There’s nothing that takes us back to basics more than camping. Take away the shower, the clean toilet, the puffs and powders and that whole sleep thing and you’re playing on a level field. Or are you? After the first set, I watched as scores of men took to the fence, whipped their genitalia out, and relieved themselves with an efficiency almost amounting to elegance. Then a girl and her friend approached, one providing coverage to the other. Barely had she begun to unzip when a (female) security guard magically materialised – you can’t do that. Use the portaloos, please.

Now we can argue endlessly about the acceptability or otherwise of whipping any species of privates out in a public place, but surely if we’re going basic for the weekend, we should all be as basic as each other? As for the portaloos themselves, well – the feminist implications of in-conveniences for the ladies have already been discussed in this very publication, so I won’t repeat them, but I will ask you to consider what happens when those using urinals also share the cubicles with those for whom this is not an option. And the queue-length that implies. All in all, I ended up feeling my experience had been inferior to my male companions’ on account of my sex (and, in the case of the security guard, because of my gender, too). But others have had it worse…

Managing events on this scale, however much it may be a British institution, comes with all kinds of questions around safety, both onstage and off. The dominant concern must always be to make people feel like they’re living dangerously, when in fact they’re safe as the proverbial houses. That’s how you deliver a great live experience. No-one wants to feel on-edge all weekend, but no-one wants to feel mollycoddled either. After all, the teenagers who trash Reading Festival each year are trying to get away from their parents, and it’s surely a given that any festival is riddled with drugs. Who cares?

Festival Republic (who manage Glastonbury and run Latitude, Reading, Leeds and the Big Chill) took this thesis to its logical conclusion in 2010 and significantly scaled down their police presence from the outset. The resultant spate of thefts was accompanied by a gang rape on the first night, and a second instance on the second. On-site, the organisers responded with that old chestnut about women not going around the site unaccompanied. Oh! There’s that gender thing again.

I find this particularly galling because there was a suspected instance of rape in the campsite I was staying in myself on the Saturday night at Bestival. It seemed to be a case of domestic abuse, but it’s the height of irony that a festival attended by 30,000 people could be seen as a ‘safe’ space to take this toxically private crime outside its eponymous home. It’s even more ironic that these crimes against women are occurring at events that are almost synonymous in many minds with the image of one very famous female – Kate Moss, whose ‘festival style’ was recently voted the most iconic festival fashion moment of all time, beating Jimi Hendrix’s tasseled white Glastonbury shirt. Rarely was it more truly spoken that one is never so alone as in a large crowd.

The live events sector is a multi-million pound one, and despite this year’s setbacks (and the state of the economy more generally), it’s still a growth industry long-term. Illegal downloading and the resultant changes to the music industry’s economy will only make live music events of all sizes more important over the coming years. And with Beyonce this year becoming the first female headliner at Glastonbury in 20 years and women like Kate Moss and Sienna Miller leading the style stakes, there’s clearly a female voice coming through. Yet, as unpleasant as it undoubtedly is to admit, when something goes wrong, it’s often the women who suffer – festivals are the perfect rape storm: scantily-clad girls (whose hemlines do not but may be perceived to = consent), large groups of drunk men (our neighbours serenaded us with a beautiful rendition of ‘Get your rat out for the lads’ at four in the afternoon on the Saturday), crowds that can easily separate you from your party, softly-softly security, copious amounts of drugs and large open spaces where people may hear your scream but probably won’t realise, care about, or be in a state to deal with, its urgency. There’s been evidence that some live events companies are listening, of course, and I don’t want to suggest a doom-fest of misogyny either – but with the industry set for the boomtimes to come, I’d like to be assured that festivals aren’t a feminist issue.

Fausta and her mother in The Milk of Sorrow

There are times when I’m glad I live in such a blinkered cultural bubble, with only a dim grasp of global politics. Case in point: while I was enraptured by Mysterious Cities of Gold in the 1980s, the real-life land of the Incas – Peru – was being torn apart by a bloody internal conflict between communist guerrilla army the Shining Path and government security forces.

I was only five, of course. But when I watched it again at university (a rite of passage, surely?) only a year after the conflict had wound down, I was none the wiser. In fact, in some senses it hasn’t really ended. The latest reported attack by Shining Path rebels was in April 2010.

Between 1980 and 2000 some 70,000 people died, including huge numbers of civilians. Countless survivors are still in search of justice, including the thousands of women who were victims of sexual violence and humiliation at the hands of soldiers.

Despite this, and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is a reluctance in many places to discuss the events of the war and what happened, and many women, especially poor and indigenous women in the Andean areas that were worst effected, struggle to voice the suffering they have endured, to access support and see justice being done.

The Milk of Sorrow

It is this situation that is addressed in Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film, The Milk of Sorrow. The film is based on the book Entre Prójimos by Kimberly Theidon, which collected testimonies from women who had experienced sexual violence, including brutal gang rape (here’s an interview with Theidon). Many of the women Theidon spoke to reported a belief that the trauma they had experienced had somehow been transmitted to their children through their breastmilk. Llosa claims in this Birds Eye View interview that this is a genuine belief (hm…) but either way it is certainly a good expression of the severe psychological damage and lingering emotional distress caused by conflict to individuals and entire communities.

The film follows Fausta, a young woman whose mother was raped during the war, and who believes she has been fed on the milk of sorrow. Another character says that children like her have no souls; they have fled for fear. Fausta is so afraid of her mother’s fate she inserts a potato into her vagina as a guard against rape. Here’s the trailer for the film.

Llosa’s first film is also set in Peru, also deals with sexual violence, and stars the same actress, Magaly Solier. Madeinusa (2006) is on the one hand a bit of a fairytale, about an invented religious custom in a fictional Andean village. But on the other hand it deals with poverty, rape, incest, murder and child abuse. In the village in which 14 year old Madeinusa lives, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday Christ is dead, so there is no sin. Or rather, your sins don’t count. Beautiful scenery, gut-wrenching scenes. It’s bleak – there’s no wholly sympathetic character in the whole film, and even the everyman ‘good guy’ is happy to take advantage of Madeinusa’s teenage interest in him. She emerges triumphant, after a fashion. Here’s the trailer (in Spanish).

Explaining or exploiting?

While I think both Madeinusa and The Milk of Sorrow are stunning bits of cinema, they do make me uncomfortable, as both films and their director have been accused of racism in their portrayal of the indigenous population of Peru as superstitious, vicious and backward. Llosa belongs to the Peruvian white urban elite, and in fact now lives in Spain. The charge levelled at her is that she has used the stories and experiences of Andean women to turn a profit but without showing respect for indigenous communities or involving native people in the project in more than a superficial way. Carlos in DC sees this as emblematic of the inequality in Peruvian society:

I have witnessed the racial and cultural discrimination that our Indigenous peoples face in Peru, especially in the city of Lima where we are discriminated by our accents, ways of living and traditions. At the same time, Lima profits from our cultures and resources.

To me, The Milk of Sorrow symbolizes that racial and economical division exactly. A filmmaker from Lima and her producers from Europe are using the sad experiences and the suffering of our Andean women as a topic for their profitable film.

It’s that old chestnut again: by representing and discussing sexual violence and using real testimonies to inform your representation, are you reinforcing a message of victimhood and exploiting the women whose experiences you use? Worse still, are you at risk of producing something titillating? It’s a tough one even without the dimension of race, which clearly can’t be ignored in the Latin American context (or, well, anywhere really).

The Milk of Sorrow, more than Madeinusa, has served to raise awareness of sexual violence in conflict, and Magaly Solier has also supported an anti-violence against women campaign, so perhaps there’s the social good silver lining.

Lots of impatient IMDb reviews urge people just to enjoy the films as art and stop worrying about the politics. I think that is exactly the wrong approach. Whatever else Claudia Llosa’s films are, they are an opportunity to talk about things which don’t often get an airing; painful, complex things which need to be voiced.

Feminism in Peru

I’m trying to pay attention to things that are happening in the world wider than London, and especially learning about and learning from the women’s movement in other countries.

Happily, I got to meet women from two leading feminist organisations in Peru – DEMUS and Fepromu – at a Womankind Worldwide event in April, where they spoke about their work. You can watch subtitled films of their talks here and here if you’d like to know more about what it’s like working for women’s rights in Latin America.

There’s also this interesting article about the relationship between development, Western feminism and the grassroots women’s movement in Peru, centred around the network of comedores.

Amid calls for the video to be banned, it’s interesting to see how much of the outrage centres on the murder, rather than the rape. Granted, the shooting and its aftermath is shown far more explicitly than the hinted-at assault, but commentary such as that of media watchdog Paul Porter:

“‘Man Down’ is an inexcusable, shock-only, shoot-and-kill theme song. In my 30 years of viewing BET, I have never witnessed such a cold, calculated execution of murder in primetime…”

appears to be divorcing the shooting from its context, concentrating on Rihanna as the agent and perpetrator of a crime, rather than as the victim of one. This wilfully ignores one of the video’s central messages, which is the ease with which these roles can be merged.

Sex and violence, and sexual violence, as themes in art and entertainment are as old as art and entertainment themselves. To be flippant for a second: maybe it’s just the use of the word ‘Mama’, but the chorus of ‘Man Down’ put me in mind of that certain section of Bohemian Rhapsody where the narrator, having just killed a man, ruminates on how ‘life had just begun and now I’ve gone and thrown it all away’. And while I don’t think Freddie Mercury was ever actively described as a positive role model, neither was he castigated for encouraging cold-blooded cod-operatic executions among 1970s youth.

Is Rihanna coming in for particular criticism because of the publicity previously given to her real-life encounters with violence? Those of you following along at home will of course have noticed that she didn’t respond to her experience of assault by shooting Chris Brown on the concourse of Grand Central Station. Surely no one seriously believes ‘Man Down’ to be advocating that the victims of violence engage in violent reprisals – any more than that was true of Thelma & Louise, or Straw Dogs, or, to really stretch the analogy, Death and the Maiden? ‘Man Down’ is, on one level, a revenge fantasy which relies on the dramatic and the sensational to get its message across.

Roger Ebert wrote of Irréversible, whose backwards chronology ‘Man Down’ recalls, that the film’s structure makes it inherently moral – that by presenting the vengeance before the acts that inspire it, we are forced to process the vengeance first, and therefore think more deeply about its implications. Might the same apply to ‘Man Down’? Throughout the lyrics and video, the song’s protagonist may contextualise and explain her actions, but she’s not free of regret, she isn’t gleeful or exultant, and she acknowledges her actions as a crime with implications for the rest of her life. She calls herself a ‘criminal’ and reflects that her rapist and victim was ‘somebody’s son’. The narrative doesn’t glorify murder, but it recognises that we live in a world where this kind of fantasy-vigilante approach might often seem more accessible and plausible than relying for justice on the state or the police.

Art and entertainment don’t exist in a vacuum. Art will be asked to justify itself, particularly when it touches on themes that are an everyday reality for many of us and which feed into issues like the space which women, particularly women of colour, have to express themselves, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes versus the impetus, the desire, and perhaps the moral duty, to openly discuss the conditions under which we live.

The complex intersections of race and gender hardly lend themselves to being cleared up in the confines of a blog post, but ‘Man Down’ has sparked plenty of engaged and informative discussion online – at Crunk Feminist, The Beautiful Struggler, and Hello Beautiful for starters. I’m just glad debate is happening and that we have a mainstream artist who doesn’t shy away from instigating it.

*

Rhian Jones also blogs at Velvet Coalmine.

OVARY

Oh! Darling.

Ovary hopped onto the semantic stage around 1658 meaning ‘the female organ of reproduction in animals, in which ova or eggs are produced’ (ova being the Latin plural form of ovum = egg). Eggs, of course, are now generally recognised as a crucial part of reproduction in all species (a chicken ovulates every day, fact fans), making the ovary rather important for the construction of little’uns. Straightforwardly, the word derives from ovarium: ‘ovum’ + ‘-arium’ (aquarium, oceanarium, planetarium, toastarium). Consistency: it’s helpful. But hold! 1658? Really? What about before? Was there some mass genital evolution in the late seventeenth century that made early modern cisgendered Woman so drastically different from her medieval sisters?

Hartsoeker's drawings of 'homunculi', or 'little humans' inside sperm. (1695)

Well no, but there was an evolution in what Scientists considered “Woman” to be. For hundreds of thousands of years previous, the established thinking had been that they were simply men ‘turned outside-in’: female genitals were held ‘up there’ by a colder body temperature than their male counterparts, and, thus, sex differences were a matter of degree. Women were men who hadn’t quite unfurled properly.

Oh My God

With this thinking, the vagina became an inverted penis, the labia a foreskin, the uterus a scrotum, and the ovaries testicles – and all these now-familiar gynecological terms date from the same period: the oft-maligned vagina (= ‘sheath’) is faux-Latin from 1680, labia (= ‘lip’) slightly earlier (1630s) and uterus the earliest, from 1610 (although, as already mentioned in these pixellated pages, it was conflated with the gender-neutral ‘womb’ or ‘belly’, its original Latinate meaning). Pre-seventeenth century ovaries were consequently referred to as ‘female testicles’ or ‘stones’, and the synonymity was so literal as to accept the possibility that if a girl got too hot through strenuous exercise, her entire reproductive system could accidentally pop out and turn her into a boy.

So if sex was a false distinction to make, how did male and female manage to breed? Seventeenth-century scientists approached this question firstly through Aristotle and his theory of epigenesis (= ‘origin through growth’). Aristotle reckoned male semen gave the embryo its form, and female menstrual blood supplied the raw materials.¹ The ‘soul’ enters the embryo at the moment the mother first feels the baby kick.

However, by suggesting new people can spring into being organically, epigenesis risks dispensing with divine involvement. Not cool. So a much more palatable alternative, for seventeenth-century scientists, was preformation (the idea that the parents’ seed already contained a miniature adult, so all the embryo has to do is increase in size). Bit creepy, right? Nicolaas Hartsoeker (1656-1725) was well into this idea and even claimed he could see these ‘homunculi’ through the microscope (above, right).

But once this had been agreed, there came the inevitable Swiftian debate about how you like your eggs, with scientists divided into ‘aminalculists’ and ‘ovists’: those who were with Hartsoeker in believing the ‘germ’ of life to be in the sperm, and those who preferred the ‘egg’ (= ‘the female’). Arguing in favour of the latter was the (understandable) confusion about why God would be so wasteful as to create thousands of Hartsoekerean sperm-germs to be lost on every egg-ward excursion for the sake of one single fertilization: from the outside, the female looked a bit more efficient.

Oh! You Pretty Things

But clearly, all this Knowledge was better on the subject of males than females (and even the women themselves were hard pressed to explain menstruation or recognise pregnancy): ova were still shrouded in mystery, and ovulation a great unknown – it was not even certain whether human females could conceive without orgasm, or if they were more like cats, rabbits, llamas (now known as ‘induced ovulators’) and, er, men. Official advice erred on the side of caution and recommended that both man and wife reach orgasm during procreation – as a side-effect, a rapist could get off scott-free if his victim fell pregnant, since, until the nineteenth century, the law worked backwards and considered conception to imply enjoyment and, therefore, consent.

It is William Harvey (1578-1657), most famous for ‘discovering’ the circulation of the blood, who is commonly credited with realising the importance of an ovary-thing, and the frontispiece to his treatise on the subject blazons the tag ‘ex ovo omnia‘ (‘everything from the egg’). But he was thinking less of a modern day ‘egg cell‘ and more of a ‘spirit’: an egg was the mother’s ‘idea’ of a fetus which was ‘ignited’ in her womb during sex. It was a general generative catalyst, not technical anatomy – as is clear from the image (below, left).

Can of worms... The frontispiece to Harvey's Treatise on Generation (detail). Image from http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/visibleembryos/

Oh My Gosh

After kicking around for just over a century, ovary suddenly became enshrined in anatomy books as an independent organ that somehow encapsulated ‘woman’: in 1844 Achille Chereau declared that ‘it is only because of the ovary that woman is what she is’ (oh dear). In part, this was to do with a retreat from the previous centuries’ idea that women and men were anatomically the same and an advance towards the notion that sex equalled gender (a surprisingly modern invention, if you listen to Thomas Laqueur). With this came an increasing focus on specifically ‘women’s’ problems via hysteria (= ‘womb trouble’), and, neatly (if disturbingly) a favourite cure for this pre-Freud was the bilateral ovariotomy, also dubbed ‘female castration’: removing a patient’s healthy ovaries to man them up a bit (just as men become ‘feminized’ through removal of the testicles). The ovariotomy would thus, it was believed, act not just as a cure for hysteria, but also for behavioural pathologies including nymphomania, and even general aches and pains. Of course, it also stopped menstruation, rendered women infertile and carried risks endemic to c19th surgery methods. WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS DOES, SO LET’S JUST TAKE IT OUT.

It was not until the 1930s that scientists got near a hormonal understanding of ovulation, how it worked and how it could be controlled. Here we really should give a nod to that symbol of 1960s sexual liberation: the combined oral contraceptive pill, a great source of division between parents and children, as epitomised in the backstory to the seminal Beatles song She’s Leaving Home (1967). See, children of the 1920s and 30s must have found the idea of their daughters silently and imperceptibly controlling their ovulation terrifying, whereas the children of the 1960s saw such control as simple empowerment. In miniature, this gives us the whole history of ovary and its linguistic cognates: what cannot be seen is inevitably free for appropriation by a host of meanings. Meaningarium.

Further Reading:

• Making Visible Embryos – an ‘online exhibition’ from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. And Thomas Laqueur, of course (as linked).

NEXT WEEK: P is for Pussy

1. Yes, menstrual blood.

L

LADY

‘My lady’, as her friends called her, sincerely desired to be a genuine lady, and was so at heart, but had yet to learn that money cannot buy refinement of nature, that rank does not always confer nobility, and that true breeding makes itself felt in spite of external drawbacks.

Louisa May Alcott, Good Wives (1869)

She’s A Lady.

Funny Etymology Submission #billion: lady sprung from the Old English hlaefdige (I dunno, I didn’t do Old English), a compound of hlaf (‘loaf’) and dig (‘to knead’). So a lady is literally ‘she who kneads loaves’.

I guess you can kind of see where it went from there, since its original (now obsolete) meaning is as ‘the female head of the household’; i.e., the one what does the cooking, with the ambiguity that still runs through many households where Mum’s In Charge, but Dad’s Earning. Thus, in its second meaning (also Old English), it becomes ‘A woman who rules over subjects‘, now only used in ‘poetical’ or ‘rhetorical’ senses. But in extended Middle English usage, it’s refined to ‘A woman who is the object of a man’s devotion; a mistress, lady-love’.

That’s No Lady, That’s My Wife.

Here we enter the troubled seas of courtly love, that pretty part of medieval culture peopled by sighing knights sitting under rose-bushes. Supposedly ‘invented’ by Eleanor of Aquitaine, at her court in Poitiers, it was brought to England with her marriage to Henry II in 1152.

Fra Angelico, Madonna of Humility, c.1430

The basic idea was an almost iconoclastic worship of your lady-love, whose favours you sought through brave deeds, refined behaviour and that sort of thing. The highest ‘favour’ was the fantastically ambiguous ‘naked embrace’ (although you might well sleep with an unsheathed sword between you), and your ‘lady-love’ didn’t have to be a viable option – she could be married, generically unavailable, or just someone you’d never met but heard lots about down the alehouse. She was a spur to bravery, swordplay and courtliness, not, like, your girlfriend.

Lay Lady Lay.

But courtly love was emphatically not a concept that elevated hoi polloi: your lady would be a lady in the fourth sense of the word (‘a woman of superior social position’) and quite possibly also in the specific extended sense of the second, ‘the female corresponding to lord’ (Lord and Lady Godiva).

In contrast, peasants ‘are impelled to acts of love in the natural way like a horse or a mule’, in the words of Andreas Capellanus, who quite literally wrote the rule book for courtly love. Capellanus advises his readers to steer clear of the ‘game’ of love where the lower classes are involved, and, if overcome with lust, to ‘find a suitable spot [and] not delay in taking what you seek, gaining it by rough embraces’¹ .

And such attitudes are never far from this most ‘pretty’ of love-traditions – a lyric in the Carmina Burana (c.1230) tells what happens when, despite ‘long service’, the lady still denies her knight ‘the final and best stage’:

She rampages with her sharp nails, tears my hair, forcefully repels my violence. She coils herself and entwines her knees to prevent the door of her maidenhead from being unbarred. But at last my campaign makes progress; […] I tighten by embraces our entwined bodies, I pin her arms, I implant hard kisses. In this way Venus’ palace is unbarred.

The ambiguous power-structure at the heart of being someone’s lady could hardly be clearer.

All this said, if you were Specially Virtuous, courtly love was the ideal forum for worshipping a very specific lady – the word’s third sense, ‘Our Lady’, the Virgin Mary. Ah, Mary. Everybody loves Mary, and throughout the middle ages, she picked up honorific titles like a big bit of blue velcro: ‘Our Lady’, ‘Our Blessed Lady’, ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’, ‘the Queen of Heaven’, ‘the Blessed Virgin’ you name it. She even had a special colour-code – white (sometimes red) and blue. Pre-Prussian Blue (discovered in 1704), blues were the most expensive painting pigments, so someone decided MARY SHALL WEAR ONLY BLUE, WE LOVE HER SO.

Nevertheless, Mary has an evil analogue: post-Reformation, there are plenty of references to the ‘Lady of Rome’ or the ‘Lady of Babylon’, an abusive term for the Catholic church in reference to the ‘scarlet woman’ of the Apocalypse. The dichotomy continues outside religion: see also lady‘s more worldly senses: lady of easy virtue, lady of the town, etc.

The Lady Is A Tramp.

In modern usage, lady‘s social standing is ‘loosely defined but not very high’; often, it is ‘merely a courteous synonym for woman‘, giving a strange social gloss to cisgendered biological fact. It was around 1861 (just before Good Wives) that it got its more specific sense as ‘a woman whose manners, habits and sentiments are those characteristic of the higher ranks of society’.

This could be interpreted as Alcott uses it, or, if you are Walt Disney, as exactly what it says: think Lady and the Tramp (1955), one of many poor boy – rich girl tales. The title plays on Sinatra’s song ‘The Lady Is A Tramp‘, which is repeated in strangely sexualised form in the film about the Tramp himself (you could never have a female tramp). The same idea returns in feline form in The Aristocats (1970), where again Society wins but appropriates some of the gritty male spark from the other side of the tracks. For polite desecration only, please.

So a lady can stand for certain upper-class ‘manners, habits and sentiments’ that are in opposition to those of a simple man or woman. From courtly love to the leash and collar set, the feminized force of sophistication calms, restrains, and decorates.

NEXT TIME: we’ll be halfway through! But not before Hodge takes a little Christmas break. We return in 2011, with M for Marriage.

1. …all translations are P.G. Walsh’s: it’s too early in the morning to read blogposts in Medieval Latin.