I’m not a fan of stereotypical femininity, so when my sister decided to organise a trip to see the stage version of Dirty Dancing for her hen night – with compulsory “prom dress” costumes – it sounded like my idea of pink, fluffy hell.

But I was pleasantly surprised to discover that when you get past the neon pink advertising and the frilly dresses, there are some surprisingly serious and complex themes woven into the plot. By the time we reached the interval I had been converted, but since it can be difficult to find anyone to discuss intersectional feminism with you on a hen night pub crawl, I’ve had to save my observations for the internet.

In case it’s been a while since you’ve seen the 1987 film, here’s a quick recap of the plot: in the summer between high school and college, Baby spends a few weeks with her well-off family at a holiday resort in the Catskills, where she meets Penny, a working class dance instructor who has recently become pregnant and then been dumped.

Penny desperately wants to have an abortion, but it’s illegal and therefore expensive and risky. On top of that, she can’t afford to take time off from her second job, performing at a neighbouring resort with her dance partner and platonic best friend Johnny.

Baby steps in to help her, first talking her father into lending her the money to pay for the abortion, then learning the dance routine so that she can take Penny’s place on stage. In the process of learning to dance, she has to spend lots of time with sexy dance instructor Johnny, in situations which conveniently provide excuses for him to be wet and/or shirtless, and they end up having a hot summer fling.

Although it’s easily overlooked in favour of her romantic relationship with Johnny, it’s Baby’s friendship with Penny which sets up the film’s feminist credentials: the main catalyst for the plot is one woman helping another woman to obtain an abortion. Unlike more recent American films about unplanned pregnancy, such as Juno or Knocked Up, Dirty Dancing approaches abortion from an openly pro-choice perspective. At no point does Penny face any moral judgement for her decision, but there’s plenty of criticism for the man who abandoned her, and the abortionist who charges her hundreds of dollars for a procedure that leaves her seriously ill.

But even before she makes her grand gesture of sisterly solidarity to Penny, Baby is presented as a feminist character. When she is first introduced, we learn that she is about to go to college (it’s later explained that she plans to study economics at a prestigious women’s college) and wants to join the Peace Corps after graduating. This stands in stark contrast to her sister Lisa, whose main ambition appears to be finding a husband. Lisa and the other female guests at the resort demonstrate the kind of comfortable yet uninspiring lifestyle that Baby has decided to reject in favour of having adventures and trying to save the world.

Baby’s determination to make a difference could have been presented as a straightforwardly positive trait, but her ability to help Penny is closely tied to her family’s wealth, and the writers use Johnny’s reaction to comment on her privilege. Johnny initially resents her involvement, and makes the scathing comment “it takes a real saint to ask Daddy” when Baby hands over the money for the abortion.

As they grow closer and Johnny begins to talk about his life and his precarious employment situation, Baby looks naïve and sheltered in comparison, but by the end of the film she has started to understand her own privilege and question her father’s assumptions about Johnny.

Baby’s class privilege affects the dynamic of her relationship with Johnny, giving her power and agency that goes against traditional gender roles. As a guest at the resort, Johnny relies on Baby’s cooperation for his continued employment, and he feels further indebted to her because she is paying for Penny’s abortion.

Baby’s background means that she’s used to getting her way, so she isn’t shy about talking back to Johnny during their early dance lessons, and she remains assertive when they grow closer, eventually being the one to initiate the sexual aspect of their relationship.

Women’s sexuality is a major theme in the film, and it’s actually kind of refreshing to see a film address women’s interest in sex without trying to dress it up in a desire for True Love. There are frequent nods to the female gaze, whether it’s through the blatant fanservice of Patrick Swayze’s shirtless scenes (set to music like Hungry Eyes), or the resort owner, reminding the nice, respectable college boys he has recruited as waiters that part of their job is to provide holiday romances for the younger female guests.

There are also comments about the “Bungalow Bunnies”, middle-aged women who stay at the resort all summer and are only joined by their husbands at the weekends, who use Johnny for sex in a reversal of the older-man-exploits-young-woman trope.

As a coming-of-age movie, the script also touches on the idea of sexual awakening, contrasting Baby’s experience with her sister Lisa’s. In one very brief scene (which starts at 0:50 of this clip), the two women discuss when they should lose their virginity, and Baby tells Lisa that it should be with “someone you sort-of love”; not necessarily the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, but someone you like and are attracted to.

Lisa sees sex as part of a long-term plan to persuade Robbie – who the viewer already knows is the sleazebag that dumped Penny when he got her pregnant – to marry her, while Baby, who isn’t deliberately looking for a husband, ends up with the better man and the more rewarding relationship. This might not be much of a revelation to many real women, but it’s unusual to see a chick-flick where the romantic happy ending doesn’t involve marriage and babies.

Dirty Dancing isn’t without its flaws: the Bungalow Bunnies fit what we would now call a cougar stereotype, and Johnny’s final speech about how Baby has taught him to be a better person might be kind of dodgy from a class perspective, but it’s a little unrealistic to expect a low-budget romance film from the 80s to be totally right-on.

It stands out, not because it’s perfect, but because the writers address class and gender issues at all, and as a result has been sneaking a little bit of Trojan horse feminism into teenage sleepovers and girls’ nights in for the last 25 years. It’s the feminist sleeper agent of chick flicks, and deserves a bit of recognition for that.

• Alyson Macdonald is an admin worker by day and a writer the rest of the time, blogging mostly at Bright Green and tweeting from @textuallimits. She wouldn’t normally be caught dead watching chick flicks, and hopes that her reputation as a scruffy geek survives this encounter unscathed.

I quite like Agent Provocateur in general – while it’s a bit ridiculous in places (this may be many things, but it is not a ‘playsuit’), I do feel like it’s positively targeted at strong, empowered women who like luxury lingerie, and their partners (the Gentleman’s Guide for boyfriends on their website is quite amusing).

This may be because their creative director is herself a female force to be reckoned with: Sarah Shotton, who worked her way up the company from an ‘apprenticeship’ when it had just started up. Now at the top, Shotton states that she tries every design she looks at on a size 8 model and a size 16, to ensure that it works on a range of shapes. No more than she should do, perhaps, but probably still more than many other lingerie designers. So I’m on side from the get-go, really.

But to the ad!

H&M’s Winter 2012 campaign

First things first, this has got to be in the minority among lingerie campaigns in that the female protagonist is active and capable. She’s not in a boudoir and she’s not being sexy for an imagined (male) viewer. I present this from La Senza and this from the M&S ‘Autograph’ lingerie range for comparison.

For a more current spin, to my right is H&M’s Winter 2012 print campaign. Oh look, it’s another woman in lingerie on a bed (/ weird sheepskin shebang), lit so you can’t actually see her face. For a more avant garde take on these same ideas, check out this bizarre mini-film masterwork from Damaris. Damaris, I love you dearly, but seriously, what is this?

Conversely, in the Agent Provocateur advert our heroine is out and about, and about to get on a bus. She’s wearing a wrap dress and plimsoles – well-dressed, but clearly not on any kind of Special Sexy Trip – and she also just happens to be wearing matching Agent Provocateur lingerie.

One effect of this decision is to make the underwear look practical. This is not true of most of Agent Provocateur’s range (or price tag). They’ve always been really into the idea of lingerie as a ‘special secret’ (not Victoria’s).

The photography on their website is lit as if by searchlight to reinforce this, and this advert refines that a little, pushing lingerie as a secret just for you, the wearer. But, they’re arguing here, it’s also something viable for every day. Our protagonist is just hangin’ out in her designer lingerie, because she wants to wear it – for herself.

Personally, I commend her: good underwear is the skeleton of an outfit, and I don’t see why, if you’re lucky enough to be able to buy luxury lingerie, it should have to languish at the bottom of a drawer until some performative Special Occasion.

But I think this ad – and its slogan, ‘sexy never takes a day off’ – is also saying that there’s something almost intrinsic about ‘sexy’. In this advert, the Agent Provocateur underwear, and the choice to wear it out and about, is just an extension of the heroine’s natural confidence and, well, sexiness.

It’s this confidence that makes her actually embark on the chase in the first place. The underwear’s not making her sexy; she’s chosen the underwear because she already is sexy. Typical advertising, of course, but isn’t it better to see someone being sexy in their day to day life than backlit in a studio, lounging on a bed?

Of course, I’ve deliberately stacked the deck there, partly because I don’t think the chivalry debate is actually a debate; it’s a way of obscuring the real issues behind a warm, old-timey phrase.

“Chivalry” tends to enter the conversation when it is suggested that women might be treated as equals in the public space, that they might not be subjected to sexualised commentary for simply walking down the street, or might be paid an equal salary to men.

Then “chivalry” suddenly arrives as the benign, patronising face of patriarchy. Don’t women want men to open doors for them, to buy drinks for them, to arrange for them to be unable to support themselves economically and thus be dependent on the contingent goodwill of another person for their livelihood? That’s just plain mean, and almost certainly emotionally manipulative.

The reason this gambit interests me is not how ridiculous it sounds when spelled out (though that too) but how much explanatory force is attributed to such a vague and nebulous ideology.

Even more than evopsych, another gender-wrangle bugbear, “chivalry” offers so little specific justification. Even the debased version of evolutionary psychology one meets in the arguments of MRAs and redditors who have stumbled furiously into the comments section of Feministe (in the manner of a partygoer in Cancun who reaches for that Hawaiian shirt in the wardrobe and finds himself amid the snows of Narnia) purports to present an argument and a set of historical (well, mythical) explanations.

That’s why “chivalry” is so often a distraction, a way of blowing warm, nostalgic smoke across the debate until its not clear what we’re even arguing against.

The other reason it seems odd is the diametrically opposed way we use “medieval”. Like sixteenth-century humanists, we rush to brand anything barbarous, vicious or ignorant as “medieval”. The actions of Boko Haram, for example, or the conditions in an inner-city crackhouse, or Creationism. Somehow “chivalry” expresses a comfortable reactionary vision of gender relations, in which women simper and accept being corralled into particular spheres of activity away from real power, whereas “medieval” is backward and dumb. The bad kind of backward and dumb.

Between them these terms manage a bait and switch on our engagement with the past and its bearing on gender politics. A necessary one, given the preponderance of “princess” vocabulary which saturates the images offered to girls and young women. Narratives about dating, dress and men’s attention are full of language which assumes that the chivalric romances of the Middle Ages – all those castles, quests, damsels and princes – are the natural image of relations between genders.

At the same time, it’s necessary to decry the treatment of women in other countries as “medieval”, to maintain the fiction that women in our culture have nothing to trouble their heads about. The terminology carefully allots two meanings to the same collection of past events, and assigns our (rightly) divided feelings of shame, horror, belonging and heritage to whichever side is needed to keep gender norms in place.

The word “chivalry” has been particularly bothering me recently since I started rereading bits of Malory’s Morte Darthur. One of the most influential Arthurian works in the English language, this fifteenth-century version of the Camelot legends looms over almost all subsequent Arthurian works in some form or another, whether that be Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, or the recent BBC TV Merlin.

An examination of this romance also gives a bit of a lie to the myth of “chivalry”. It’s not that it debunks the soft-focus pageantry with a brutal expose of fifteenth-century repression and sexual violence (though an account of its author might do something of the sort). Rather, it undermines the “princess” paradigm by offering a very different kind of female character.

As Helen Cooper notes in her edition of Morte Darthur, women are often the characters who incite action:

Most of them, moreover, are active agents, not mere passive damosels.

The book also seems quite at home with women’s romantic agency: to quote Cooper again, Malory “takes it as natural and unthreatening…that women have sexual desires” and act upon them.

One particular passage struck me as illuminating this issue: when Dame Lyonet realizes her sister Lyonesse is in love with the knight Sir Gareth. The section doesn’t need much more prologue:

Then was Sir Gareth more gladder than he was more. And then they troth-plight, other to love and never to fail while their life lasteth.

And so they burnt both in hot love that they were accorded to abate their lusts secretly. And there Dame Lyonesses counselled Sir Gareth to sleep in no other place but in the hall, and there she promised him to come to his bed a little before midnight.

Their counsel was not so privily kept but it was understood, for they were but young both, and tender of age, and had not used such craft before.

Wherefore the damosel Lyonet was a little displeased, and she thought her sister Dame Lyonesse was a little over-hasty, that she might not abide the time of her marriage; and for saving of her worship [reputation] she thought to abate their hot lusts.

And she let ordain by her subtle crafts that they had no their intents either with other as in their delights, until they were married.

Unfortunately I haven’t got space to continue copying out the episode, but the way she decides to use her “subtle crafts” to frustrate her sister’s insufficiently crafty crafts involves creating an enchanted knight who comes charging in whenever Gareth and Lyonesse manage some alone-time, causing Gareth to have to battle it.

He defeats it each time, in increasingly final ways (eventually swiping its head off, and carefully chopping the head into a hundred pieces and dropping it out of a window into the moat) but each time Lyonet puts it back together with magic ointment. Because who doesn’t have space in their life for a moment-ruining sorcerous cyborg created by their older sister?

This passage also exhibits some surprising gender politics. On first reading it’s simply another fabulous (in both senses) tale of magic and love, but the framing is strikingly modern.

Firstly, the narrator seems to find nothing either surprising or blameworthy about the two young people wanting to have sex before marriage: that use of “lust” is, in context, simply denoting a particular emotional and physical state. It’s not the “lust” of the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s more like the lust of a Magnum advert or a Cosmo special issue.¹

Neither does Lyonet see anything wrong with her sister wanting to sleep with Sir Gareth – she simply realizes that everyone else knows what is going to happen, and that her own wish for her sister to be happy won’t stop people shaming Lyonesse. She creates the magical knight because she’s acutely aware of the gap between her own sympathetic understanding of her sister’s feelings and desires, and the hypocritical attitude of the society they have to live within.

Interesting that the word “craft” is used of both Lyonesse’s secrecy and Lyonet’s magic. I’m tempted to read this as suggesting they’re both sets of skills which the women have developed in order to survive in a difficult world – though Lyonesse’s is far less effective. The initiative Cooper identifies in Malory’s women is dramatically present here: Lyonesse instructs her lover where to be at night and comes to visit him, whilst her sister makes a counter-plan to foil her.

Sexual attraction is hardly an unusual motive for action in the fiction we see around us, but in this case it’s the young women who take action and negotiate their way between their feelings and the expectations of a broader community.

There’s also something meta-romance about Lyonet’s solution. I may be over-reading this brief passage, but Malory’s deliberately laconic style encourages us to interject motivations and connections to make sense of the narrative. So I think the form Lyonet’s obstruction takes – an enchanted bouncer – is also a symbol of her superior ability to understand heroic romance as a genre.

“Alright, little sister”, her choice of magical weapon seems to say, “You want to be the heroine of a chivalric romance? Because in all the romances I’ve read you don’t get the knight that easily…” She ironically goes along with Lyonet’s casting of herself as romantic damosel, and cranks up the volume, providing her sister with her very own enchanted nemesis to overcome before she can get what she wants.

If we wanted to translate this into a realist mode, this gestures towards the idea that love doesn’t end your story arc as a person, and that finding the person you want to spend “happily ever after with” doesn’t subsume your identity into a “game over” montage.

Lyonesse still has to deal with what Camelot will think of her, and she’ll do so whilst remaining Lyonesse and a member of her own society. The meta-romantic element, in which Lyonet goes to the spell-book to slow up her sister’s love life, seems to valorise young women who are symbolically and semantically competent, as well as active in the world.

Lyonet wins this episode because she is more capable than Lyonesse of taking the narratives which surround them in their culture, understanding and decoding them, and then redeploying those narratives to her own advantage, with a combination of critical analysis, sisterly compassion, and geeky in-joke wit.

So if nothing else, this chunk of Malory provides us with another reason to sneer at “chivalry” when used to argue that the world was better when women were (supposedly) passive, and to own up to our medieval heritage, whether it’s embarrassing, troubling or apparently irrelevant.

Because occasionally we may trip over moments like this, where Dame Lyonet is exercising her subtle crafts. Crafts which, as I read them over again, look more and more like medieval geek feminism.

• Images taken from Kate Beaton’s inspired ‘courtly love’ comics over at Hark! A Vagrant.
• Jem Bloomfield also blogs at Quite Irregular

1. Not that either of those are anything but problematic, but my point here is the modernity of the word’s implications.

Not a hotbed of radical political lady-times, and yet it’s been home to not one, but two awesome women. Briefly, it was also frequented by our editor Miranda this autumn, so technically that makes it three, and the temptation to create Bad Reputation plaques, possibly as stickers, is actually quite strong.

Anyway, here’s the street…

Pelham Place, Hastings. Most feminist street ever?

…and here are the plaques.

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827-1891, Educational pioneer and campaigner for women’s rights and artist. Lived here 1830-1853.

Muriel Matters-Porter, 1877-1969, Adelaide born activist and first woman to ‘speak’ in the House of Commons. Lived in this house 1949-1969.

The two women in question, Barbara Bodichon and Muriel Matters, are not only pleasingly alliterative but also both very cool people in their own way.

Barbara was a formidable lady. Born out of wedlock to a reasonably wealthy and very forward-thinking father, she had an “unusual upbringing” by all accounts (well, here’s an account that says that).

Bodichon was an artist who travelled Europe, and she was heavily involved in women’s suffrage. She is credited with helping campaign for the Married Women’s Property Act, a step towards independant financial security for women which allowed them to own and control their own property.

She also set up the English Women’s Journal to discuss issues pertaining to womens’ rights, and founded Girton College, Cambridge.

As an aside, her family is related by marriage to the Bonham Carter family which contains both Florence Nightingale and, eventually, Helena Bonham Carter, a BadRep Towers favourite, so there’s clearly something going on in this family and they deserve watching.

Muriel Matters, meanwhile, was born in Australia, moving to the UK to participate in the suffrage movement, where she became known for being somewhat militant and outrageous in her attempts to gain publicity for the cause (including hiring a dirigible).

She was also a campaigner against slums and poverty and an early teacher of the Montessori Method. She stood as a candidate for the Labour Party in 1924.

Matters lived in the house on Pelham Street, which was a nursing home, until her death, the later part of her life focusing on what is coyly described by Wikipedia as “the local community”, and spending time being a pretty great lady of letters.

I can only imagine what it must have been like to campaign so ardently for change and to see it realised in your lifetime, then to go on and survive through the war, all the way to to the revolutions of the 1960s. It’s only when presented with those dates that I can begin to appreciate the scale and speed of the feminist project, that so much happened within these two overlapping lifetimes. It’s inspirational to think about what could be achieved within our lifetimes.

The two didn’t overlap when they lived at Pelham Place, sadly, and my Google-fu doesn’t reveal any evidence they actually ever met, but that’s certainly a Fantasy Dinner party guest list to think about.

I like the Blue Plaque project. I like any kind of history you can pick up just by looking up whilst you’re walking along. It’s nice to be able to put things in context and to see the past as places with real people rather than objects in a museum.

But this combination in particular strikes a chord with me, possibly because it is so unusual. And it’s the standout element here that makes this a Found Feminism.

Let’s face it, most commemorative plaques are about men – English Heritage is working to tackle this issue – and the coverage of women’s rights is often a late addition to the table. The Pankhursts didn’t get their plaque intil 2006, for example, so to have two together is impressive.

So here’s to Pelham Place, and to Hastings!

• 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, or made you stop and think? Share it here, tweet us, or send your finds to [email protected]!

Shiver me timbers. I bet she’s cold.

We both enjoy reading about and discovering stories about women pirates.

Sadly, they are often poorly represented in pop culture and in advertising as little more than the aforementioned nautical sexpots, turning up, as women sadly often do, only to prove that the central male characters are heterosexual and dashing.

The example on the left is a good one. This was taken from a pirate-themed crazy golf park. The male pirates had clothes. And coats. And treasure. All kinds of useful pirate things.

This is the trope we are used to – men representing the cut and thrust of the character, women thrown in for a bit of titillation (assuming that you like your titillation in this form, and sadly we live in a universe were that is the the assumption).

But all is not lost, me hearties!

There’s a sea-change coming. If we set sail to Hastings, that lesser known bastion of cut-throat feminism, there is a weather-beaten and battered but nonetheless awesome figure of a woman pirate on the roof of a restaurant.

A far cry from scantily-clad mermaids attempting to flog battered cod and chips – and a very refreshing change, as well as two fingers up to all the people who think that a woman’s place is stapled to the prow of a ship.

Avast in front! Now you’re talking.

No high seas bikini here! She’s got an outfit suitable for Proper Adventuring, she’s steering a boat, and she’s got treasure, which (aside from clothing that protects you from the elements and your enemies) is what every pirate wants.

Throw in the eyepatch and a pet crow (plus points for cool animal companion) and she’s ready to plunder the high seas.

So, aside from the fact that we’ve finally (finally!) got a female character in a similar position and costume to male characters, what really makes this a Found Feminism for me is the placement: we’re so used to having female characters as the special, odd one out, look-at-me-I’m-a-girl that having this figure here without any particular attention drawn to it makes it all the better.

It’s not a special Lady Pirate Restaurant, it’s just a bit of pirate ship decor which also happens to have a normalised, non-stereotyped female pirate aboard.

I’ve long flown the flag for giving women characters equal weighting in stories, especially fantasy and sci-fi fiction, where writers and audiences get the joy of experiencing other worlds that aren’t bound by the tedious social rules of our own – including sexism.

Well, it’s maybe not surprising that Mrs Garrud’s guides were written from a feminist standpoint, but I wasn’t expecting quite the same level of realism from the very military William E. Fairbairn in a book I stumbled across this week.

A policeman and soldier, Fairbairn knew a LOT about combat. I mean, really. No, REALLY. As the ever-excitable website Badass of the Week put it:

Fairbairn was stationed in Japanese-occupied Korea from 1903 to 1907, and he spent the majority of those four years learning everything he possibly could about the long-lost art of epically kicking the fiery rainbow-living sh**fire out of every living thing on the planet until the only things left inhabiting Earth are multi-colored protoplasmic bags of liquefied organs and bone shards.

What made him unique was that he didn’t mind fighting very, very dirty if it meant you won. And so he did win, usually against street gangs and organised crime rings in Shanghai, where he served with the police. And he then taught that to the commandos, and special forces, the pre-CIA, he invented the SWAT team and tactics still being used today, had a black belt in judo certified by the guy who invented judo, and allegedly held a six-week training course in ‘silent killing’ which included using only a normal stick. He is an enormous figure in Western close-combat history.

In 1942, Fairbairn wrote a book which was marketed in the US as HANDS OFF! Self Defense for Women. Where the feminist interest comes in isn’t that he wrote it at all, or that it contains full-strength combat moves while being aimed solely at women, but that he included paragraphs like this:

It frequently happens that you meet a person who is very proud of his gripping powers and takes great pleasure, when shaking hands, in gripping your hand with all his strength, apparently with the idea of convincing you that he is a real “he-man”.

It is a very simple matter for you to take the conceit out of him – place the point of your right thumb on the back of his hand between the thumb and index finger, as in Fig. 27A.

The cover of the book, featuring a young woman and her trusty umbrella.

The thing which struck me about the whole book is his attitude, which coincides completely with Edith Garrud’s where she wrote “Woman is exposed to many perils nowadays, because so many who call themselves ‘men’ are not worthy of that exalted title.”

Fairbairn assumes that the male attacker in his examples – who grabs, threatens or harasses a woman – deserves no mercy from the terrifying array of STONE-COLD KICKASS which she is then encouraged to perform in return. And he does so not with a tone of patriarchal protectiveness, but of dismissive contempt for the man and righteous calm practical advice for the woman.

In some places, he qualifies his including the more extreme moves with a ‘should you need to’, but it always seems to be cushioning language for civilians frightened at the thought of personal combat, not at all because the reader is a woman. In his introduction, the only differences he cites for women are in typical averages of height and muscle strength, never some imagined intrinsic weakness of will or emotions. That stuff was rampant in 1942, and not including a word of it is impressive.¹

What’s also nice to see is that he classes any unwanted touching – such as a man stroking a woman’s knee when sitting next to her at the theatre or cinema – as serious enough to warrant a physical response. Damn right. Also, ouch. (He calls the resulting arm-lock ‘The Theatre Hold‘ and notes that while his photographs show just two seats together, if it was done when there is a row in front, ‘the opponent’s head would have been smashed onto the back of the front seats‘.

The opponent. For a knee-stroke. YES.

Sadly our attitudes to the public groping of women have relaxed a great deal, but it’s nice to find a manual with no condescension, a frank regard for the dangers women face, and the emphasis placed on a woman’s right to her own body. In 1942.

At no point does he even begin to discuss the idea of victim-blaming, that the woman could have ‘brought it on herself’ through dress or actions. It doesn’t come into it.

I’m currently developing self-defence classes for women and have to always keep in mind a level of force which will seem very reasonable in law, and frankly, the attitude in this book is a breath of fresh air. Because I didn’t have to go any farther than the partner I’m demonstrating moves with to find a woman who has had her knee stroked creepily by a stranger in public in the last six months, as well as her boob grabbed in the last week and frequent close approaches by strangers, the temptation to step things up to Fairbairn’s level is mighty high. (But then, I think the appropriate legal response to street harassment should be the sound of a woman drawing a sword).

So well done to Col. Fairbairn for producing a work with a respectful tone and the rare inclusion of harassment scenarios aimed solely at empowering women. If you’re in need of some (eye-wateringly violent) advice on how to fend off attackers, check out his book here. Just bear in mind that the suggested responses might be viewed as legally off-the-scale today!

(And don’t do the thing with the umbrella in Fig. 34, because seriously, sheesh.)

• Readers will note that this is not the first time one of us has found an artefact from the past and gone on a little feminist history adventure. We like old books! And history adventures! Have you had an adventure like this? Do you have recommendable artefacts we should investigate? If so, SAY HELLO TO OUR INBOX. We’re nerds for that stuff. It is one of our favouritest things.

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: For some more context, this post has some history of sexist media treatments of women’s boxing. Since, uh, we’re on the subject of gendered perceptions of who does and doesn’t do martial arts.

In a world where it’s increasingly hard to get your message across, and available methods of communication are becoming more and more sophisticated, it’s refreshing to see a return to the simple things in life.

Like slapping a sticker somewhere nice and prominent that screams FREE PUSSY RIOT in fat felt tip pen.

I found this beauty a couple of months ago whilst walking across the Golden Jubilee pedestrian bridge. Sitting loud and proud, obviously homemade, with bright colours and a take-no-prisoners message.

Hear hear!

So, why is this a Found Feminism?

Well, obviously there’s the show of support for Pussy Riot and the spreading of their message. Whoever slapped this on the wall was inspired to make and display the sticker themselves. I hope there are hundreds of them stuck around London. I only found the one. I hope other people find more. I hope they make their own.

I’m also going to add points for the artwork, done in a way that echoes feminist punk stylings. It’s that hand-drawn aesthetic of “we did this in our bedroom” personal creation. It mirrors the hand-knitted balaclavas of the band members, and it’s the heart and soul of grassroots movements.

Plus, it’s funny.

I’m not saying that feminism should be side-splitting all the time, although I do dislike that stereotype about feminists as po-faced, dungarees-wearing, yoghurt-plaiting monsters² who hate all fun and all jokes. But being able to make someone smile when you get your point across can be valuable – and who wouldn’t grin at this sticker, with its cheerful two fingers up to one of the most terrifying and powerful men in the world? Doesn’t matter how strong you think you are, Mr Putin – the writing on the wall in London thinks you’re a dick.

Finally, there’s the political message here. The sticker, and Pussy Riot, are part of a rekindling of the political power of feminism, reminding us all that there’s more we can do (much, much more) than form elegant critiques of the use of the female nude in art for the Sunday edition of the national newspapers.

There are problems out in the world that an active, aware and politicised feminist movement can work to solve. Should work to solve. And the fact that someone with a few highlighter pens and a handful of stickers is getting out there and having a go, in their own way, at doing it should put a rocket under those of us who have more reach and power to do what we can.

So yeah, fuck rubber face Putin.

• Check out the website Free Pussy Riot for news and how you can get involved.
• Our Rhian wrote on Pussy Riot when they first appeared in the UK national press here, and again after the trial here.

1. Terry Pratchett, THUD (particularly in the form of Granny Weatherwax, he’s the source of a lot of useful moral philosophy).
2. Actually, I really like dungarees, and would quite happily wear them, especially for their iconic status in (mis)representing feminism. But that’s because I’m a real person and not a stereotype! I cannot plait yoghurt, however.

Some time in 2010 or 2011 (I’m dating this by my handset) the Harley Medical Group started advertising plastic surgery on the tube. Images of pert models told women that they needed ‘new year, new confidence’. Plastic surgery is nothing new, but pushing that advertising on people as they go up the escalators was a new and unwelcome assault. “You’re on your way to work, by the way, have you considered that your tits could be better?” Then something wonderful happened: people started answering back. (Click on images for zoom.)

I was tickled to see a few with red printed ‘sexist shit’ stickers which I’d seen sold at a feminist event a couple of weeks before… but then more appeared. People were writing their own slogans on stickers and whacking them on as the escalator sped them past. At first I just saw them at Kings Cross where I commuted through every day. Then, little by little, I saw them in more and more places. More handwriting, more slogans. This was… a movement.

And then, as the posters went away, so the stickers did too. I noticed there was a second wave of plastic surgery ads a few months later which seemed to have toned down their rhetoric a little. Still crap that unnecessary surgery was being pushed on women but something seemed to have twigged with the advertisers, too. This level of crap will not stand. I salute you, culture-jammers of London. Long may you reign.

This plaque is in St Mary Abbots Parish Church in Kensington, and is a slice of history I thought worth sharing.

An epic tale. Set in stone.

Let me introduce you to someone I didn’t know existed until a couple of weeks ago. Jael Boscawen. She was born Jael Godolphin in 1647, a revolutionary year in which King Charles I was captured by Cromwell,  the Levellers published their manifesto and the New Model Army marched on London.

Challenging times. And a challenging lady, it seems.

Before we get down to details, the case for the defence.

Why is a bit of stone in a church and a woman long dead a relevant Found Feminism?

Well, it’s about history and culture. We know that there has been a problem with women in history – as in, there often don’t seem to be as good, or rich, or as many records for the ladies of the house as the menfolk. Despite it being almost certain that there were as many women in the past as men. There’s an underlying collective shoulder shrug of “well, that’s because women generally didn’t really ever do anything of any note.”  With the snide sidenote of “and generally never will”.

Which is sexism at its most toxic, and history at its most lazy.

When we do find written documentation about women like this one, it’s even more important and valuable to dive into it. Seeking out these women and their history is part of the feminist project. Writing the history of women, and telling it, is part of that project too. The more women we can find from the past, the more confident we will be at reminding ourselves that being a woman does not confine you to being a helpmeet. Then or now.

This is especially true when the women are not quite what we might expect. And such is the case of Jael Godolphin.

What struck me about this plaque in particular is that it seems to be the only record I can find of her. She’s a mystery. A quick Google of her name doesn’t reveal an awful lot. She doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. Her life, as far as we savvy internet creatures are concerned, was no life at all. She was born, she married, she had children, she died. The same bland story of so many women in the past, it seems.

Finding a history written in stone is significant because it indicates how important she must have been (this kind of dedication, with its prominent place by the church door, would not have been cheap). But more significant,  perhaps, is how she is described. The stereotypical view of a “good” woman from this time period would have her as a dutiful wife, daughter, mother, etc.

Not so with Jael Godolphin. The words written about her are about, well… her.

She was adorned with rare faculties of the mind, singular acuteness, sagacity and judgement, with a generous heart.

Let’s be clear. There’s no prattle about how meek, mild and akin to the Virgin Mary she was. No, this woman from the 17th century is immortalised in an expensive chunk of stone, by people who loved and respected her for her mind. Her brain. Her ability to make decisions. To make good decisions, certainly – she had a kind heart, but the brain came first. Exactly the sort of text you might expect to see on the grave of a (male) patron.

Now this is the bit where it gets even better.

Confessedly the ornament and at the same time the tacit reproach of a wicked Age.

Not only was she smart, she was also complicated. I would add her to a fantasy dinner table guest list in a heartbeat, if only to be able to unpick that sentence. What does it mean? In my head she is an Elizabeth I figure, who used the perceptions of her gender to her advantage, self-aware and very canny. But all I have are these words. Not even a picture. However, given all the problems with women and images, perhaps these words are better?

I’m going to end on a shoutout for events such as National Women’s History Month and resource gathering projects such as Wikipedia’s Women’s History. This post was done with love, but not a lot of technical know-how on the whole history front. I stopped doing the subject at 14 when it became clear I was not getting much out of endless, collective-guilt-inducing rehashes of the bombing of Dresden.

If there are any historians out there inspired by this and better at research than me, I’d love to know more about her.

• 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, or made you stop and think? Share it here – send your finds to [email protected]!

I’m a massive fan of Star Wars – from back when I was growing up watching old VHS tapes containing 1980s commercials (and that fizzy line that would go down the screen indicative of tape data decay), to the voluminous novels and graphic novels I read as an awkward teenager, through to the infamous new trilogy with all its flaws – and there definitely are many flaws. Even if we excuse the bad dialogue of 2005’s Revenge of the Sith, the ongoing debate about the canonicity of the Star Wars timeline, or even Jar Jar Binks, there are distinct flaws present in the first trilogy which make the films fare pretty badly in the politics of difference.

For a fantasy science fiction world with all kinds of alien species, the first Star Wars trilogy didn’t fare well in terms of embracing real-life social diversity. There were very few non-white or female characters, and when they were present as main characters, they weren’t exactly charitable representations. Leia is defined first by the fact she is female (gold bikini, anyone?), and (perhaps because there are so few women in the galaxy?) even her own brother is initially attracted to her. Although Leia had many heroic tendencies, the original trilogy would surely fail the Bechdel test since there are so few women visibly present in speaking roles. Don’t get me started on the lack of (human) ethnic diversity – put it this way, when the species of Mon Cala mari are better represented than human diversity, you know something’s wrong.

This aside, I’ve quite enjoyed a recent offering from the Star Wars cash empire: the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars (or TCW). The premise of the series is that it’s supposed to take place in the couple of years between Episodes II and III. The later novels and films have integrated a little bit more diversity into the series, even trying to retcon why there are so few women around in the Empire (it’s due to the Emperor’s sexist ideology).

TCW is set in the period where destined future villain Anakin Skywalker is now an established Jedi Knight and takes on an apprentice of his own. The moment of Found Feminism for me arrives with the five-foot-something appearance of his apprentice: the awesome Ahsoka Tano. Ahsoka (nicknamed ‘Snips’) is an unruly teenage Jedi whose aggression and flagrant disrespect for authority is markedly similar to Anakin’s.

After some reflection, I found myself liking Ahsoka more and more. She’s a swashbuckling Jedi risking her life on a regular basis with bravery and self-sacrifice, but sometimes she also shows a capacity for self-criticism and learning, and at no point do the other Jedi pass demeaning comment on her on the basis of her gender, nor is she defined as a character by any sense of sexuality. Most of the criticism she does receive comes as a result of her young age and brash manner. It’s refreshing to see a character like her represented in a less gendered way, and that the ways in which she is both awesome and flawed don’t come down to essentialist concepts of femininity or female sexuality. She isn’t depicted in a putative gendered manner – even when other Jedi such as Anakin or Mace Windu are exemplars of a archetypical masculinities, from ‘hunky hearthrob’ to ‘badass motherf*cka token black guy’, Ahsoka’s merits as a character come from her inner resolve, personal strength and her commitment to the Jedi Order and the Galactic Republic, and not her looks, what she wears or who she fancies.

Granted, I suspect most episodes of TCW fail to pass Bechdel, and there are few moments of female interaction which do not involve talking about men¹ It’s hard to call TCW a ‘feminist’ show by most stretches, but it is refreshing that this action-packed show, which has little to do with romance, does not exclude women from roles of leadership and armed conflict.

BadRep Towers: Thinking about Star Wars continuity for a moment, Ahsoka obviously isn’t in the movies. Although LucasFilm isn’t exactly famous for continuity, what do you think will happen to her at the end of the series?

I think she’s going to die, but the question of her fate will probably be answered in the final (perhaps 5th?) season. The show builds up a positive and somewhat simplistic view of the Republic, partly because it’s a kid’s show, but there’s a sense of pathos for the older audience who know all the relationships between the clones and Jedi will break down – and that Palpatine is really the bad guy. Ahsoka’s death is prophesised between the episodes 3×09-13, but these episodes were very weird and hard to interpret.

BadRep Towers: We found some forum posts from parents saying how much their daughters admire Ahsoka – though there are a few questions about her costume being raised which we also thought were interesting – do you think her bare midriff is a less applaudable design decision, or does it fit well with her teenage tearaway identity?

This is one subject that I didn’t want to acknowledge because it’s so complicated – but it is a critical consideration if we’re looking at this as feminists. I just did a Google image search to remind myself of her different outfits, and I found some fanart, ‘sexy’ cosplay outfits, and a few actual pictures from the series. In a way, I think that reinforces the answer I was originally going to give to you. My view is this: the show is expressed through a male gaze in the sense that in a series about war, technology, weaponry and realpolitik, almost all of the people in positions of authority (clone commanders, Jedi generals, Palpatine, Dooku, Yoda etc) are men. To be honest, I don’t know how to interpret Ahsoka’s bare midriff. In one sense you might say that because it’s science fiction, all kinds of kooky outfits can exist to highlight non-human styles and costumes. You might also say that female Jedi tend to dress a little bit differently to male Jedi. On the other hand, when I did that Google search, under ‘related searches’ there’s ‘ahsoka tano pregnant’. I’ve also found some fairly sexualised fan pictures. So I think it’s fair to say that among a large number of (probably) male fans, her outfit has been interpreted as ‘sexually provocative’.

I think this is the kind of issue that people will have to interpret in their own way – just because she dresses in a certain way that some men definitely think is sexual, doesn’t mean there isn’t scope for alternative interpretations. However, I’m no sociologist, and I’m not a woman. I lean on the side that it’s a bit ‘male gaze’ since Padawans would officially wear something like what Obi-Wan did in Episode 1, and judging by some of the fanart out there of what is a fictional teenage girl.

BadRep Towers: Touching on something you said earlier about heroines being defined by sexuality or romantic roles – do you think Ahsoka’s relative lack of sexuality is actually, perhaps, an existing trope? I’m thinking of young female warriors such as Joan of Arc (what TVTropes calls the ‘Jeanne D’Archetype’, although they list Leia as an example, which might not fit your take on her!). I like Joan-type figures so I don’t see this as a bad thing, but I think it’s interesting that trends in TV and Hollywood are often so overbearing that a reaction against “defining women by their sexuality” is to remove sexuality wholesale. Would you put her down as a Jeanne D’Archetype?

The short answer is that I’m not quite sure how to think about this issue. There are so few female characters in significant roles in TCW – 3-10 characters represent the whole of the galaxy’s female gender. As you point out, Jeanne D’Archetype is defined in non-sexual terms, and Ahsoka fits this. She also has a rare force power that can see the future, so that and being part of a religious order kind of puts her strongly in this trope. But without doing a discourse/content analysis on 80 episodes of the show, there are a good few instances of other significant female characters portraying a sexual/romantic dimension. Padme’s is Anakin’s secret wife; Duchess Satine has a hinted romantic relationship with Obi Wan (but she isn’t defined by it) and there is a controversial banned clip of one episode where the dark Jedi Asajj Ventriss kisses a clone as she kills him.

I think it’s quite notable that Ahsoka is one of the most important female characters and is not defined by who she fancies. Of all the things I am currently watching and streaming, it’s probably the only instance.

• Michael moderates and blogs at Noumenal Realm and tweets at @NoumenalRealm. Last year at a talk he gave, Michael was critiqued for perpetuating a ‘white and bourgeoisie elitism’ for his Kantian/Adorno-influenced views on art and culture. If it’s possible for a British Asian from a working class background to be accused of being a white dead German, he supposes its okay for him to be accused of being a feminist too. His favourite character in Star Wars is Palpatine.

1. Examples of this include Ahsoka working with Jedi Apprentice Barriss Offee on a difficult mission where they are on their own without support, and an instance where Senator Amidala works with head of state Duchess Satine of Mandalore to solve a corruption scandal, each expressing their political values along the way.