Age old question, really, this one, and one where “want” and “need” are often made unhelpfully interchangable, just to make it EVEN SIMPLER.

Welcome back to Feminist TwitBomb, Deluxe Edition, in which we take a sexist Twitter hashtag and try and make it slightly less soul-harrowingly bleak by exploring its inherent absurdity, usually with caps lock, bad puns, and the sudden appearance of wildlife. Previously on this channel: how #TipsForLadies was skewered.

Abridged (But Still Frustrating) History Of The #WhatAWomanNeeds Question

• 14th century: The Wife of Bath tells us one particular knight (and rapist) had a complicated time working it out.
• 1920s: Freud facetiously prattled about it (often available as a patronising e-card or rubbish Tumblr graphic. Life=complete).
• 1993: Tammy Wynette warbled “a ring on my finger and champagne on ice” at Elton John in a song helpfully titled A Woman’s Needs; if you are lucky enough to have these items to hand, I advise you to down the entire bottle before you try to listen.
• 1999: Even Christina Aguilera is disappointingly lyrically coy about it – the song is originally titled What A Girl Needs and renamed to Wants by the record label execs. FOR FEMINISM, I assume. (Either way, apparently the answer is “whatever her dude wants her to want/need”).

PROBLEMATIC, as Tumblr might say.

It’s all fine, though, guys, because TWITTER TO THE RESCUE. Eat your heart out, Sigmund, Xtina and Geoff, for the question will now be answered.

#WhatAWomanNeeds

An initial peek at the feed for this trending topic was a little bit unedifying. I’ve anonymised the authors because they’re really only being quoted for background. The fun comes later when you lot get involved.

“Curves and long hair”

Does it matter where the hair is? Can it be in my nostrils?

“Endless closet space”

FOR THE SKULLS OF THE FALLEN.

“a guy who will protect her like she’s his daughter, love her like she’s his wife, and respect her like she’s his mother.”

Apart from the fact that many of us do not fancy these things at all (or men), this is a worryingly ambitious MAIDEN-MOTHER-CRONE SUPERCONFLATION, and I am not paying his therapy bill when shit gets too confusing.

“oven mittens”

… hoo, boy, watch out, sisterhood. This dude’s a serious wordsmith.

“to meet One Direction”

Ah, shit. *throws up hands* Busted.

You get the picture there, anyway: high time, we decided, for a cheering TwitBomb session.

What the hell is this world where neither the pay gap nor Kool and the Gang are given true credence.

Amazingly, all these things can benefit blokes, too.

Now we’re talking, ladies. Now we’re talking.

From a friend on a locked account:

(In a strictly non-imperialist way, mind: no colonial elephant-hunting or dodgy empiring here. The helmet will be ethically sourced in a fetching shade of electric blue fairtrade material and will mainly be worn by the aforementioned wisecracking mandrill. Whom I have named Artemisia.)

"Fuck Jimmy Choo."

I got pretty wrapped up in this whole sweetly awesome world we were creating, actually.

Seriously. I cannot believe LEGO are still spraying all their “girl budget” on pastel shades whilst failing entirely to address the lack of ladypirates in this product’s long and otherwise noble lineage. Yes, I know there was one or two. One or two is NOT ENOUGH.

It just fucks with my chi, that whole business, okay?

OK, I feel better now :).

Stellar advice from one of the brilliant Better Strangers Opera collective there. (The Apocalypse Girls would be proud.)

This next one actually broke into the Top Entries for this hashtag, which I frankly regard as one of my life’s crowning achievements so far. It’s sitting there, nestled loudly between Smug “Oven Mitts” Guy and Creepy Oedipal Posturings. It’s ruining the vibe of patronage-and-patronising quite nicely. Proud moment.

(I feel like a load of Level 50 Gyrados waving DEFEND THE NHS placards would only be a good thing, really.)

A hat trick of pragmatism for us all from our own Markgraf. By the way, this team is never going to conduct a TwitBomb without reference to the noble pheasant at some point. No reason. It’s just better than ovens, chivalry and sleaze. And when these sorts of ridiculous generalisations continue to be hashtagged, surely anything goes.

"hey girl"

Other Vital LadyNeeds(TM)

• Reasonable Armour
• “A BRA THAT FECKING FITS PROPERLY! Also no more sexism ever please”
• “additional bionic arms”
• Destruction of tedious genderessentialism
• Awesome orchestral movie soundtrack for daily life
• A violent end to the categorisation of “WOMEN” (and “men”!) as amorphous Borg-like blobs of sexist predictability, unvaried by differences of any kind
• FAITHFUL CAPSLOCK BUTTON

And More Seriously

…you’d be hard pressed to argue with this one, whoever you are.

I’m glad we had this talk, Twitter. Now this pressing question’s been answered, we can all get back to the revolution.

Hoverboards, DEPLOY.

Last week’s example was the trending topic “Tips for Ladies”. The online world took this tremendous opportunity to help guide women through life by posting thousands of tweets featuring the words ‘cooking’, ‘cleaning’, ‘clothes’ and advice on how to be more sexually available to men, all with exciting new adventures in spelling and grammar. (Don’t search for it. Just don’t. Your brain doesn’t need the trauma). Okay, look, here’s one at random and you can take my word for it that there are many pages of similar entries:

#TipsForLadies Cooking and Cleaning up does not make you a good woman.Your suppose to do that.

(I choose to read this as “Following society’s bullshit gender roles won’t make you a magnificent person – YOU are the one who must strive to transform yourself.” I choose to interpret it like this, because otherwise I would turn to drink most days.)

But then…

Then I noticed something new. It started small and grew as the rebellion began… BadRep’s very own Hannah Chutzpah brought the first one to my attention:

@MissEllieMae
#TipsForLadies Remember, when enacting nuclear fusion, the nickel isotope is more stable than the iron isotope.

I decided to write one of my own:

#TipsForLadies CERN’s results where neutrino speed appeared to break relativity were probably due to relativistic motion of the GPS clocks.

Markgraf weighed in:

#TipsForLadies Pheasants are easy both to capture and domesticate.

But it wasn’t just Team BadRep on the case.

@prattprattpratt
The way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach… unless your sword is kinda bendy upwards. #TipsForLadies

@GRILLEVERYTHING
#TipsForLadies When battling Gorgons, avoid turning into stone by only viewing your foe through a reflective surface.

@MsBathtub
#tipsforladies The ability to start a fire can mean the difference between life & death in survival situations.

(Ms Bathtub also quoted Rilke).

And another from Ellie Mae:

@MissEllieMae
#TipsForLadies Join a union. You’ll get paid more and have better working conditions.

Even Darth Vader’s PR team got in on the act:

@DeathStarPR
#TipsForLadies Don’t be a Bella Swan when you could be a Princess Leia. #StarWars

The line says "Remembered for 30 years, the same way Bella Swan won't be."

And I felt a little better. Found Feminism is often about finding voices fighting back in unexpected places, and that’s exactly what I hope people take away from this. In the online environment, we are surrounded by people too young, inexperienced or just plain bigoted to spread anything but the easiest, most poisonous dreck society has to peddle. The answer is to speak up. Use comedy, use popular trends, but even if it’s just you and just once, speak up for equality. And we’ll leave little beacons of hope in the places most easily reached by the most people.

Twitter is regularly a hopeless mess of misogyny – I could pick a new trending topic every week.

That just means we have to engage with it MORE.

Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck

Anyhow, on to finer things.

Now, I particularly love Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck in the revamped Battlestar Galatica. And that in itself would be a Found Feminism, if it weren’t already enormously obvious, especially after everyone (well, some bloke) got their knickers in a twist over Starbuck being played by a woman.

For reference, a good interview with Ron Moore, the director, on that decision is here.

We can rejoice in that decision, and also now in the existence of (new) Starbuck as an internet meme.

Which brings me rather meanderingly to the actual Found Feminism. This hashtag: #thingsstarbuckwouldntsay, started off on Twitter by Katee herself.

Personal favourites, hand picked by fellow Bad Repper and Sci Fi nerd, Steve:

Does this flightsuit clash with my highlights?

I’m sure you’re all going the right way, … men always have a better sense of direction.

How many calories are in this drink?

I can’t go yet. I’m finishing my makeup!

Could Things Starbuck Wouldn’t Say be a Skippy’s List for Found Feminism?

So say we all.

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

Hashstag, by Rakka

Twitter hashtags make conversations and exchanges that would previously have been invisible to anyone not involved in them available to everyone. You can stick your head out of your own online bubble and peer into someone else’s. If you listen in to a conversation on a bus or in a bar you’ll often get a similar effect, and if you ever share a train carriage with a stag party you may well overhear some of the same sentiments.

There are a lot of possibilities and interesting conversations growing out of this (here’s a good Mashable post about cross-cultural conversations) but it can be uncomfortable having a front row seat for the social reproduction of gender stereotypes in real time.

Tweeting gender

[Apologies to any gender theorists out there for this next bit, in which I will be oversimplifying some complex ideas.]

[Oh and just to be clear, when I’m talking about men and women I don’t mean all men or all women, and I know those categories are far more fluid than our friends the hashtaggers would like to admit.]

Part of the Great Promise of the internet was that in the gap between your avatar and your fingertips on the keyboard all kinds of subversive genderfuck fun was to be had. And it is being had (hooray!), but there’s a tangible disappointment in some areas that the web is used as much to police and reinforce gendered ideas of appropriate behaviour as it is to undermine them. Social networks, it turns out, are simply another arena in which to enact and consolidate gender identity. Like the bus, like the pub.

And a big part of successfully Being A Man or Being A Woman is policing the behaviour of others. By laying down the rules you’re letting everyone know you understand them. In fact you’re an expert. By calling out someone else on their inappropriate behaviour (for example, women that are ‘loud’ – how unfeminine!) you’re picking up gender points for yourself. And appropriate gender behaviour points win prizes!

You can see this in action in the huge numbers of women participating in sexist hashtags and imparting helpful advice to their own gender:

#rulesforgirls stoppp being so easyyyy!

#ihatefemaleswho act like they in to sports

#agoodwoman sucks her mans dick w|. out no hesitation lOl.

#agoodwoman aims to please

Thanks for that. Now I’m all set. In another recent hashtag, #youneedanewboyfriend, large numbers of male and female Twitter users took the opportunity to remind everyone that male femininity = gay! Which as we all know = very bad indeed:

your man has more clothes with different shades of pink than you.#youneedanewboyfriend

If your man turns down sex from you, #youneedanewboyfriend

#youneedanewboyfriend If he knows all the words to every @ladygaga song out there #notnormal

It’s not just about putting women in their place, it’s about keeping men in line as well. If you can do both that makes you the Manliest Man of all, and king of all you survey. The tweets I quoted in the first post are part of this process. On the one hand encouraging traditionally feminine behaviours, and on the other boosting the masculinity points of the men tweeting, and asserting their dominance and entitlement (consider yourself lucky if you missed #itaintrape – that one was Not Nice).

What I think is happening here is that a large number of people are using a new medium to do exactly what an even larger number of people have already been doing for centuries, millennia, even. What’s different is that the isolated conversations are being collected and shared on a global platform.

What now?

"You are what you tweet" doodle by neabat

The flagrant misogyny of most of these trending topic hashtag tweets makes me furiously angry. But I don’t find them shocking. I think Germaine Greer is wrong on lots of things but right on this one: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.” Well, now we have a handy index in our Twitter sidebar. The scale of the problem is intimidating, I agree, but being shocked isn’t going to help.

The good news is we don’t need to start a cultural revolution from scratch. There’s some excellent work already going on: for example, Womankind and PinkStinks are challenging misogyny and sexist attitudes among young people (who seem like the obvious group to start with, to my mind).

There are also lots of truly wonderful online projects that are trying to break down some of these poisonous stereotypes and ideas. BadRep is one, of course ;-) .  But another of my favourites is Genderfork – follow them on Twitter for the perfect antidote to all this #rulesforgirls/boys crap.

What else can we do? Mocking the hashtags is fun. Hijacking them is fun too. It might not overthrow the sexist idiot regime, but if it makes just one person stop and think then it’s surely worth it. Another blogger on the topic of hashtags suggested getting some feminist hashtags circulating. Suggestions included #feminist and #ilovemybody. That’d be nice for other feminists, but I can’t see how they’d have very wide appeal, particularly because they don’t invite people to personalise them.

So I’m going to end with a challenge: can we come up with a funny, pro-feminist / genderfuck hashtag people might actually use?

Here are some examples of standard fare, from apparently male users. Apologies. They’re pretty grim.

#aGOODWOMAN knows how to shut the fuck up!!!!!!

#agoodwoman is always ready to give head!

#Agoodwoman cooks for u when u get in from work and gets up and cooks breakfast when u leavin to go to work

when y’all cheat, expect for it to be over… when us men cheat, you have to be forgiving and give us another chance… #rulesforgirls

#rulesforgirls When we say we wana watch football, that means no cleaning,no talking,NO FORM OF INTERACTION.We will Chris Brown you.

#ihatefemaleswho slap they boyfriend thinkin he wont hit you back

And my two favourites, from the same guy:

#IHateFemales Who want to be men. God gave you the best gift ever bitch, acknowledge it!

You tell her! Why on earth would she want to be a man? *scratches head*

#IHateFemales Who don’t see the beauty in them & still don’t take care of their bodies & looking decent.

Why can’t she see how beautiful she is? And maybe get a wax?

These make for depressing reading, and when you’re faced with a whole screenful and 60 more appear in a few minutes, it’s easy to feel hopeless.  But I don’t think what we’re watching is a misogynist Twitter takeover as some people have suggested. So what’s going on? I’ll start with some theories I have encountered and explain why I don’t think they’ll do as an answer.

A) “There are just more sexist idiots on Twitter / the internet than in Real Life”

I was at an event recently where Yasmin Alibhai-Brown spoke briefly about her recent run-in with Twitter, and was disappointed that the insight she chose to pass on to the room of feminists was to be careful of using Twitter because it’s filling up with horrible geeky misogynists.

Not really relevant, but I love it.

This comment on a blog post about hashtags clarified it for me: “I wish I understood how and why stupid hashtags become trending topics.”

Um. Because they’re popular?

Sorry everyone, I know you don’t want to hear this, but Twitter is people with misogynist views, at least if the trending topics are anything to go by. I would hazard that Twitter might feel like a feminist space that has been invaded by these ‘orrible ‘ashtags because you follow feminists. But we’re in the minority, just like in Real Life.

It’s much easier to craft your own media bubble online than offline, but it’s basically the same thing. If you read the Guardian, and hang out with other people who read the Guardian, then Guardian-y sort of opinions are going to appear to be the norm. Whereas the norm, in circulation figures at least, is actually the Sun. And then the Daily Mail.

Like I said, sorry.

B) “Because black people are more sexist than white people”

Click on a sexist trending topic hashtag. Everyone in the hashtag stream is African American. Therefore…

Just, whoa there. Wait a second. Since when are ALL BLACK PEOPLE represented by a subsection of a social network? Following that logic you might think that every single white person owns an iPad. And besides, there’s plenty of misogyny to be found in ‘white’ hashtags streams too – some of the trolling on #mooreandme for example – and on Twitter in general. Sexism isn’t restricted to hashtags.

I’ve seen a number of people describe trending topics hashtag streams as the ‘dark undercurrent’ or ‘dark side’ of Twitter.  I don’t think for a second that they were referring to the ethnicity of the users but I think it’s illuminating nonetheless. There are some fascinating (and sometimes toe-curling) discussions going on at the moment about ‘blacktags’ or ‘black people twitter‘ which I recommend checking out, in particular this comment.

I think it’s safe to say that there is greater uptake of the attitudes and poses of hip hop and R&B – genres notorious for misogyny and heavily polarised gender stereotypes – in the young African American twitter demographic than there is in, say, the middle-aged white British demographic, and that’s probably part of it.

But before you try and tell me that black people invented sexism (that must be why wholesome family entertainers like Jim Davidson hate them so much!) I recommend reading this 1994 article on misogyny and gangsta rap by bell hooks.

C) “Because the web encourages people to be shitheads”

There is definitely some truth in this one, and I can’t put it more eloquently than this.

I think it’s also about the hashtag format. It’s a joke, and there’s an age-old link between cheap gags and crude gender stereotypes. See also: your mum jokes, mother-in-law jokes, women driver jokes, blonde jokes, Essex girl jokes, nun jokes… Comedy, to some extent, encourages (or allows?)  people to voice more controversial opinions than they might in another context.

But I can’t help feeling that there’s more to it than a web 2.0 Bernard Manning routine. In Part 2 I’ll throw in my two cents about why sexist hashtags are so overwhelmingly popular.

Part 2 is now online here.