In 1937 Goebbels presented a birthday gift of 18 Mickey Mouse shorts to the Führer. […Disney] and Hitler […] shared an overall social vision. They dreamed of a dispersed post-urban society, with a population — kept in line by a strong domestic realm instilling a keen sense of blood loyalty and “family values” — that could be efficiently mobilized to serve either the military needs of the state or the labor needs of industry.

– Matt Roth, The Lion King: a Short History of Disney-Fascism

Everyone knows about Disney’s ongoing racism issues, so to hear that Uncle Walt was an active member of the American Nazi Party during the Thirties may not come as much surprise. But there were pink triangles as well as yellow stars in 1930s Berlin, and I want to know why pretty much all of Disney’s villains seem designed to display some kind of sexual or gender deviance.

An Actor’s Life for Me

An Actor’s Life for Me: The Fox seduces Pinocchio

It starts with Pinocchio, and the Fox and the Cat. Probably best remembered for their song ‘An Actor’s Life for Me‘, it’s this pair of crooks that first lure young Pinocchio off the straight and narrow. And I mean that literally: they’re Theatre Folk, dapper, urbane and not a little camp. Their bodies are constantly intertwining, grotesque and chaotic. I’m with Matt Roth when he says they’re obviously coded as gay – one of the key minorities Hitler argued, in Mein Kampf, were threatening the health and morality of contemporary European youth.

But this doesn’t end with the fall of Hitler; later Disney films work their way through a succession of sexually deviant or ambiguous villains. The first significant entrant is the terrifying Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty(1959). Like Aladdin‘s Jafar (1992), she is elegant and a bit camp, though fundamentally sexless (witness how unattracted Jafar is to Princess Jasmine, wanting her only for political gains). Maleficent inhabits a strange underworld where orgiastic parties are the norm, and, like so many of her villainous successors, she’s got no-one of her own, but still remains determined to thwart the monogamous, heterosexual union of the noble royals Princess Aurora and Prince Philip (whose name was chosen by Uncle Walt in the 50s, when our Prince Philip was still someone nostalgia-loving Anglophile Americans might feel dewy-eyed about).

Cruella de Vil – a withered, aberrant form of sexless femininity – squares up to the hyper-femme homemaker Anita

Two years later, 101 Dalmatians‘ Cruella De Vil continues the trend. She shares Maleficent’s ill will towards the heteronormative family sphere, and acts as a kind of child-snatching boogyman. Her hyper-femme fashion sense only throws her withered, sexless frame into relief, and unlike the blissful feminine home of her friend Anita – who has settled down and found a nice man to take care of, sorting out Roger’s chaotic life with a Woman’s Touch –  Cruella’s decadent mansion is completely falling apart, which we can probably assume also mirrors the state of her biological clock. Cruella’s flamboyant yet barren sexuality focuses itself instead on fetishising the traditional trappings of femininity, including fur coats made from the produce of wombs more fecund than her own – like Perdita, the sexy Dalmatian.

Dragged Up

In the 80s, long after Walt’s death, the intentional gender deviance of Disney’s villains becomes more blatant still: this time the Gays are even more obviously in drag, and they’re looking back to the golden Pinocchio age of seducing The Children away from their suburban homes: think of Ursula in The Little Mermaid (1989) and her contrast with the alpha male King Triton, his big beard, and the Barbie-style InnoDBl with her Princess Diana hair.

Dragged up… Ursula from The Little Mermaid

Ursula is overweight, flamboyant and dragged up; her tentacles, as my pal Matt Roth points out (you really must read this article, seriously), only make her the more sexually ambiguous. Like Maleficent, she lives in an underground other-world, with a ‘garden’ of corrupted young people now condemned to live half-lives as plant-like beings. Her stagey hyper-femininity presents her as a dangerous prospect for the heteronormative, cisnormative InnoDBl – whose voice she steals in order to seduce the also very straight Prince Eric.

Ursula is given a metaphorical kind of new life (after being conquered by, er, the erect prow of Prince Eric’s enormous ship) in the figure of Hades in Hercules (1997). He’s pretty much an exact counterpart to Ursula, black tentacles and all. His cabaret-style song ‘My Town’, from the Hercules TV series, introduces the underworld as a kind of underground New York, with its king a flamboyant, gender-ambiguous leader revelling in its delights:

It’s interesting, of course, that because of the source-text, Hercules must of necessity espouse the Ancient Greek worldview that says the Underworld – and therefore Hades himself – is a crucial part of the order of things; unlike the shady worlds of Pleasure Island and The Theatre in Nazi-era Pinocchio, ‘New Hades’, and the queers and deviants that inhabit it is a potentially corrupting influence that can be tolerated, as long as it’s kept firmly in its place. It’s much the same theory as the ‘Circle of Life’ proposed by Mufasa in The Lion King (1994) – the ghettoised handout-dependent hyenas and their liberal, childless and urbane overlord Scar are fine, as long as they’re kept in their own sphere (that is, the obscure Elephants’ Graveyard). When they take over, the Pridelands fall into ruin and corruption.

Hanging on

Intertwined: the hyper-masculine Gaston and the fawning creature Le Fou

There are also a whole host of less significant characters throughout Disney’s oeuvre who are mostly made ridiculous by virtue of their sexual ambiguity and concomitant lack of personhood. First up is the rotund Le Fou in Beauty and the Beast, who fawns, much like the Cat on the Fox, on the hyper-male Gaston (who is in strange contrast to the uber-femme but dragged up Ursula, and seems suspiciously uninterested in the various females laid on for his consumption).

Then there’s Chi Fu, the emperor’s advisor in Mulan. He is primarily ridiculed because he is camp and rather gender-ambiguous – he has bunny slippers and a woman’s scream – in what I’d suggest is a double-whammy of homophobia mixed with Orientalist racism, much like that currently directed against Asian-American basketball player Jeremy Lin (‘Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple of inches of pain tonight‘ was a tweet from Fox sports commentator Jason Witlock on Lin’s recent sporting triumph). Or, to put it in Disney’s own terms, how about the notorious Siamese Cats in Lady and the Tramp, whose own gender is confused to say the least?

Miss Man

The only difference between male and female Mulan is a bit of grooming.

It’s interesting to compare these gender-fails with Chi Fu’s own filmic context – Mulan (1998), where the title character is herself cross-dressing. There are two direct references to drag in this film (strange, given that Disney doesn’t in general have much of Dreamworks’ obsessive-compulsive need to shove in over-the-kids’-heads jokes for the parents). The only one in direct reference to Mulan is Mushu (Eddie Murphy)’s Hilarious Ebonics – ‘Miss Man had to take her little drag act on the road’.

Yet, unlike the true weirdos doing it for a sexual thrill (like Ursula), Mulan’s is a noble gender-variance, taken on for the sole purpose of rescuing her ailing father and (ultimately) preparing herself mentally for marriage, which is how the film ends; note too that she has to become male in order to truly triumph in the male sphere, and that once this has been accomplished she can return home to her father and marry the sexy shirtless man (as she was unable to do at the beginning of the story).

It is therefore in keeping that her methodology basically amounts to ‘hair down = female; hair up = male’ – and no-one ever notices it’s all the same person, just with a different hairstyle (note how shocked the Evil Shan Yu is when she dons her ‘disguise‘): her gender-switch is more of a ‘sign’ to the audience indicating which social sphere she’s inhabiting than anything literally transformative. Interesting stuff here.

Hmm. So… From the Fox and the Cat to the villains of the 90s, Disney’s villains have represented a kind of ‘other’ that is almost always couched in terms of gender or sexuality, representing a challenge, and a threat, to the heteronormative worldview of the heroes and heroines – which always conquers, of course. What’s disturbing is that it’s so oft-repeated it almost becomes the whole unspoken tenet on which Disney’s works are based. The fight of good vs. evil is not so much a battle of objective morality as of sexual identity and preference.

Oops.

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.

I have no idea how that happened so fast, but either way you can’t now enter the local shopping centre without being bombarded by Now That’s What I Call The Best Xmas… Ever! (Vol.64). In honour of the season, I thought, time allowing, that I’d do some little case studies on some of the songs currently assaulting your ears as you shop. You may hate all Christmas music, or you may love it – personally I’ve never minded it much – but pop singles are like miniature time capsules, so examining their gender politics, and what happens to these when new artists cover them, is one way to divert your brain into a state of broad feminist contemplation rather than all-out anti-consumerist rage in the queue at HMV¹.

Um. I said contemplation. But I can’t guarantee that every vid embedded in this series I’m proposing won’t have you reaching for a pretty stiff drink.

Been an Awful Good Girl

Anyway! Cast your mind, readers, back to the postwar baby boom – specifically 1953. Elizabeth II ascends the throne here in the UK! Everest is climbed and DNA discovered! And the volume of the Kinsey Reports titled Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female, an attempt to research women’s sexual appetites and desires, is published to great controversy and brouhaha. And in December, this guy called Hugh Hefner launches some magazine or other and sells over 54,000 copies. The cultural melting pot for the sexual revolution of the Sixties is neatly bubbling away.

Christmas novelty smash hits have become a Thing since the War – White Christmas came out in 1942. And into this arena slinks Santa Baby, recorded by Eartha Kitt and penned by Joan Javits (a Republican Senator’s niece). It sashays onto the airwaves with a ba-boom-ba-boom of barbershoppy backing vocals, tongue shoved firmly in its cheek.

These days it’s been heard so often and covered enough times that people seem to have forgotten that it’s witty, that it actually stands out as distinct from more earnest fare like White Christmas. White Christmas is about a generation of people longing for their loved ones during the War. It dreams of idyllic peacetime Christmases. Santa Baby, on the other hand, is a playful and sly kick in the tender area for rising peacetime consumerism, as well as a tale of a trophy wife who always wants more stuff, from yachts to platinum mines to rings (not on the phone). In 1954 Eartha re-recorded a version called This Year’s Santa Baby, the lyrics of which reveal that the yacht wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and our heroine still isn’t satisfied.

Come And Trim My Christmas Tree / With Erotic Capital From Tiffany

For the feminists in the queue at HMV, especially those being subjected to the Pussycat Dolls version, this is naturally not unproblematic, not least because the kind of woman the song portrays appears to be exactly what Catherine Hakim, in her book Honey Money, wants women to aspire to be like. Without any tongue in cheek about it. And Honey Money only came out this year, despite the fact that it appears to be the product of what happens when you take Eartha Kitt completely literally. The gold digger the song portrays is a popular stereotype, and the song’s contemporary with the postwar rise in popularity of the “male breadwinner” family model, which wasn’t economically feasible across all social classes. More generally, of course, it’s a riff on a whole social trope around women’s bodies and feminine sexual allure as a source of transactional power.

I think for a lot of people, being exposed to the versions Kylie, the ‘Dolls et al have come out with has somehow managed to dampen our sense of the irony within the original – which makes more sense within the context of more ‘wholesome’ Fifties Christmas music, which it does snerk at, and class politics of the time – perhaps because newer versions are contemporary with many songs that aren’t particularly ironic in their appreciation of Worldly Stuff?

Shame, really, because Eartha had this sending up the golddigger stereotype thing pretty down. Check out her recording of Old Fashioned Millionaire, which is similar to Santa Baby but ever so slightly more acerbic, ably sending up cliches of postwar consumerism, patronising Empire-era South Pacific-style racism (which as a mixed race performer she was certainly no stranger to) and middle class pretensions around social properness and upward mobility with lines like “I want an old fashioned house with an old fashioned fence / and an old fashioned millionaire” and “I like Chopin and Bizet / and the songs of yesterday / String quartets and Polynesian carols / But the music that excels / is the sound of oil wells / as they slurp-slurp-slurp into the barrels…”

Some Very Different Covers

There are a lot of other covers of the song out there, like the bratty pop-punk stylings of the Dollyrots – Wikipedia lists loads. Most notable for me, in very different ways, are these two.

RuPaul’s 1997 cover takes precisely no prisoners, announcing “Been an awful good queen”, and adding in caustic asides like “Now honey, Miss RuPaul has been so good, it just hurts, and now I want you to reciprocate… by givin’ me a few ITEMS, you know…” and the wink-nudge reply to “come and trim my Christmas tree…” of “Honey, you ain’t trimmin’ nothin’.”

Surely after that glorious effort there was nowhere else the song could really go, right?

Wrong!

Santa Buddy

From the sublime, dear readers, to the ever so slightly ridiculous.

For lo, Santa Baby has just this year been covered again by – wait for it – Michael Bublé, god-emperor of bland, whose official site bio at the time of writing boasted frankly awesomely reality-disconnected statements like “his essence remains solid as a rock”, and “like Elvis”. But let’s not stare into that particular abyss too long – back to Santa Baby, for which Bublé’s version has completely rewritten the lyrics to recast the entire song as being about… um… a straight dude who likes presents.

That’s it.

No erotic funny business round here; Michael’s after CARS and FOOTBALL TICKETS and he’s going to MAKE PLATONIC MANLY BRO-FRIENDS with Santa until he gets them. Clearing all that flirting out the way – presumably to make room for all the “decorations bought from … Mercedes”, because I have NO idea how you hang a car bonnet on a Christmas tree, after all – he cracks out “Santa, buddy” at one point, and makes sure to stipulate that the convertible needs to be “steel blue”, since presumably “light blue” wasn’t quite macho enough. Though I’m not sure it really works, it’s fascinating – and the complete opposite of what RuPaul does with it. He even throws in a fastidiously heteromanly “I’ll wait up for you, dude“, to avoid looking too camp.

Of course, in this, as with nearly everything else Michael Bublé attempts to accomplish that isn’t looking like every photo of him would be marvellously improved by the addition of hungry velociraptors, he fails hilariously.

Mind you, to be fair to Michael, for every alteration he makes to keep the conversation with Santa strictly platonic – “Santa pally” (?!) – he also adds in “been a sweetie all year” rather than Eartha Kitt’s original “been an angel”, and where Eartha has “think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed”, Michael’s got “hotties”, which is pretty gender neutral, the writers clearly being aware that in the marketing niche he belongs in, squarely between Ronan Keating and Will Young, for every five straight middle aged women buying his records, there’s also a pretty significant gay following – he mentioned it himself with some enthusiasm in an interview.

And really, for all the “women like jewellery and men like… CARS” binary implications in there… there’s something about the way he goes “forgot to mention one little thing / cha-ching!” that just isn’t really all that macho after all. It’s almost rather sweet. Or maybe I’ve been looking at all those images of him being stalked by raptors just a bit too much and started feeling sorry for him.

It only seems right to end such a string of different treatments of a song about femininity and consumerism with the ultimate scion of both: Miss Piggy. I truly believe that she is perhaps the only one who’s almost on a par with Eartha herself. Think of all the froggies she hasn’t kissed!

Enjoy your Christmas shopping as far as possible. I’m contemplating tackling Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses next. AREN’T YOU EXCITED. I BET YOU CANNOT WAIT.

1. NB: for the record I’m inclined to think said rage quite justified, but at the same time, you probably can’t afford a criminal damages bill in these pressing times of recession and tinsel.

But what do we want for Christmas?

Left to right: I thought Fornarina's hyper-feminine snowlady was sort of cute, but Jen was severely unnerved; the xmas card I'm trying to avoid; M&S pops cooking on the right, and socks and Top Gear merch on the left.

Following on from Sarah’s post, I conducted a team survey.  The result? The following peek into our own wishlists, plus our gift ideas for the friendly feminist in your life. It might be too late to order some items, but maybe we’ll spark an idea or two.

There’s a range of tastes in force at BR Towers, so in a way, conversely, this post stands as proof that categorising anyone by labels when it comes to predicting what they’ll like – even ‘feminist’ – is often a fool’s game. But what the hell. S’better than yer average “For Him! For Her!” Superdrug sleighbell slew, eh?

Turn up your recordings of Christmas Wrapping please, for…

TEAM BADREP’S FIRST EVER CHRISTMAS WISHLIST

JENNI says…

“This Hated By The Daily Mail T-shirt ‘s going right on my wishlist.” Wear with pride!

BPAL: mini sample bottles. They call 'em "imps' ears".

In the realm of  traditional-lady-gifts, Jen recommends perfume… with a difference. Check out the eldritch alterna-goth world of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. Refreshingly not taking an exclusively “for her” angle, their unisex scents are oil-based, concentrated and long-lasting, doubling as room-oils. You’ll not find descriptors like “polished metallic notes, glossy leather, and frankincense” down your local Boots! (Downsides? The site’s an arse to navigate – but persevere, it’s worth it – and you’ll need to email them and state you’re ordering from outside the US.)

HODGE says…

Where did she get that Greek Alphabet tea towel? Alas, the Cure-listening queen of the Alphabet of Femininism is keeping that one secret, but says of Women Who Read Are Dangerous, edited by Stefan Bollen, “This is a lovely book; got it for Christmas last year myself.” It’s a coffee-table compendium of art depicting women reading, accompanied by (says Amazon) “politely fiery text which serves to remind one that, in the not too dim and distant past, for a woman to be seen absorbed in a book was considered at best a selfish act and at worst a subversive one.”

What else? “For the parent, I’d say Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (in its non-pink and sparkly format) is a wonderfully feminist work for kids – the men in it mostly just leave the women to become highly successful on their own, through education and hard work (don’t forget the shurely-lesbian Dr Jakes and Dr Smith). The fact that Petrova shuns the girly stuff and becomes a pilot is particularly pleasing.”

SARAH C says…

After initially considering the perfume-pants-and-shoes ladypresent tropes for a moment,

SHINY.

Sarah will happily accept the shoes, as long as they’re a shiny, stompy set of Doc Martens. Pants? Well, if you must, what about Who Made Your Pants, a women’s collective who make sexy underwear ethically from offcuts? Or if there’s gotta be a romance novel, let’s make it an interesting one, like The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters.

SARAH J says…

“Anne Taintor magnets! Examples here, here, and [fave: make your own damn dinner] here. Or there’s this ‘‘Reading is Sexy’ T-shirt …”

Anything else? “Sticker Sisters do lots of cool things.” Agreed – try these ‘Action Not Glamor’ shoelaces for size. Or the corresponding tee! (US spelling; universal sentiment.) Or this ‘Brave Girl’ tee!

Finally, Sarah reckons you could do worse than pop one of the Alanna books by Tamora Pierce in someone’s Christmas stocking – “They’re for children/teens, but I don’t think they hold up too badly for adults who want a right-on but undemanding fantasy read. There’s a magic cat, a lot of sword fighting and a surprisingly healthy and sensible attitude to sex. Here’s the first one (of four) on Amazon.”

STEPHEN B says…

“I want to buy everyone the Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series boxset. (And I mean everyone: boys, girls, geeks, non-geeks, everyone else, it’s good for all.) Not the movie, no.”

Anything else? “Membership to the UK Wolf Conservation Trust. You can go for walks in the forest with wolves. Yes, really.”

MARKGRAF says…

“Picture books!  I love picture books.  Didn’t you love them as a child?  Who didn’t!  What’s going on with us stopping reading them, then?  It’s nonsense.  Picture books are the greatest, and there’s a whole world of completely fabulous queer-friendly picture books out there that I just wish I’d had as a kid.  But now we’re adults and we get to spend how we like… and one of those ways can be picture books.  Because we can.  Here’s a little selection of my favourites…”

And Tango Makes Three: “You’ll have heard of this one, presumably.  It was banned in some schools in America.  It’s a book about penguins who love each other – also, it’s based on a true story.  And it was banned because the penguins who love each other are boys!  What an amazing world we live in.”

King And King: “I bought this straight out before I read it because it sounded so perfect.  It is indeed perfect.  I cried all over it and I’m not even ashamed to say so.  It’s one of the reasons I’m not allowed in childrens’ book sections any more.”

10,000 Dresses: “I want this so badly I don’t even know what to do with myself.  I can’t give you a full précis of it because I haven’t read it yet!  But it came to me highly recommended, and frankly, we need trans visibility that isn’t risible or offensive. Yeah!”

RHIAN says…

I task Rhian, fresh from her recent post on punk, and now the latest addition to our team (YEAH) with providing a music recommendation. I’m not disappointed.

“Hmm. How about the Indelicates album, Songs for Swinging Lovers? Based not only on Julia Indelicate being one of the most incisively outspoken radical feminists currently hammering a keyboard, but also on the band’s method of DIY distribution which means you can officially pay what you like, including zero, to download their stuff. The album is available here.”

I say…

What about a vintage poster? Casual misogyny may be rife in wartime propaganda, but you can’t beat Rosie the Riveter, co-opted for years as a feminist icon, for a bit of wallspiration. We can do it! Here’s a page of posters featuring Rosie-related imagery. Or you could boldly brave the Imperial War Museum shop, bypassing the more patronising end of the poster archive (I’m looking at you, Keep Mum, she’s not so dumb), for this mighty number, which is up on the wall at BR Towers.

Readables? I dig Alison Bechdel‘s autobiographical Fun Home (Jen also attests to this, as I threw it her way in November for her birthday). Or how about recent Booker-scooper Hilary Mantel’s haunting novel Beyond Black, which features a complex pair of women at its centre, one of whom is psychic? Or the book which reminded us to get off our arses and start this site, Reclaiming the F-Word?

NOTHING NOT TO LOVE.

Or check out the Museum of London shop in person for this badass suffragette sketchbook ‘n’ tote bag, pictured above. Warning, I’m not sure if they still have it; I’ve looked online, but I can’t find it.  Hopefully they’ve not run out…

Whatever you’re up to, have a good one!

– Team BadRep

Underlying it all is the idea that being an alpha male is a good idea (for men) and that having alpha males is a good idea for society.  I disagree.

So let’s look at some definitions to get the balls rolling. I’m using wiki and an A level in Biology here, so Actual Scientists please have your white lab coats and clipboards at the ready to score me on this one. The David Attenborough lexicon would have “alpha male” as a perfectly acceptable term for the dominant male in a group of pack animals (note that not all alphas found in nature are de facto male, and often you will find an “alpha pair” as the sole breeders in a group). This usually resembles a social set of multiple females and their young, sometimes including juvenile males. Social dynamics vary from species to species but generally the defining trait of the “alpha male”  is that he is the only sexually active male in the group – all the females mate with him alone and he will chase off or kill other males who approach.

Problem solving - if you are a male red deer

So far, so Darwin. By constantly battling to be top dog, the male maintains his status as physically fit to father offspring and consequently he’s the best genetic offering for the females. Now, let’s step away from the forest and into the urban jungle to look at human animals.

Why do we like to apply this term to men?

Superficially, it’s all very easy, obvious and media-friendly to ascribe animal behaviours and terminology to people for a handy reference point.  The list is vast and serves as shorthand for personalities. “Alpha male” carries with it all those connotations that we like to think of as traditionally masculine – aggression, sexual dominance, high status. However, like all metaphors it can be carried too far to be rendered meaningless, and this is absolutely the case with “alpha males”.

The parallels between humans and animals only go so far. We don’t live in a forest. We don’t hunt our food using our own hands and teeth. We don’t compete for space, food or shelter in the same way that animals do. We don’t live like animals, so why are we aspiring to their structures? Our society is complicated and challenging, and yes, there is competition, but the idea that we are basing all our actions on base instinct inherited from our ancestors, and that this is a good way to live is absurd, and frankly, oversimplistic.

Problem solving if you are a business man

Worse still than caveman antics, the term has become something for men to aspire to without really thinking of the consequences of persuading 50% of the population to butt heads and massacre every other man in sight. There are hundreds of websites dedicated to becoming an alpha male.  Some are quite tame and offer encouragement in leadership and confidence – good things for any person, but some are just plain nasty. Problems abound, including that contention that “feminine” traits are weak – read bad – and “masculine” traits are strong – read good.

Let’s get this straight from the get-go. I hate the use of the word “alpha male”. Whenever I hear it, my brain automatically erases those two words and replaces them with “wanker” or “desperately insecure”. I think it’s a terrible metaphor both for masculinity and for relationships between (straight) men and (straight) women, and the more we can question it the sooner we can throw it into the bin and come up with something a little bit better.  So on to the questioning.

What are the implications of having “alpha males” in our society? First, it creates a hierarchy in which the men who can bag the most women are the best.  Being an alpha is about being the manliest of men, and that means not being “feminine” or “gay” – both are of course bad things to be.

The inclusion of alphas in our society immediately makes it a sexist one – no room for the gay, the bi or the queer. No room for anything other than manly-men and womanly-women. And it places us all in an “us versus them” scenario with prospective partners.

Sexual conquest is all. This sets up a contest for male dominance which requires female (and other male) submission. In order to “win” the female must “lose” – as must the other men trying to get her. Women are a prize or a target. Other men are competition. Hardly the basis for a co-operative or productive society. This kind of scenario is clearly seen in the seduction community / pick up artist style of thinking which aims to reduce a woman’s confidence (often picking targets with low self esteem in the first place).

This is the power of the playschool bully and it’s high time that they grew up.

What we are looking at here is in fact a  zero sum power exchange in which no one wins.  Rather than both parties coming out of it feeling postive or ready to build something for the future, one of them is tricked and the other knows they have played a trick. It might be smug and satisfying to con someone into bed, but I don’t think that kind of underhanded behaviour is a worthwhile measure of a man.

Being an alpha male, or trying to be one, is bad for men. There are a few ways in which this works. The first is the manipulative gameplayer outlined above. That’s a common (and deeply unpleasant) way of living, but if all you want is sex, then it might make someone a terrible person but it might not make them feel bad about themselves. The other ways probably will. For one thing, if masculinity and self worth all about how attractive men are to women, then there’s a problem. This is a game that we women have been playing for a long time (being attractive to men, that is) and it’s not a lot of fun, so I don’t really advise it.

Looking good, feeling yourself? Image from Flickr via dallasmuslworship

Look at the chap here, for example – he’s quite hard not to look at. You want to be an alpha? You want to attract the most ladies? Well, this is what you need to look like then – a torso you could play the xylophone on, and frankly who cares about your personality? Not sure about those pants though, baby. Here, let me help you with those.

A world in which we encourage men to become alphas is one in which we are telling them that their appearance and sexual attractiveness is their only important feature.

The other reality of the alpha male is a lonely and isolated existence, in which other men are to be rejected for fear they take away “your” women, and women themselves are only of use for the notch they can put in your bedpost. The nature of being an alpha is to be uncollaborative and unyielding, thereby contributing towards “strong and silent” archetypes that have coloured our view of maleness for many years, resulting in an idealised brooding male.

Being around an alpha male is also bad for women. It means being one of many “conquests” instead of someone special. It means always worrying about being played or being tricked.

It means that your partner just wants you for sex and possibly just to display their own ability to have sex with you. It means being valued for your ability to make them look good rather than because they enjoy your company or even, heaven forbid, like you. And in order to maintain this status quo they will constantly have to put you down in order to feel big, hard and clever. Ladies – this one is a keeper.

Having alpha males at all is bad for a proper, grown-up society. The alpha male condition reduces the wonderful variety of men in our midst into nothing more than adrenaline pumped, testosterone fuelled, muscle bound animals. Suitable only to fight each other and die for the glory of impregnation. It replaces personality with a set of operational parameters. And frankly, I want better for the men in my life and the men in the world.

And so should you.