“It’s all about the joy of creation…”

… is the song that Lego use on their website to showcase their Friends series.

Not what you were expecting? Perhaps you thought Stand By Your Man or some other such cringeworthy song might be more appropriate for a series so blatantly gendered. Well, so did I, but one happy little girl at a time, the Friends range has swayed my feelings.

Let me backtrack and give it some history.

The Lego Friends series was released earlier this year.

When the toys (and adverts) were unleashed, the internet seemingly exploded with outrage. (I am,
of course, referring to my internet – the one with feminist twitter feeds, blogs about toys and sexy pictures of Neil Gaiman. Your internet might be a bit different.)

In particular I watched Feminist Frequency’s videos on the series, but I also read blogposts from dads who want their girls to work in Silicon Valley and study at MIT.

The first few toys released were a bakery, a café, a beauty shop, a house and an inventor’s
workshop. These initial toys are made up of pastel pink and purple bricks, they only feature girls and
those roles present are mainly gendered home-keeping roles.

My blood was boiling, like many other people’s, at the narrow roles I could see girls being pushed into. At my local Toys R Us there is a vast collection of Lego from the Creator series to Cars. In fact I have never seen so much in one retailer.

However, the Friends series is not placed in their giant Lego selection. It is in a (very clearly labelled) ‘Girlz’ aisle,nowhere near the Lego corner, which has so much sparkle and glitter I thought cupcakes were
going to spontaneously erupt from the walls.

Friends is not like the rest of Lego: it’s for girls, and must be segregated.

So far, so sexist.

However, I’m slowly putting the guns down. Across the various worlds of Lego, equality is growing. As someone who has an obsessive love of toys, I frequently visit their website. Every time I find
myself riled up about Lego, I go on the site and find that a far greater balance of characters is presented there than we see in the shops.

For example, they have little character bios for nearly every mini-figure. I was angry about the lack of girl characters in Spinjitzu. But Nya (pictured right) has a  token girl description which does include phrases like “she’s no damsel in distress” and “Nya is fed up with the ninjas’ boy’s club syndrome”.

Here, the minority female mini figures I have collected become role models. Still a token, but a valuable one at that, and the question remains why we don’t see more of this outside of the website.

I recently decided to explore the Friends section of the website and was pleasantly surprised and then genuinely excited about what it offers. I believe that Lego listened to the petition from Change.org (the one that got over 50,000 signatures, the one I signed) back in April 2012, and have turned something that was completely sexist into a city of steps toward empowerment.

First of all, they have toned down the overwhelming pink tones of the bricks, and gone for more brown tones, like the riding camp. There is also a greater range of sets, including a treehouse, design
studio, bedroom set with a drum kit and the Heartlake Flying Club.

This last set was definitely the swing vote for me. It has the least amount of pink; mere touches of it on the plane. Furthermore, the stereotyped role for women in a plane is Air Hostess, and Lego didn’t go there. Stephanie is the pilot of her own seaplane, looking more Amelia Earhart than Pan Am.

The Friends themselves might enjoy traditionally feminine roles, but they also have jobs, varied interests and detailed characters that allow for diverse roleplaying. The key with Lego is that it can be as many things as you can imagine. Emma’s Design Studio, for instance, has one piece which suggests this is for fashion – but with the large desk, the ruler and the laptop Emma could just as easily be an architect or an engineer.

We also shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that enjoying balloons or sweets makes you weak. It’s more that giving girls only that which is sugary-sweet which is the issue. Although Lego still have a long way to go, I think there are at least positive conversations being had at Lego HQ.

In her second Lego video Anita Sarkeseesian says that the emphasis with the Lego Friends series is on traditional home-keeping play. She cites the adverts, comparing the Friends advert slogan “Drive to the newly built café” to the “You can build the castle” of another Lego advert featuring some classic father-son bonding.

She draws the reasonable conclusion that boys are offered a more active play experience that encourages them to use maths and motor skills.

However, if we look on the Lego website the section for Friends has the theme song I quoted at the beginning of this post, which accompanies all their videos:

“We can do it, we can dream a whole new way
We can do it, you can build with me today
It’s all about the joy of creation”

I think this new emphasis on building which is subtly surrounding you the whole time you shop is part of a change that encourages girls to gain all the skills and experiences that Lego has to offer.

They may not have it all, but the newer Lego Friends sets and marketing are a step in the right direction, and with these steps being echoed in other areas of the Lego Universe… watch this space.

• Ruth Coustick has yet to understand the concept of ‘growing up’. She spends her hard-earned cash on Playmobil pirates and building Lego versions of Samus, and wants to see the childish books and toys she loves become more diverse and inclusive. She works in digital rights and has a host of other nerdy interests like comics, board games and First World War poetry. She blogs about her life and fashion at Origami Girl.

You may also be aware of the FREE HUGS meme. It’s quite sweet: you hold a sign with “FREE HUGS” on it, and people can come to you to claim their free hug. Because free things are nice, hugs shouldn’t be charged for, and aaahhh and d’awww and other such sentiments. FREE HUGSing is very prevalent at comic conventions.

Having set that up, let me tell you a tale.

The scene: a large and popular comic convention held in a large and popular UK city. It’s spring, verging on summer, and it’s warm.

Cosplayers roam the convention with absurdly large props and wigs, and excited teenagers clutch bags of stash from their favourite webcomic artists, faces flushed with glee. Someone is dressed as a cardboard box. Someone else has a large plush Totoro. Gangs of Stormtroopers march about, videogame demos blare and cameras flash.

Numerous people saunter about, idly holding scraps of paper with “FREE HUGS” scrawled on them in pen, either because it’s what everyone is doing, or because they hope for a tiny scrap of human affection in this amazing sea of other people’s playtime.

Something terrible jingles past.

A long, thin, white jingling thing, with no real face and long tentacular horns. It has claws and hooves and no eyes and… a FREE HUGS sign all of its own.

Jingle, jingle, slrrrrrrrp.

Do you hug it?

My costume monster, Babylon, is a non-gendered-but-femme creature, with no anthropomorphic secondary sex characteristics, but with performatively femme behaviour.

Now, as it is rare for women to “perform” their femininity, performative femininity generally tends to be the preserve of people that don’t identify as women – because “performance” indicates a degree of “artifice”, and it is unusual for someone to “put on” the presentation that’s generally considered “appropriate” for their identity.

(But of course, it does happen, because everything does, and identity and presentation are two different things and being a woman doesn’t make your presentation femme by default, so of course one can identify as female and also perform your femininity. That’s a thing that happens too. I don’t need to explain these things to you: you know about stuff, you’re all down with this. Back to telling the tale.)

So. Big, sparkly performance femme-ness is A Thing and a grand one at that – just, not necessarily tethered to a gender identity.  So Babylon is very hard to read. It’s too over-the-top femme to be a girl, but surely boy monsters are big and spiky, right?

Obviously, the answer is that Babylon is non-binary, but our average member of the public in need of a full Gender 101 isn’t going to assume that.

I had lots of fun wearing Babylon during the convention, mostly because it is nice to dress as a monster, but also because I discovered a few interesting things about how people interact with an ungenderable non-human costume.

• Teenage girls with stripy armwarmers shrieked with delight at Babylon, largely gendered it male, and happily gave it hugs.
• Women my age wanted photographs and loved Babylon’s boots.
• Older steampunk gentlemen gendered it female and wanted photographs.

But the most hilarious demographic by far was teenage boys, and other men in costumes.

Teenage boys roam in knots about conventions, all holding papery requests for hugs. Their knuckles blanched as their grip on their FREE HUGS signs tightened when Babylon indicated that their desire for hugs was the same, and came over to hug them.

Oh, they didn’t like it. Oh, teenage boys didn’t like the Babylon. Oh no.

“What is it?” they said.
“Urgh,” they said.
“Oh man, it’s a bloke, mate,” they said.

Babylon is not a bloke. I’m a bloke; Babylon is a Babylon. They didn’t want photographs.

slrrrrrrrpp

You probably see where I’m going with this. My next example is brilliant.

I Babyloned up to a group of Star Wars Stormtroopers. Now, I rather like masks and men in uniform, so I saw this as a brilliant opportunity to put the “play” into “cosplay” and be an alien at them. Which is what I did.

Babylon jingled everywhere and posed for photographs, and one of the chaps, reading Babylon as female, got a bit saucy with it. This is fine, and Babylon, of course, sauced right back, all jingly silver bits and long talons – and then the Stormtrooper asked us, “Getting a bit hot are we, ma’am?”

Babylon made a surprised gesture (it doesn’t have a mouth) and indicated that he was wrong, and it wasn’t a “ma’am.”

The Stormtrooper, who had been happily playing moments before, rasped, “Oh my god, you’re a dude,” and immediately stopped playing. He backed right off.

I wondered if this was the first time in his life that he had ever had anyone he had not been sexually interested in being flirtatious and forward at him.

I idly thought about all the times I’ve been out with lady friends of mine who’ve experienced street harassment. Random strangers making sexual advances they weren’t comfortable with. I suppressed the urge to tear off my monster mask and bellow, “HUURARRRGGH, FEMINISM, NYERRRGH” and spray liquid feminism at him from my nipples.

Remembering that I’ve been told that sort of behaviour “hurts the cause”, I kept my mask on and flounced off elsewhere.

What’s the moral to this post? There isn’t one, really. It was just an amazing, beautiful, interesting and inspirational experience to be both fully androgynous and have no face.

I’m androgynous myself in presentation and I get gendered more-or-less randomly, but I have a human face, and this means I get treated differently from if I don’t. Some of the roughest transphobia I’ve ever had was when I was masked, and I don’t think that was a coincidence. Babylon doesn’t have anything like a human face: just two slits with emergent tentacles, and this simultaneously intimidates people and makes them feel more free to loudly express their opinion of it.

I’ll be at the large, popular comic convention again at the end of October. If you’re going too this Hallowe’en, come and find us and give us a hug!

First photograph used with permission of the owner; second picture courtesy of the artist. Stormtrooper image Creative Commons, from Wikipedia. 

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.

About a month ago I emailed both Sainsburys and Tesco, following it up with tweets, about the gendering of magazines. It seemed wrong that New Scientist, Photography, NME, The Economist and Private Eye sat in ‘Men’s Interests’ sections while women had the 3,738 fashion and beauty mags as well as knitting and cooking mags.

Tesco were the first to respond, telling me via tweet that they were passing this up to central management:

It took a while for anything else to happen, but a week later I got an email from Sainsburys saying that where they were refurbishing or creating a new store, they would cease to gender their magazines.

Fabulous. I mean, I would prefer it if they spent the small amount of money printing new labels for the plastic holders on their magazine racks and replaced them all NOW, but that’s because they have a lot of stores, and seeing this every day still makes my head hurt and fear for young girls who go in and subconsciously learn that science and politics are not for them and that they should concentrate on being pretty while cooking.¹

But Tesco still haven’t replied properly. Nothing more except another tweet to BadRep saying management are looking at it. And now, the Everyday Sexism Project (@EverydaySexism on Twitter, and you can also check out the hashtag #everydaysexism) is really helping out – drawing attention to the gendered labels in a local store and retweeting those pressuring @UKTesco to take some form of action.

What would be even better would be for more of us to email them. And while you’re at it, email Sainsburys too and ask them to put their hand in their pocket to start making the changes now, so we don’t have to look at this sexism everyday. It’s just not good enough.

• To contact Tesco, go here. For Sainsburys, here.

1. Ed’s tiny note: Or indeed the boys who learn to compartmentalise “knitting”, for example, as “for girls” – certainly some proud male knitters have commented on this site in the past!

And if you have a guest post brewing in your brain, you know what to do: pitch us at [email protected].

Image: Flickr user Toban Black (http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobanblack/)

The Problem

Dear Tesco and Sainsburys,

Can you please cease categorising The Economist, New Scientist, Private Eye, and the Spectator as ‘Men’s Interest’ magazines? I think you’ll find all genders are interested in politics and business. You are perpetuating the myth that women only care about (because they are valued for) their beauty.

While I accept (but hate) that a large proportion of women read Cosmo and Marie Claire and Good Housekeeping, I think that a large proportion also watch the news, vote, work, and may be interested in reading The Economist from time to time. You don’t segregate papers (although papers themselves, with their Femail sections, and Style sections, also start pushing my buttons). Why the shit have you determined that certain topics are not for the eyes of women?

Women still suffer unequal pay way before they think about maternity leave, and this is part of the same problem – you are saying that business and politics (something we are all involved in, one way or another) is purely the domain of men.

Sort this out immediately, please. It’s patronising and misogynistic. Actually, can you please also remove film, photography, game, cars, nature and music mags from the same category while you are at it, as that’s also inaccurate as well? Unless you think women can’t like music, cars, photography, video games, nature and film? I mean, it’s not as if you really think only men are interested in those topics, right? You have to admit that, say, there have been some female musicians, and some women actually enjoy going to the cinema and hey, Diane Arbus existed, and gosh, there are female commuters on the roads.

I’d stick with just Men’s Health if I were you, and even that’s shaky.

Thanks,

Women in the UK

What to do?

To complain to Tesco, please go here. For Sainsburys, here. If we get enough people complaining, maybe they’ll actually listen and change their stores. I mean, if a little girl can get the name of a loaf of bread changed at Sainsbury’s, surely they’re amenable to listening to vindicated complaints by women who are tired of being told to not use our brains and instead just look pretty. I mean, bread name change by photogenic small child must have meant something rather than being innocuous PR in a time of recession, right?

Boom! Progress from Sainsburys!

From: Sainsburys
To: Lizzie

Dear Lizzie

Thank you for your email and suggestion that we reconsider the signage used to categorise magazines in our stores. I understand you feel our current method is dated and we certainly do not want to imply the magazines are gender specific.

Up until now we have used information from publishers, who identify the target demographic for their magazines. We have organised the magazines on our shelves accordingly. We appreciate the points you have made, and have undertaken a review of the signage we use in store.

I am pleased to say that going forward, our magazines will be shown by genre and they will not have a gender prefix. There will not be an immediate change to the magazine sections in all our stores as this will be a gradual roll out replacing the existing signage. This should also address the grammar issues that you kindly brought to our attention.

We appreciate you taking the time to contact us, giving us the opportunity to look into your concerns. We look forward to seeing you in store again soon.

So that just leaves Tesco, from whom, as we go to press, Lizzie is still waiting to hear. Bad form, guys. (Although what Sainsburys mean by “grammar issues” is eluding us slightly here at BR Towers. This is a SEXISM ISSUE.)

Time to get on it, readers! To the Tesco feedback page, one and all.

• Thanks to Lizzie for making a noise and sending us her progress. Have you had a Customer Service Breakthrough or Problem lately? Get in touch and tell us all about it!

I say ‘feminist’ up there, I’m not sure that’s how all these artists would define themselves, but if you are a feminist or even have an interest in gender I think you may find a lot to love in their work. To be honest I’m not even sure they’d all call themselves cartoonists either… You may well have heard of them before, but if not, you’re in for a treat.

Planned Parenthood Superhero by Ellen Forney

1) Ellen Forney

I picked up I Love Led Zeppelin after Forney was mentioned in Trina Robbins’ fantastic book From Girls to Grrrlz. It would have been worth it just for the fantastic ‘how to’ series, which include: how to re-attach an amputated finger, how to dominate someone, how to talk to your kids about drugs. But there’s lots of good stuff here (especially if you like your stuff on the queer side) and I love Forney’s warm, clear lines.

The Plantagenets by Kate Beaton

2) Kate Beaton

Creator of the sublime Hark! A Vagrant. Lovely sketchy style and irreverent, affectionate, feminist comics about famous figures from literature and history including personal favourites Queen Elizabeth I and the Brontes.

This Shit Gets Me Down by Kate Leth

3) Kate Leth

Works in a comic book shop, is awesome. Cartoonifies episodes from her life and renders them adorable. Bonus points for feminism, geekery, queer themes and excellent tattoos. The Ultimate Kate or Die book is available from Etsy.

Mermaid and pirate embrace, by Dame Darcy

4) Dame Darcy

Artist, doll-maker, banjo-player, part-time mermaid… Dame Darcy is morbid and fabulous just like her comic Meat Cake, which largely defies description. A bizarre and chaotic mix of Victoriana, fairytales, gothic and goth, Meat Cake has a cast of equally strange characters which include a smooth-talking wolf, a superbitch mermaid, and the tragic undead Strega Pez who can communicate only through messages delivered on Pez-like tablets from her slashed throat. Makes Gloom Cookie look like The Archers.

Lovelace with cogs, by Sydney Padua

5) Sydney Padua

Sydney Padua is responsible for taking the already badass Ada Lovelace, putting her in breeches, giving her a raygun and setting her off on a series of steampunk adventures where she can use MATHS to fight crime, solve mysteries, battle vampire poets etc… There’s a book on the way it seems, but in the meantime you can buy 2D Goggles merch.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a history with kitchen equipment – it’s a sad, sad story involving a large quantity of Red Bull, an all-nighter at University, an offer of 50p, a camera, a toaster, and my genitals. The problem is that the output of my culinary bodgejobs tend to be either inedible, burned, or contain more cheese than the average human is capable of dealing with.

It’s hard to deny that cookery is fun, though. Get in a kitchen, crack out all kinds of implausibly-shaped apparatus, put squishy and goopy and chewy things together, bung it in the oven, hope for the best. It’s like science, but with an end product that will either serve as your dinner or a cheaper alternative to Polyfilla.

So, if you’re like me and you feel that, for the sake of all involved, cookery is best done vicariously – it saves on cleanup, anyway – fear not, because the Internet is here to help.

It Begins: Epic Meal Time

Epic Meal Time is where it all started. A bunch of guys got together with a camera and made some brilliant, stupid food. The preview frame for each video contains a picture of the eldritch horror that is produced, along with its calorie count.

Previous creations include their riff on the turducken – the TurBacon Epic (79,046 calories, pictured above, and described as ‘a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig’), Fast Food Sushi (11,816 calories of I assure you that you really don’t want to know), and the Valentine’s Day special – 190,400 calories of ‘Super Sloppy Sundae‘.

I think we can rest assured that this is the kind of cookery that would give Jamie Oliver an aneurysm, and the rest of us a nasty case of angina. And why the hell not? It’s your body, and you should choose exactly what you want to put into it. If you can have a good time with your friends in the process, so much the better.

Epic Meal Time was brilliant, witty, and otherwise furiously entertaining for a long time. It got the idea that cooking could be a gentlemanly pursuit out there to a lot of eyeballs, and that has value. What ruined it though was, like so many things, its own success. Suddenly, the self-parodying bravado of this group of friends became actual bravado. A sponsorship deal and continuous references to ‘Internet Money’ took the metaphorical axe to the humour.

Behold: Epic Meal Time’s personal twist on gender balancing.

It wasn’t just that, though. You can be damn certain that if I’m getting the arse on at something on BadRep, there’s a gender angle too, and sure enough, there is. When the bravado became too genuine, the continuous (and already tenuous) references to ‘bitches’ went from problematic to outright misogynist. Attractive women started to feature in the videos – but only eating the food, never participating in its creation as part of the group. I can’t even remember a single video in which you hear a female voice.

Once it stopped being self-parodying and just became self-aggrandising, the shark had been jumped.

Scandinavia Steps In: Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time

A Swedish gentleman with the kind of facial hair not seen since the heady days of Technoviking decided that Sweden could do better without making any special effort.

With the ancient Swedish tradition of bacon tug-of-war, everyone’s a winner.

Our host regaled us with fairly uninspiring, everyday meals, prepared in a wonderfully over-the-top manner. Mayonnaise was eaten straight from the jar (“PRE DINNER SNACK. IT’S GOOD FOR YOU”). Butter was smeared by punching it. Cardboard packaging was opened with teeth. Water for boiling pasta was collected in the form of snow.

There’s undeniable machismo, but since this show is meant as a parody of Epic Meal Time, I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made for it being exaggeration for the sake of comedy. It doesn’t grate in the same way that Epic Meal Time started to.

Cooking is a better experience when combined with facial hair and shouting. Fetch yourself a horn of mead and check it out.

The obligatory, if unorthodox, musical: Vegan Black Metal Chef

Black metal conjures up imagery of teenagers in too much makeup running through the woods, filming themselves on their Dad’s camcorder, while they scream about the Grim Frostbitten North and wield ludicrous knives that they bought on eBay.

What it doesn’t conjure up, however, is vegan cuisine.

This is exactly the reason that Vegan Black Metal Chef is amazing.

The Dark Lords of the Deep are well-known for their vegan tastes.

The effort that goes into the Vegan Black Metal Chef kitchen is pretty mindblowing. The whole place is outfitted with studded black leather, occult symbols, skulls, you name it. The food isn’t particularly inspiring, but that might just be how I see vegan food. Fortunately, the food is far from the point.

Black metal is another field of intense bravado. Though I don’t want to paint an entire subculture by the failings of its extremes, it’s hard to avoid the fact that black metal fandom is a subculture full of homophobia and transphobia, and is often popularly associated with Nazi music. It’s wonderful, then, that Vegan Black Metal Chef is so inherently subversive. It’s self-deprecating mockery in which you’re invited to laugh with someone at the sillier bits of their own subculture, and that makes it a pleasure to watch.

The extensive make-up is a  wonderful parallel here with more ‘traditional’ female-led cookery shows, particularly Nigella Lawson’s sexualised content where her appearance is pushed to the audience just as much, if not more, than the actual food. Vegan Black Metal Chef, it could be argued, takes host-over-food cookery content to the next level.

In any case, do you want to see a man in corpsepaint invoke Lovecraftian horrors over a bowl of Pad Thai? Of course you do. Vegan Black Metal Chef is for you.

Booze and brilliance: My Drunk Kitchen

As far as I’m concerned, My Drunk Kitchen is the best cooking show on the Internet right now. Hosted by Hannah Hart, it’s a very simple premise – drink booze and cook some stuff.

Shortly after this frame, the self-heating bag begins to billow smoke. If that isn’t selling you on My Drunk Kitchen, I don’t know what will.

It’s the first of the shows that I’ve covered here to feature a female host, and what I find particularly important is that it doesn’t fucking matter. There’s the occasional line that bugs me, but by and large the humour is genderless, and there’s no (or very little) cutesy look-at-me-I’m-a-girl-on-the-Internet-teehee. Hannah Hart is Hannah Hart, and she’s drinking beer and belching and overdoing it with the cheese and burning herself on the oven because fuck you, that’s why.

Far and away my favourite episode is the one where the good Ms. Hart tackles military Meals Ready to Eat – known as MREs – outdoors and clad in a bodgejobbed Braveheart-esque shawl.

It’s not going to teach you to cook. It’s going to make you grin repeatedly. Watch it.

And the rest

I’m absolutely certain that I’ve missed some gems. Have I neglected to mention your favourite homebrew cookery show? Let me know about it in the comments. If there are enough, and BadRep haven’t fired me for overuse of the term ‘bodgejob’, I’d love to write a followup with the fan favourites that I’m currently unfamiliar with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Brené Brown

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

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

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

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

The Trailers

You may remember that when I first burst onto the pages of BadRep I was talking about RPG advertising and the distinct lack of women in these trailers, despite the games’ built-in capability for you to play as a female protagonist. I mentioned Mass Effect advertisements, and no sooner had I criticised them than they announced they’d make a ‘FemShep’ trailer and let the fans vote on what she’d look like. So I thought it’d only be right to address the marketing of ME3 before I tell you all about the game itself.

The first glimpses we saw of Mass Effect 3 didn’t show a female Shepard; actually, they barely showed a male Shepard either (but he was still there) – we were simply teased with the knowledge that the war was coming to Earth. Notably, the voiceover doesn’t say “if he doesn’t bring help” but just says “Shepard” to avoid any issue of gender. But then you see male Shepard… so, er, kinda redundant there.

When they first showed everyone FemShep, to me, the trailer didn’t have the same production quality that it could have had, but they made this up with later offerings, such as those below.

Next we have the Take Earth Back pair of trailers; one male and one female. These two did good. They’re the same, just with a different version of Shepard in each. There’s no making one look cooler, or more badass, than the other, and that’s great. The pity is, though, that TV channels didn’t really seem to pick up FemShep’s version – I only ever saw the male version being broadcast.

Then we get to launch day and they start pushing the ‘Launch Trailer’, and as far as I can discover, there’s only one version: Male Shepard (or BroShep)’s version. This might not be too bad; there’s a lot of female characters shown – Ashley, Liara, Jack, Miranda etc – and that’s more than a lot of games can say at the moment. The thing that ruins it, though, is the (totally unnecessary) sex snapshot of Shepard bedding Ashley, who is the woman fighting beside you in the T.E.B. trailers I linked above.

Of course, it could be argued that having that in the trailer shows how you can romance your team-mates if you so desire and that it’s an all-inclusive RPG experience. But it really isn’t necessary and is completely discordant with the rest of the trailer.

The Packaging

Here I can only talk about my box when it arrived, so there may have been people receiving differently presented games. When my game arrived the sleeve insert (that paper thing that slips under the plastic on the box) was displaying a proud BroShep on the front and back. I was a bit disappointed as I’ve never really thought much about Template BroShep’s appearance as part of my gaming experience.

It wasn’t until I had to insert Disc 2 while loading the game that I discovered FemShep hiding underneath the disc! The cover is reversible, so you can have FemShep on the front and on the back (though the screenshot inserts are still BroShep) if you take the insert out and flip it around. Obviously, I did this immediately so I didn’t have to look at his smug face anymore. The reversibility is great, but you have to realise it’s available and then you have to do it yourself.

Have they done well, then?

I think they have, but there’s a bit of improving yet to do – not for Mass Effect, as the trilogy is now complete, but for other titles following in its footsteps.

The male interpretation of an either/or, binary choice, RPG protagonist is still the default in marketing, it seems. There may well be more male gamers buying these titles, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want to see all a game can offer.

I’m really very pleased that the marketing strategy has improved – at least for this game – and I’m hoping it’ll continue to do so for other releases this year and in the future. It is a real treat to see FemShep kicking some bottoms in that Take Earth Back trailer, and I hope we’ll see lots more awesome female protagonists to come.

—

As a side note: for those of you waiting to see a review, it’s coming – I’m just being extra thorough. And yes, I will talk about that ending and the ensuing furore.

Innocence and Sexualisation

The vigour with which some people are prepared to attack moves towards more open, honest and comprehensive sex and relationships education is baffling. What are they so afraid of? Educating young people about safer sex doesn’t lead to an increased sexual activity (that’s from this great Avert resource, by the way). Two words that pop up fairly regularly in the fog of general objection are ‘innocence’ and ‘sexualisation’. I think they’re masking other, simpler causes for so much reactionary guff, but let’s have a look at them anyway.

The idea that the ‘innocence’ of children must be protected at all costs is absurd. Innocence in the criminal sense is a good thing to hold on to, of course. But innocence in the wafty Victorian lamblike sense (aka “freedom from guilt or sin through being unacquainted with evil”)?.  I fail to see the value of being ‘unacquainted with evil’. Knowing about sex isn’t the same as having sex. And also: SEX ISN’T EVIL, GUYS. Besides, it’s a bit of a risk, if you ask me, turning someone loose in the world if they have no concept of evil. They’re in for a nasty shock and quite possibly some dangerous or exploitative situations. Likewise someone who has been kept in the dark about pregnancy, STIs or abuse. Even if you’re working with some kind of arcane points-based system of morality, how can you get your approval for being without sin just because you don’t know what sin is? That’s like congratulating someone on not eating the cookies they didn’t know were there.

Anyway, that’s enough poptheology. Next: ‘sexualisation’, on which I basically agree with Laurie Penny that the word is a “troubling piece of cultural shorthand” which

suggests that sexuality is something that is done to young women, rather than something that they can own and control: that they can never be sexual, only sexualised. This is not a helpful message to send to girls as they begin to explore their sexuality.

The moral panic over “sexualisation” assumes instead that sex is only ever damaging to young women, and that having sex or behaving sexually must be resisted for as long as possible. The problem is not, however, that young women are “growing up too fast” – rather it is that they are growing up to understand that they are erotic commodities, there to be used and abused, shamed if they express legitimate desires of their own, and taught to fear their own bodies.

Child sexual behaviour is complex and difficult to discuss, but it exists. Children have this weird habit of growing up. And it doesn’t work the way the Sun would have it – every girl is an innocent princess until a few moments past midnight on her 16^th birthday, at which point it’s A-OK to start slavering over her. Seriously, until 2004 plenty of Page Three girls were 16. There were even 16^th birthday specials in some other tabloids. Your, er… your double standard is poking out, by the way.

Ewwww Isn’t Good Enough

Critics of broader sex education have done a pretty good job of cosying up to some quarters of the feminist movement, and I’d love to believe that concern over women or children’s wellbeing lay at the heart of the Bailey Review and the media outrage. But it doesn’t. Sexual conservatism is shorthand for a certain kind of morality, and this is a holier-than-thou contest fuelled by the crippling shame and squeamishness about sex that is our shared cultural inheritance. That’s why we feel the need to keep any notion of sex away from children for as long as possible, because on some level, we do think there’s something bad about sex. What other explanation can there be? An otherwise sensible, right-on and feminist former manager of mine once insisted we end a teabreak conversation about how often you should have a sexual health checkup, saying “Can you just stop talking about it please? It makes me feel all ewwww.”

Well, feeling ‘ewwww’ has created a dangerous situation. Without giving children and teenagers a safe space in which to discuss and learn about sex, relationships and sexuality we are creating a vacuum that will be filled by three things: a) whatever their parents choose to tell them; b) all the shit teenagers talk to each other; and c) ideas about sex derived solely from cultural representations of it. Advertising and porn are the big guns here. The version of sex in most porn and advertising isn’t particularly safe, consensual, varied, respectful or even likely to be that much fun (good luck to any women planning on having an orgasm) and the additional messages it peddles about gender identity, power, race and sexual orientation are pretty unhelpful.

Some Scary Numbers

As well as the great Tory terror of teenage pregnancy *cue Hammer Horror evil laughter and lightning strike* this is a public health issue. Although last year there was a small decrease in the total number of STIs diagnosed in England, 2010 still clocked up 418,598 new diagnoses, and the under-25s experience the highest rates of STIs overall. In 2008, the UN reported that globally only 40% of young people aged 15-24 had accurate knowledge about HIV and transmission, while the same group accounted for 45% of all new HIV infections. SRE also presents an opportunity to undermine the stigma faced by people living with HIV through education about transmission without moral judgement. (Stats from here.)

This is important, big picture, long term stuff. It’s very hard to unlearn attitudes and prejudices formed in your early life, and not everyone has an Usborne Guide To Growing Up at hand (even that magnificent volume had its blind spots – Miranda reminded me of the ‘kthanxbai!’ box-out on homosexuality…² ) But there are excellent people fighting the good fight who deserve your support. Here’s a linklist – go show them some well-informed, safe and respectful love.

Campaigns, Organisations and Events

• Education for Choice
• A rallying cry by Zoe Margolis on Comment is Free
• Petition for 21^st C sex and relationships education
• Sex Appeal comedy fundraiser
• National AIDS Trust campaign to get HIV education into classrooms
• Brook
• FPA
• HIVAware
• Avert

Resources and Badass Sex Educators

• Vagina Pagina
• Bish
• Scarleteen
• UNESCO International technical guidance on sexuality education: an evidence-informed approach for schools, teachers and health educators
• Sexedukation
• SRE Project
• Contraception Education
• Dr Petra Boynton
• Dr Petra’s Twitter list of sex educators

1. Ed’s note: I can’t bear linking the Mail and am still in mourning for IstyOsty, but search and ye shall find; it’s titled “Casual Sex and ‘Bad Touching’: Guess What Your Eight Year Old Is Learning At School These Days”. *facepalm*
2. Ed butting in again: has this been expanded yet? Anyone seen if they’ve revised it to be even slightly less heteronormative? *shuts up*