With a history spanning three centuries, Tatler is Establishment to its very core. It sells itself to advertisers as having ‘the wealthiest readership in the UK’ and accordingly peddles luxury goods and the accompanying lifestyle to Society dahlings and their postulant doppelgangers. The magazine worships the higher reaches of British class structures, fawning over those who through their money, their fame or their postcode can be considered ‘society’ and celebrating an incongruous, archaic social order.

Tatler seems an unlikely champion of diversity. The world it represents is one of deep privilege in which abide the casts of Jilly Cooper novels: men of title or profession and their charity-supporting wives; women in Jaeger gilets and and twentysomethings who order £19 martinis; the worst upper class caricatures made flesh for their own amusement and forwarded as role models for the aspirant gaggles. But editor Kate Reardon has noticed a problem: gay men, she says, are widely represented in Society but gay women are not, and she’s going to do something about it.

Her reasoning is thus: lady-lovers make people ‘either titillated or a little bit frightened’ – a conclusion I can only assume was arrived at with a sense of deep profundity at 3am and through the bottom of a cocktail glass – and claiming that parents are thrilled when their sons come out but embarrassed when their daughters do. Lesbians, she says, have never been accepted by High Society, a fact that Virginia Woolf, Natalie Clifford Barney and Betty Carstairs apparently missed the memo on. The way to address this problem, obviously, is to find some sapphic sisters and do a feature on them. Choose wisely, though. None too butch, none too… y’know… dykey, and if they’re over a size 12 then headshots only.

The fact is that she may well be right, but the issue is not one of sexuality but of gender – lesbians don’t have the status and visibility of gay men because women don’t have the status and visibility of men. A magazine which targets an overwhelmingly female audience (around 80%) is a routine place to celebrate women, and putting a handful of queer ladies in the spotlight is never going to be a bad thing.

We shouldn’t shy away from acknowledging lesbians and lesbianism, claimed Reardon in an interview on Woman’s Hour, and with this effort she’s ‘just bringing it up’; it’s up to us to talk about it. Noble enough, I suppose. The problem is that Tatler isn’t exactly bashful when it comes to creating a sensation when sales are falling (Anthea Turner naked but for a python, anyone?) and according to Janet Street-Porter in the Daily Mail that’s exactly what’s happening right now. With a drop in readership of more than 20% in the last year, and 25% within its target demographic, it’s easy to believe that Tatler is just trying to pretty up the sales figures. And why not? Vanity Fair saw a boost in audience with its infamous KD Lang/Cindy Crawford cover in 1994 just as defunct soap Brookside did with its Beth/Margaret kiss the same year. The mid-nineties may have been the height of lesbian chic, but the same trick might well work today. However easy it is to think that we’ve moved on in this post-Queer As Folk, post-Ellen world, the promise of a bit of girl-on-girl still sets the collective knees of the nation a-tremblin’.

The feature in Tatler is fluff, but what else did we expect? Seven fashion-plate photographs and an ad for a Belgravia-based lesbian and gay introduction agency make what the cover assures us is the definitive portfolio – though seven is not the definitive portfolio of anything, unless it’s colours of the rainbow – and takes up fewer pages than cover star Alice Eve. Whoever sent out the press release dubbing this ‘the lesbian issue’ was clearly overstating things a bit. Each photo is accompanied by a brief, soundbitey blurb in which such insights as favorite colour are revealed. It’s an exercise in mediocrity. I mean, they’ve managed to make Sue Perkins dull. How is that even possible?

Tatler’s website offers ‘behind the scenes at the lesbian shoot’ – a startling prospect given the physical magazine features a what to wear to a [game] shoot guide. As well as vaguely hinting that Tatler staffers get their jollies shooting wild lesbians in the Home Counties at the weekend, the dodgy syntax in this headline treats the women in the same terms that it does its fashion: the Marc Jacobs shoot; the unfathomably expensive sarong shoot; the lesbian shoot. These women are modelling an accessory, and it is lesbianism. Instead of celebrating gay women, Tatler has narrowed the playing field – as this sort of faux-diverse tokenism often does – by offering a blueprint for acceptable lesbianism, a whitewashed ideal for the rest of us to not quite live up to.

A black tie dinner (dubbed the ‘lesbian ball’) hosted by Tatler in celebration of this barrier-smashing seven-pics-and-an-advert brought 200 women, of all sexualities, together for an evening of networking and masturbatory self-congratulation which, while undoubtedly productive for those involved, did precisely nothing for the women (generally) and lesbians and bi women (specifically) who could actually do with a leg up. This was not a benefit for LGBT charities. It was not the launch event for a campaign seeking to address actual inequality. No speeches were made about why the event was held. It was a party. Just a party. For the most privileged group of women in the UK and with a guest list so diverse that knicker obsessive Mary Portas was invited even though she’s trade. According to one nameless attendee over on themostcake, a spiffing time was had by all, and though the photos don’t show it, I like to think the evening ended with a load of drunken women kicking off their Louboutins and singing ‘I am Woman’ at high volume in the taxi queue.

Tatler had an opportunity to do some grandstanding and they nibbled on canapes instead. Radical.

• Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN , the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

We were also better organised, having managed to create a proper banner and it was great running into other feminist and activist groups such as bloggers from The F Word and the Queer Resistance crew.

Look at our banner! It

Most importantly, we were also a little wiser, having learned to pack water, snacks (wholemeal scones with dried fruit have been designated the official protest food) and weather-suitable clothing, which in this case meant sunblock and waterproofs.

We gathered outside the tube station to co-ordinate ourselves and our outfits before filtering over to Hyde Park Corner where the marchers were being gently herded by stewards. It’s estimated that over 5,000 people marched on the day, far more than originally thought. The sun beat down on us as the air filled with a festival air of drumming, and SlutWalk London banners: “No Means No” and “My Dress Is Not A Yes”. Homemade banners told a range of stories, from the extremely personal (“I was wearing jeans and a jumper”) to the slightly Dadaist (a hand-drawn image of a breast crying black tears).

After a little longer in the sun than we might have liked, we eventually set off to a chorus of cheers, chanting “yes means yes and no means no”. The well-dressed folk outside the Ritz, combined with the builders digging up the road, added a slightly surreal quality to the proceedings.

Along the march we were able to look around at our fellow slut-walkers, who all seemed to have arrived from a wide variety of backgrounds, and many of them newly politicised and newly interested in feminist activism. The variety and number of people present was impressive. Men and women, cis and trans* people, old, young, queer and straight. But sadly, that hasn’t been precisely how Slutwalk has been addressed or represented.

The march has been depicted as a “women’s protest“, with most articles leading on the high volume of women and only skirting over the fact that there were plenty of men at the march. This attitude was sadly widespread on the day itself: we were referred to as “ladies” by other marchers despite the fact that we had men in our group.

Here at BadRep Towers, and partly hidden by the veil of the internet, we are often assumed to be a group of women, whereas we are in fact variously women, men and bugger-off with-your-gender-identification. Whilst on the march, we were very visible (especially with our amazing banner!) and yet we still faced the same problem. The men walking with us were either ignored, or even more tellingly, assumed to be women in later writeups altogether. And there was persistent misgendering going on too, even after people were set straight. It’s pretty awkward and upsetting to witness people being excluded on a march because of how they look, when you are marching to remove prejudice over how people look.

The other challenge here is that if SlutWalk is viewed as a man-excluding club then it falls too easily into the trap of accusations of man-hating, rather like common judgements of feminism itself. So, for the record, there were plently of chaps and not just the ones that write for this website. And hurrah for them!

Other media responses included criticisms of the reasoning behind the march itself. The blogosphere exploded into hackneyed analogies along the lines of “people who leave their front doors open should expect to get burgled”, and the media started to generate all sorts of ways to stir up other reasons why SlutWalk is a bad idea.

The Mail (of all places) criticised Slutwalk for being too middle class in its focus. We (much like the Mail) did not conduct an in-depth survey of the class background of all 5,000 protesters, so I’m going to let the image of women holding a Socialist Worker sign used in that very article attest to the class conscious values of those present. Irony points, indeed.

And, as was sadly bound to happen, some members of the press completely missed the point or just concentrated on the titilation aspect.

Media response aside, the general mood on the day was very positive and there are plenty of articles out there that are just as upbeat, just as expressive of the wide range of people who support Slutwalk: lesbilicious offers an eyewitness account, or if you don’t feel like doing any more reading, there’s a huge collection of photos that show the range of people at the Slutwalk over at Urban75.

We met a lot of cool people and heard a range of inspiring, heartfelt and amazing stories from speakers when we landed in a jam-packed Trafalgar Square. In the bustle, it was hard to see the speakers, so we let a wave of different voices wash over us. We listened to plummy, stately tones deride the idea that only working class women get raped, then the quiet voice of “Just Jo” deliver her life story about the experiences of being a trans woman subject to verbal and physical abuse. We heard the shocking facts about abysmal treatment of sex workers in instances of rape, delivered by Sheila Farmer of the English Collective of Prostitutes and activist Sanum Ghafoor angrily berated the catch-22 situation of living in a society that criticises women and dubs them “terrorists” in the street when they don the hijab and “wear too much”, yet casts them as “slags” when they wear too little. She was ably supported in this by the presence of Counterfire’s Hijabs, Hoodies and Hotpants block.

Personal stories told by all kinds of people, but all pointing to the same conclusion. Rape happens to people regardless of what they are wearing. Rapists, not those who are raped, and certainly not the clothes of those who are raped, are to blame.

SlutWalk London still need some extra cash – organising protests costs a lot of money. You can help them by donating here.

Very quietly, in April, a study was published that found that in American children’s books published between 1900 and 2000, female characters were under-represented by a ratio of 1.6:1. Not much happened. Then, at the beginning of this month, the Guardian wrote it up, and the Daily Mail tried their best to misrepresent it, failing to note the criteria used, representing the research as if it had been conducted in the UK, and generally being, well, a bit Daily Mail about the whole thing.

Two things then happened. The lovely lovely Daily Mail comments section went mad with people declaring (presumably based on the many years of research that each of them had done) that the results were clearly rubbish and anyway a bit of sexism never did me any harm now get in the kitchen and put my tea on. The Guardian‘s commenters largely ignored the piece, or said ‘no shit, Sherlock’ and went back to what they were doing before. So far, so par for the course.

But this lack of inquisitive attention is wrong for two reasons: first, this is a massive undertaking, so, y’know, kudos; secondly, these findings are Important. Important enough to use a capital ‘I’: at a time when children are developing their own gender identities, their literature both represents and defines what is expected of them. We need to know what those expectations are; the expectations that come not from our own choice of books for our children, but from what the literary establishment deems ‘good’ award winners are – rightly or wrongly – arbiters of taste, gatekeepers of acceptability. So when a study comes along that pays particular attention to, amongst other things, a century-worth of Caldecott Medal winners, we should be sitting up and taking notice.

Children’s books, and books in general, are not here-today-gone-tomorrow entities; they persist. In short, voices from both the distant and recent past are telling our children that women are simply not as important as men.

I’m not going to blather on about why it’s important for the message of gender of equality to be strong in the cradle and the classroom, nor why the repression of female characters in children’s fiction reinforces patriarchal gender systems, because if you’re over at BadRep you probably already know (and if you don’t, plenty has been written on the subject before).

I am going to blather on about why on earth this disparity between the genders hasn’t changed very much in a century.

So, let us return to the statistics. Since the early 1970s, studies have repeatedly found girls and women to be under-represented in children’s fiction, and this latest one is no different. It finds that in central roles male characters have a representation of 57 percent, and female characters only 31 percent. Significantly, it notes that “no more than 33 percent of books published in a year contain central characters who are adult women or female animals, whereas adult men and male animals appear in up to 100 percent”. You can get a free PDF of the whole study, by Janice McCabe, Emily Fairchild, and others from universities in Florida and Indiana, here or read the abstract here.

Not only are there fewer female characters in books in the first place, but “reader response research suggests that as children read books with male characters, their preferences for male characters are reinforced, and they will continue reaching for books that feature boys, men, and male animals”. This disparity of gender representation is made even more significant when we learn that boys redefine female protagonists with whom they identify as secondary characters¹ and recast secondary male characters as central when retelling the same stories². Educators, too, make a distinction between the genders when choosing appropriate literature for their classes, opting for stories with male protagonists more frequently than female even when their self-reported politics would suggest they do otherwise. ³

It is worth mentioning at this stage that the numerical representation of the genders and the stereotypicality of the behaviours those genders present are separate issues, and while the latter is fascinating in all sorts of ways, it is a large enough arena of study to warrant a separate post.

Children’s literature is particularly sensitive to sociopolitical forces. It’s probably not surprising, then, that this study finds spikes in the parity of gender representations coinciding with the second – and third – waves of feminism, so the books published in the 1930s-1960s show less gender parity than those published before and after, and more equal representation of the genders in books published after 1970.

Take this graph – Ratios of Males to Females, Overall Central Characters, Child Central Characters, and Animal Central Characters across the full set of 5,618 books the study analysed, spanning a century from 1900-2000:

These peaks and troughs in the equality of gender representation paint a worrying picture. When the feminist movement is active, female and male characters do move towards a parity of representation. But when feminism goes off the boil, so does gender equality.

What does this mean for the futures of feminism? Are we destined to keep pushing the message, safe in the knowledge that it will be quickly unlearned if we stop? We cannot rest on our laurels. The third wave feminist movement has, arguably, made feminism more accessible, and this can only be a good thing. But history teaches us that we need to take the waves out of feminism, to keep working, to question inequality whenever we see it mindful that old habits die hard.

“Ending discrimination”, says Kat Banyard in her book The Equality Illusion, “will require a no less than a total transformation of society at every level: international, national, local and individual.” Our children’s books are an indication of this, and a litmus test by which progress can be measured.

You can find more musings on various aspects of kid lit over at my blog TreasuryIslands, including an ongoing series on feminism for beginners with heaps of recommendations. Meanwhile, here are a few of my fabulous feminist favourites.

Totally awesome feminist children’s books:

Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer, translated by Chantal Wright
Isabella doesn’t like being a princess. She doesn’t like being waited on, she doesn’t like smiling all day and she doesn’t like her pretty frocks. She’s had enough. Throwing her crown into a pond, she awaits her punishment from the king, but when he sends her to live in a pigsty, the results are far from what he expected…

Captain Abdul’s Pirate School by Colin McNaughton

Pickles is a pupil at pirate school. A reluctant student, Pickles learns how to talk like a pirate, make cannon balls, fight and get up to all the mischief expected of a pirate at sea. Leading a mutiny against the teachers, Pickles shows bravery, cunning and compassion.

Only on the last of the book’s 32 pages is Pickles revealed to be a girl named Maisie.

Katie Morag Delivers the Mail by Dr Mairi Hedderwick

With a little help from her dungaree-wearing, tractor-driving granny, Katie Morag delivers the mixed up post on the Scottish island where she lives. She’s a great young heroine with a seriously badass gran.

Give Us The Vote! by Sue Reid

Based on the true story of Dora Thewlis, 16-year-old suffragette. A Yorkshire mill worker, Thewlis took part in a mission to break into the Houses of Parliament in early 1907. She was arrested and imprisoned, a move which found her on the front page of the tabloids nicknamed ‘the baby suffragette’. Part of the My True Story series, Give Us the Vote! is an excellent lesson in first wave feminism.

Libby earned her feminist stripes interning for the Fawcett Society where she was horrified by most of the stories she heard. An accidental activist, she is a regular contributor to BCN, the UK’s only 100% bisexual publication. Her latest project, TreasuryIslands, is the home of her other passion – children’s literature.

Libby is very proud of her bad reputation.

1. a finding by Elizabeth Segel, whose 1986 work is referenced in the study.
2. Bronwyn Davies noted this in her 2003 book Frogs and snails and feminist tales: Preschool children and gender, and it’s also referenced.
3. Deborah A. Garrahy’s 2001 study “Three Third-Grade Teachers’ Gender-Related Beliefs and Behavior” is worth a look for more on this, in The Elementary School Journal, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 81-94.

H

HYSTERIA

O, how this mother swells up toward my heart!
Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow,
Thy element’s below.
– King Lear, II.ii.246

No Reason To Get Excited

In its purest sense, hysteria simply refers to the womb, no more, no less; like all those other lovely hy- words, it comes from the Greeks, and specifically from their word hysterikos – hystera (= yes, ‘womb’. Think ‘hysterectomy’). There may be little trace of its origin in modern usage, but its ‘female’ signification is perfectly in line with the word’s association with legions of Anna Os, Doras and Victorian virgins, eyes rolling, bodies attractively prone.

Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, c. 1781

But here we must pause, and take an exciting medical-historical diversion. The Latin equivalent of hysterikos is the homonymic ancestor of our modern term ‘uterus’, and means ‘womb’ or ‘belly’; and this last strangely ambiguous definition seems less odd when you realise that ‘womb’ itself, in its Old English form, refers not to the generative organ but to a ‘belly’ or ‘paunch’ and that history is full of scientists arguing that this now-feminized organ was gender-neutral, with the ‘female’ womb simply some kind of equivalent to the ‘male’ stomach. Well? It does have some kind of logic: both are cavernous places where you, er, store stuff, but the female of the species may be more creative than the male.

Oh, Mother.

So, grasping this information in our sweaty little palms, to Shakespeare. When King Lear complains of ‘this mother’ he is referring to, as he says, ‘Passio Hysterica’, or ‘the suffocation of the mother’ – mother here used as a synonym for ‘womb’, as in Edward Jorden’s Treatise on the subject. Contemporary medical belief held that there were circumstances (Jorden specifies ‘of a wind in the bottom of the belly’, but refuses to elaborate on whether this is indigestion or some meterological force) in which this sexless womb-stomach could physically wander round the body, where ‘it causeth a very painfull collicke in the stomack, and an extraordinary giddiness in the head’. Uh, yeah: ouch. Or, in Lear’s terms: ‘O me, my heart! My rising heart! But down!’

She’s Lost Control.

The development of  the female-specific womb may be a topic for another day, but hysteria meaning what we would understand by the term, ‘hysteric fits or convulsions, a convulsive fit of laughter or weeping’ was in use as early as 1727. In 1791, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote what is arguably the first attempt to put hysteria into musical form – with The Magic Flute‘s Queen of the Night, also a ‘mother’ – spectacular as the music is (and her arias in particular), its driving purpose is to contrast the hysterical irrationality of women with the enlightened forces of Men and Freemasonry (gendering hysteria explicitly female in the process).

One to be taken each night with a mug of cocoa

There is then a gap in the word’s lexical development until the medical issue resurfaces: hysteria as a diagnosable condition was first officially used in 1801, where, as the dictionary points out, it was in reference to a seeming epidemic of women Going Crazy – or, specifically, experiencing ‘a functional disturbance of the nervous system, characterized by anaesthesia, hyperaesthesia, convulsions, etc., and usually attended with emotional disturbances or perversion of the moral and intellectual faculties’. Covering all its bases, you could either have no sensation at all, or hyper-sensation. Brilliant. That’s exactly what today needed.

It’s Not Easy Being Green.

One explanation for its seeming explosion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is its use as a catch-all term for Generic Women’s Troubles (hence calling it, essentially, ‘womb-problem’), and indeed, it does seem to have been partially conflated with chlorosis (a type of anaemia), which is perhaps better known to Renaissance drama fans as ‘green sickness’. Thus, in John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore (you’d think you couldn’t top that title, wouldn’t you?) Annabella is thought to be suffering from ‘an overflux of youth’, in which case ‘there is no such present remedy as present marriage’. Translation: get a willy in her, quick.

Something along these lines, dubbed ‘pelvic massage’, was indeed considered to be a helpful course of action for hysterical women of later years, and this, bizarrely, is where the vibrator makes its entrance on the historical stage. Helped along in its retail life by widespread use of electricity in the home, this particular modern gadget was originally a time-saving device for hard-pressed, fee-jealous doctors with hundreds of hysterical women to bring to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ before lunch. It was a young medical man named Sigmund Freud who decided that the ‘talking cure’ might be more helpful, and his early work in hysteria underscored much of his subsequent work on psychoanalysis.

Pervert Doc Caged

In its post-medical life (unsurprisingly, it is no longer considered a valid diagnosis), hysteria continues to rejoice in its second definition, a figurative use, meaning ‘unhealthy emotion or excitement’ (1839). Its most common modern usage would probably be in reference to media hysteria, which does, alas, tend to be aimed at women: the Daily Mail, the archetypal screeching tabloid, was, from its initiation in 1896, a newspaper aimed at women, and to this day its readership is over 50% female. As such, it tends to focus on condemning threats to ‘traditional family values’ – primarily immigrants and those on benefits, but it also simmers with barely suppressed homophobia (‘Abortion hope after “gay genes” finding’ was a headline from 1993, and Jan Moir’s article on Stephen Gately more recently attracted justified ire from all corners).

This, sadly, does tend to suggest that in the eyes of People Trying To Sell Us Stuff, women are still very much the hysterical creatures they were considered in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, this does not stop legions of women actually buying what they sell.

NEXT WEEK: I is for Infant.