Dear Deep Silver,

I have just seen the parody ad for the collector’s edition of Dead Island: Riptide. While violence against women and graphic dismemberment are fairly cheap, extremely tasteless and far too easy targets for “shock value”, I’m impressed by your provocative attempts to further the dialogue about the sinister and ingrained misogyny of videogame culture by taking it to a disgusting extreme.

Limited Edition! Specially designed and crafted! Completely and utterly terrible!

Oh… wait, hang on, I’ve just heard from Rock, Paper, Shotgun that you’re actually serious about this. This apparently isn’t just a misguided pastiche of publicity stunts. Oh. Oh dear.

You claim that this hunk of resin will:

… make a striking conversation piece on any discerning zombie gamer’s mantel.

Well, as someone who has notched up damn near 1,000 hours of zombie killing in recent years (thanks, Steam, for keeping track of that. I was starting to worry that I was wasting my life), let’s have a conversation about it. I’ll go and brew up a steaming cup of Sityourassdown while you perch on the naughty stool and think about what you’ve done.

I can hear it already, the rumbling of defensive PR managers approaching.

“But it’s a zombie game! The whole point of it is to commit heinous acts of violence against the undead in self defence! A zombie torso with its limbs severed is a trophy that represents your prowess!”

Before I address this, in the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I am not a qualified physician. However, from my forays into the study of human and zombie biology, I can confirm that the healthy, warm-tanned skintone, obvious freshness of the blood, the lack of any sort of necrosis or decomposition of the flesh indicates that this torso was certainly not a zombie at the time of her dismemberment.

Exposure of the lower ribs suggest traumatic chest injury; however, it’s not clear whether this occurred before or after the time of death. My working hypothesis is that her death had something to do with either decapitation or the loss of all her blood. Even without formal medical training, I am fairly confident in positing that there is no coming back from complete removal of the head.

There isn’t even any artistic merit in what you’ve created, which is almost as offensive as the glorification of horrific violence against women. You have the gumption to describe it as:

…Dead Island’s grotesque take on an iconic Roman marble torso sculpture.

No. Stop. Please. The skies are filled with the anguished cries of Classics and Art History students, joined by the despairing sobs of everybody with a functioning pair of eyes. There are several salient differences between your abomination and classical works of art, but I’ll set out a few of these for your convenience:

• Artistic merit. Marble sculptures are exquisite works by highly-skilled craftspeople demonstrating the depth of their abilities. Weeks of work go into a marble sculpture, creating something dynamic and evocative from a chunk of something cold and unyielding drawn from the earth. These are not pieces that can be “designed” in an afternoon by a gaggle of fratboy marketers over their weekly office keg.
• Anatomy. Sculptors who work with marble show an intimate and thorough knowledge and understanding of human anatomy. Every muscle, every curve, every millimetre of skin is honed to a perfect representation of the human form. What you have done is plonked two tennis balls on a solid block of resin, doodled in a crude cleavage with a Sharpie, then splashed raspberry sauce all over it and called it a day. Which brings me neatly onto my next point…
• Overt sexualisation and glamourisation of violence against women. Classical torso sculptures are not without limbs due to some horrible run-in with a horde of undead and a crazed survivor with a katana. If any Classics types would like to weigh in on this, I’d be interested to learn. However, I’m pretty sure that the motivations of those classical sculptors was not “Hurr, violence is EPIC. You know what else is epic? TITS! Yeah! But you know what’s not epic? Any part of a woman that isn’t tits or crotch. Let’s put, yeah, some tits and a crotch in a string bikini, and like, cut everything else off. Gamers will eat that up. Oh man, I’m jizzing my pants already. Tits and extreme violence. We’re geniuses.” (Again, classics students, if there’s any evidence of the great Graeco-Roman sculptors having had this discussion, I will withdraw this point. Let me know.)

In summary: what the hell? After the first Dead Island game failed to quite live up to its own teaser trailer, do you just feel like you need to continue along this trajectory of disappointment? Were you hoping to hit rock bottom with today’s sick display in the hope that thereafter, the only way would be up? If that’s the case, I’d be tempted to applaud your shamelessness, had it not been such a swing and a miss.

Now, I’m a feminist, but I also don’t believe that every catastrophic misunderstanding of how to exploit the “desirability” of anything that vaguely resembles a woman’s body (usually one that conforms to narrow standards of Western beauty) is born of true misogyny.

I believe it’s quite possible that you “just didn’t think” of the implications and repercussions of showing a violently dismembered female torso and selling it as an ornament. For those of us – women and some men – who actually live in bodies like the one messily represented in your collector’s edition, it isn’t possible to “just not think” about the possibilities and the realities of violence.

Women are disproportionately more likely to be the victims of domestic violence or sexual abuse, both by people they know and by strangers. We are taught from childhood that our bodies are weaker, that if we don’t want to be attacked we have to dress demurely, to know our limits, to keep our mouths shut and to do as we’re told.

We live in a victim-blaming world that constantly promotes the idea that the only way to not be a victim is to not provoke those strong and burly menfolks, who cannot be held to account if they attack you because you were obviously “asking for it” if and when it happens. Although this line of reasoning was born of institutionalised misogyny, it doesn’t exactly paint men in the most flattering of lights either.

The discussion is thankfully broadening, so this is not an issue I’ll go deeper into here. But Deep Silver, consider yourselves called out. There’s a wealth of resources, information, blogs, zines, articles, and opinion pieces out there. You have no excuse for not educating yourselves about why what you have done is damaging and irresponsible.

Everybody fucks up sometimes when it comes to the way they think about or treat people less privileged than they are. What really proves whether or not they’re capable of meeting the criteria for being a decent human being, or a company with any integrity, is how they handle and learn from their fuckups. My advice? Apologise. Be humble. Be grateful to people who have called you out on this. Make the choice to educate yourselves. And for the love of all things zombie, don’t do it again.

I do, however, have one thing to be grateful to you for about this. Should I find myself romancing a fellow gamer in future, and we go back to their house, this statuette will be an immediate and unmistakable red flag that this person has questionable taste in games, décor and attitudes towards women. This information will be a clear indicator that this isn’t somebody I should be spending time with.

Perhaps your statue could replace the endless whining about “the friendzone” as the hallmark of somebody utterly clueless about human relationships and endlessly disrespectful to women. Then I would laud you for your achievement, because that shit is getting very, very tiresome.

Yours sincerely,

Mia Vee

Without thinking, I responded in kind with a big, angry, I-will-slash-you hiss.

DESIST

He looked pretty taken aback.

I carried on my way and mused that I appear to speak feline like a mothertongue, but also I got to thinking: what the ever-loving crap?! Seriously, what on earth was he expecting from that encounter? What would a positive result have been? Surely that’s never worked for anyone, right?

Ah, street harassment. It’s been a few months. Usually my experience of you is relegated to when I’m wearing a summer dress (gender norms for the lose) but it sucks whenever it happens. It’s also antithetical to ever actually getting my interest because – no matter how many mad cat-lady vibes I’ve got going on – no one who thinks they can approach me like a pet is getting the time of day.

This particular encounter didn’t throw me much because I actually had a comeback – I walked away pleased with myself for thinking fast – but how you deflect it shouldn’t be the first point of call. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?

Far more often it’s crap shouted from cars – which I find rubbish twice over because they’ve gone before you can say or do anything in response. (Come back right now, dudebro. I have a LOT to say about what you just did.)

A friend of mine recently had some jerk shout “nice tits!” at her from a car. She was (understandably) angry and upset for the rest of the day, but the guy shouting it might have told himself it was a compliment – some interviews with street harassers have revealed what is either complete ignorance or willing ignorance of the effect it has on women. Many of the men, when asked why they do it, say it’s a compliment and it makes women feel nice.

Maybe it is a compliment for a very small percentage of people – I cannot claim to speak for everybody – but I am yet to meet or hear of one person who’s had a catcall, wolf-whistle or similar and felt good about it. The thing about street harassment is, it’s not flirting. Street harassment doesn’t make a person feel good because it isn’t about a person: it’s boiling them down to their physical attributes (‘nice tits’, ‘nice ass’) and funnily enough that doesn’t feel great.

“News of your interest in my ‘nice butt’ has not made my day in any way.”

The other thing is, it’s almost never a conversation: mostly ’cause the objects of the harassment aren’t interested and want to get on with their day, and also because often it’s at a remove – stuff shouted from cars, or (to use the cliché) from scaffolding. The people doing the shouting don’t actually expect a response. This isn’t a tool used to chat up women: it’s used to silence them. Under the guise of a compliment it’s a one-way street of objectification.

And Objectification Street is a crappy street. Seriously, I looked at a flat there once. There were rats all over the place and it smelled bad.

Of course, if people are physically closer to the harassers, it doesn’t exactly get better. The wonderful (and award-winning) Anti-Street Harassment UK campaign (ASH UK) was set up after its founder, Vicky, was harassed by a group of men who were initially shouting at her from a car, threatened to rape her, then got out of the car and followed her into a tube station where they assaulted her. The police (who did intervene) then blamed her for responding to them and said “boys will be boys.” SO. MUCH. FAIL.

Um… *cough* male readers – this is essentially Met officers saying your entire gender are all hopeless gropey asshats. Erm… *cough* I wouldn’t take that.

So, what can we do?

• Well, the first step is breaking down the idea that it’s either normal or OK. It’s neither, and we need to spread the word. Thou shalt not take shit, and (not that our readers should need telling) thou shalt not dish it out, either.
• Read up on it – from the likes of stopstreetharassment.org to this brilliant video on street harassment and women of colour:

• Check out Jezebel’s ongoing street harassment category, and call catcalling out for the asshattery it is.
• Those who want some background on why people are often hostile to approaches on the street would do very well to read this blog post ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’. (Heavy, but a thousand times worth it.)
• And in the meantime, don’t let that ‘compliment’ strawman argument derail you on your quest for gender justice.

On that note…

… since you’ve been such a good class of gender justice warriors today, I’m going to let you finish early with just one more video:

I absolutely love their line of questioning about “has that ever worked for you?” Also “sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchial dividend – it’s so over” should be on a t-shirt. I would buy that shirt.

And that’s a wrap. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to more important things – like buying cat food for my wonderful kitty – because some catcalls are nice. The ones that come from an actual cat.¹

• All images of unimpressed cats in high dudgeon from Morguefile, the free image bank!

1. Not Schrödinger’s cat. He is a meanie.

“Oh no, no, it’s OK, don’t get offended, it’s not your fault. You can’t help it, I understand that. Your genitals are disgusting and they stink, especially when they’re bleeding and there’s nothing you can do about it. You didn’t ask to be born with such a terrible curse, and nobody expects you to take responsibility for it. Help is at hand, though! If you give me lots of money every month for forty years of your life, we can help! Because believe us, you need it…”

I will admit up front that I am not a trained marketer, but it’s plain to see that the above isn’t the most convincing of sales pitches. Unfortunately, it’s a far more honest pitch than the current campaign for Always sanitary towels, which proudly declare the addition of “odour neutralising ActiPearls” as the next step in the evolution of “feminine hygiene” products. What the ads coyly decline to mention is that they’ve taken lessons in odour neutralisation from the Lynx school of “synthetic chemical stench and hygiene are THE SAME THING.”

This is straight-up vagina-shaming. It’s insulting and inexcusable. And giving me yet another reason to be pissed off when I’m already simmering with ire about the massacre going on between my legs is inadvisable. So congratulations, P&G: you’ve lost my custom for the next thirty years.

The packaging claims to “neutralise odours rather than just masking them”. This is at best a delicate glossing over of the truth. It’s impossible to tell whether “odours” (those vaginal FIENDS!) are neutralised or not because of the perfume.

Oh God, the perfume.

I appreciate that scent perception can be a highly subjective thing, so I’ll attempt to keep the description as general as possible. Cloying, synthetic, sweet florals with an undertone of disinfectant, false and stereotypically feminine. It hits you as soon as you open the packaging, before even unwrapping the first towel. A scent that lingers for hours even if you switch to an unscented brand immediately after using one of these. A scent that does not mask menstrual blood, but mingles with it into a nauseating aberration.

What I Expected

A thoughtful free gift from Always!

What I Got

OH.

The problems presented by this are manifold, but there are three main ones that leapt out at me. Bullet point list time? Bullet point list time!

• The obvious implication that people who have vaginas are utterly clueless about personal hygiene and how to take care of themselves, plus the completely ignoring the fact that vaginas are self cleansing and look after themselves without much intervention from their owners beyond showering/bathing regularly. The idea that menstruation makes a person malodorous or otherwise “dirty” is an outdated and misogynistic notion. If a vagina IS smelling bad, whether through illness or neglect, adding an unpleasant artificial scent to the crotch is only going to make the problem worse.
• Following on from this, people who are at least vaguely aware of their sexual health can tell from changes in vaginal scent if something untoward or unusual is going on. Trying to cover that up with perfumes isn’t going to help anybody stay in touch with their genitalia.
• The choice of such a blatantly “overt femininity-pink-and-flowers-BECAUSE-THIS-PRODUCT-IS-FOR-GIRLLLSSS” fragrance risks alienating trans* men and genderqueer customers who choose to use these products. As if the patronising “have a happy period, always” slogan weren’t bad enough. Not only are Always trying to insist that a reminder of nature not necessarily assigning the genitalia that most closely match an individual’s gender identity should be a matter for celebration, but also that everybody should smell like a field full of artificial blossoms when their loins are creating underpant carnage. Way to consider the needs of your whole customer base, there.

Now, at the risk of incurring violent flames, I’ll admit that I am not the biggest fan of my vagina. I appreciate the vast capacity for pleasure that it and its associated physiological paraphernalia provide, but for the most part our relationship is one of tacit acknowledgement and grudging acceptance. This does not mean, however, that I do not appreciate the inherent beauty and wonder of such genitalia.

A vagina should smell like a vagina. A vagina should not smell of roses or perfumes or any number of artificial masking agents. Every healthy vagina has a personality and life all of its own and scent to match.

At a time where in the USA, the wealthy, middle-aged, cis-male elitists running the country seem determined to drive women’s bodily autonomy and sexual rights back into the Victorian era, now seems a very prudent time to turn our eyes to our genitals and send a clear message to politicians and megabucks sanitary product manufacturers alike that our bodies belong to nobody but ourselves. Their efforts to undermine and deny our sexuality will be met with the resistance and fight it deserves, until they back the hell off what’s between our legs.

If we really must accept defeat and acknowledge that we are no longer capable of keeping our own vaginas spring-fresh, then our next step is clear: begin a campaign to Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab to produce their own range of sanitary towels impregnated with their gorgeous scents. Because if my vagina isn’t allowed to smell like a vagina any more, it can do a hell of a lot better than Procter and Gamble’s sickly synthetic flower bleach.

Age old question, really, this one, and one where “want” and “need” are often made unhelpfully interchangable, just to make it EVEN SIMPLER.

Welcome back to Feminist TwitBomb, Deluxe Edition, in which we take a sexist Twitter hashtag and try and make it slightly less soul-harrowingly bleak by exploring its inherent absurdity, usually with caps lock, bad puns, and the sudden appearance of wildlife. Previously on this channel: how #TipsForLadies was skewered.

Abridged (But Still Frustrating) History Of The #WhatAWomanNeeds Question

• 14th century: The Wife of Bath tells us one particular knight (and rapist) had a complicated time working it out.
• 1920s: Freud facetiously prattled about it (often available as a patronising e-card or rubbish Tumblr graphic. Life=complete).
• 1993: Tammy Wynette warbled “a ring on my finger and champagne on ice” at Elton John in a song helpfully titled A Woman’s Needs; if you are lucky enough to have these items to hand, I advise you to down the entire bottle before you try to listen.
• 1999: Even Christina Aguilera is disappointingly lyrically coy about it – the song is originally titled What A Girl Needs and renamed to Wants by the record label execs. FOR FEMINISM, I assume. (Either way, apparently the answer is “whatever her dude wants her to want/need”).

PROBLEMATIC, as Tumblr might say.

It’s all fine, though, guys, because TWITTER TO THE RESCUE. Eat your heart out, Sigmund, Xtina and Geoff, for the question will now be answered.

#WhatAWomanNeeds

An initial peek at the feed for this trending topic was a little bit unedifying. I’ve anonymised the authors because they’re really only being quoted for background. The fun comes later when you lot get involved.

“Curves and long hair”

Does it matter where the hair is? Can it be in my nostrils?

“Endless closet space”

FOR THE SKULLS OF THE FALLEN.

“a guy who will protect her like she’s his daughter, love her like she’s his wife, and respect her like she’s his mother.”

Apart from the fact that many of us do not fancy these things at all (or men), this is a worryingly ambitious MAIDEN-MOTHER-CRONE SUPERCONFLATION, and I am not paying his therapy bill when shit gets too confusing.

“oven mittens”

… hoo, boy, watch out, sisterhood. This dude’s a serious wordsmith.

“to meet One Direction”

Ah, shit. *throws up hands* Busted.

You get the picture there, anyway: high time, we decided, for a cheering TwitBomb session.

What the hell is this world where neither the pay gap nor Kool and the Gang are given true credence.

Amazingly, all these things can benefit blokes, too.

Now we’re talking, ladies. Now we’re talking.

From a friend on a locked account:

(In a strictly non-imperialist way, mind: no colonial elephant-hunting or dodgy empiring here. The helmet will be ethically sourced in a fetching shade of electric blue fairtrade material and will mainly be worn by the aforementioned wisecracking mandrill. Whom I have named Artemisia.)

"Fuck Jimmy Choo."

I got pretty wrapped up in this whole sweetly awesome world we were creating, actually.

Seriously. I cannot believe LEGO are still spraying all their “girl budget” on pastel shades whilst failing entirely to address the lack of ladypirates in this product’s long and otherwise noble lineage. Yes, I know there was one or two. One or two is NOT ENOUGH.

It just fucks with my chi, that whole business, okay?

OK, I feel better now :).

Stellar advice from one of the brilliant Better Strangers Opera collective there. (The Apocalypse Girls would be proud.)

This next one actually broke into the Top Entries for this hashtag, which I frankly regard as one of my life’s crowning achievements so far. It’s sitting there, nestled loudly between Smug “Oven Mitts” Guy and Creepy Oedipal Posturings. It’s ruining the vibe of patronage-and-patronising quite nicely. Proud moment.

(I feel like a load of Level 50 Gyrados waving DEFEND THE NHS placards would only be a good thing, really.)

A hat trick of pragmatism for us all from our own Markgraf. By the way, this team is never going to conduct a TwitBomb without reference to the noble pheasant at some point. No reason. It’s just better than ovens, chivalry and sleaze. And when these sorts of ridiculous generalisations continue to be hashtagged, surely anything goes.

"hey girl"

Other Vital LadyNeeds(TM)

• Reasonable Armour
• “A BRA THAT FECKING FITS PROPERLY! Also no more sexism ever please”
• “additional bionic arms”
• Destruction of tedious genderessentialism
• Awesome orchestral movie soundtrack for daily life
• A violent end to the categorisation of “WOMEN” (and “men”!) as amorphous Borg-like blobs of sexist predictability, unvaried by differences of any kind
• FAITHFUL CAPSLOCK BUTTON

And More Seriously

…you’d be hard pressed to argue with this one, whoever you are.

I’m glad we had this talk, Twitter. Now this pressing question’s been answered, we can all get back to the revolution.

Hoverboards, DEPLOY.

• Awesome photo of two 1980s punk girls on the Tube.
• Retronaut: the most horrendous and terrifying vintage valentines imaginable. More here! And finally, a bit of 1900s those-humourless-suffragettes sentiment here via Brainpickings… some things never change, eh ;)
• The Case of the Sudden Femme Fatale: author Delilah Des Anges guest blogs for author Melanie Clegg (whole lotta authorship in here) on reimaginations of Irene Adler.
• Scandalous Women Celebrates Black History Month (note: the USA has BHM now, the UK in autumn)
• Female Illustrators You Should Know, plus more, more, and more!

New to the hobby in 2008, I assumed women could box in the Olympics, and was surprised to find this wasn’t reliably the case and thrilled when things changed. Having failed to secure tickets, I nearly nosebled with excitement when a friend offered to sell me hers. Katie Taylor‘s competing! Hero worship explosion!

So. That’s the background to this post. But what I want to talk about today is the Amateur International Boxing Association’s latest statement about women and boxing, which the Beeb reports thusly:

The latest talking point is not whether women’s boxing should become the newest Olympic discipline at London 2012, but what the boxers will actually wear when they compete.

During last year’s World Championships, the Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA) presented competitors with skirts, rather than the usual shorts, which it wanted to “phase in for international competitions”.

AIBA asked boxers to trial the skirts, which they said would allow spectators to distinguish them from men.

There’s this, too:

“By wearing skirts, in my opinion, it gives a good impression, a womanly impression,” Poland coach Leszek Piotrowski told BBC Sport. “Wearing shorts is not a good way for women boxers to dress.”

My initial reaction? More flail than the semaphore alphabet. I’ve now slept on it and had a bucket of calming tea. There’s a lot of justified rage already out there. This is a shitty patronising move by AIBA, and one I find quite insulting, but no doubt this surprises nobody. So rather than just spitting WHAT THE BILLIONTH FUCK? about the place forever, here’s a bit of history and a bit of telly, via which we can consider for a moment what all this says about the neurosis we have about women who punch things.

I’m gonna start with Popeye. Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

She’s A Knockout

Never Kick A Woman, a six-minute short in which Olive, with the aid of Popeye’s spinach, goes toe-to-toe for his affections with a Mae West-a-like female boxer who throws punches in a skirt and heeled boots, came out in August 1936.

Contemporary with the Berlin Olympics, this springs from a place where women didn’t commonly box at high profile, and the interaction between Olive, who transforms into a cat for her fighting sequence, and the boxer bombshell, is all a bit ooh-matron (“Not bad for the weaker sex!” remarks Popeye, before declaring a desire to sample “her equipment”). However, women were competing with pretty solid regularity, as they had been throughout the nineteenth century, in underground/amateur events, with varying levels of safety and credence afforded them, although they were often fetishised by the small press coverage they received. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the overall feel of women’s events was that of a circus prizefight. There’re many surviving photographs of women boxing from this period, some in skirts, some in bloomers. But things develop, and from about 1920 onwards, if you look at the images on this webpage, they’re also commonly wearing shorts, revealing that Poland coach Leszek “not a way for women boxers to dress” Piotrowski doesn’t really go in for research. Or even Google Images.

Prize-Fighting Amazons

That article also nails the early social response to women’s boxing in the 20th century:

While the battered body of the male boxer was a symbol of the defeat of heroic masculinity, the battered body of the female boxer was the very denial of the supposed essence of femininity and a symbol of brutalization and dehumanization, at the same time creating an image of exciting and animalistic sensuality. For that reason, women’s boxing always attracted male voyeurs – not only working men, but also local dignitaries and businessmen.

This attitude prevails – YouTube’s comments are often a bear garden, but comments left on the Popeye cartoon include quite seriously invested gems like “I love that sexy blonde beating Olive senseless”. Amazon’s fancy dress catalogue also includes some heavily eroticised “boxer babe” outfits, almost all of which are pink and satin, and some of which have skirts.

All of which is to say: skirts in boxing generally collide in two contexts: erotic fancy dress, or “vintage” prizefights as we might popularly imagine them – even if in reality they might’ve looked like this, this or this – it seems to have been a matter of personal preference and the general variation across continents and regional scenes. Reintroducing skirts at this stage in the development of women’s boxing is a bit like citing Edwardian paintings of ‘women wrestling nude in ancient Sparta’ where they’re all looking conveniently sexy and liberated as definite historical fact for what that shit was really like – it’s easy to throw up your hands and say “this is the traditional feminine way for women to box” when the historical truth, or the reality of who this is all for, may contain extra layers of complexity. Exoticising women who box professionally does them no favours, and because it carries with it the aesthetic of prizefighting, insisting they skirt up will do just that. There’s no easy way to divorce the garment from this sort of context, and especially not the way the AIBA are handling it. It reeks of “Cor blimey these girls can punch!” and when tabloid joshing and Popeye-style “wanna check out that goyl’s equipment!” are being encouraged by the governing body… that’s a very sexist problem there.

Rather than promoting the boxers themselves, who work unbelievably hard to get where they are with sweet FA big press recognition, AIBA, whether it intends to or not, is pandering to prizefight imagery with this decision. This, in turn, selects the kind of schoolboy-tabloid-YouTube-comment response to women in boxing as the primary favoured response. Women shouldn’t have to feel that they’re perfecting their footwork for a panel whose engagement with basic principles of equality barely extends beyond the level of a Popeye cartoon. What else are we supposed to feel?

A skirt is not, of course, disempowering in and of itself. Roller derby, for example, makes frequent use of skirts, booty shorts, and so on. The difference is one of context. Derby’s given rise to the whole idea of the ‘rollergirl’, who is free to mix feminine costume elements – thigh-socks, pleats, and so on – with imagery that subversively references horror, punk and violence. It has a consolidated identity as a predominantly female sport. Derby aesthetic pitches at an audience with heavy female participation, and has a significant queer following – so there’s a sense that the skirts aren’t really “for” a dominant privileged gender group, or being imposed from on high on the players. (I do wonder, if male Derby players wanted to wear skirts, whether they’d necessarily be stopped.)¹

Mantastic

Boxing, on the other hand, has deep roots in understandings of masculinity and male violence. “White collar boxing” and “chess boxing” (a round of violence, a round of chess, a round of violence) are popular phenomena within the boxing scene, and usually aimed near-exclusively at male participants. It crosses class boundaries in its universal appeal as a sport for men.

Just as it’s popular in media portrayals of working class male environments – Rocky channels his frustrations, while Billy Elliott longs to escape his mandatory classes – boxing also has a relationship with upper class expressions of masculinity around honour and gentlemanliness: Queensberry rules, and all that. But when we put women in the ring, there’s just something about the purity of action boxing involves – simply punching someone else, with an emphasis on the upper body as the weapon – that makes people actively dislike women across all social classes going near it. In a way that kickboxing or judo doesn’t. Amir Khan expressed his distaste about it a while ago, following in the footsteps of Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier, who laughed it up in 1978. (Gotta assume they later revised their opinions, since both their daughters went on to box and even fought each other.)

Women have enough crap to deal with in the boxing world without having to get in the ring with AIBA just to earn the right to a pair of shorts. This is a serious sport, which carries a risk of serious injury, and caricaturing women’s involvement in it does them a great disservice. There’s a lot of romance in boxing – the image of the boxer in film is universally that of a lone struggler, with personal issues, addictions and anger management all channelled into the ring. For female protagonists, usually that gritty struggle involves a fight with sexism too. The image these women cut is powerful and often inspiring – but whatever you think of Million Dollar Baby you can’t quite see Hilary Swank shutting up and donning a skirt.

My favourite boxing film? Girlfight. It’s supposed to show fictional examples of sexist behaviour in boxing and in life – partly as part of the pattern all boxing movies tend to follow of lone-struggler-makes-good, and partly in order to affirm a positive message specifically to women who want to go there. It’s depressing to realise just how much truth there is in that film, and how far we have to go.

I hope Katie Taylor’s forthright dismissal of the skirt issue as “a disgrace” forecasts the failure of AIBA’s suggestion; the last thing anyone who’s fought that hard to get into the ring needs is a constant reminder that they’re still being cast as some sort of other.

1. If anyone has tried this, let me know how it went.

Final Round: What are you wearing?

Miranda: Before we answer this question, I have to say I was almost tempted by this, the most surreal thing Yandy has ever spawned. I give you ARCADE CUTIE. So unhinged I might actually wear it.

Look at the FACIAL EXPRESSION on the skirt. The skirt is actually embarrassed to be part of the outfit, which contains not one but THREE STRATEGICALLY PLACED FACES. It’s even better than Boob Fury. Absolutely blew me away in the sheer entropic blaze of its own wrong-glory. Katy Perry has nothing on it. But anyway, what are we all wearing? I suspect almost none of us are going down the off-the-peg costume route?

Sarah J: I’m going to two parties so I’m attempting to combine the themes The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and Le Tigre into one outfit. I haven’t really worked out how yet, but I think I’ll probably be Riot Lucy (who looks pretty similar to Manda Rin from Bis).

Miranda: Alternate-Universe Lucy, who survives that horrible train crash in The Last Battle! Maybe you’re undead, too, and vowing revenge on CS Lewis for such a terrible plotting decision.

Jenni: I was actually the wardrobe from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe one year at school.

Miranda: I dressed up as Anne Bonny last year. Needless to say, I did not use a shop-bought costume. Pirates do particularly badly in terms of costume-shop gender separation – all the women’s clothes are labelled “VIXEN PIRATE”, “WENCH PIRATE”, “MAIDEN PIRATE”, and so on, while the dudes get to be “CUT THROAT JACK”. So I just bought some plastic pistols and raided Age Concern. There was slightly more boob-coverage going on than in this 1700s etching. This year I think I’m going more trad-gothic-novel-heroine, but hopefully with an impressive amount of lace and waft.

Rhian: My Halloween costumes tend to be ridiculous rather than sexy – in the past five years I’ve dressed as Terry Hall (incredibly vague tangential ‘Ghost Town’ joke), Patrick Bateman once, and Thatcher twice. Last year I had an entire party themed around Tory/Coalition Horror, but I fully accept that’s just me being slightly self-parodic. I don’t think I’ve ever knowingly done Sexy!Halloween, it feels like a bit of a cop-out almost in the dressing-up stakes (as in, I’d far rather someone react to me with ‘That’s really funny’ than ‘Wow, you look hot’).

Jenni: Your predilection for dressing as Thatcher has always worried me, Rhian.

Markgraf: As I warned at the start of this chat, I’m going as a sexed-up Misdreavus. That’s a Pokemon. And I’m not even sorry. I love the shit out of Hallowe’en, and dressing up, and monsters, and bodypaint, and Pokemon, and horrible outfits that try to be sexy but aren’t. I love the former five for obvious reasons, but I love the latter because they’re so incongruous. I mean, sexy takeaway food? What the fuck? The allure of dressing as a tarted-up cartoon ghost from a videogame with the assistance of stripper heels and bodypaint is always going to be too much for me to resist. Also, I’m a boy. Hyper-femme incongruous drag is something I can pull off. So why not? Halloween is for dressing up as things that’ll impress or terrify, and I can’t think of anything more impressive and terrifying than sexy Pokemon cosplay in little more than paint and a wig.

Miranda: Thatcher, a sexed-up Pokemon, and Riot Grrrl CS Lewis. We know how to party in here. How do I compete? Maybe I’ll just build some kind of furry several-headed contraption that fits over my shoulders and just go as Three Wolf Moon.

Jenni: Or the Pixar lamp.

Miranda: That person wins the entire internet.

Rob: Well, I was going to dress as a pumpkinhead – as in, I am going to hollow out a pumpkin and wear it on my head – but this whole exchange is making me think maybe I should sex it up a bit. Me, with a pumpkin on my head… and a bikini.

Happy Halloween from Team BadRep!

So, let’s start with the bad, because that’s where the fun is, right? Right.

Neonomicon – Alan Moore

A four part mini-series that wrapped up just recently, Neonomicon was… well, it was, as much as we might wish it hadn’t been. A modern spin on Lovecraft’s Cthulu Mythos, Neonomicon actually looked like it had potential to start with. A good Mythos tale lures you in with mundane normality and then – bam! – unspeakable eldritch abomination and the creeping madness behind your eyes. In a similar way, Neonomicon lures you in with a clever enough idea and characters and then – bam! – racism and gang rape. We’ll get to that in a moment.

So, that acceptable start we mentioned. We’re given a pair of FBI agents investigating some strange goings on that very quickly become Mythos related. And hey, we think, the two lead characters are not square jawed white guys. We’ve got a female lead and a black male lead, nice to see some variety in character design for a change. Sure, some of the Lovecraft references are a bit heavy handed, but that’s okay.

And then the second issue happens. Our two agents have followed the lead to a Mythos sex shop in a quiet New England town. It’s not sure whether it wants to be creepy or played for laughs with some of the novelty items visible in the background. One thing leads to another, and they’re infiltrating a sex cult and… oh, now the guy has been shot, and the racial slurs are flowing freely. And now it’s gang rape time for the female agent. Thanks for that, Alan Moore.

Now, Moore did say (there’s a quote in this interview here) that when he was writing this he thought (paraphrased): “…let’s put all of the unpleasant racial stuff back in, let’s put sex back in.” And that could have been interesting, handled differently. It could have been a chance to tackle some of the issues with Lovecraft, to look at the fact that Lovecraft was a bit of a terrible racist and misogynist. But that isn’t what happens here. This isn’t a story that uses sex and racism to raise questions and make a point. It’s just a story full of non-consensual sex and racism. Or, as a friend put it: “If God were to look down upon this benighted planet in judgement, he’d probably think the place worthy of a second chance. Until he read Neonomicon. Then he’d remember why he commissioned the Book of Revelation in the first place.”

Carbon Grey – Hoan Nguyen

Carbon Grey is our “has potential, but also issues”. Let’s look at the potential first.

Set in a slightly steampunky spin on First World War-era Europe, the story follows the Sisters Grey. Each generation, we’re told, see three sisters born to the Grey family, hereditary defenders of the Kaiser. Three sisters, one for strength, one for grace, one for wisdom. Except in this generation, where the youngest sister has a twin, a fourth Grey, a sister for revolution.

What does this get us? It gets us explosions, and action, and the four very deadly Sisters Grey kicking ass and changing the face of politics in Mitteleuropa. It gets us spies and assassins and clever dialogue. And did I mention the ass-kicking? In the opening sequence of the first issue the youngest Grey pulls off more awesome action stuff than can be found in an entire Die Hard marathon.

The issues, then? Well, mostly it revolves around one thing: the art (which for the most part is very, very pretty, as long as you don’t mind the manga influences). With one notable exception in the form of a background character with no lines, all the female characters have essentially the same body type. It’s that improbable superhero-woman build, all gravity defying breasts and waist lines that surely don’t leave enough room for internal organs. The Queen of Germany lounges around in a scrap of white fabric that’d make Emma Frost blush.

The intro arc has just wrapped up, so now’s a good time to get in on the main story of Carbon Grey, if you can look past the art problems.

And now, on to the good.

Scarlet – Brian Michael Bendis

Bendis is a lot better on his creator-owned work than he is when he’s writing superheroes for Marvel, and Scarlet is among the best of his creator-owned stuff. The first plot arc just finished, so now’s as good a time as any to get started here.

Scarlet was a regular hipster kid in Portland, just generally existing. Then things went wrong and she learnt a harsh lesson in how messed up the world is. Now she’s running a grass-roots revolution. That’s the basic gist of the series. Oh, and she wants your help and is telling the whole story via fourth-wall breaking narration. Between some excellent lines and a fantastic snapshot life sketch in the first issue, we get Scarlet as a nicely well-developed character, someone we can accept as real.

It’s an interesting look at what it takes to shake someone out of their comfortable middle-class white comfort zone, and what they do next. And with everything being told to us via Scarlet, who very definitely has an agenda, we get to see how bias colours perception. The police and politicians aren’t all corrupt and evil, but seen through Scarlet’s eyes they become significantly darker. These aren’t events as they are, they’re events as one person believes they are. And I’m a sucker for an unreliable narrator.

The art serves as a distinct counterpoint to Carbon Grey’s over-the-top women and frequently absurd costumes. Scarlet, and the people she interacts with, look like real people. They dress, move and talk like real people. This is perhaps not surprising, given that (long-time Bendis collaborator and fantastic artist) Alex Maleev does a hell of a lot of photo referencing, to the point where it’s almost a comic equivalent of a rotoscoped film like A Scanner Darkly. It’s definitely nice to see, though.

So there you go. Go read Scarlet, consider Carbon Grey, and bin any spare copies of Neonomicon you find, before Judgement Day rolls around.

But hey, that was decades ago, right? That was from a time when people held far more dubious views, hell people had only recently stopped using tape worms as a miracle diet (no, seriously). It was a less enlightened time, but we’ve moved on since then, yes?

Well, no, not so much. The world of advertising is still filled with dubious messages, awkward depictions of race and gender, and terrible division of products along gender lines (“This is a girl product! Make the packaging pink so they’ll buy it! This is a boy product! Fill the advert with explosions!”) So what we have here is a collection of half a dozen or so recent magazine adverts that have taken their attitudes straight from the 1950s.

Mr. Clean

It was Mothers’ Day in the US recently, and Mr Clean decided to run this advert for the occasion. Maybe I’m misinterpreting the advert. Maybe Mothers’ Day in the US is a bit different to the UK. Either way, the apparent message of “Get back to the cleaning! And get your daughter to help, she needs to learn!” seems a little… well, off.

Goldstar Beer

Goldstar Beer have an interesting view of how drinking works, one that manages to simultaneously insult both men and women. Women are complex and have to worry about matching their drinks (girly, fruity drinks, naturally) to their outfits, because they’re shallow like that. Men, meanwhile, are simple-minded creatures who are only capable of desiring one thing: beer. And not even good beer. Crappy mass-market beer.

Goldstar have another advert in this campaign that manages to be even worse on some levels – take a look for yourself here.

Nike

It’s not just gender that advertising fails on either. Here we get a delightful intersection of gender and homophobia from the fine folks at Nike. Because ballet isn’t manly, you see, and you don’t want your son to do something that isn’t manly. Best buy him some Nike trainers as soon as you can and get him doing something macho like soccer, before the homosexuals lure him into their sordid world of energetic dance routines and toned calf muscles. Because that is totally how reality works. Yes.

DeBeers

Women, you see, are basically like magpies, only larger and incapable of flight. So not very good magpies. But like magpies, women are innately drawn to shiny shiny things; the shinier the better. And as DeBeers know, if you feed her craving for shiny objects then she’ll pretend to like you and sate your desperate need for validation. Which, of course, is all women are good for. (That and cooking you dinner, which is a talent the common magpie rarely excels at.)

Wait no, all of that was wrong. What the hell, DeBeers? Really?

Prudential Financial

Social values, 1950s style. Cooking, cleaning, caring for your child. These all start with C. More importantly, they’re all things that the wife does, because hey, it’s not like she has a job, right? Women in the workplace? Madness! And all of those things are time consuming; why, hiring someone to do them all would be fairly expensive. When your wife dies, you won’t be grieving over the loss of your life’s love, you’ll be wondering who’s going to make dinner if you can’t afford to hire a cook. So you’d better get life insurance out on her. Or, I guess, buy some diamonds and lure a magpie, either way.

Qsol Servers

I was going to say something bitingly snarky and witty, but… I just… wow. I’ve been defeated by this advert. Just imagine I said something hilarious and cutting and you’re all very entertained.

So, defeated by that last advert, I’m going to stop here. I implore all of you to go out and get jobs in advertising and make better adverts than these, so that we can someday feature them in Found Feminism.

I hasten to add that I’m not a furry.

Werewolves are the greatest thing ever. They’re great, big, vicious monsters that will pull a person to shreds with their claws, and yet can disguise themselves very effectively as the thing they prey on to hide amongst them. There’s lots of story potential lurking in the legend of the lycanthrope. They’re transformation, liberation, sexuality, secrets, puberty, forbidden passion, rage, hunger and loneliness all at once. The idea of a human that can literally turn into a terrifying predator and go on a rampage has been inherent in legends and folklore since before we could write, probably because of the storytelling and thematic potential in such a creature. What can’t you do with a werewolf? (Still not a furry.)

So I went to see Red Riding Hood because, well, it’s a werewolf film and I have this biological imperative when it comes to werewolf films, and also because I was interested to see what they’d do with them. It’s directed by Catherine Hardwicke, also responsible for the heinous pile of shite that was Twilight, which made me cautious – but I still wanted to see what threads of the werewolf myth would be re-spun for the Twilight generation. I’m all for innovative takes. And, you know, with all that potential behind the werewolf, surely they’d find something fun to run with, right?

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, oh god, wrong. I didn’t set my bar particularly high in the first place because, you know, Twilight (do I really need to go into why I don’t like that franchise? Really?) but Red Riding Hood neatly limboed right underneath.

***I suppose there’d better be a spoiler warning here.***

The setting is what you’d expect: pseudo-Medieval village in the middle of an unrealistically spiky forest, with an insulting gender dimorphic, binary society. The characters are nothing more than pages from TV Tropes printed off and pasted onto cardboard cut-outs. The dialogue is emotionless tedious drivel that I’ve seen beaten in artistry by ten-year-olds writing about their lunchboxes and the plot wouldn’t know what “innovation” meant if the OED definition was carved into the side of its face with a screwdriver.

I don’t know about you, but I am hopeless – absolutely hopeless – at being bored. I get violent. It’s a dreadful personality flaw, and really I should be more patient, but if I find myself stuck doing, watching or listening to something that bores me, I get enraged to the point of being pugnacious.

Half an hour in, and I was seriously considering starting a fight in the auditorium.

It’s as simplistic and colourful as a child’s toy. I know it’s aimed at the prepubescent, hormonal tweenagers that take Twilight as seriously as people take their religious texts, but it’s so monodimensional that I found myself Photoshopping in new, imaginary dimensions just to keep myself from falling asleep.

When can we all get as bored as I am of this heterocentric one-girl-two-guys trope? The story, instead of revolving around something interesting and mutable (like, say, werewolves), revolved around the personality vacuum that passed as the lead character (Amanda Seyfried being fought over by HER ONE TRUE LOVE and HER FINANCIALLY VIABLE FIANCÉ (Shiloh Fernadez and Max Irons). Neither of whom was a werewolf. And neither was she. It was like the bloody werewolf was an inconvenient distraction from the real “meat” of the Fisher Price plot.

It did, however, keep me guessing, if just because I couldn’t believe how intellect-insultingly bland it was. “Ooh, the werewolf is going to be her One True Love boy,” I thought, initially. “It’ll be an exploration of forbidden passion and how lust can turn you into a monster.” A well-trodden, predictable and dreadfully slut-shaming path, but at least it was werewolf-centric.

But it wasn’t.

Disappointed, I then thought, “Okay, it’ll be her grandmother, and it’ll be a sisters-doing-it-for-themselves female sexuality tribal-loyalties thing. Look, they’ve even colour-coded her, her mum and her grandma in transcendental Virgin Mary blue!” But no. No, nothing that complex or potentially interesting from a feminist perspective.

It was, in fact, neither of these. The werewolf part of the plot – and I have no idea why I’m being so careful not to spoil it for you – chose the most boring, incidental and lazy option that it could possibly find, and didn’t even bother meshing it into the love-triangle schtick. It was Scotch-taped on like an afterthought, as if just to get a bit of mileage out of the “STAY AWAY FROM ME I AM BAD FOR YOU” unattainable-boy routine that made bloody Twilight so popular.

And after all that, there was only one rampage! It was a good rampage, however, because there was lots of the werewolf smashing stuff, biting people’s arms off and leaping across rooftops – but there was no blood. In fact, this was the most bloodless werewolf film I have ever seen. It was about as horrific and monstrous as a Mr Men book. I felt betrayed. But more than betrayal, I felt pity. Perhaps they didn’t know how to make fake blood? I considered writing to the director and sending her my tried-and-tested recipe for realistic fake blood, but then realised that this might encourage her to make more films and no-one needs that.

Pretty werewolf, though, if a bit plasticine-y. And there was Gary Oldman being a fiendish, villainous priest, and that’s definitely something I can get behind in an extremely visceral sense.

The artist would like to apologise for the lack of illustrations accompanying this review. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, he is going on holiday tomorrow morning. Secondly, he doesn’t think Miranda would ever forgive him for just filling an entire article with werewolves doing random things, like ironing.

YOU SHOULD SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• It has a nice werewolf in
• Gary Oldman is on Level 5 Ham and god help me but I’d do him lopsided
• The soundtrack is pretty lush

YOU SHOULD NOT SEE THIS FILM BECAUSE:

• You could make a better, more engaging story with a set of MegaBlocks dragons
• Angela Carter already did the Red Riding Hood theme a thousand times better with The Company Of Wolves
• It makes Twilight look like a seminal feminist masterpiece
• Watch Dog Soldiers instead

Right! That’s it for us until after Easter and the bloody Royal Wedding. We’re taking a quick holiday breather, but we’ll be back after the Bank Holidays, following on from this review, with a week of fairytale-themed posts! See you on the other side…