Everyone approaches veganism from a different angle.

Some vegans find their way into it through kindness and empathy for living creatures; others are swayed by hard facts and shocking images. Neither is more or less agreeable, and I suspect that in our day-to-day lives, most vegans use a combination of both when faced with questions from curious veggie or omni friends.

But then there’s People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA as they’re commonly known. PETA’s ongoing racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and fat-shaming ads and publicity stunts are frequently ripped to pieces online.

Plenty of veg*ns dislike PETA’s controversial tactics, yet many agree that at least their attention-seeking techniques shine a light on the fight and get results, regardless of the harm they cause to others in the process.

PETA are a massive organisation, and they spread a very clear message: animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on or use for entertainment – but we’ll appropriate the Holocaust (see below), slavery, women’s bodies, homosexuality and trans* stereotypes to further our cause – and we don’t give a hoot what oppression we’re supporting in the process.

One of the *less* triggering unhelpful images one’s Ble.at dashboard can get covered in.

PETA aren’t the only platform for animal rights, though. Vegans rejoiced a few weeks ago when the beta version of Ble.at finally went live. For you carnivores not in the loop, Ble.at is a social network for vegans to exchange recipes, activist resources, articles, images and videos.

It’s similar to Tumblr and Twitter insofar as the primary purpose is to upload original content that can then be reblogged (“rebleated”) by fellow vegans. It’s a great way for vegans to connect on a micro level, by spreading awareness of local causes and events, and on a macro level by communicating with vegans on a global scale.

For the first week, it was mostly gifs of piglets, infographics of banana ice cream recipes, and cartoon avocados. With 5,500 profiles created within seven days of the site’s launch, the content rapidly improved: awesome recipes, powerful pro-vegan ads, witty one-liners and inspirational quotes promoting veganism were rife. But unfortunately, so was rape culture.

Due to the reblogging nature of the site, the same images kept popping into my feed: an illustration of an angry cow squeezing the bare breast of a lactating woman, a cartoon of a robot raping a blood-covered cow¹, milk being referred to as “rape juice” and the comparison between enjoying the taste of meat to the sexual pleasure a rapist experiences (below right).

Most shocking of all was a video entitled “Women forcefully milked in the street”. The short film documents a provocative street performance in which a lactating mother has her baby snatched from her arms by masked men with bloodied hands, who then tear open her blouse to reveal her bare breasts. The rest of the content is in the title. It’s absolutely horrific to watch.

Another less visually graphic, but horrible bit of viral reblogging.

When I mentioned my abhorrence of the casual connection between rape and the dairy industry on Twitter, a vegan pal asked, “What else would you call it?”

Well, the industry term for the bench on which female cows are artificially inseminated is often the “rape rack”, so referring to the process as rape isn’t a particular stretch. But the very fact that this is a common term within the dairy industry is a product of rape culture.

The pig factory employee found forcing metal rods and electrodes into the vaginas of sows is a product of rape culture. The flagrant disregard for the mental health of survivors by flaunting these triggering images to promote veganism is a product of rape culture.

By comparing the industrialised rape and infanticide of the dairy industry to the rape and infanticide of women and children, we are asking non-vegans to project the empathy for the latter onto the suffering of the former. The problem with comparing the dairy industry to rape is that we still live in a rape culture.

Unfortunately, we live in a world in which a teenage girl is gang-raped, photographed unconscious by her aggressors and is still blamed. We live in a world in which an accused rapist’s conviction is overturned because his disabled alleged victim did not resist the attack. We live in a world in which women are threatened with rape on a daily basis and are expected to laugh when comedians crack rape jokes. We don’t live in a world that cares enough about the rape of humans for the comparison to be truly effective.

By spreading these images of women being assaulted, we are supporting rape culture, and we are appropriating the suffering and strength of survivors. It is unacceptable to hijack, trigger and traumatise to forward a cause that has so many other convincing arguments to sway potential vegans into ditching the dairy.

Do we really want to be part of a movement that, like PETA, pushes animal rights forward with one hand and shoves civil rights, women’s liberation, LGBTQI rights, issues of race and body positivism aside with the other? That is not my veganism.

To paraphrase Flavia Dzodan, my veganism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit. From dressing up as the KKK to producing pro-domestic violence ads, PETA are absolutely rancid, poisonous and unforgivable. It’s also unforgivable to use triggering imagery of women being assaulted to push the vegan agenda.

• By day, Alice Slater is a writer and bookseller from London. By night, she is a horror film addict who always keeps the lights on. She writes for Mslexia and Drunken Werewolf, and she blogs about veg*n high jinx at SmokinTofu.com

1. Ed’s Tiny Note: We’ve not linked these two as they really are truly unpleasant. They’re definitely real, though.

Part 2: The Myth of the Agent Provocateur Woman

If it is understood that the dominant discourse still pertains to heterosexual and patriarchal ideologies, Agent Provocateur was certainly aiming to challenge this in 2008. The brochure for their Spring/Summer collection that year contains many examples of non-heteronormative behaviour.

A model in a swimming costume and stilettos stands in front of a seated, similarly attired woman, who touches her leg and looks up to her. Two women in satin lingerie and high heels are seen walking together – one has her hand on the other’s buttocks. A woman in animal print lingerie brandishes a spanking paddle and leans over an anonymous prostrate naked woman, whilst holding a rope that is attached to the submissive woman’s neck like a leash. An anonymous red-haired woman straddles a seated gasping woman whose arm is being stroked by a blonde in lingerie, brandishing a riding crop. Another woman, who is standing with her legs apart and her hands on her hips, watches an athletic female pole dancer. A topless woman in a red wig climbs on top of a woman in lingerie who lies, restrained, on a table.

There are also many examples of dominant female behaviour. Two women in bright coloured wigs and lingerie tie up and blindfold a clothed man on his knees. A man in underwear stands, with hands tied behind his back, displaying marks on his chest that suggest he has been struck by the riding crop held by the woman to his left. A handcuffed man is disrobed by a woman, whilst another woman records the scene using a professional video camera. A man lying restrained on a table, has his trousers unzipped by a lingerie-clad woman who is holding a glass of brandy and is staring directly at the viewer.

In this image, the Agent Provocateur woman is powerful yet playful. She is passionate, determined to satisfy her own desires and, from the facial expressions depicted, is clearly enjoying herself. She is active, not passive, and has agency.

However, in the 2012 brochure, the Agent Provocateur woman appears to have little or no agency. She faces the camera as if directed to by the photographer and is entirely the subject of the gaze – continually watching herself. This appears to be a return to the woman John Berger describes in Ways of Seeing:

She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.

There is little or no resistance to dominant discourses in the images contained within this brochure. All of the women appear sexually available, but are inviting sex rather than pursuing it. A woman stands in lingerie and heels next to a similarly attired seated woman, both facing the viewer with their legs apart. A woman kneels on a velvet chair, glancing over her shoulder at the viewer, with her buttocks prominently displayed. A woman in lingerie reclines on a chaise longue. A seated woman with her legs apart, hand on hip, stares at the viewer. There is no interaction between these women, even when more than one appears in the same image. Their only purpose is to invite the viewer’s gaze.

Christian Jantzen and others conducted a series of interviews with white middle class women in Denmark. The results suggested that these women wear delicate lingerie in order to achieve a sensation rather than a look. They wear it for how it makes them feel – confident, sensual, happy and satisfied – not necessarily for how they will be perceived by their partner. Some of the interviewees even admitted that the men in their lives do not understand their desire for exquisite lingerie. For them, the purchase and wearing of beautiful expensive underwear is about much more than just sex. It is about identity, pleasure, knowing how to dress for the right occasion, and, occasionally, projecting a desired alternate self-image:

The importance of lingerie to most of our respondents is due to the fact that this kind of garment enables them to demonstrate that they can manage a modern femininity. By adhering to a certain scheme of classification, they show how they master their performance in different situations. This confirms their social self.

Their research suggests that presenting lingerie as something to be enjoyed by the viewer rather than the wearer would not appeal to women. Even if this is not always true of women outside of their small study sample, I would argue that the current representation of the Agent Provocateur woman would therefore not appeal to the customer the brand originally sought to attract.

To conclude, the Agent Provocateur woman’s identity is, like the identity of every woman, shaped by discourse and the ideologies she is exposed to. If the woman is surrounded by, and part of, discourse which challenges what is currently dominant, she will herself become part of a reverse discourse. Agent Provocateur was originally conceived by Corré and Rees as a celebration of femininity, and the initial representation of the Agent Provocateur woman emphasised the performativity of her gender and her rejection of the patriarchal ideologies so often present in lingerie advertising.

Although the association between Agent Provocateur lingerie and this playfully erotic yet not passive lifestyle is purely arbitrary, it was exceedingly easy for customers to see the brand’s values and decide whether or not they wished to adopt them. Through the act of putting on this particular brand of quality exotic lingerie, a customer would create her sense of self, create her gender and transform her life into that of the Agent Provocateur woman. All of this was successfully conveyed in the promotional images and advertising for the brand up until at least 2008.

In looking at the differences between the images used to promote the Spring/Summer 2008 collection and those of the Autumn/Winter 2012 collection, it could be argued that the sale of the brand to a multinational company had an effect on how the Agent Provocateur woman was represented. The brand’s ideal woman appears to now offer far less resistance to current discourses on gender, sexuality and femininity than she did when Corré and Rees first sought to use lingerie as a way to disrupt and question the fashion status quo.

In expanding the market for the brand, the new owners appear to be attempting to create erotic lingerie that does not offend, thus diluting the original ethos of Agent Provocateur. Perhaps it is the current discourse which has changed, or maybe the Agent Provocateur woman simply works with the current discourse rather than against it? However, it could also be claimed that what is considered to be erotic is entirely subjective.

• Lori Smith is a rant-lite feminist who enjoys turning her thoughts into word form and then throwing them at the internet to see what sticks. She does this on a regular basis over at Rarely Wears Lipstick, and has previously contributed to The F-Word under her Sunday name.

Part 1: Agent Provocateur, Discourse and Performativity

In 1971, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren set up ‘Let it Rock’, their first King’s Road boutique. Their son Joseph Corré followed in his parents’ footsteps and opened a shop in London with his wife Serena Rees in 1994. Named Agent Provocateur, the unusual boutique bridged a gap between the erotic lingerie sold in Soho’s sex shops and the respectable prettiness of the established quality brands sold in department stores.

Corré and Rees saw the brand as a vehicle for their creativity and their ideas about women and femininity. In 1995, they began a search for a woman who ‘would represent the concepts behind the clothes, model new designs, and be a spokesperson at upcoming events’. They saw the face of their brand as ‘charming, glamorous, curvy, independent and intelligent’ (see Agent Provocateur: A Celebration of Femininity).

The finalists of their competition were used as part of a publicity stunt at London Fashion Week, staging a demonstration against bland passionless fashion that drew the attention of the assembled press. After a decadent Miss Agent Provocateur Party had been held, where the winner was announced, Corré and Rees realised that a single woman couldn’t represent their brand’s values as the concept was too diverse. Every woman has the potential to become an agent provocateur.

Corré and Rees have since divorced, and in 2007, Agent Provocateur was purchased by 3i Group. This gradually led to a significant change in how the Agent Provocateur woman was represented in the brand’s advertising campaigns. The brochure to showcase the Spring/Summer 2008 collection retained a lot of the ethos of Corré and Rees’ original vision. It has a cover designed to look like an invitation to an exclusive party, featuring the text ‘you are cordially invited to attend a very private affair […] Bring a blindfold and an open mind!’. Each image inside forms part of a digitally-created montage, with the pages containing small parts of the panoramic whole, unfolding to reveal one uninterrupted tableau.

The models are depicted as attendees of the party and are engaging in activities of a sexual nature. Nothing pornographic is depicted, merely hints of erotic and light BDSM play. Most of the party guests are women, clothed in Agent Provocateur lingerie and swimwear, but there are also a number of men in the image. The women take both dominant and submissive roles, whilst the men are purely submissive.

Product information about the lingerie sets featured, such as name and price, is listed on the back of the image. With this choice of layout, it could be argued that the images are designed to be enjoyed first, and to be informative second.

By contrast, the Autumn/Winter 2012 collection is presented in a brochure containing separate images for each named set of lingerie, with the product details directly underneath each photograph. The theme of the collection is ‘Wilhelmina: Show Your True Self’ and the associated campaign focuses on a woman in Victorian London whose inner sensuality is revealed by a backstreet photographer’s magical camera.

Each image contains between one and three female models, with little or no interaction between them. The women are not engaged in any activity other than modelling the clothing for the viewer, and are, as such, passive subjects of the gaze. Hair and make up is consistent throughout and maintains the look of a catwalk show, where the models are presented as a homogenous entity – a representation of how the brand’s woman should physically embody that season’s look.

Each model’s ‘true self’ appears to be no different from the others. This presents us with a single type of Agent Provocateur woman, as opposed to the idea that she is present in all women, as Corré envisioned seventeen years previously.

It has often been suggested that the female body in lingerie is more erotic than the nude female body. Roland Barthes touches on this in his essay on striptease, published in Mythologies:

Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked. We may therefore say that we are dealing in a sense with a spectacle based on fear, or rather on the pretence of fear, as if eroticism here went no further than a sort of delicious terror, whose ritual signs have only to be announced to evoke at once the idea of sex and its conjuration.

At the very heart of the original concept of the Agent Provocateur brand, when it was founded by Corré and Rees, was the idea of lingerie as a ritual sign which evoked the idea of sex. Although they sought to design underwear which referenced socially acceptable quality French lingerie, eroticism was very much a part of Agent Provocateur’s core values. They made the brand accessible to women who would not normally venture into sex shops to purchase erotic lingerie.

It could be argued that Corré and Rees were also responding to dominant discourse on sexuality and gender when they set up Agent Provocateur in the 1990s. In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault analyses changes in discourse on sexuality and argues that discourse is a productive force; for example, leading to definitions of “normal” and “other”. He also looks at the concept of docile bodies versus active agency, discussing reverse discourse as an empowering method of countering the dominant discourse.

There is little doubt that Agent Provocateur – whose name refers to an undercover agent employed to provoke suspects to commit illegal punishable acts – originally sought to engage in a reverse discourse on female sexuality. In The History of Sexuality Volume 2, Foucault delves further and discusses what he calls ‘techniques of the self’, emphasising the role of practices and instruments in generating a sense of self.

Clothing is very much a ‘technique of the self’. People use their clothes to transform, change and project a chosen image on a daily basis. Although society still often restricts the individual’s choice of outerwear, unseen underwear offers the wearer a sense of agency. Lingerie is considered by many to be an instrument in generating a sense of self, and it is worth considering here that the self is also shaped by gender.

It is widely understood that gender is a cultural construction that is shaped by discursive forces. One of the main issues considered by Judith Butler is the performativity of gender. Gender is not a performance – as that suggests the performer returns to a more genuine self once they leave the stage – but it is performative, as we are all constantly putting on an act. Lingerie is but one aspect of the act of femininity.

Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires, and because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all.

– Judith Butler

Therefore, what could possibly be more “womanly” than dressing oneself up in Agent Provocateur lingerie? In Gender Trouble, Butler explores the spaces of resistance to dominant discourses. Like Foucault, and with reference to his work, she asks how we can go beyond the boundaries imposed on us by discourse, and explores the concept of agency. Gender and identity are more of a “doing” than a “becoming”, and are constantly shaped by discourse. Like any woman, the Agent Provocateur woman’s identity is fluid. She is constantly made and remade by the forces around her.

• Lori Smith is a rant-lite feminist who enjoys turning her thoughts into word form and then throwing them at the internet to see what sticks. She does this on a regular basis over at Rarely Wears Lipstick, and has previously contributed to The F-Word under her Sunday name.
• Pop back tomorrow for Part 2 of Lori’s reflections.

Last week’s long-awaited, big-release comic was Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Young Avengers #1, a classic coming-of-age story about a group of 18-year-olds who just happen to be superheroes.

While many mainstream comics are still producing the kind of material that gets sent up on Escher Girls and The Hawkeye Initiative, Gillen and McKelvie actively reject the kind of objectification that gives the genre such a bad reputation amongst feminists. In contrast to the stereotypical tits-and-ass fare, the opening sequence of Young Avengers provides the reader with a three-page essay on the (straight/bi) female gaze. In a medium that overwhelmingly caters for straight male desires, this is a rare demonstration of how to do a sexy scene with decent gender politics.

On page one, Kate Bishop wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, having just hooked up with a man whose name she can’t quite remember. At this point anyone who’s familiar with comics, or popular culture in general, would expect to see some slut-shaming, or at least some titillating semi-nudity, but we get neither. Kate is dressed in a t-shirt which comes down to her mid-thigh, and it’s clear that she has no regrets, thinking: For a second, some part of me thinks, “I should be ashamed.” I think that part of me is really stupid.

In the fourth panel we even see Kate smiling as she thinks back to the earlier part of her evening, and it’s the smile of someone who has just got laid and is pretty damned pleased with herself.
The second page introduces us to Noh-Varr, whose bed Kate has woken up in, and this is where we see another convention subverted, because he’s the one in nothing but his underwear. In an interview with Comics Alliance, artist Jamie McKelvie explains the idea behind this scene:

We’ve long had a problem in comics where the women are “sexy” (in a sexist fashion) and the men aren’t. Time to redress the balance. And there’s a big difference between sexist and sexy.

Although male superheroes are usually drawn with extremely muscular physiques, it’s not normally sexualised in this way – the reader is supposed to want to be them, not have sex with them. This is a rare acknowledgement that people who fancy men read superhero comics too.

But rather than providing equality of objectification, the aim here is to have a sexy scene which enhances the story and doesn’t devalue either of the characters. If you’re enjoying the view of Noh-Varr in his underwear, it’s just a bonus, not the entire point of the sequence; if you’re not into it, his lack of clothes is incidental. As Gillen puts it in an introduction to the character of Noh-Varr on his Tumblr:

…characters being sexy is cool but objectification in the process is bullshit. An inability to see the difference is a fundamental weakness. My wife’s in the next room watching Lord of the Rings, and I guarantee she’s thinking sexy thoughts about Aragorn. But that works without anything which annihilates him as a character, y’know?

The reader is supposed to see this scene through Kate’s eyes, and as she watches Noh-Varr dancing around in his pants, it acknowledges the existence of the female gaze, both through Kate’s interest in watching him, and the fanservice of the artwork.

Noh-Varr has a masculine appearance, but – perhaps because he’s an alien from another dimension – he doesn’t appear to be burdened with ideas of conventional masculinity, as we can see from his music choices. The comic’s title page states that the record he puts on is ‘Be My Baby’ by the Ronettes (incidentally, this is the track played over the opening titles of the film Dirty Dancing, which is also about female sexual awakening), and he talks about his enthusiasm for “close harmony girl groups” in a way that a heterosexual Earth man probably wouldn’t, because he’d be afraid of seeming effeminate. The play on gender roles is, of course, entirely deliberate, as one of the major influences in this version of the character is David Bowie during his androgynous, bisexual-identifying period in the early 1970s.

As Kate watches Noh-Varr, the scene is interrupted by a Skrull attack (Skrulls are a species of warrior aliens that occasionally pop up in the Marvel Universe to attack either Earth or Noh-Varr’s species of warrior aliens). If this was a horror movie, this would be the moment where Kate’s decision to go back to Noh-Varr’s place for sexytimes gets her killed in a disgustingly graphic way, but rather than being punished for her naughty behaviour, Kate is rewarded with another adventure, when she pilots the space ship.

As well as understanding what many female fans want to see, Gillen also accepts that sometimes our appreciation goes beyond what’s on the page:

Ever since our work on Phonogram, Jamie have [sic] strove to make our comics – for want of a better phrase – slash-fic-able. If you’re working in certain heroic fantasy genres, that’s part of the emotional churn.

(taken from Gillen’s tumblr post on Noh-Varr)

Recent comic book adaptation movies like Avengers Assemble and X-Men:First Class have been gleefully adopted by fanfiction writers, who find that the gender imbalances and close friendships between male characters give them plenty of material to work with. While slash has sometimes been treated as fandom’s dirty secret, Gillen and McKelvie are obviously quite comfortable with it. The title page even provides a nod to fangirl culture by adopting their language: editors Jake Thomas and Lauren Sankovitch are credited with “LOLs” and “feels” respectively – that’s “humour” and “emotions” to anyone who isn’t up-to-date on their internet memes.

Young Avengers clearly demonstrates something which I’ve long suspected to be true: it really is possible for male writers to “get” female fans. Although there are female comics creators producing work that doesn’t make women cringe – even with big publishers like Marvel and DC – it doesn’t mean that their male colleagues should have a free pass to be obnoxiously sexist. We should be holding more men to the pro-feminist standard that Gillen and McKelvie have set, not just in comics, but in all forms of pop culture.

• At night Alyson Macdonald dons a cape and tights to fight sexism and the Tory government on the internet. She mostly blogs at Bright Green and tweets as @textuallimits.

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

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

But to the ad!

H&M’s Winter 2012 campaign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other people have made better arguments (here’s one, and here’s another) than I could for why having a teenager with her tits out in the first few pages of a national newspaper might not be a particularly stellar idea. It’s objectification at its worst, and the empowerment argument neglects the fact that there are better, safer, and more rewarding ways to take your clothes off for financial gain if that’s what you truly want to do.

My argument against Page 3 is quite simple; if you don’t want to reject it simply because it’s in bad taste, insensitive, and chauvinistic, then reject it because it uses psychological techniques to manipulate your views into agreeing with whatever fits the Sun’s goals at the time. The Sun sees its readership not just as customers, but as bargaining chips and weapons.

Let’s take a quick look at a few examples of Page 3. The rather excellent Tim Ireland over at Bloggerheads, nemesis of Nadine Dorries, has been collecting these –  I hope he won’t mind me mirroring them here. Credit due entirely to him and anyone who might have scanned them for him.

Now, it’s quite possible that these women hold these opinions. It’s quite interesting, however, that they coincide with the vitriol that appears in the The Sun Says portion of the paper, home of a much more blatant attempt to tell their readership what to think.

Think about this, though – what if these statements are invented by the paper? Then, what we have on our hands is a cheap attempt to use the many cognitive biases that sexual attraction brings into play to form an opinion in the undecided. This person is attractive; you’re naturally more inclined to agree with people that you find attractive; your opinion is swayed. All the time, you’re seeing it as just a bit of fun, just a silly piece of paper with a pair of breasts. Every day, this message hits home. Over time, it affects people – they think the way the Sun, and thus the Murdoch empire, wants them to think.

Yes, alright, I’ve strayed a bit into tin-foil-hat territory. The fact is, though, that this is having an effect on the Sun’s readership. How big an effect is arguable, of course, but it’s non-zero. Also, don’t forget that there’s a huge line on the role of these women – they’re being used as tools, to have opinions thrust into their mouths. Even the names are probably pseudonyms. They are there for no reason at all other than to be a pair of tits, and that shit is just not on.

If you won’t boycott the Sun because you hate the exploitation and objectification of women that it represents, boycott it because you value your own power of self-determination.

NASA doll

…in a Fox News shop of all places.

It’s a female astronaut doll.

Now, no doubt you’re still reeling from that the shock that Fox News – bastion of feminism-hating, Sarah Palin-supporting, “family values” madness – is fielding a toy for girls that encourages them to study science and quite literally reach for the stars.

Here’s another doozy.

Look closer and you will see that – pink casing aside – there’s almost no other “girlification” going on with this toy. Sure, she’s standard issue doll shaped, but wearing a very functional, non-revealing, blue and black NASA jumpsuit. Even the tagline reads as pleasingly gender neutral: “Space Crew”.

And to cap it all off, she’s not even blonde.

Unlike Barbie.

Who when she went to space looked like The Invasion of The Ghastly Metallic Pink Shoulder Pads (clicky the link, but don’t say I didn’t warn you).

I can’t believe I’m typing this, but looks like we’ve got a genuine Found Feminism from Fox News. Wonders will never cease. Feeling pretty chuffed about that, actually – it’s one thing that you can see progress being made from friends, quite another from enemies.

Feminism: to infinity, and beyond!

• 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]!

It’s funny because someone asked me about why I dressed the girls like that, and I said, ‘Do you not get the metaphor there?’

… You can say what you want about the movie, but I did not shoot the girls in an exploitative way. […] As long as you’re self-aware about it, then that’s okay.

– Zack Snyder

In this article, I discuss the abuse portrayed in Sucker Punch. I don’t discuss it in detail, but what I do discuss could be triggering for some.

Gather ’round, internet. Sit about me in a circle while I tell you a tale. Open your belief-flaps.

You know that the gorgeously wonderful Sarah C has already reviewed Sucker Punch. I know that, too. We both know that together. But what I also know is that I went to see it, too, and my face exploded with woe. Intergalactic space woe from the woe tubes. You know the stuff.

Like Sarah, I felt I was the target audience. I’m a pubescent boy who likes ladies, dragons, guns and stuff going on fire. There was no ingredient that went into this that, in theory, I wouldn’t like. But I hated it. I was blisteringly disappointed. Let me assail your faces with why.

I am not the person this film was made for. Neither was Sarah. The person this film was made for is a person that fetishises abuse, and likes their women best when they’re woefully underclothed and sobbing in fright.

This is not Sparta.

That’s a harsh paragraph. I realise that. But it really is the only way I can describe this film. It’s chock-full of abuse (implied rape and explicit beating) and the way it’s handled is emphatically not empowering in any way. The film is ostensibly about women battling their inner demons (quite literally, in this case – I see what you did there, Mr Snyder) and surviving, but it fails at every possible hurdle. The only way the characters can be powerful and dangerous is if they’re laminated in glitter, leather and fishnet. And the only way they can survive their abuse is if they cry and scream on screen and track mascara down their faces. Fear is sexy, you see.

I can’t put it better than if I just quote what one of the characters says (not verbatim, but it ran along these lines): “They act it all out up there [on a stage]. It’s quite a show, you know, when they’re acting out who touched them or hurt them or whatever.”

It is quite a show, yes. It smacks of Snyder trying to make the film self-aware and clever – he does it quite a lot, like the bit where we traipse right into Baby Doll’s inner world and there’s this line (again, paraphrasing, but Zack himself paraphrases similarly in the interview linked at the start of this post):

Wait, wait, wait, back up. This is meant to be sexy? Sexy school girl, I get. Frightened mental patient, yeah, okay, it’s a bit weird, but I kinda get that, too. But lobotomised vegetable?!

Hi, Zack, I see what you did there, too. You’re trying to make us think that this over-sexualised portrayal of abuse survivors is ironic. You’re trying to tell us that all this dribbly mascara and all these panty shots are ironic. That this wall-to-wall objectification and infantilisation (hell, the lead character’s name is Baby Doll and she constantly dresses like she’s 13) is all in the name of ironic, clever, snappy feminism. It’s a lancing, sassy criticism of objectification, you say.

Well, let me tell you something, Zack. There is nothing sexy, sassy or ironic about rape. There is nothing clever, witty, edgy or cool about showing us terrified, crying girls dressed like they’re 13 years old, getting abused in a way that is clearly meant to be titillating. It was about half-way in, and there was another scene of a weeping, shaking girl being hit in the face by a man who – it was strongly implied – at least attempted to rape her, when I realised that I just didn’t care what clever, witty, ironic message Zack Snyder was trying to send. The fact of the matter was that I was being fed images that anyone with even a hint of abuse in their past would find nauseatingly upsetting to watch and I was meant to be sitting there, revelling in how darkly sexy it all was, and going, “Hmm, yes, well done Mr Snyder, this is certainly a very clever comment on the sexualisation of women!”

Fuck that. I’m furious.

I could now continue to comment further on the film and how the characters were distinguishable only by outfit and hair, and how stating facts about characters doesn’t make us care for them automatically. I could say that the only bits that I loved in the film were the bits with the airships and the dragons. I could say that the only character that I empathised with was the Mother Dragon. But Sarah’s covered that and I agree with her, so what I’m going to say instead is this:

This, on the other hand, is Sparta. Look at the lack of sexual harassment amongst the chaps.

Zack Snyder was the man that brought us 300 – a smorgasbord of semi-naked, oiled, unrealistically ripped manflesh and violence – and I loved that film. I ain’t gonna lie: I’m predominantly androphilic, and that film catered to my tastes. I love 300 very much, and not because it’s a man-thigh sandwich. I love it because the characters in it work as a tightly-wound, perfect humanoid machine. Also because asksdjfh the Persian army are amazing.

But it wasn’t based on something that Snyder originally wrote. And, most crucially importantly, the objectified, sexualised Spartan warriors and their acres of bronzed musculature are not abused. They struggle, fight, love and die for each other in a war, but they’re not smacked in the face and threatened with rape every fifteen minutes. When they fight as an army, the camera caresses their strength, their competence and their teamwork alongside their biceps. The muscle is part of their mechanised, physical unity and strength.

In Sucker Punch, on the other hand, when Baby Doll slices up giant samurai robots, we’re treated to her pants every four seconds, her thighs every minute and her unchanging expression of “Oh no! A penis!” pretty much constantly. It’s exasperating. It’s writhe-in-the-seat horrible. It’s as if the panty shots are put there purely to lubricate the idea that she might be physically powerful, too. In fact, one of the major themes in the film is that the only power these women have is their sexual desirability. I’m insulted on behalf of everyone I know.

And this is from someone that really enjoys thighs.

I am disappointed and sad about it. Also angry and frustrated that this film, which is a landmark work in terms of how many women it had centre-stage, had so much potential to do good, but fucked it all up by trying to play “WOOO IRONICALLY SEXY” with something as serious and horrible and real as abuse. I actually want to bill Zack Snyder for my ticket price.

But I really loved the bit where the zeppelin exploded. At least there’s that.

Here are my pros and cons to go alongside Sarah’s.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• A zeppelin explodes! :D
• DRAGONS! :D

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• No power in creation can justify this level of sexualisation in the handling of abuse.

Tomorrow When The War Began

I’m very used to seeing Action Movie Posters – they tend to have muscle men front and centre. If women appear then they have strangely low cut tops and are in that curious pose that only women in posters ever adopt.

You know, the one in which they twist around in order to show their bottoms, chest  and face at the same time. Seriously – click here, here, here and here for some quick examples. Then walk around all day trying to work out when you ever do that pose naturally.

Here’s a man in the same pose. Note massive coat covering everything.

So you can really play Spot The Difference here. On this poster, not only are there more women than men, but they are all dressed pretty much the same. And no-one is wearing ridiculous costumes. Or standing in a funny way.

Yes, the women are all pretty actor types. But then so are the men.

The film itself (wiki article here) is coming out shortly. I had to check what it was about to make sure I wasn’t making some terrible mistake – if so, I’ll have been tricked into promoting a hideous anti-feminist car crash of a film.

Now, the plot is not without its problems, though mostly around the issue of race rather than gender: teenagers fight a guerilla war after their Australian town is invaded by the Asian “Coalition Nations”. This is such a hackneyed big budget trope (attack by foreigners/aliens), and it clashes a bit with the indie flick, Blair Witch-esque documentary feel I got from the trailer.

I remain hopeful (fingers crossed) that, like the poster, the film will do something different.

Found Feminism? See you at the cinema. Let’s discuss over popcorn.

• 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]!

Today, I’m subverting my own trope and writing about a game.  I do love a good computer game.  I like ones with excellent, flawed characters, and even more excellent, bizarre plots.  I like them big and sweeping and mind-bending, ideally with some kind of stealth element and something freaky and supernatural in the mix.  So naturally, I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.  Dear god do I love the Assassin’s Creed franchise.

“Love” is probably not the right word.  It’s not enough to convey the level of brain-melting, nose-bleed-inducing obsession I have with it.  It doesn’t illustrate the way I dissolve into a twitching heap when exposed to the soundtrack, or that I screamed at the ending of the first game and spent the next week – avoiding spoilers – sleeplessly deciphering it with the aid of the internet.  “Love” just doesn’t cover it.  My affection for it is worrying.  It feeds my soul with the purest, shimmering godlike joy from on high through a glee tube.

So please understand how hard it is for me to criticise it in any way.

The franchise is, as the title may suggest, about Assassins with a capital A: not hitmen-for-hire, but the original Hashshashin, a devoted army of politically-motivated killers locked in a battle against the Knights Templar in an exciting tangle of conspiracy theory fodder that gets increasingly bizarre as the series continues.  Most of the characters are male.  This is partially a reflection on the time period in question (mid-Crusades era Syria and the Italian Renaissance) but also because, according to trope, there is only one type of female assassin.

“What type is that?” I hear you cry, perplexed that there should be more than one type of Assassin at all.

You already know.  It’s the Sex Assassin.  The one that lures in the victim with sexual desire, and then! when they’re at their most vulnerable! murders them with stabbing.

This trope is old.  The Sex Assassin is inevitably female.  She’s the Battle Whore; a sexually desirable object of cunning, guise and stabbing, and it’s exciting because there she is!  Subverting regular heterosexual intercourse by penetrating the man she’s seduced!  With a knife. Do you see what they did there!  Surely we are all undone with the inventiveness.  Women being all deadly and effective!  But only if couched in the narrative device of being used as a sex object.  That is the only way they can be empowered, apparently.

I desperately hoped that my beloved Assassin’s Creed would break free of this trope and give us some hard-ass, female battle bastards, but it doesn’t, really.  I looked at the line-up of playable classes for the most recent massive release, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and there’s an array of interesting traditionally male roles: you’ve got a tank hangman, a plague doctor and a priest… and then there’s the woman.  There she is, at the back.  You can tell that she’s The Woman because there’s an awful lot of cleavage going on.

One of these is not like the others.

She’s a Sex Assassin.  That’s what she is.  Because she’s a woman.  What else would she do?  She’s special!  She has breasts, unlike all the other people in the world, who are apparently all hard, breastless, cisgendered men.  Women and their breasts are magical and rare, much like unicorns.  So naturally, she’ll be a Sex Assassin because goodness me, we can’t have any of the guys doing that.  Because they don’t have breasts.  And men are not sex objects for anyone ever.  Also, that’d be gay.  And that’s terrible!

There’s also a female harlequin, available as an optional extra.  And that’s brilliant, because the harlequins are terrifying, androgynous, lithe and competent (exactly what you want from an Assassin, really) and it really is nice to see a deadly, dangerous female character that isn’t a sex worker.   But – an optional extra?!  Why am I having to look for female characters who aren’t clinging desperately to the Lady Sex Assassin trope like a koala bear to the last damn eucalyptus tree on earth?

The second game (well, of the big platform releases; there’s been numerous spin-offs and blah blah blah, massive nerd dump on the series goes here, honestly, you’re better served asking Wikipedia than me because it is massively less drooling) is no better.  Ezio, our hero, has to learn how to be stealthy and to pickpocket people.  So, he learns from a female stealth expert.  Guess what she is!  Correct!  A concubine.  Because, of course, there is no other sort of dangerous woman.  All other women in Assassin’s Creed II are either harrowed victims in a revenge cycle, or Ezio’s passive, faceless lovers.

And what’s the deal with sex workers being cast as “dangerous”, anyway?  Is it yet another embodiment of Evil Female Sexuality, wherein a woman in control of her own sexuality is deemed “savage” or “out of control”?  Or is it some kind of “trap” issue?  The normative dialogue is that Mr. Cisgendered Manly McHeterosexual takes the first step towards initiating sexual contact; our Ms. Sex Assassin twists that by being the one that does the seducing instead.  The assumption, then, is that the seducer is the dangerous one, being as that men are the ones to usually instigate sex, and I’ve dropped my monocle in horror.

However!  It’s not all bad news.   Sidestepping any spoilers, Assassin’s Creed I and II have “framing” characters away from the time-travelling stabbination who are female Assassins.  They don’t stab anyone up, but are actually totally brilliant, stealthy and clever, and frequently save the (male) protagonist.  There!  That’s the juice without any spoilers.  The modern-day framing narrative characters rock my entire world, even though they’re not as action-entrenched as Altaïr or Ezio.

Recently, one of the wonderful Ubisoft community developers I follow on Twitter linked to some beautiful Assassin’s Creed-related artwork.  “Sexy Assassin!” they said.  I exploded with joy all over the internet and clicked through, hoping, as I always do, to find hot male pin-up.

Well.  I found this.

I mean, look at it.  It’s gorgeously done.  I can’t paint even remotely that well.  Hats off to the skills there!  It’s completely brilliant!  And who doesn’t like stockings?  Nobody.  Stockings are a sure-fire winner.  And, you know, I’m a fan of knives and stockings.  So that’s good.

But do you see the point I’m making?  Women apparently can’t be Assassins unless they’re some kind of Sex Assassin.  No!  Please!  It is perfectly possible to have scary, efficient, ruthless, politically-minded, devoted, armoured Assassins who are women.  Please give your female gamers someone to identify with who is tough and awesome without the over-riding message that the only way for them to be so is to give themselves sexually to men.

And, you know, I know this has been said before but – what’s with the lack of male pin-ups?  Why can’t we have male Sex Assassins?  What’s going on there?  Ezio is certainly meant to be sexy, and there’s lots of handsome portraiture of both him and the lovely Altaïr from the first game in the fanart-producing sector of the fandom.  But nothing quite like the “Sexy Assassin” I’ve linked to above.  Where’s all the ludicrous cheese and posturing?  I love cheese and posturing.  Ezio is one of the cheesiest posturers of any videogame character I have ever seen.  So where’s the pictures of him in just the hood draped all over Florence like it’s a city-sized chaise longue?

So, Ubisoft, if you’re reading, I gift to you the following three illustrations:

NUMBER ONE: the battle-worn avenger who kills for her beliefs and her Hashshashin family.

NUMBER TWO: the wise, old Master who is not to be under-estimated despite her years.

NUMBER THREE: Altaïr (artist’s impression thereof) in stockings doing a cheesecake.

NOTE TO READERS: I really do love Assassin’s Creed more than anything; please don’t let this article lead you to believe otherwise.

OTHER NOTE TO READERS: Anyone who suggests that I wrote this article as an excuse to draw Altaïr in lingerie is a heretic and liar and probably a Templar.  The Brotherhood are watching you.

Image credits for the Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood box art lie firmly in the hands of Ubisoft.

• Postscript: So then Ubisoft actually read this post, and Markgraf wrote a follow-up. You can read that here.