media bollocks – Page 16 – Another angry woman

The anchor effect: how to drag a debate your way (also, I hate Liam Fox)

Liam Fox, the worse of the two Dr Foxes, has said something so horrifyingly, cartoonishly evil that it’s hard to know where to start. He thinks the economy should be shocked back to life by doing away with capital gains tax–something that makes the very rich all cross–and make up for the shortfall by slashing benefits–those things that help poor people not die.

The brazen, naked announcement of where his priorities lie–firmly on the side of the most repulsive form of capitalism–is disgusting. It’s flabbergasting that someone can think this way, and feels that it’s appropriate to say something that amounts to “fuck you, ordinary people, we only care about money”.

The thing is, it’s actually a fairly smart thing to say. It’s disgusting, but it’s pretty clever in achieving the things that scum like Fox want.

This is due to a psychological effect called anchoring. A good way of explaining how anchoring works is to look at sales. Now, it’s become a running joke that sofa-floggers DFS have a sale which will last until the heat death of the universe, but what they’re doing is actually some pretty clever marketing using anchoring. The “WAS” price they provide sticks in your head. A smaller price therefore becomes more reasonable, even though that sofa was probably never worth £599 and you’re almost certainly still being ripped off when you pay £399 for it.

In short, you’ll fixate on the first thing you’re told. Your brain will stick to that number even when thinking of another number. It will be “anchored” to it.

Even though Fox probably fervently believes what he is saying about capital gains and slashing benefits, he’ll know that this is a particularly nasty pipe dream. The thing is, he’s thrown down his anchor, and dragged discourse in his direction. Suddenly, smaller benefit cuts and a smaller cut to capital gains tax seems far more reasonable, because we’re fixated on the BIG AWFUL HORRID THING he just proposed.

Anchoring is a powerful tool, and it’s used well by a lot of terrible specimens. Take, for example, the fact it’s now practically impossible to talk about fascists like the EDL without going “well, there are concerns about immigration”. The fascists have successfully dragged people a bit further right. Likewise, look at the state of the Labour Party, who are about as left-wing as a row of jars of bankers’ farts filling a recently-closed library. At least in part, they’ve been dragged right by the dominant right-wing discourse that they’re anchored to.

Generally speaking, while the radicals on the side I’ll broadly call “not evil” are pretty good at not falling victim to the anchors of the right, the liberals are very bad at this. This is why the TUC are marching not for anything interesting, but for more jobs and other such waffle. This is why there’s such a rush to condemn any form of property damage. This is why there’s no imagination any more.

And this is why there’s very little positive change and we’re all drowning in a mountain of neoliberal turds.

We need to use the anchor effect to our advantage, and drag everything back our way. When pleas for “unity” come from the liberals, what they need to do is back the radicals rather than the other way round. Demand FULL COMMUNISM, and maybe then it’ll sound more reasonable to revive the welfare state. Demand KILL ALL MEN, and maybe then it’ll sound more reasonable to give women equal representation in politics.

The anchor effect is a powerful tool. It’s time we used it as well as the bastards of the world do.

The legal system and cultural problems: why street harassment won’t be criminalised, and shouldn’t be.

The Guardian rather melodramatically reports “Sexist remarks and wolf whistles could become criminal offences“. From that headline, you might be forgiven for thinking that street harassment could become a crime in the near future. Actually, that isn’t the case, as is outlined in paragraph 8, where a government spokesperson specifically says that wolf-whistling and the kind of unpleasant bog-standard street harassment comments won’t be criminalised. So, let’s pause to give the Guardian some golf-claps for some woefully misleading reporting, then let’s batten down the hatches and wait for the men’s rights types who would never read all the way down to the eighth paragraph of a news story to find out what’s going on to kick up a fuss.

Now, it’s easy to see why the Guardian might have got the wrong end of the stick on how it would be possible to criminalise street harassment. David Cameron will be signing the Council of Europe’s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women. At the time of writing, actually finding the full text of the Convention led to a jolly bilingual 404, but the pertinent bit as quoted in the Guardian is this:

Among the pledges in the convention… is one to pass legislation or other measures to criminalise or impose other sanctions for “unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”.

This is certainly pertinent to street harassment, which creates an environment which is intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive, and props to the Guardian for recognising this. However, criminalising street harassment would change absolutely nothing whatsoever, and possibly make things worse.

The thing is, street harassment is a symptom of a culture wherein women are viewed as somehow less than people, less than human. Women are viewed as objects, and therefore don’t get the basic level of respect that allows us to walk down the street without a creepy “HEEEEY LADY”. In fact, we’re expected to appreciate this, because apparently we exist entirely for men to look at and stamp us with their manly seal of manly approval. There’s a whole set of underlying attitudes that need unlearning at a societal level, and criminalising a behaviour from individuals cannot do this.

Let’s talk about efficacy first. The Guardian article came out more than six months ago (yet is inexplicably trending today), long after David Cameron has signed this pledge. He hasn’t stopped doing things that create an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating and offensive environment for women himself. If the legal system were to genuinely sanction people for their role in this culture, Cameron would be a convicted criminal. Admittedly, all he’s done is sign the pledge and hasn’t actually bothered bringing in any changes to the law, which is–and I hate to say this–probably a good thing.

Let us imagine a world in which street harassment is a criminal act, for which the penalty is a fine. I’m basing my assumptions on it being similar to Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which refers to behaviour causing harassment, alarm and distress (which actually covers the worst of street harassment anyway, so there wouldn’t really need to be a new law).

The most famous recent Section 5 case was that of John Terry, who racially abused a fellow footballer on the pitch. Despite the fact he was shown using racist language targeted at this person, John Terry was acquitted. There’s now a frightening number of people who think that it’s unfair to call John Terry a racist because he was never convicted in a court of law, despite the fact that in this incident, he was blatantly racist. The criminal proceedings actually made it harder to point out this ingrained and unacceptable racism, because suddenly apologists can cling desperately on to an inadequate legal system. John Terry got off. That doesn’t make his actions okay in the slightest.

What criminalising actions does is shift the blame on to individuals, ignoring the system which allows this to happen. These individuals are either innocent or guilty, and discussion of the cultural backdrop and whether such actions are acceptable can be effectively shut down with reference to woefully narrow legal definitions and cases.

A further unpleasant effect to criminalising street harassment would be the policing of this law. If the cops bothered enforcing it, they probably wouldn’t do a very good job of it. They kind of suck at policing violence against women anyway. At best, they’d be completely negligent. At worst, they’d use it as an additional stick to harass the groups they tend to harass: young men, black men, poor men.

There is no way that the individual responsibility enshrined in the legal system could possibly lead to the cultural shift that would end the day-to-day harassment that women face. It needs work on a societal level, a full transformation. We all need to work towards building a society wherein oppression is unacceptable, we all need to learn and to unlearn. It’s a Herculean task, and it feels so much easier to ask the legal system to stick a plaster over the gaping wounds. But this is not the way to achieve change.

GOLD! Somehow it tightens your hole

This is an actual product that actually exists.

A cream being marketed in India promises to make women feel “like a virgin” again. Apparently its mechanism of action is not by restoring sex to awkward fumbling, but, rather, by tightening the vagina.

Its ingredients are all-natural and include gold dust and pomegranates. I have no idea how gold is supposed to firm up one’s cunt, but pomegranate might have an indirect effect as it has historically been used as a contraceptive (admittedly a pretty pisspoor one) so I suppose theoretically it could stop things getting looser by preventing childbirth. But, basically, it sounds like snake oil, unless it provokes a horrid allergic reaction which makes everything swell up a little. Cynically, one would guess that the presence of the gold is merely to bump up the price a bit.

The more crucial issue with this product is not how silly it is, but its intended purpose. Beyond tightening the vagina, it is touted as making women feel “like virgins”. While its marketing department argues that this is purely metaphorical, we live in a world where this is unmistakable for truth. After all, hymen reconstruction surgery is on the rise in India, virginity is prized, and it is still linked to marriageability.

This set of attitudes is not limited to India, though. It’s everywhere, it’s a pervasive part of patriarchy. Hymen reconstruction surgery originated in the West, and virginity is just as fetishised. All over the world, a woman’s sexual behaviour is still seen to be a Big Thing, and factors into relationships, response if she is raped and so on. While virginity might not be the focus, not being a big slutty slut is. There’s still an emphasis on purity.

It’s nonsensical, this archaic patriarchal belief, but sits there humming in the background and we don’t even notice it until we see something as preposterous as a gold-tinged fanny-tightening cream. Yet it’s there, quietly shaking its head at women who enjoy sex.

The publicity material for the gold-tinged fanny-cream says it will empower women, basically allowing them to fuck before marriage and without societal effects. This is a hollow form of empowerment, though; it does not overturn the belief system which prevents women from doing this in the first place. Rather, it continues to perpetuate this cultural fetishisation of virginity and regulation of women’s behaviour, all the while financially fleecing women.

I doubt anybody thought a cream could solve these problems; there is no salve to soothe the problems of patriarchy. The only solution is a revolution.

Big, big tip of the hat to @MatofKilburnia for thinking of that headline

HOT CUM-GUZZLING EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

The news has whipped itself into a frenzy about the latest headline-grabbing guff from evolutionary psychology: blow jobs cure morning sickness. Specifically, the pregnant woman should swallow the semen of the father of the baby because then she’ll develop a tolerance to his genetic material. That sentence alone is eyebrow-spraining. Delving deeper, it only gets worse.

The research comes from an evolutionary psychologist named Gordon G. Gallup. It is useful to view the morning sickness story in the context of his previous work because a pattern starts to emerge.

Gallup’s career started out fairly promisingly, with him developing a paradigmatic test for recording self-awareness in animals, which has been widely used. He was then the go-to guy for research into what happens when you hypnotise chickens, which is probably far more interesting than it sounds.

Somewhere along the line, though, Gallup lost his way, and moved towards the side of evolutionary psychology which is obsessed with sex and comes to thoroughly bizarre conclusions about both sexes through the use of dodgy science. Many of the studies I’m going to highlight here are paywalled, but you’ll probably shit a brick off the abstract alone if you know anything about science or have ever enjoyed sex.

Gallup became interested in boobs, hypothesising that breast implants were a way for women to advertise their fertility, then never testing this hypothesis because, let’s face it, how the hell would you? He delved into homophobia, suggesting that it was an adaptive response to parents thinking the gays would bum their children into homosexuality. This was tested by getting college students–not actual parents–to fill in questionnaires about hypothetical children, and some of them saying they wouldn’t like their kid to go to a gay paediatrician. When the work was criticised for implying that gays are paedophiles and maybe this was down to “xenophobia” (in the evolutionary sense, rather than the sociological sense; i.e. a fear of strangers), Gallup responded by saying that actually there is a disproportionate number of homosexual paedophiles, so there. Another study of Gallup’s ostensibly showed that women take more care to stop themselves being raped when they are ovulating, by guessing when the participants were ovulating and administering a questionnaire.

None of this encompasses Gallup’s true love though. Shaking off the mantle of being the chicken-hypnosis guy, Gordon G. Gallup is now the semen guy.

Regular readers of this blog might remember the time I went ballistic over a study claiming to show that semen was an antidepressant. That was one of Gallup’s studies. It showcased some almost criminally bad science, which I covered here, and it’s worth reading the whole thing to see just how bad it is. If you can’t be bothered, the tl;dr summary is that vaginally-administered spunk isn’t an antidepressant and there was no way he could have ever shown it with that study. Other miracles of semen, according to Gallup, is that if a man regularly spaffs into the mother of his kids, he’ll be a better dad. Again, Gallup didn’t even bother testing that hypothesis.

After covering his bases in getting semen into women, Gallup turned towards how to keep it there. Readers with penises, did you know that your cock looks like that because it evolved to displace semen of rivals from a vagina? It totally is, because Gallup has some hardcore science to prove it. This paper is open-access and well worth a read if you fancy a laugh. He used two different tests for this hypothesis. In the first set of studies, he bought some dildos and an artificial vagina from a sex shop, mixed up some fake spunk, put it in the rubber fanny, then fucked it with some dildos. He found that the more realistic the dildo, the better it displaced the jizz-mixture. Oh, and the dildos being dildos, they lacked foreskins, which throws an enormous spanner in the works as it means that human cocks would function entirely differently, considering circumcision is a minority practice and didn’t happen while we were evolving.

So he turned his attention to humans. Rather than watching them fuck, he went for a questionnaire, which is distinctly less fun, and proved about as much as his sweaty session with a fleshlight and a dildo. From a survey, he discovered that men fuck their girlfriends harder if they’ve been away for a while, or if they’ve heard their girlfriend was cheating. Passionate reunions and angry hatesex, according to Gallup, are actually just the chap trying to thrust any stray spunk out of his lady-friend.

Which brings us, finally, to the morning sickness research. Having exhaustively researched how to get sperm into a vagina and get it out again, he wondered how best he could get it into a lady’s mouth. His theory is this: morning sickness arises from the woman reacting to having unfamiliar genetic material inside her, i.e. the father’s DNA in the foetus. In order to build up a tolerance, the woman needs greater exposure to the father’s genetic material which means loads and loads of semen, and apparently eating it will totally work.

It’s important to note here that this has never been tested, and, like much of the work we have seen here, it is just a hypothesis presented at a conference, which the media have picked up and ran with, presenting it as SCIENCE. It isn’t. Also, it’s a pretty fucking shitty hypothesis for two major reasons.

First, it goes against the general evolutionary thinking regarding morning sickness: that it’s a way of protecting the foetus from any toxins or bad nutrition by causing anything harmful that has been ingested to be shouted into rainbows. Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, how the hell does Gordon G. Gallup think women get pregnant in the first place? It kind of involves exposure to semen. While a lot of pregnancies may not stem from regular exposure to the same jizz, a lot of them do, and morning sickness affects up to 80% of women. Furthermore, within Gallup’s hypothesis, if it’s just the father’s genetic material the woman needs and it can be got through ingested semen, this can easily be transmitted by any other means, such as lots and lots of snogging to exchange saliva, or touch, or blood rituals, or whatever.

It makes no goddamn sense whatsoever, and I look forward to seeing him try to prove it.

I don’t know if Gordon G. Gallup has dedicated the later part of his career towards discovering escalatingly spurious reasons to insert his semen into women–if so, I think we can expect future studies which show that bukakke makes you immortal–or if he has simply found the recipe for media success: say something silly which dovetails with existing patriarchal prejudice. Either way, I wish he’d stop, and I wish the media would stop gushing with excitement about hypotheses and bad research.

Update: commenter James, who is an experienced midwife and pre-eclampsia researcher has found a cohort study which Gordon G. Gallup obviously hasn’t read. The study looked at recurrence of hyperemesis gravidarum, a severe morning sickness. It found that sickness was less likely to occur in a second pregnancy than in a first. The authors had a large enough sample of women whose second pregnancies were from a different father than the first pregnancy. Comparing recurrence of hyperemesis, it emerged that risk was lower in women whose second pregnancy was by a different father than those who had had two pregnancies from the same father: 11% risk of hyperemesis for those who had changed paternity, versus 16% for those who had not. While this is a cohort study, and therefore low down on the pyramid of evidence, it’s still far better than some dude who had a hypothesis, and provides some evidence to suggest that “unfamiliar semen” is not what causes morning sickness.

Ladies, education makes you masculine. There’s a graph and everything.

I think I might make a semi-regular feature of people I would never have sex with, ever, given the internet seems to be riddled with the fuckers. This week’s fucknozzle is a pick-up artist named RooshV whose advice I would seriously recommend not following if you ever have any intention of ever having sex with a woman.

The thing about dear RooshV is I suspect he’s profoundly dimwitted. I suspect this because he’s seen fit to explain a relationship between “femininity” and education level, by means of a graph. The relationship would be a negative correlation of the statistical holy grail of R=1 were it not for the following criticisms:

He has conflated education level with current career.
“Career” appears to be a categorical variable, and thus it is inappropriate to use correlational analyses in the manner outlined by the author.
It is unclear precisely as to how femininity was calculated due to the y-axis being unlabelled.
He clearly made the graph himself at home using one of those graph generators.

Actually, I’m beginning to see why he finds education unsexy. It can’t be very nice when any woman with a high-school level education in statistics can point out how he is shit at proving his points.

RooshV also provides some qualitative evidence to support his hypothesis, proposing the following occupations to be “boner softening”. These betray a staggering lack of imagination in the bedroom and add to my burning desire to never have sex with him ever. In bold, I have added the first thing that pops into my head when confronted with each of the things which dull-shag RooshV thinks can’t be hot.

Sexy IT specialist (Ethernet bondage)
Sexy business manager (micromanaging)
Sexy tort attorney (would make a good top and gets a fun wig)
Sexy civil engineer (OHMYGOD imagine the possibilities for pervy devices they could build)
Sexy anesthesiologist (needles and illicit substances and fun oh my)
Sexy research associate (sub. Total sub)
Sexy financial analyst (honestly, who doesn’t want to spank a financial analyst every now and then?)

That literally took 15 seconds. RooshV , bro, you are vanilla as fuck.

To complete his thesis, RooshV has decided to furnish us with a list of “masculine traits” that might show up in women who are more educated than him. These include keeping condoms at home, dating multiple men at the same time and “saying filthy things in bed when you hardly know them”. From the sounds of it, RooshV is a total lights-off-socks-on kind of chap, and it’s probably a good thing he can’t conceptualise the existence of strap-0ns because that would blow his fucking mind.

All in all, though, it’s probably a good thing RooshV isn’t into educated women. Because I can’t imagine an educated woman who would consider going within miles of him.

The #PornTrial reveals the prejudices (and possible peccadilloes) of the CPS

Today, a man was found not guilty of a crime which harmed no-one, and should never have been considered criminal in the first place. His offence? He had some porn in his email which involved scenes of consensual fisting, urethral sounding and a man wearing a gas mask. Oh, and he’d pissed off some cops by prosecuting them for disciplinary offences, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with the decision to prosecute him.

It seems ridiculous to prosecute a person for this in the first place, especially considering the last fisting trial ruled that fisting is not obscene. Like bluebottles bashing their heads against a window, the CPS decided this time to prosecute under a different act relating to extreme pornography and harm. Despite evidence from two medical professionals describing the minimal harm involved, the CPS still insisted on pushing the harm line.

The risible excuse for evidence presented by the prosecution was at best wobbly, and at worst, outright offensive, for example:

CPS – Walsh fantasised about being involved in being in an orgy.

Yes. The defendant’s fantasies were used as evidence against him. A not uncommon fantasy, either. And something which is perfectly legal for consenting adults to participate in, whether in person or on film.

Not content to merely stigmatise what people think about, despite it being thoroughly irrelevant to the case, the CPS also decided to go after people who get regular sexual health checks.

Astonishing that CPS have contended in Court that people who attend sexual health clinics engage in more risky practices.

In fact, regular health checks are a responsible thing to do, and to attempt to use responsibility to smear the character of the defendant is risky as fuck.

As if this all wasn’t offensive enough, the CPS decided to inject a bit of sexism into the case–no mean feat, considering the defendant was a gay man and all of the porn in question was gay porn. For some reason, though, they felt it appropriate to ask a female expert witness if fisting would be more degrading if it involved a woman, and they didn’t much like the answer she gave:

CPS – Dr Smith would not concede images were degrading if it pictured a woman. This is clearly wrong.

Thanks for the paternalism, CPS! Also, apparently it’s selfish and untrue to say that it isn’t degrading:

CPS – Dr Smith’s evidence was disingenuous, self-serving and dishonest.

That clears that up, then.

The case lays bare the societal prejudices against non-mainstream sexual preferences. None of the porn depicted anything non-consensual, and everything is perfectly legal to try in your own bedroom, even if you have invited a lot of people along to watch. After watching all this porn, the jury rightly concluded that no crime had been committed.

It’s surprising that in 2012, the law still has a fascination with trying to restrict perfectly consensual sex and fantasies. The prosecution’s case rested entirely on dated ideologies and stigmatisation of kink, and I’m glad the jury saw right through it.

It made no sense to prosecute this in the first place, in a case which seemed doomed to fail from the start. I can think of three possible reasons why it happened. Only two of them are kinky.

The CPS has a fetish for showing juries fisting porn.
The CPS likes to be humiliated, and is pushing ever harder at boundaries with ever more ridiculous cases.
The CPS have the backs of the police and helped them in their quest for revenge.

I hope it’s the first or the second reason, as in this case, we can work together to help the CPS safely play out its fantasies by finding them some playmates with a thing for being consensually maliciously prosecuted. Sadly, though, the third option seems most likely. The defendant pissed off the state, and the state decided to punish him. Despite the not guilty verdict, the defendant has lost his job and his privacy has been thoroughly violated, with vanilla society knowing about his kinks and judging him for them.

It’s a grotesque abuse of a law that shouldn’t exist in the first place, allowing prejudice to be catalysed into a spiteful smear campaign.

I’m no lawyer, so if you want more information and analysis on the legal background to the case, these posts from ObscenityLawyer, NoMoreLost and David Allen Green are good sources, and here’s a good write-up of the verdict from NoMoreLost.

In which I feel ever so slightly sorry for Louise Mensch

“Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much” -Oscar Wilde

Last week, I was entertaining the chilling possibility of Louise Mensch one day becoming Prime Minister. Today, in a surprising twist, Mensch announced she would be resigning as an MP.

For a fleeting second, it felt like today might be the Best Day Ever, starting with a robot comfortably landing on Mars and immediately sending back a grainy photo of its wheels on alien soil, and then the resignation of arguably one of the worst people in politics. But my hand stayed on the metaphorical cork of my metaphorical champagne bottle when I saw her reason why.

To spend more time with her family.

Now, admittedly, this is a highly flexible excuse for quitting and can mean anything from “I want to spend more time with my family” to “I just accidentally destroyed the economy through my sheer incompetence and I’m jumping before I’m pushed” to “I shagged a goat and I want to spare my party the embarrassment”. However, given Mensch’s background, it seems likely that her reasons for resignation lean closer towards the actual wanting to spend time with family end of the spectrum.

And I feel kind of sorry for her over this: her husband lives and works in New York, and she and her three children frequently hop across the pond to be together, until now juggling this with her work as a politician. And of course, living under patriarchy, it was Mensch who had to quit her job to make the move.

Tory feminism has failed Louise Mensch. Even with all of her privileges, she couldn’t have it all.

On Twitter, I asked why Mensch’s husband couldn’t have been the one to quit his job and move to the UK to support his family. While a lot of people agreed with this sentiment, there were two reasons given (mostly by men) that this set-up would make no sense whatsoever.

First was the notion that Mensch’s husband’s job earned more money. Perhaps so, but in the grand scheme of things, the potential career progression for an MP is somewhat better: running a country is arguably better than booking hotel rooms for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Even being an MP has a higher degree of social capital than making sure Metallica get on their plane at the right time. For those who believe in representative democracy–and I’m assuming Mensch did–her job was better and more important than her husband’s.

Second is the idea that the kids weren’t his. This is such a grimly archaic view of families that it doesn’t really require much comment, save to say that if this factored into the decision at all, Louise Mensch would do better to get a divorce.

It was patriarchy that killed Louise Mensch’s career in politics, and for that reason I can’t feel as happy as if she’d resigned for other reasons, such as being a chronic liability due to monumental hubristic failure, or as a post-revolutionary head-on-a-spike. Somehow I doubt she’ll see it that way: the lens of Tory feminism refracts these decisions into nothing more than personal choice.

In which I actually write about the Olympics: sexism and racism in the Ye Shiwen doping allegations

My plan for an Olympic-proof bunker has failed. I have been exposed to London in its full dystopian horrors, and been unable to avoid news and stories about a bloody sporting event. I even willingly watched the men’s synchronised diving the other day, though I had to turn off the sound to avoid the Nuremberg-style cheering from the British crowd every time a British person did something that should have been entirely expected of them.

It didn’t escape my notice, then, that a 16 year old Chinese woman has caused rather a bit of a stir. Swimmer Ye Shiwen smashed world records in the 400m individual medley. In the final 50m of her race, Ye managed to swim faster than some of the fastest-recorded male swimmers! Rather than celebrate this achievement, whispers of doping immediately began.

In a statement that smacked of sour grapes, the swimming coach for the USA team did his best attempt at media spin, avoiding an outright accusation of doping but banging on for paragraphs and paragraphs about how Ye’s swim was “impossible” and “unbelievable” while sticking in the occasional “I’m not saying she’s doping, but…”. He then manages to drop this seethingly sexist clanger:

Leonard, who said Ye “looks like superwoman” added: “Any time someone has looked like superwoman in the history of our sport they have later been found guilty of doping.”

That, right there, is the crux of the matter. The fact that if Ye Shiwen had been thrown in a pool with men, she would have beaten them too. Supermen are fine and dandy, and to be expected from a sport. It’s when a woman is as good, or better than a man that something must be wrong. This is made abundantly clear if one compares the Chinese tit-for-tat suggestion that American male swimmer Michael Phelps must be doping, which nobody seems to be taking particularly seriously.

The sexism of the whispers surrounding Ye Shiwen are reminiscent of the story of runner Caster Semenya, who ran so fast that the sporting authorities decided she must be a man in disguise and subjected her to invasive gender testing. It seems completely implausible to society at large that women can be as capable as men of sporting feats.

Indeed, sometimes it seems as though society is actively trying to keep women from reaching their true potential: an example of this comes from the incident which saw runner Paula Radcliffe temporarily stripped of her marathon world record because she had male “pacemakers” who she was racing (and beat). In the end, Radcliffe was allowed to keep her record, but the governing body ruled that women’s records must be set in women-only races.

Arguably, Radcliffe and Semenya are “superwomen”, as constructed by the US team coach. In fact, they are just women with the capacity to beat men. This is likely to be true of Ye Shiwen, too, given that the Olympics are generally pretty stringent in testing athletes for drugs.

Ultimately, the US coach’s beef lies in the fact that a woman from a different country swam faster than a man from his own country, and this does not compute. Clearly, there is a tribalism at work here, too, a patriotic belief that his country is better than any others (especially their rival China). It’s the implicit us-and-them mentality which disguises racism.

Some of the reporting, though, is less thinly-veiled in its racism. The Daily Mirror attempts to kindly say that Ye might not have been doping, but unfortunately the only way they can do this is by drawing on stereotypes about China in the most cartoonishly, embarrassingly, excruciatingly racist way possible:

The disturbing truth is that, while her performance may not be drug-enhanced, Ye Shiwen and her Chinese teammates have been manufactured like automatons on a cynical human production line, forged by training techniques many say border on torture.

This might not be cripplingly racist if China had a literal athlete upgrading factory, but unfortunately that’s not true. The rest of the article goes on to describe the training techniques which do not sound that far removed from how athletes train. They select promising youngsters, they start young, they train hard.

Then they win, and everyone freaks the fuck out.

That’s all there is to it: someone performed well at a sport. Time will tell if Ye Shiwen was doping, but the rumours and rush to find out speak volumes about prejudice.

In which I write the obligatory review for The Dark Knight Rises

Spoiler warning: There are going to be a lot of spoilers in this review. If you haven’t seen The Dark Knight Rises yet, you might not want to read this.

The eagerly anticipated final film in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy is finally here. I will admit I went to see it with some trepidation: the trailers looked like shit, it couldn’t possibly be a patch on The Dark Knight, and what the hell was up with casting Anne Hathaway as Catwoman. It looked set to be the too-many-characters clusterfuck of Spiderman 3, and I went in thoroughly prepared for disappointment.

Perhaps my low expectations paid off, because I really rather enjoyed it. As a film, it worked. As a final installment in a trilogy, it worked really well, tying together the themes from the first two installments. It was well acted, and well-directed, though some of the dialogue was a little clunky. It wasn’t a patch on The Dark Knight, but Christopher Nolan retains his record of never having made a bad film. Of course it was problematic as hell, but it’s perfectly possible to be a fan of problematic things and overall, I’m going to say I liked it.

Of course, most of you read this blog for two reasons: to nod along with my anger at social problems, or to tell me to shut up because I’m wrong about social problems. So I feel it’s only right to go through the problems with the messages The Dark Knight Rises is trying to convey.

Quite a few people have pointed out that the film–and Nolan’s Batman trilogy as a whole, and arguably the entirety of the Bat-canon–is right-wing as hell. This is certainly true. It repeats, uncritically, plenty of right-wing myths of both the authoritarian and socially conservative flavours.

Order

The central theme of The Dark Knight Rises is order. The film opens with a big celebration of how Harvey Dent’s legacy has led to a thousand baddies being in prison. Everyone is very happy about that, and nobody mentions the possibility of community rehabilitation for people who are probably small-time crooks (the possibility of better treatment of the people with mental health problems who are sent off to Arkham Asylum is also never addressed, but that is less relevant as for once, the Big Bads of the film are unrelated in any way to the asylum).

As part of the shit-hitting-the-fan moment, Bane (who you can tell is a bad guy by the fact he is bald, wears a mask and keeps murdering the shit out of people) manages to successfully bury almost the entire Gotham Police Department in the sewers. He explains rather dramatically that he has done this to liberate people. Do the people of Gotham at this point embrace their freedom from a rather corrupt police force that seems utterly inept as it is more obsessed with throwing every police car in the city into chasing a grown man dressed up as a rodent? Does FULL COMMUNISM spontaneously break out due to the sudden lack of coercive state forces? Of course it doesn’t. This is partly because Bane is actually kind of a dick and hasn’t bothered reading up on his anarchist theory and has decided to be in charge himself, partly because of the imminent threat of a nuclear bomb, and partly because the film just can’t imagine any possible upside to doing away with all the coppers.

Needless to say, eventually the police manage to get out of the tunnels, and there’s some interesting imagery as they do battle with Bane’s militia: demoralised and disarmed from spending months living down the drain, the cops are a rag-tag bunch in black. Haphazardly, they charge the more regimented and better-armed oppressors. It looks a little bit like riot footage, and we’re supposed to root for the police, who, just for a moment, stripped of their power, are playing the role of the rabble. Unfortunately, at this point, Nolan sees fit to explain to us who we’re meant to be supporting in this battle by showing the cop-bloc tearing past a fluttering, tattered Stars and Stripes, which rather spoils what could have otherwise been quite a cool scene.

Ultimately, the film teaches us, order comes from giving the right people power: the “good” cops like Commissioner Gordon should get to police the city; the “good” rich men like Bruce Wayne should look after all the dangerous weapons and wield them well; only good eggs should be in charge of a big fuckoff nuclear reactor. Anything else, we are shown, leads to loads of people dying. In the Nolanverse, this happens so much that one would think Gotham’s authorities would have a “city held hostage in a metaphor for urban life” plan in place by now.

Individualism and the greater good

A second, minor theme in the film is social mobility. Characters discuss opportunities for orphans in getting out of the ghetto (unfortunately, it seems a lot of the poor kids have taken to working for Bane). Catwoman explains that she is an improbably-skilled jewel thief because she wants to make a better life for herself, something Bruce Wayne was born with. Bruce Wayne himself loses his entire fortune in a slightly baffling attack on the stock market from the baddies. Later, he is cast into a prison which is a huge hole that anyone is free to leave if they climb out of it, which is definitely not a metaphor for lacking privilege.

After moping for a bit about how much it sucks being stuck in a hole, and failing to climb out of ~~poverty~~ the big hole, Bruce finally has a bit of a pep talk from a nice old man who tells him not to use ~~welfare~~ a rope. Bruce Wayne manages to climb into the light, surprisingly not by pulling himself up by the bootstraps. He returns to Gotham and is reunited with his Bat-copter. We never hear from the other people in the hole again. Presumably they just didn’t try hard enough to get out.

Thrown in with all this is the concept of doing something “for the greater good”: Catwoman’s rejection of self-preservation to help save Gotham is a major turning point for the character, Batman dresses up as a giant rodent and beats up people for the greater good, and then there’s all the nonsense about how only some people are fit for power. It’s not exactly a collectivist message, though: ultimately, it shows us that one has to look after oneself in order to be able to get rid of the guy in charge if he happens to be the wrong guy.

Gender

There are two major female characters in The Dark Knight Rises, both of whom are quite essential to the plot. First we have Selina Kyle/Catwoman, an antagonist and later ally of Bruce Wayne/Batman. She dresses in the impractical leather-and-heels costume beloved of femmes fatales, but is shown to be a clever and resourceful woman in her own right. Even her cat ears have functionality: they double up as little goggles that do… something (no doubt if Bruce Wayne owned those goggles, we would have been treated to a lengthy exposition of their operational parameters from Morgan Freeman). She weaponises her femininity, getting out of sticky situations by performing tearful or sexy, which is not unproblematic, but better than most straight-up uses of tears and flirting. Selina is fiercely independent and individualistic, but eventually Does The Right Thing and helps save Gotham.

Our other major female character is Miranda Tate, who is slightly foreign and quite hot and rich. She’s, um, not as well-developed a character as Catwoman. She agrees with all of Bruce Wayne’s ideas then has sex with him. Then it turns out she’s been a baddie all along and is absolutely crazy and wants to blow up Gotham with a nuclear bomb because she has daddy issues.

The film even passes the Bechdel Test: there’s a scene where Selina explains to her friend Jen why she isn’t that happy with the chaos Bane has wrought in Gotham. I think there’s also a bit where she teaches Jen how to be a better pickpocket, but they’re talking about thieving off a dude there, so it’s a borderline case.

Unfortunately, if we look at where our main female characters end up, it’s another story entirely with each ending up with one of the two Hollywood Approved Character Arc Termini For Female Characters. Miranda ends up dead. A minute before the nuclear bomb goes off, she gloats about how her unstoppable plan has been realised then just sort of dies, despite nothing appearing to be wrong with her. At least she died happy, not knowing that mere seconds later Batman totally foils the shit out of her unstoppable plan. Meanwhile, Selina ends up in the arms of a man, enjoying a Florentine pavement coffee with a not-dead-after-all Bruce Wayne.

Overall, not brilliant representation of women, but better than average for Hollywood.

Go and see it anyway

As I said, the film is problematic, but it is nonetheless enjoyable. Yes, it’s conservative and yes, it’s sexist, but so is pretty much every film ever made, and most of them don’t have well-directed scenes of people in fetish wear beating the living fuck out of each other.

The rejection of the notion of enthusiastic consent: a facet of rape culture

Enthusiastic consent is a simple notion: a move beyond “no means no” into “yes means yes”. It means communicating about what you want in bed. It means checking if your partner(s) is into whatever you’re doing. It’s easy and it’s hot.

Most people tend to Get It. Some know the terminology, the principles, the politics behind it. Others just possess an essential skill for being a good fuck. These are the sorts of people I tend to surround myself with.

I forget, then, that some people don’t get it. It is most obvious when engaging as a feminist with rape apologists: when pointing out a sleeping woman can’t possibly give enthusiastic consent, the very notion of being able to say yes (rather than the absence of a no) is rejected. They might lash out by saying that that would somehow “ruin sex” (spoiler alert: it doesn’t) or that that would render a lot of sex non-consensual (spoiler alert: it does).

The rejection hums in the background like white noise. It crops up in jokes (“it’s not rape if you shout surprise!”) and advertising. I realised just how widespread it was when I read this piece of sex advice from Tracey Cox (self-identified “sexpert” with a good publicist) on Lovehoney (who sell mid-range sex toys generally aimed at the male gaze). A man wrote in complaining his wife wouldn’t give him oral sex after a bad experience. Cox replied:

Wow! This happened TEN YEARS AGO and she’s still using that as the reason why she doesn’t want to give you oral sex?

…

It’s one thing being a little miffed at your husband coming in your mouth when you aren’t expecting it. Quite another, refusing to give you oral sex for a decade afterward. I mean, really? It sounds like you have good sex but I think you’re within your rights to suggest, nicely, that perhaps it’s time she, well, got over it.

She then goes on to give some tips to help this man coax a woman into participating in a sexual encounter with which she was not comfortable including this:

At that point, she removes her mouth and continues using her hand to finish you off. If – shock horror – it happens again and you ejaculate into her mouth, have a box of tissues next to her. She then just spits it out. Easy. Course, she could try swallowing it and stop behaving like semen is sulphuric acid, but perhaps you could work on that later!

The trivialisation of the woman’s issues with oral sex and complete lack of any consideration that she’s not into that and that’s OK is a more subtle indicator of this wider societal rejection of enthusiastic consent.

In trying to elucidate why this belief is so prevalent, the misogynists are a good place to start: at least they’re honest about their disdain for sexual autonomy. They think it’s too hard, and that a shift in thinking would stop them being able to rape whoever they feel like. And that’s a gear the perpetual motion machine of rape culture.

It pervades thought, and leads to exactly the sort of ghastly advice given by Tracey Cox, who has internalised some deeply problematic beliefs (I am going to kindly assume she isn’t writing sensationalist crap knowingly repeating societal beliefs to make a few quid). The truth is, nobody has “get over it”, nobody has to do anything with which they are uncomfortable, and a “yes” is just as important to respect as a “no”.

It may feel difficult to fight something so thoroughly ingrained. But it’s a battle that can be won and must be fought.