned about feminism, and not when it was packaged with a free lipgloss. Who is a feminist because it’s fashionable? Surely we are insulting young women somewhat by trying to package it as something ‘cool’.

The other papers were very interesting, and included a brief history of the stiletto heel, a smart analysis of those Suit Supply ads and the ‘desire of indifference’ and an introduction to the Brinkley Girl. But the only one which directly commented on the idea of ‘branding’ feminism was from Catherine Maffioletti, who made some good points about the tension between the “wild and divided” nature of feminism and the patriarchal (and capitalist) project of naming and fixing its meaning in a saleable product. As Maffioletti said, “branding difference is an impossible project”. Feminism is “emergent”, “a mobilising force”, something alive and oppositional that can’t be pinned down, boxed up and sold.

I’m not a marketer, but…

As the day went on I started to feel the burden of pragmatism weighing on my shoulders and spoiling the fun, as it often does. There’s a little voice inside me always wanting to know: what are we going to do about this? What’s the plan? That’s not what the conference was about, but I started wondering about practical applications.

I think a serious attempt to ‘rebrand’ feminism would be madness, because it is “wild and divided”; it’s plural and adaptable, and means too many different things to too many people, and I’m nearly ready to argue that’s one of its strengths. As Catherine Redfern pointed out, feminism is a leaderless grassroots movement; who would have the audacity to try and redefine it?

But I reckon that as individual feminists and as groups of feminists, we could do a lot more to broaden representations of feminism, to counter the negative stereotypes, to make the case more effectively without letting the end run away with the means.

You don’t have to call it marketing. It’s as simple as putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, understanding their criticisms and concerns and addressing them, learning what they want, and showing them how you can help.

Or if that sounds too cuddly, you can call it propaganda.

This is an exciting web 3.0 INTERACTIVE post, rather than one that’s full of pictures, because of copyright licensing laws. When you hear this noise – *ping!* – click the link and hopefully the search results will open in a new window for you to enjoy.

Google Images

*ping!*

Google provide personalized search results of course, so what you see when you Google images of feminism is probably different from what I’m seeing. But what I got is for the most part old favourites, and mostly images created by or appropriated by the feminist movement. I love these pictures. But they are getting kind of old:

Ouch!

• Rosie the Riveter (what are we going to do when the 1940s aren’t fashionable anymore?)
• “If I had a hammer… I’d SMASH patriarchy” graphic (a proto-Feminist Hulk? SMASH!)
• The female symbol with fist – actually a little alarming when you think about why that symbol represents the female.  Punching wombs for equality!
• Various classic slogans on t-shirts, badges and banners
• Pictures of Women’s Liberation marches
• The ‘Look, kitten’ cartoon
• A painting by Artemisia Gentileschi. It’s ‘Judith beheading Holofernes’, in fact. Bet she was a feminist too – we can’t get enough of violence against men, apparently (more on which later)

In amongst these are the anti-feminist blogger’s illustration of choice, the demotivational poster.

Clipart

*ping!*

These days, some people pretend to be dorky to be cool. I’m the real deal. My major love-in with clipart was at secondary school when I decided to make a school newsletter. No one would do it with me, so I wrote and laid it out and printed it and distributed it in all the classrooms by myself. There was no second issue.

Anyway. Clipart offerings for feminism were pretty thin on the ground, and included:

• A burning bra. Sigh. It never happened, you know.
• A woman dressed as a man! Well, in a shirt and a tie.
• That female symbol again.
• A woman with a placard.
• Three women in red – one in a boardroom, one in a boxing ring, and one hefting her male skating partner on high.

Those women in red are just the tip of the iceberg in representations of feminism as women fighting / besting / attacking / murdering men, it turns out…

Stock Photos

Famously bizarre friend of the low budget publication producer, there is nothing quite like browsing cheap stock photography websites. There’s even a tumblr dedicated to some of the more outlandish findings.

Let’s start with iStockPhoto.

*ping!*

Yes, that’s right. The first image to come up under ‘feminism’ is a woman holding a gun to her sleeping partner’s head. See also:

• Tiny man being crushed by enormous womanfoot
• Man being strangled by a woman, Hammer Horror stylee
• Woman with boxing gloves
• Woman delivering K.O. in boxing gloves (live action and cartoon versions)
• Woman standing on a man’s chest in pose of triumph
• Woman treading on a man’s toe in high heels
• Woman unconvincingly kicking a man in the groin

This startling picture came up under 'feminism' on free stock photo site www.sxc.hu

I find this simultaneously worrying, revealing and hilarious. There we were, slogging away, trying to get recognised as a valid and powerful political movement and to assert our credibility as a critical paradigm, and it turns out all the people creating and using these images are afraid that we’re going to come and BEAT THEM UP.

Other things come up too, but the women-attacking-men theme is pretty striking. One notable exception is this unbelieveable piece of tastelessness: “Sexy woman wearing a Burkha”.

On to Shutterstock, a much friendlier and sexier place, it turns out.

*ping!*

There’s really too great a variety of bizarre representations of feminism here for me to summarise, but highlights include:

• One half of a “sexy young couple” smooshing her partner’s face
• “Glamor still life”
• A serene headless phantom feminist
• An old bag

The violence against men is present, but it’s more symbolic – women are cutting or stamping on their ties – or implied: the boxing gloves are back, and this enterprising young lady has an assault rifle.

There are also a lot of pictures of attractive models looking like they can’t wait to advertise your new cleanser.

Not that I could ever afford to buy pictures from Getty, but I checked them too.

*ping!*

Popular themes seem to be men and women glaring at each other in offices, arm wrestling and tugs-of-war (also in offices) and another disturbing guns-in-bed picture.

Last stop:

Creative Commons

Firstly: I love Creative Commons; it basically makes my job possible (producing decent communications materials for charities). Y’all should donate to support them.

*ping!*

Flickr is the main place I use for CC pics, and what comes up under ‘feminism’ is on the whole just pictures of the day-to-day business of it. Panel debates, speakers, meetings, marches, placards, some cool graffiti…

Not especially glamorous, but less weird and less violent than what stock photography sites seem to think goes on.  For example, I couldn’t find a single picture of a sexy bride in boxing gloves punching a businessman’s head off.

F

FEMALE

Are you all sitting comfortably?

‘Well, well,’ I thought, as I cast my eye over the (now somewhat bedraggled) series of scrawled lists of letters for the Alphabet shoved into my pockets, bursting out of purses and sketchbooks and rotating in scarcely less tatty form in my head. For the question was obvious: What am I going to do for F? Because, you see, Z, Y, X, all those, they’re not actually that hard. They don’t have that much riding on them. But F … well, from the various incarnations of the F-word onwards … a headache.

Because, you see, the word feminism just isn’t that interesting.

Or rather, its interest lies in its power to evoke wide-ranging, frequently violent reactions while remaining semantically straightforward. Feminism gets precisely a centimetre of a three-column page in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Because it means two very simple and uncontentious things: in rare form, ‘the qualities of women’, and as it is more commonly understood today, ‘advocacy of the claims and rights of women’, first used sometime around 1895. All those extra things, the bad reputation … those are add-ons, and not linguistically valid ones, either. So I turned my attention away from feminism, and thought that perhaps I would go back to basics. After all, how often do we think about what female means?

Hey ho, let’s go.

From http://www.edbatista.com/. Used with permission.

Well, it derives from the Middle English ‘femelle’ via the Latin ‘femella’ which is in turn a diminutive of ‘femina’ (= ‘woman’ – yes, another diminutive. They keep popping up, don’t they?) In its most basic incarnation, female simply means ‘belonging to the sex which bears offspring’. This does not have to involve birthing: let me tell you of the seahorses.

Despite his undisputed ‘masculine’ role, the male seahorse receives a parcel of eggs from the female. Upon doing this, he sets out on an aqueous pregnancy-journey, bearing his unborn sea-foals in a pouch specially evolved for the purpose. During incubation, the female what knocked him up visits him each day for a brief catch-up (approximately six minutes), during which time they revisit the rituals of their courtship (holding tails, doing a little pre-dawn dance, smoking that bud and chillin’).

[Here, you must listen to The Sea Horse by Flanders & Swann. I’ll wait here.]

Unlike words like woman and lady, female therefore has a very precise biological meaning that underscores its subsequent development: it is unsurprising that the next place it shows up in the dictionary is in botany (1791), where it refers to the parts of the plant that bear fruit, or, in reference to ‘a blossom or flower’, ‘having a pistil and no stamens; pistillate; fruit bearing’ (slightly later: 1796). Of course, ‘perfect’ plants are ‘bisexual’ in that they possess both male and female parts (this latter, the ‘gynoecium’, literally meaning ‘woman house’). GCSE Biology ftw.

Alongside this specific development is an extremely general one: ‘consisting of females’, ‘pertaining to women’ (the dictionary quotes Pope on ‘the force of female lungs’), and then ‘characteristic of womankind’ in the seventeenth century and ‘womanish’ in the eighteenth. It is curious that the usage here should be ‘womankind‘ rather than ‘femality’ (of which more presently), since woman seems pretty clearly human, and therefore arguably more subjective, than a simple reference to the egg-bearing species.

How low can you go?

It is exactly this sort of little shift that leads to female‘s seventh meaning, as an epithet of ‘various material and immaterial things, denoting simplicity, inferiority, weakness, or the like’ (one wonders with alarm what ‘the like’ might be). Here, of course, we have the realms of the ‘feminine rhyme’, which, while often weaker, are nonetheless much harder to pull off (and more effective, when successful) than any number of the old Moon and June. And mechanics also gets a shout out: female is there applied (as of 1669) to ‘that part of an instrument or contrivance which receives the corresponding male part’. (I love the dry non-specifics of ‘instrument or contrivance’.) However, it should come as no surprise to find that female eventually passes into apparently exclusively negative use: ‘as a synonym for ‘woman’ now only contemptuous’.

They are no ladies. The only word good enough for them is the word of opprobrium – females.

– Anonymous (1889)

‘Female’ … A circular hole or socket having a spiral thread adapted to receive the thread of the male screw.

– Anonymous (1669)

By way of a postscript: some now rare variants on the word. Femality can be both ‘female nature’ and ‘unmanliness’; feminality refers to ‘a knick-knack such as women like’, and Feminie is ‘Womankind; especially the Amazons‘. We like it when things stay self-referential.

NEXT WEEK: G is for Girl