This week my attention was drawn to a Facebook group that made me so angry I had to listen to loud music and punch a cushion to prevent all of the crockery in the flat being smashed to bits and my fist going through my laptop screen.
The Facebook group in question was Woman Against Feminism. Yes, women who are against feminism. They have all sorts of reasons for being against feminism.
“Ornithoscelidaphobia” is the fear of dinosaurs.
Pointing out to someone with ornithoscelidaphobia that it is completely irrational to be scared of dinosaurs because they have been extinct for 65 million years isn’t going to elicit the response “oh really? Brilliant, thanks, I will stop being scared of dinosaurs now that I know”.
Because the whole point of a phobia is that it is irrational overreaction. It’s an extreme state of fear, and hard to control. It’s not being ‘a bit scared’ of something the way you would be perfectly rational to be scared of say, a lion should you find yourself directly face to face with one. In which case you should probably be more than a bit scared, but you get my meaning.
I don’t have Ornithoscelidaphobia, although I did have some recurring nightmares which were pretty frightening after I saw Jurassic Park when I was 14. I do have a lot of friends with arachnophobia - which in the UK isn’t particulaly rational. We have no spiders that can give you anything worse than a mild infection, and even then only if you’re really unlucky. I rather like spiders. They eat wasps and any creature that eats wasps gets a big thumbs up from me. Not that I have ‘spheksophobia’ either; although Mother RDP has a potentially fatal wasp allergy which means I just really hate the fuckers. A friend of mine has ‘coulrophobi’a - the fear of clowns - which is surprisingly common. Perhaps too many of us read/saw It at a formative age. (n.b. for the love of god don’t follow that link if you have coulrophobia)
‘Trypanophobia’ is my monkey. I am terrified of injections, blood tests and having a drip/cannula. While they all come under the same heading, I think of them as quite different fears, as they come from different bad experiences.
On my ninth birthday I was bitten by a dog while in france. This led to my having to have a tetanus injection, delivered into my arse by a non English speaking doctor who with little ceremony or kindness threw me onto his lap and jabbed the needle in my backside, in full view of my Mum’s boyfriend at the time, who I barely knew. (Perhaps this isn’t exactly how it happened, and perhaps this is how my 9 year old scared brain interpreted it or remembers it, but it was enough to give me The Fear thereafter.) When I was 13 my entire school year was given the BCG. I warned the nurse that I had difficulties with injections. She was kind but businesslike - after all she had 60 odd injections to do that day - but something went wrong and the syringe cracked as the injection was given. Some of the fluid sprayed into my eye and the nurse freaked out and jumped back, letting go of the syringe and therefore leaving it hanging out of my arm. While I find injections really difficult, I can generally manage my fear response. I don’t freak out, or scream, or faint, but I do have to do mind over matter breathing exercises and need somewhere quite to sit for a little while after. It helps that bar those two bad experiences I haven’t had a disastrous injection incident since.
Blood tests are a completely different matter. I have no single bad experience with blood tests, or cannulae. They are ALL AWFUL. I have never had a blood test that hasn’t been painful and traumatic. I have ninja veins. Nurses will spent ages getting me to clench my fists, tying and retying tourniquets, smacking my arm, sighing, giving up, smacking the backs of my hands, sighing, saying “it’s ok why are you so worried?” whilst looking suspiciously concerned at the lack of visible veins. I’ve experienced on more than one occasion a delay while the most experienced person in the hospital is summoned to come and take the blood/put in the cannula instead. That’s before we’ve even got to the matter of my slow blood pressure. (If I am really really stressed, it goes up to what could be considered normal. When I was in the midst of depression I’d have these weird moments where it was like my body couldn’t actually produce enough blood flow to keep me upright, I’d feel a bit headswimmy and then bang I’d be out cold on the floor.) So once they’ve managed to find the vein and the ‘just a little pin prick’ (FUCKING LIES) has taken place I then have to contend with the sounds (I can’t look, I am too busy trying to remember how breathing works) of them trying to get blood out of me. Or fetching someone else to do it. All while being acutely aware that they are actually now hurting me, and I am getting more and more distressed.
All this considered, I actually think I handle myself relatively well. I cry, sure, and I find it hard, but I don’t have a massive freak out and I actually go and have the damn things done in the first place.
I always warn them in advance. “I have a phobia, I probably won’t faint, but I will probably cry a bit, and it’s really hard to get blood out of me, but please just get on with it and I’ll get on with staying conscious”.
What makes it really difficult is the inevitable reaction of the hospital staff when they see I have tattoos. This immediately invalidate my warning. Apparently, it’s COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE for me to be scared of blood tests/injections because I have tattoos. But that’s like saying “You don’t mind lizards. Whyare you afraid of snakes?”. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS.
With my medical history, I’ve had many, many blood tests. I had to have 7 just last week. I think they got enough blood for 5, and that was after 20 minutes, taking blood from both hands, and leaving me with a hematoma in one hand. The three medical professionals that ended up involved with this marathon blood testing session all failed to take me seriously when I said I had a phobia. One ended up in tears herself, and one was incredibly rude to me, repeating over and over again that I had tattoos as if that would somehow make my fear vanish. Oh, you’re RIGHT! Dinosaurs ARE extinct. How silly. Oh YES! I AM much bigger than the spider, and it probably IS more scared of me than I am of it. Of COURSE! Most clowns AREN’T homocidal manicacs! Great, thanks, my fear has immediately vanished and I am now cured.
In all my years of having injections and blood tests there have only been two medical professionals that haven’t said this. You know what they both had in common? TATTOOS.
However irrational a person’s phobia may be, telling them to ‘suck it up’ or ‘just get over it’ isn’t going to help. Nor is pointing out the irrationality of their fear. All you are doing then is belittling the person, who might be sitting there looking at a picture of a clown and using every breath and every muscle and every beat of their heart trying to control the impulse to scream, cry, freak out or faint. Telling that person that they are being ridiculous is the least sensitive thing you could possibly do - and partly because THEY KNOW they reaction is over the top, and they are embarassed about it, and are using all their emotional reserves to control it.
Even if someone’s phobia seems ridiculous to you, remember that we’re all scared of something. If you are ever confronted with a person having a freak out over something you think is really dumb, just try to put yourself in their position. Imagine yourself confronted by your biggest fear. And just say, hey, it’s ok to be scared. Keep breathing, and you’ll get through this.
And if that person has hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, pick your words carefully…
Last week I mentioned, in passing, how angry I was about some t-shirts I saw in the window of a local branch of a cheap menswear chain. I’ve been angry about it all week - ever since I saw them in the window of the shop. They were all world cup themed, having several for different football teams all with one thing in common. Nearly naked women. Some sitting astride footballs. Some with footballs covering their breasts. Some with nation flags as little thongs.
It should tell you something when I have to warn you that those links may be NSFW. Yes, images which are potentially not safe for work - because they are sexual in nature and could get you fired (for A - having sexually inappropriate pictures on your work computer and B - sexual harassment) are not only available for sale but are proudly displayed in the windows of stores and are also available in children’s sizes.
I did a double take when I first saw them. I couldn’t quite believe that here we are, 2014, and somehow it is perfectly OK to sell t-shirts with practically naked sexually objectified women on them? Not just men’s t-shirts, but children’s t-shirts?? And sure, there may be a woman wearing one on the splash page of the shop in question’s website, but just because a woman is wearing it doesn’t render the shirt not sexually objectifying due to some some weird gender waveform cancelling effect.
I became more shocked and disheartened when I started to discuss these shirts with others to find that some didn’t think there was anything wrong with having practically naked women on a t-shirt. Woah now people. WOAH NOW.
There’s nothing wrong with having a nearly naked woman on a t-shirt.
How did we get here? At what point did we become a society that is so immune to sexually explicit imagery, so saturated with images of the sexualised female form, that we (men and women alike) are able to look at those t-shirts and say “where’s the harm?”
I was born at the end of the 70s - when feminism had been a truly powerful force in the previous decade and wrought powerful changes. I grew up in the 80s, where women started to reap the benefits of that success and as the 90s dawned feminism almost started to seem obsolete. I came of age in the 90s, where women sang in rock bands and wore big shit kicking boots and Kathleen Hanna sang “Rebel Girl” and we started to feel powerful and strong - there was still a fight to have but we were going to bring it…
Then what happened in the 00s I cannot say. Was a big red “reset” button pushed somewhere on the control desk of “women’s liberation”? It’s like the progress stalled, rolled to a slow stop and then started sliding backwards to the point where sexual objectification is so every day, so normal, so accepted that we see nothing wrong with selling naked objectified women on the front of a t-shirt to a child.
As Laci Green in her excellent video says:
This is some bullshit. Everyone should be PISSED that this is so normal.
Before we go further, please go back a little and watch Laci Green’s video. The whole thing. Right to the end.
Done?
She says everything in that video I could possibly say about these t-shirts. They exemplify a society which sees women as decoration. As things to be looked at, admired for certain ‘qualities’. And we are bombarded with these ideas on a daily basis. What does this do to us? And I don’t mean “us” as in women, I am talking about all of us - men and women alike - growing up and developing in a world which tells us men are people and women are bodies - a collection of parts. And not only are women a collection of parts, but in order to be acceptable as a women, those parts must be the right size, the right shape, smooth and hairless and flaw free. Even the well meaning “real women have curves” is horribly misguided. I have thin friends. They are still definitely ‘real’. I have trans friends who are also very much ‘real’.
I have struggled with my own body image my whole life. I was a short chubby child with early developing boobs, and have remained a chubby voluptuous short adult. I long to put on some clothes, any clothes, and just go out and not give a shit. It is definitely easier the older I get, but I still care desperately. I care what people think of me. When my eye allergy flares up I “can’t go out” because “I can’t go out without makeup”. I have meltdowns when I am feeling “fat”. I can’t go outside wearing shorts without leggings because I am acutely aware of my big thighs and my stretch marks and my cellulite. Mr RDP was driven to distraction on a holiday we took to a very hot climate; he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t walk around in just a bikini top, or without leggings.
He hasn’t been subjected in the same way I have from a young age of being constantly told, subliminally and overtly, in a million tiny insidious ways and a hundred massive blatant ways, that the most important thing about me is my body, my clothes, the way I look and my hair. What I say, what I want to be or become, what I think? All of that is secondary, tertiary, inconsequential even to the way I look.
And the kicker? I KNOW that this is social conditioning. And yet I still feel like this, nearly every minute of every day of my life. The conditioning is so strong, the message so powerful, that even though I KNOW it is wrong, even though I KNOW I am labouring under a false consciousness bourne of a myriad of harmful external messages, I still cannot escape it.
These t-shirts are a kick in the face to every person who believes that men and women are equal beings deserving of equal respect. Anyone that wears one needs to take a long hard look at themselves. And possibly a kick up the arse. And to be forcibly made to watch Laci Green’s video.
This headline in the Daily Mail sums everything up for me.
Someone at the Mail clearly realised at some point that this was perhaps not a wise headline - maybe after the above link had been retweeted 1.5K times - and it has since been changed but the new headline is barely an improvement. Amal Alamuddin is an intelligent human rights lawyer, very respected in her field with one hell of a CV - but the most important thing about her, according to the media, is that she’s pretty, wears nice clothes and is going to marry George Clooney. What sort of message does this send to young women? Is it any wonder, given these sorts of messages, that being a “reality TV star” or “marrying a footballer” are seen as viable career choices for young girls?
It’s the same message as those T-shirts - that women are objects, parts, bodies wearing clothes. That women are for looking at, first and foremost. Everything else is background data.
This is some bullshit. Everyone should be pissed that this is so normal.
So I went along to the “Firing Up Squad” session ran by my MP Stella Creasy that I mentioned last week, partly because I think our MP is awesome and partly so I might have something to write about. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and was quite nervous about having to speak to Unknown People.
I walked in to see a screen with I (HEART) FEMINISM. Good start. I do indeed (HEART) feminism, as you probably already know if you’ve been reading for a while, although lately I have been finding it increasingly more difficult to find the confidence to write about it.
Last week I wrote that I was struggling to find things to write about. I now have to admit that this isn’t strictly true. I have so many things to write about. For example:
All of these things were going around in my mind over the last few weeks but I felt unable to write about them and for one reason. I read too many comments “BTL” (below the line) on other wonderful articles about similar subjects by other writers - both male and female - and was so disheartened by those comments that it made me fear putting my voice out there. People can be really cruel, and dismissive, and downright scary in their BTL comments but that wasn’t just what put me off - it was also the sheer volume of comments from people who simply cannot grasp the issues at hand. Who use straw man arguments, whataboutery, demands for ‘evidence’ and their own personal anecdotes to disprove the writer at all costs, without really ever being able - or even willing - to consider the points made by the writer. I started to feel tired and overwhelmed at the task of writing about these things when writers more successful and more eloquent than me have failed. I’d even started to doubt myself in the face of the relentless bashing of feminist ideas on the internet.
In the first few minutes of her introduction Stella Creasy blew away my unspoken fears and doubts. “Let’s get one thing straight” she said. “You are discriminated against.” CVs are more likely to be considered highly if they have a male name on. Orchestras are increasingly holding blind auditions to eliminate gender bias. Women bosses are judged more harshly and are paid less than their male equivalents. You want evidence? There’s plenty. Stella also discussed how women are not brought up to be ambitious, or celebrate our successes, or put ourselves first when it comes to making big changes in our lives. Her point was proved when she introduced one woman as a “hero” and the woman shook her head and rejected the accolade. And yet, when she delivered a short but passionate talk about her experience of FGM and her ambition to raise awareness of it within the the UK, it was clear she *was* a hero, she just wasn’t able to comfortably hear that.
So far, so inspiring. And to have been inspired to get writing about things I feel strongly about is a pretty big boost. But that’s not all I got out of the evening.
There were a number of exercises designed to get us thinking about our dreams, our achievements and our plans in a real and confident way. I really struggled at first. It was clear that many of the other women at the event were high achieving, driven, ambitious and skilled. I almost felt like an imposter. I felt that I had no real achievements to speak of, and no real ambitions. I was actually pretty content with my life. I have a job I like which pays enough, somewhere to live and some hobbies that I enjoy. It started to occur to me as the evening went on that being “content” with things wasn’t quite true. It dawned on me as the other women spoke, and as we went through the exercises, that the reason I’ve no big ambitions or plans, or that I am not driving myself on, is because I am *scared*. I am scared of failure, and I am scared of being ill again. I have struggled a great deal with my mental health in the past and realised that I am living with being ‘ok’ because being ‘ok’ is safe. In an exercise about our recent achievements I discussed how I’d had my appraisal at work and got “exceeds” in all areas, and how I’d discussed with my manager how to get more experience in my role so I could perhaps in a year or so apply for a job like one I’d found on the internet I liked the look of, but didn’t think I was quite ready for. I saw this as an ambition to aim for.
My half-hearted ambition that I wrote for the excercise was the inexcusably vague “be more brave about making little changes that could make a big difference”.
It was when one woman said that she felt that it was easier for men to be ambitious because they were less afraid of rejection that I had a revelation. For one, I disagree. I don’t think all men fear rejection less. I agree that society is geared towards instilling a confidence in boys in this regard that it doesn’t in girls; but it doesn’t follow that it is ‘natural’ that men will fear rejection less. I definitely handle rejection better than Mr RDP, I thought. Mr RDP recently got a new job. It’s a great job, a step up from where he is, and he deserves is. But he nearly didn’t go for the interview, as he didn’t think he was ready. He didn’t think he was experienced enough. I told him he should go for it - it didn’t matter if he didn’t get it because it was great experience. That if he didn’t get it he could ask for feedback and work out what he needed to work on to get a similar job next time. It was clearly brilliant advice, I’d been proud of giving it and secretly took a little credit for him getting the job on the basis of my awesome advice.
As I was thinking this through, organising my thoughts to make my point about this out loud, it hit me. Why on earth was I giving such excellent advice, but not following it? Why I am rejecting a job opportunity because I am not ready when if it was anyone else I would be encouraging them to go for it anyway, because the experience is always valuable even if it’s ultimately a ‘no’. Why would I bully Mr RDP (because that’s pretty much what I did) into applying for a job when I am not prepared to take the same steps for myself?
My partner in the earlier exercise about challenging our ambitions and making them clearer and more focussed obviously saw that something was going on in my head. It must have shown on my face as she leant over with a knowing smile. “Are you ready to talk about it?” She whispered. I grabbed a pen and wrote on the blank piece of paper in capital letters:
TO DO LIST
I stared at the page in shock. I’d been so proud this year of giving up alcohol and sugar and starting a BSL course it hadn’t even occurred to me that there were all these things I wanted to do. But there they were, on the page - things I wanted to get involved in but was too sacred of shaking up the status quo. “You’ve missed one.” said my exercise partner with a meaningful look. I added to the bottom of the list:
And I have to, because we have to catch up with our partner in a month and tell them how we’re getting on with our plan.
Going into the event I’d had little idea of what to expect. It was astounding to leave having felt like I’d had the biggest, kindest, most loving and supportive kick up the bum you could ever imagine.
And my old List is getting a little longer.
I have always been outspoken and strongly opinionated - even from a very young age. Mummy dinosaur has many stories to tell of this somewhat unaccountably moral and open minded small person.
aged 5, asking “What’s a homosexual?” and on receiving the reply “well, some men like women, and some men like men…” responding casually “oh, it means gay.”
aged 6, writing “you are killing me” and “cough cough” and “please don’t die” and drawing skulls and crossbones all over cigarette boxes in felt tip pen (decades before the passive smoking link was proved)
aged 7, taking a taxi driver to task for a racist comment
aged 9, seeing this (quite frankly TERRIFYING) public information advert on the television and very seriously telling Grannie dinosaur to be careful because “there’s a new disease called ignorance”.
I am sure there are many more.
I’ve never been entirely sure where my fervent belief in social justice came from, or my habit of challenging anyone I thought saying anything wrong or unfair, even when perhaps not safe or sensible to do so.
My early years were spent in North Devon in a small town where until the mid eighties there was one black person. Literally, one. He wore a top hat and ran a second hand record store in the older part of town. When I was taken on my first trip to London in the early 80s I was warned that there would be lots of people of all different colours, and that I shouldn’t stare at them. This isn’t that long ago - just a few decades. There were so few non-white people in my home town that my Mum was concerned I would stare, or comment, or say something embarrassing in my typically outspoken way. But even then, at the age of 6, started I’d already somehow - even growing up in a tiny English country town with no discernible diversity whatsoever - assimilated the idea that people that weren’t white were people too and should probably be treated just the same as I treated everyone else.
We moved away from Devon when I was 11, to a very middle-class small city in Hertfordshire. Very different from the little town I’d grown up in, but still very white, very middle class. It was the first time I started to hear overtly racist things being said; by classmates (picking up opinions from their parents?) and felt unable to say anything back. The first few times I did I was earmarked as a “weirdo” and “different” and a “poor backwards country girl who used to live in a cowpat”. Fortunately I changed schools at some point (long story) and got to do my GCSEs as a much more diverse school. And that’s how I discovered Mr D.
You know how people often talk about that one teacher who inspired them and who they will never forget? Mine is Mr D. He was hilarious, terrifying, intelligent and dedicated. There’d be no “hands up” to answer his question in his class - he’d pick the person to answer. And he had an uncanny ability to pick the one person who wasn’t really listening to his question, or who had been giggling, or (in my case) had temporarily zoned out watching a squirrel out of the window.
He was one of those people who didn’t just teach you the facts, but made you think about them. He wanted this group of young teenagers not to just know what happened in the USA in the 1850s, but understand how those events shaped the USA now. He encouraged us to take an interest in the modern politics of countries, and try to draw a line between now and the political shape of their past.
He was a fervent ‘leftie’ - perhaps one of the first (to my knowledge) that I’d met and a staunch anti-monarchist (which made our lessons on the Wars of the Roses interesting). He was occasionally derailable - we knew what topics made him particularly passionate and inclined to go off topic, and there would occasionally be competitions to see who could get Mr D on a rant. He was passionate about his subject - and if he ever heard people moaning about learning about “dead people and stuff that happened ages ago, why is it even relevant” he would deliver a rousing speech about the importance of learning from the past so we don’t make the same mistakes in the future.
We left him little cakes or jokes on the blackboard (for the younger of you out there, before there were whiteboards, there were blackboards. You wrote on them with chalk. It’s really not that long ago…) and it was all done with a huge amount of affection because we loved Mr D. We loved his passion for his subject and how he made us think and question. Of course at the time we might not have known we loved it, and we might not have understood why he was our favourite teacher. But he was. The sole reason I wanted to do History A-level was because of Mr D.
And so in this environment, from a big old anti-monarchist David Starkey hating leftie, we learned about the 2 World Wars and Hitler’s rise to power. From a man who had a great skill in getting teenagers to draw modern parallels, from a man whose belief about his subject was that it taught us how to have a better future from learning the mistakes of our past, we learned about the Stock Exchange collapse in America, the depression, the deepening economic crisis in Germany and in Europe. The after effects of rationing in the UK. The fear of businessmen that they would lose everything. The fear of the ordinary people of poverty. The blaming of this by an enigmatic leader on a marginalised group of people. The slow and steady shift of countries in Europe to the far right. How in the space of just 4 years, building on disaffection, fear and economic hardship, the Nazi party went from having 12 seats to 230.
Is this sounding familiar to you at all?
As teenagers we simply couldn’t understand how this could happen. HOW could people vote for a party that were clearly, well, kind of evil? How could people not see the potential ramifications of voting for the Nazi party? Even with Mr D’s careful pulling together of the threads for us, showing us how the Nazi party gained power by being the ‘people’s friend’, we still struggled. How did people NOT SEE IT?
A trip for those of us going on to do History A-Level to Berlin was, on one level, a big old jolly of 16 year olds away from their parents in a youth hostel. On another, it was coming face to face with history. Much of the Berlin wall was still standing when we went - a visual scar of the country’s recent past. We visited concentration camps. For a child who had defended the rights of non-white non-straight people from the age of 5 this was shocking; it was one thing to read about it in a book in a classroom; but to stand in a room and be told ‘this is where they gassed Jews’ and feel the weight of the past press upon you in such a visceral way is quite another.
We learned about the different classification of ‘prisoners’ - for it wasn’t just the Jewish people the Nazis condemned. Homosexuals, drug users, Roma, the mentally ill, anarchists and ordinary Germans who protested and resisted - all were codified, demonised, locked away.
It’s was a sobering experience and many of us grew up considerably on that trip. It made the teenage me more determined to stand up for injustice, more determined to challenge prejudice when I saw it, particularly as it was starting to dawn on me that as a middle class white person I had a voice that was often denied to others. It was many years later that I learnt the term ‘white privilege’ but my early understanding of the concept began in these history lessons; began with Mr D.
You will understand, then, that the swing to the right that has taken place not just in the UK but across Europe makes me feel sick to my stomach. I was taught to draw parallels from our history; to see patterns of history repeating, to learn from it so that it never happens again. And what I am seeing scares the crap out of me. How can people be making this same mistake? In the centenary year of World War 1 the UK and Europe are taking a big step to the right. Let’s do the time warp again.
Ukip have been a shambles. From blaming bad weather on gays to a disaster of a ‘carnival’ to their worrying and outright dangerous views on women, their press has been dreadful. Their campaign dogged by disaster. In some areas the local MPs didn’t even try. And yet.
If I think about it I feel sick. Angry. I want to cry and throw things. I want to understand why we are doing this as a country, as a continent. Why are we sleepwalking into Fascism? Did no one else pay attention in school?
We’re walking into trouble through ignorance. And it’s terrifying.
If you’ve been following this blog for a little while you may already have picked up that I am both a cyclist and a feminist. Looking back, I became a cyclist about a year before I became a feminist. My very first really angry street harassment rant that precipitated my discovery that I was a feminist was back in 2007 on my LiveJournal, and was prompted by being street harassed 5 times in one day while out on my bike.
I discussed in my previous post how I ended up posting less and less about street harassment and feminism, despite it being a subject about which I was very passionate, simply because I couldn’t deal very well with the sheer numbers of comments along the lines of
“Not ALL men are like this…”
“I’ve never seen anyone do that…”
“I got groped in a club once so women do it too…”
“It was probably a compliment…”
“Maybe you shouldn’t wear low cut tops…”
“My girlfriend says this happens to her a lot but it never happens when she’s out with me…”
Trust me. I have heard ALL of these before. REPEATEDLY. None of them are good arguments. All of them are deeply frustrating; particularly as they are usually said by guys who I generally think of as pretty nice blokes. Good sorts, who are on ‘my side’ when it comes to thinking women are just as good at life as men and therefore deserve a fair shot at it. But what comments like these do is, at best, derail the point I’m trying to make by niggling over semantics or, at worst, completely deny my lived experience. I struggled to argue and debate the points raised and after a while grew so very tired of having the same discussion over and over AND OVER again. When you are shaking with anger because for the 5th time in a week a random man has said “smile darling” you are really not in the mood for calmly educating someone for the 30th time why this isn’t ok. So over time I just stopped posting.
This week I posted link to an interesting article about cyclists cycling in the middle of the road. It prompted a number of comments from acquaintances who drive using my post as a platform to inform me that they hated cyclists because they go through red lights, and ride on the pavements, and hold them up. Several quoted various clauses from the highway code to counter the idea that cyclists might possibly have an equal right to be on the road as them (this argument boiled down to ‘we’re faster so you have to let us pass’). I dealt with this very badly. I got upset, frustrated and had to back right out of the thread before I told them exactly where they could shove their dipsticks.
Being an overthinking sort of person, I had a long ponder (after I’d had a cup of tea and some chocolate and a bit of a stamp around the house saying AND ANOTHER THING but to the cat rather than the people on the internet and therefore calmed down a bit) about why it was I had reacted with such frustration, anger and irritation. I realised that the overall tone had made me feel exactly the same way I felt when I posted about street harassment. The comments were the same ones I always hear when I post about a near miss on my bike, or when I witness some truly dreadful dangerous driving; cyclists somehow ‘deserve it’ because of the behaviour of ‘those other cyclists”.
“I’ve never run a red light…”
“I always give cyclists room…”
“I saw a cyclist yesterday going through a red light…”
“You were probably in his way…”
“Maybe you should wear a helmet…”
I’d heard them all before, and debated them all before, and countered them all before, and PEOPLE WERE STILL GOING ON ABOUT IT. So I got cross and disengaged.
What interested me, once I’d calmed down and re-read the comments, is that these commenters had inadvertently pushed the anger and frustration back onto the cyclist, in the same way that the negative comments on an article about street harassment can push back against women’s experiences. The writer feels unheard and frustrated, the commenters feel misunderstood and attacked.
When I am cut up on my bike by a dangerous driver, I don’t assume that all drivers are dangerous. But perhaps when I discuss this I I make drivers feel as though I am attacking them. They react with their frustrations about ‘bloody cyclists’ and that they are not one of ‘those drivers’ and so I then feel like they are attacking me - after all I am a cyclist - so I take great pains to point out I am not one of ‘those cyclists’ and thus we end up back in our infinite loop of mutual frustration.
The common enemy here, for us ‘not those cyclists’ and those ‘not those drivers’ is of course ‘those ones’. The bad road users that made the rest of us look bad. I shouldn’t pick fights or have long debates over semantics with a driver who uses the road well and is respectful to cyclists and that driver shouldn’t squabble with me; we actually all agree that bad road users suck. The same rings true for those men making defensive comments on articles about feminism. The ‘enemy’ here is not the woman raising the problems she faces on a daily basis. The ‘enemy’ are ‘those men’ which are giving the majority of men (who would never even consider going ‘smile darling’ or ‘show us your tits’ to a woman on street) a bad name.
Looking back to my last post about cycling I’d made the point (in my typically rather longwinded way) that just SOME road users being shit is not an argument against improving the infrastructure for ALL road users. We ALL agree that shitty behaviour is shit behaviour. So perhaps instead of having these repetitive and cyclical arguments amongst ourselves we need to recognise the real enemy and join forces against that; be it a poor road infrastructure and road use culture that encourages bad driving and dangerous cycling or be it a patriarchal society that tells men they must be tough and never cry and tells women that ‘oi nice tits’ is a compliment.
If you are a member of (x majority group) and you find yourself angered by something someone from (x marginalised group) raises, before you respond ask yourself this: Are you really angry/hurt by the words or actions of (x marginalised person) or are you angered by the actions of the (x majority person) that has reflected badly on yourself? If the answer is the latter, consider being an ally, rather than an adversary.
It’s very easy to debate and belittle the experiences of a minority or marginalised group; and it’s easy to shut down that debate by saying “well I am (x marginalised group) and you are (x majority group) so you wouldn’t understand”. It’s much harder to step outside of those well travelled debates and realise the common interest to become allies, but perhaps it’s the best way to effect real change in an unequal society.
I discovered that I was a feminist on 4th June 2007.
I can pinpoint it with that much accuracy due to my old LiveJournal. After a particularly bad week of being shouted at in the street or propositioned by strangers I’d made three ranty posts about street harassment in the space of 4 days. In third post, after linking to a no-longer-there site (which later became the Everyday Sexism project) I wrote:
I’ve never been very interested in feminism before, or campaigning for anything really. I’ve got on with what I believe in in my own way[…] Little drops in the ocean. But this has really got me wound up, and the more I dig, the more wound up I get. I can’t tackle this one in a little private way, I’ll probably end either in a ditch having been attacked by a bloke I’ve retaliated to, or in jail, having been arrested for thumping a bloke I’ve retaliated to. […] If I start wearing dungarees, stop washing, and start singing protest songs in parks, someone please kill me. Especially if I start talking about burning my bra.
A number of my friends gently took me to task in the comments:
Trust me dungarees, smelliness and bra burning are not a prerequisite to feminism. Feminism is about realising women are treated differently and less well than men and wanting to do something about it.
One linked me to the Fawcett Society’s “this is what a feminist looks like” campaign .
one commented:
I’ve always thought of you a feminist, even if you’ve never really been interested in it. Your world view seems sufficiently well aligned to mine that I think you have feminist sympathies.
From that point forward I started to think of myself as a feminist. I didn’t take any courses, or start reading any particular writers, but I started paying more attention to what was around me, what I experienced and started challenging my own perceptions of sex, gender and gender identity. I continued to make ranty posts on my LiveJournal - but as time went on started to find the comments I was getting difficult to deal with. I found it hard to argue back when people disagreed with me. Specifically, when I discussed a feminist issue and men would reply with variations on a theme:
but not all men are like that
but men have problems too
but women are their own worse enemies/women do this too
Eventually I began to shrink from posting anything overtly feminist, or about harassment, patriarchy or objectification simply because I didn’t want to deal with a shitstorm of arguments every time I had an opinion. I didn’t have the language or the skills to argue the points that kept coming up over and over again. Other friends did, and largely did an excellent job of making the arguments for me, and I continued to learn from, and marvel at, the cleverness of my internet friends. It did put me off though, and ultimately I stopped posting anything controversial at all.
In the last few years there have been a number of things that have roused my feminist ire - only now the social media tool of choice is Facebook, not Live Journal. I’ve debated sexism in sport, the questionable feminism of Joss Whedon, gendered insults and swear words (try not using any for a week, it’s HARD.) and most recently That Snickers Advert.
Facebook doesn’t lend itself to debate in quite the same way as LiveJournal. You can support what someone is saying by just a ‘like’. You don’t have to even construct a coherent sentence to agree. The comments fields encourage shorter responses. TL;DR now extends to a comment longer than about an inch. I also am less afraid of just unfriending someone if they really fuck me off. Perhaps that isn’t the most sensible way to encourage open discourse, but it’s my Facebook and I get to chose who has access to my life. But that has the result that I am discussing with a limited pool of people who already agree with me, and not with anyone able to challenge me when they take issue with me.
I am not coming up with my own ideas or theories - I am finding what other people have said and agreeing with them. I am posting other people’s content; finding validation in my half-formed thoughts in articles written by ‘proper’ writers and going ‘THIS’ and posting a link.
Outside of Facebook, it’s a different story. When I first started this blog I had wondered if I would go back to posting some of my glorious feminist rants of the livejournal days. It felt like exposure. Write *MY* words about feminism? I can’t. It terrifies me. I don’t understand the language of feminism. I don’t understand the theories. I read an article in the Guardian about ‘fourth wave feminism and realised I didn’t even know what waves one to three were (I do now. I googled.) I googled ‘intersectionality’ and still didn’t understand it. Sometimes I read articles about Feminism and feel really stupid.
I have had a number of discussions lately with female friends who have said they wanted to share things on Facebook, but felt that they couldn’t, because they didn’t want to have a big argument with people telling them why they are wrong and making them upset - the exact same fears that stopped me posting my thoughts on my LiveJournal. The most eye opening was a discussion with a friend who is a well established blogger who I very much admire. She said that she shied away from discussing feminism because she feels like it’s a subject where she can’t write with any authority - she feels she has things to say but that her views will be rejected by feminist writers. This rang very close to home for me.
Mr RDP is a feminist. It’s one of the many attractive things about him. He’s also an Academic feminist. He wrote his dissertation on Riot Grrl and Third Wave Feminism. He understands the terms and the language of Feminism. He’s read bell hooks and probably knows why you spell her name with small letters. He knows how to debate, and how to form and dissect arguments. As an academic, he carefully constructs an argument before discussing it, testing the hypothesis by debate.
I am an non-academic feminist. My degree was in performance art. I didn’t even have to do dissertation - I created an limited audience participatory site specific piece (I built a maze and had monsters running around in it). Sometimes I make sweeping half humorous statements like “I blame the Spice Girls.” I am not prepared when people actually de-construct my argument - it confuses me because I didn’t really have an argument to begin with. With my arts background I start with a small feeling or statement and develop that into an argument through discussion, building a hypothesis by debate.
When I get involved in a discussion about Feminism my whole point of view, and perception, and all my arguments come from my position of being a woman, living in this world, and the experiences I have of it. I can’t argue from a theoretic point of view or say “well, bell hooks said…”because I haven’t read her. It makes me shy away from having discussions about feminism with Mr RDP because I end up feeling like my opinion doesn’t count because I’m an ill-read woman, and then he feels like I’m calling him an oppressive symbol of patriarchy and we both shout and I cry.
To hear my friend, an excellent writer and someone who has so much to say, voice that she feels shut out of feminist discussion because she doesn’t have the right background made me feel sad. I might have struggled to understand the word ‘intersectionality’ but I understood enough about the concept to see that alienating women from having a voice because they haven’t got an academic background is not exactly in the spirit of third (or fourth?) wave feminism. I can see how it must be frustrating for those who have studied and read feminist writers to have ‘uninformed’ female voices sharing ideas or feelings that have already been covered by writers beforehand; but to say “well, if you’d read X then you’d see that this has already been discussed” is a classic shut-down.
Since my revelation of 4th June 2007 I am a little older, arguably a little wiser, and a fair bit more Teflon of skin. I’m less afraid of a heated discussion, more confident in my feminism and happier to get stuck in to disagreements. I still consider myself relatively new to feminism. I’m still learning. When you are learning you make mistakes and you learn by them. Perhaps this blog post is a mistake I will learn from, but perhaps it will help me lose my fear of writing my own words about feminism in public.
We’re in an era where young people, male and female (and in between - but the gender binary is a whole other blog post…) are getting interested in and fired up by Feminism in an increasingly sexualised and gender divided youth culture (gendered Lego? REALLY?). Feminism is no longer in danger of being seen as the discourse of protest song singing bra burning hippies. If anything, it’s in danger of going too much the other way and becoming acedemicised to the point of excluding those who come to feminism by another less formal route.
In order to continue to encourage people to declare themselves a feminist, we need to make sure all voices are able to be heard, and not frighten away or silence those who really feel they have something to say.
I thought I had a breakthrough last night. We headed to our new local, a lovely big pub with artfully tatty decorations, mis-matched furniture and an excellent drink selection. Looking at the available options I realised they had my favourite beer (I am not generally a beer drinker but this one tastes like a Piña colada) and really wanted one. Not to get drunk, but just to drink it. That was a new experience. My breakthrough was short-lived however. It’s a popular pub so we managed to get a table only by hovering nearby people who looked like they were leaving. As they left and we sat down I saw the drink they’d left behind - a bottle of wine and two glasses and I felt that familar pang; the desire to get completely ratted. The desire was so strong it shocked me.
I didn’t drink last night, opting instead for ginger beers and lime and sodas, but still stayed out all night and had a great time. I didn’t find my ability to chat, laugh or enjoy my time with friends in any way impaired by sobriety. I am clearly getting there and the time away from drinking is giving me whole new perspectives on my relationship with alcohol. What has been unexpected though, is how it is also giving me new perspectives on our relationship with drinking as a culture.
If you are reading this, you are on the internet. If you are on the internet, there’s a fair chance you will have heard of ‘NekNomination’, a drinking game which works via social media. If you are reading this by, I don’t know, osmosis or psychokinetic powers then maybe you’re not on the internet and haven’t heard of it. So for my unusual psychic readers - it’s a very simple drinking game where you down a pint of something alcoholic, then nominate two other people to also down a pint of something alcoholic. The difference between NekNominate and your average party drinking game is that NekNominate is played via social media. The pint-downing is filmed, as is the subsequent nomination. It’s then posted on social media and the nominees then have 24 hours to also down a pint of something. There’s been a lot of press over NekNomination over the past few weeks due to the game apparently being the cause of a number of deaths of young participants.
If you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ll probably not be remotely shocked at the confession that I LOVE drinking games. I’ve made some great friendships over the years and had some of the best and most hilarious outings through drinking games. My favourites are probably ‘Ring of Fire’ - where you use a pack of cards and ascribe a truth, dare, action or challenge to each card and take turns picking the card - and ‘One to Ten’ which is pretty much impossible to explain but involves having to count to ten as a group but with each person saying a number each without agreeing who says which number and without two or more people saying a number at the same time. If you get to ten, the person who said ‘ten’ can change any number to a word, phrase or action. Both of these games have led to great times, and terrible hangovers.
Generally, the whole point of a drinking game isn’t really to win the game. The point of the game is to GET REALLY DRUNK. Therefore even if there is a loser, you’re all winners at the end, because you’re all REALLY DRUNK. The losers are the people that decided not to play the drinking game, as not only are they not REALLY DRUNK they also now have to put up with a group of obnoxiously REALLY DRUNK people.
Having said that, I have actually played both Ring of Fire and One to Ten as NON drinking games - I originally learned One to Ten as a drama/group work concentration game and introduced it to friends as a drinking game later - and can confirm they are just as hilarious sober as drunk - that is if you are able to be uninhibited enough sober to do silly things and laugh until you make weird snorting noises. You know, the sort of laughter where you actually need to stop because you can’t breathe and it hurts. I’ve had these experiences sober as well as REALLY DRUNK.
NekNomination is a very different sort of drinking game. You don’t have to be at a party, in a social space. It is played over social media, and the drinking within 24 hours rule means you could be drinking at any day of the week; not just as part of a weekend bender. Unlike my favourite drinking games, you can’t play it without booze; there’d be no point. It’s got that added pressure of direct nomination. Someone has nominated you so you HAVE to do it, or everyone will clearly see you failed. It reminds me a little of those stupid chain letters I used to receive as a child in the pre-computer days (yes, I am that old) where you had to painstakingly copy out the same letter to 7 of your friends or you have BROKEN THE CHAIN and you will NEVER FIND PEACE and small kittens in a desert somewhere will DIE.
I have a dark sort of fascination with NekNomination, which I think is entirely linked to my booze-free state. If I hadn’t decided to go booze free, I would probably already have been nominated several times by now. If I hadn’t, I would probably have really been hoping I would be. While I always hated those chain letters, and generally refuse to pass anything like that on on a matter of principle, I’d have probably got stuck into this chain game with the same huge boozy enthusiasm I get stuck into all drinking games, and with a similar justification of my over-drinking habits (I HAVE to do it, I was NOMINATED). It would be hugely hypocritical of me therefore to condemn those taking part as mindless idiots. Indeed, people I am am close to have taken part; including Baby Sister Dinosaur which gave me such a severe case of mixed feelings I couldn’t even put it into words for several weeks.
While I am aware that this no-drinking thing is very much my own journey, I have to also acknowledge the affect it has had on other people and how it has affected my view of other people’s drinking habits. Once you step outside something which is considered perfectly normal, you start to realise that it’s not actually that normal. Some friends have been almost offended by my abstinence, as if I am making a comment on their drinking habits. Others have missed the seriousness of my situation, asking me why I can’t just drink in moderation (I don’t know why I can’t. I just can’t. That’s the point.) But the thing I have noticed is how entrenched our relationship with excessive drinking is - how normalised getting REALLY DRUNK is. It’s actually more of a transgression in our culture to be sober than to get so drunk you fall over. If you don’t get so drunk you fall over then you’re doing it wrong.
NekNomination is a really visual clear representation of this binge drinking culture - it’s like a microcosm of the peer pressure to drink, and how excessive drinking is seen as perfectly normal and fine. Those that have died allegedly playing this game, by newspaper accounts, seemed to have taken it a LOT further than the average participant - one tried to drink an entire pint of vodka. Another jumped into a freezing river. These deaths are horrible, and shocking; but the media discussions around it have been very much around how the deaths and the problems are because of the game itself. But I don’t think you can look at this game as the problem; the game is a representation of a culture in which problematic drinking is not seen as being problematic at all. NekNomination is a product of our drinking culture; a symptom of a wider issue.
Baby sister dinosaur and I have both acknowledged that we won’t bother having a drink at all if we don’t intend to get drunk. My whole reason for drinking is to get hammered. And that is seen as perfectly normal in our culture. Should it be? This is a question I’ve never even considered before - it’s a question I’ve only started asking myself in the last few weeks as I reach the 2 month mark of abstinence.
How long have I suspected my drinking was problematic? If I am brutally honest, I would say nearly 7 years. And yet this is the first time I’ve gone without drinking alcohol for more that two weeks, pretty much since I started drinking 20 odd years ago. Everything around me told me my drinking was ok. Even now, I am finding it hard to avoid alcohol not because I really want a drink, but because the pressure on me to conform and ‘just have a few drinks’ is immense. NekNomination isn’t a new and dangerous craze that is killing young reckless people - it’s a drinking game which is perfectly in keeping with our current age; played by social media and fired by peer pressure, successful because “getting drunk” is virtually synonymous with “having a drink”. The reason it is dangerous is because our perceptions of alcohol and its dangers are flawed, and our relationship with alcohol deeply complex as a culture.
If you were nominated, would you do it? If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you? You know, if all of my friends jumped off a bridge on a regular basis, and if jumping off the bridge was something everyone did every weekend, and if NOT jumping off the bridge marked you as boring and no fun, then yes. I probably would jump off that bridge. And I probably wouldn’t even stop to ask myself why.
I have been cycling to work since around 2006. It started as a vague attempt to get fitter and save money, but ended up becoming something I genuinely enjoyed. Nowadays I only commute by public transport if I really have to and it makes me so grumpy and irritable that’s it’s best all round for everyone if I just get on my bike. The biggest unexpected benefit of cycling to work was far fewer illnesses - not just because you are a little fitter and healthier but because you are not in the plague pits of the tube or a London bus during rush hour. One zombie-lurgy ridden commuter sneezing on the tube can infect the entire carriage. I try not to think too hard about what sort of gross things that might be living on the seats or handrails.
I took the cycling proficiency test as a child, and cycled pretty much everywhere up until my bike was stolen shortly after graduating from University. With my massive graduate debt and having got a job far from where I was living I didn’t bother to replace it. Therefore before I took the plunge into full time cycle commuting six years later I dusted off my copy of the highway code and re-familiarised myself with the rules of the road.
Full Disclosure: I don’t drive. In fact, I can’t drive. I owned a copy of the highway code from taking driving lessons in my early twenties. I struggled a great deal with the driving lessons. An hour into my second lesson my driving instructor said, “It’s ok, some people just aren’t meant to drive” which in retrospect was not as reassuring as he probably intended it to be. My problem with driving wasn’t about using the road so much as using the car. I couldn’t understand the gears. I couldn’t get a sense of how much space on the road I took up. I didn’t like not being able to feel or see where I was on the road, or be able to judge or control my speed. Reversing was completely unfathomable. I particularly didn’t like the way I couldn’t trust any other bugger on the road.
Cycling is completely different - you know where you are and how much space you take up because you can see it, you don’t have to sense it. You know exactly how fast you’re going because you can feel it, and you can control your speed with your own body. Cycling feels so natural to me, and every bike I’ve owned that I’ve truly loved has felt like an extension of my own body. Having a bike you love stolen almost feels like someone has stolen a part of you.
I enjoyed commuting by bicycle from my very fist week - discovering new parts of London by accident when getting lost, exploring different routes (fast ones by main road, longer but safer back streets, pretty but muddy off-the-beaten-track routes…) and was never without my battered A-Z in my bike bag (this has been replaced with a smartphone with GPS navigation app - because we LIVE IN THE FUTURE). It amused and irritated me in equal measure when people said “Oh you’re so BRAVE cycling in London. I wouldn’t dare!” or “Isn’t cycling very dangerous?”. I always reassured those people that it was wonderful - as long as you knew what you were doing and cycled safely it was no more dangerous than walking to work. I had a few near misses over the years - a few car doors nearly opened into my face; a few incidents where I was run off the road by boy racers or white van men; one nasty incident where I was actually groped by a man in a van while trying to turn right off a main road. But the near misses were occasional and the benefits of cycling to work far outweighed the downsides.
Things have started to change though, which is strange because over the last couple of years cycling has become hugely more popular - particularly in London and in the area in which I live/work in East London.
While cycling has become more popular over the last few years it also feels like it’s become far more dangerous. I am having near misses regularly, and experience considerably more aggression from motorists. I am regularly run off the road by irritated, angry or oblivious drivers and am frequently verbally abused, often being told that I ‘don’t belong on the road’.
I’ve thought a lot about why this might be. There’s been much discussion over the last few months about cyclist safety, following a series of tragic accidents where 6 cyclists were killed in London within a fortnight. Every article, be it pro-cyclist or pro-car ended up the same - with a big debate in the comments section full of the same complaints. Motorists don’t look. They don’t indicate. Cyclists run red lights and don’t stop for pedestrians. Cyclists are too slow and get in the way. Motorists drive in bike lanes. Cyclists ride on pavements. Motorists kill baby seals. Cyclists steal the souls of first born sons. And so on.
I personally feel that part of the problem is this increasing media and Government rhetoric that pitches the cyclist in opposition to the motorist which actually creates conflict and defensiveness on both sides. Setting up cyclists and motorists against each other in to some sort of War of the Road is only going to exacerbate the problem and prevents meaningful change.
Personally I am a law abiding cyclist who obeys road signs and crossings and rides to the highway code. I find cyclists who run red lights and have no regard for other road users hugely frustrating. I also find pedestrians who run out in front of me on a red pedestrian light, and drivers who run red lights hugely frustrating. I don’t dislike ALL car drivers, or ALL pedestrians, or ALL cyclists simply because I witness SOME of them doing Really Stupid Annoying Shit. A rhetoric which encourages Group A to hate Group B (and vice versa) because some of the Other Group occasionally do Really Stupid Annoying Shit is unhelpful and ultimately dangerous. It has the effect that people can feel justified in shitty behaviour towards each other. A motorist feels it’s ok to cut in front of a cyclist or pass by too fast or too close because “fucking cyclists go through red lights bastards” and a cyclist feels it’s ok to scrape the side of a car or shout WANKER at someone because “fucking motorists never look and they all hate cyclists”. Don’t even get me started on the motorists who feel I shouldn’t be on the road because they “pay road tax”.
As a law abiding road user, I try to share the roads, and would like all road users to do the same, be they cyclists, motorists or pedestrians. I am fed up to the back teeth of every discussion - both in real life and online - of how to increase safety for cyclists being derailed by circular debates on who is the worst road user. Poor road use by some cyclists should not be an argument against putting in safer cycle routes or improving existing dangerous ones. Poor road use by some motorists should not be an argument for banning cars from certain areas. To be effective it is vital that changes to the transport infrastructure in London are made holistically; taking into account the needs of the most vulnerable road users (pedestrians and cyclists) as well as those of the majority of road users (car drivers) and the needs of London’s economy (public transport, delivery vehicles, HGVs). And I say that as a cyclist. A fully integrated transport system is possible, but to truly visualise what that could be like we have to drop the Them vs Us/Road Entitlement mentality.
Having said all that I am going to be a massive hypocrite, but this is my blog and I’ll do what I like, YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME. I have a few requests to make of my fellow road users, and to try to lessen the hypocrisy slightly I will make three requests from each group.
Pedestrians:
Motorists:
Cyclists:
I could go on, but I’d be here all night. And really, all of my bug bears and annoyances of other people on the road could be resolved thusly:
All road users:
Actually, I could boil that down to one rule, which I try to obey every time I am out on my bike:
Thanks to Mr RPD for the punny title.
