Kickstarter

I like Kickstarter because of its pleasing by-the-people-for-the-people ethos and the fact it gives independent filmmakers, writers, musicians and artists a chance to make their ideas a reality. It’s all very ‘open’ as they say. In fact Open Source blog says this:

The beauty of Kickstarter is that it bypasses the traditional channels artists would need to navigate in order to fund a project. Here funding depends on community participation rather than closed-door gatekeepers. The individual investments can be small and spread among those who care about that project’s success.

What we have here of course is also a fantastic opportunity for political or minority groups to get unpopular projects off the ground, projects that would never be able to attract funding from traditional investors (who tend to be of the wealthy white male variety) because they can’t see the ‘market’ for them.

Some awesome feminist projects

Have a search on Kickstarter and you’ll find all kinds of socially conscientious and community projects about race, sexuality, disability, class and yes: gender. In fact Ms Magazine in the US have started a regular Feminist Booster Club feature on their blog to spotlight different feminist projects deserving of support.

And it works. One example is the fantabulous Womanthology project which has managed to fully fund itself in a matter of weeks:

Womanthology is a large scale anthology comic showcasing the works of women in comics. It is created entirely by over 140 women of all experience levels… The purpose of the book is to show support for female creators in comics and media. There will be multiple short stories, how to’s & interviews with professionals, and features showcasing iconic female comic creators that have passed, such as Nell Brinkley and Tarpe Mills. A Kids & Teens section will also be included, showcasing their work, and offering tips & tricks to help them prepare themselves for their future careers in comics.

Of course it helps that the project has the support and involvement of a number of big names (for geeks anyway) such as Gail Simone, Bonnie Burton and Neil Gaiman. But still: awesome.

A project I’d been following for a long time before it was at the Kickstarter stage is The Illusionists:

The Illusionists is a feature-length documentary about the commodification of the body and the marketing of unattainable beauty around the world.

The film will explore the influence that corporations have on our perceptions of ourselves, showing how mass media, advertising and several industries manipulate people’s insecurities about their bodies for profit.

Having followed its development over the last couple of years I think its going to be a corker. And it’s not quite at its funding target yet, so you know… *cough* stump up! *cough*

Microloans for women in the developing world

The idea of crowdfunding has taken off in a big way over the last couple of years, and it’s often linked to the microfinance initiative in development, particularly in relation to empowering women.

There is something quite thrilling about using Kiva or another platform to give funding directly to a woman in Kenya or Nepal to help her start a business. And of course you get your money back so you don’t have to lose any time worrying whether genuine altruism really exists.

However it’s worth bearing in mind that even though you may be helping one woman, her family and maybe her community (which is nothing to be sniffed at!) spreading capitalism to every corner of the earth isn’t necessarily the best way to help women as a group. Microloans don’t do much to tackle the structural causes of poverty and inequality. In fact they don’t always help individual women.

Don’t stop giving, but think about giving to projects that will also help women protect themselves from violence, disease and discrimination while they run their business.

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

Google Images

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

Ouch!

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

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

Clipart

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

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

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

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

Stock Photos

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

Let’s start with iStockPhoto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*ping!*

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

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

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

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

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

*ping!*

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

Last stop:

Creative Commons

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

*ping!*

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

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

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?