I saw The Iron Lady. To my surprise, I didn’t completely hate it.
I had seen the film criticised for being too soft on Thatcher, or lionising her, and completely glossing over some incredibly salient issues during her stint as Chief Dickhead, most important being the miners’ strike. It did indeed have these flaws, yet I read the film differently.
The narrative is framed around an elderly Thatcher in the present day reflecting on her life. In the present day segments, Thatcher is portrayed as deep in the throes of dementia, hallucinating her dead husband and swilling rum. The first time we see the character is her hand snatching milk, having wandered away from home. Past and present repeatedly collide for the frail old tyrant and we are treated to a brief history of Margaret Thatcher shown through the eyes of Margaret Thatcher.
Of course the biography is sanitised, therefore. The story is shown to us entirely through an unreliable narrator. Our designated protagonist is reflecting on her life from a position of fragile mental health and a memory-impeding condition. It is hardly surprising, then, that all of Thatcher’s orations are accompanied by stirring orchestral swells, and she is seen as a lone crusader battling against all odds. Her memories culminate in her leaving Downing Street to rose-petal strewn floors, surrounded by adoring fans rather than the more familiar crying woman in a car. The narrative is sanitised, as the narrator has sanitised it.
Yet reality creeps in. The film makes use of newsreel footage, which shows us the poll tax riots, the public sector strikes and the sinking of the Belgrano. At one point our designated protagonist is told “you can’t just close down conversation that isn’t what you want to hear”. In the next scene, she is shown turning off a television just before a newscaster describes the criticisms laid against Thatcher. This, ultimately, is what the film is about: a fallen tyrant deep in denial about her wrongs.
More interestingly, even in Thatcher’s favourable memories of herself, she is still a complete and utter raving bellend spouting dangerous neoliberal nonsense. No amount of swelling strings can cover it. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the writing draws attention to parallels between Thatcher and the current government, choosing to emphasis public sector strikes over the miners and discussing the deficit. To the informed viewer, this film draws a clear line from Thatcher to Blair to David Cameron, demonstrating how one can play with words to hide the hideous truth.
While some have compared The Iron Lady to Downfall in its humanising of a seemingly inhuman target, I feel it is closer to Lolita. What appears to be sympathy is in fact a desperate bid from an unreliable narrator to cast themselves as a much-maligned hero. Thatcher is Humbert Humbert, and Britain is an unfortunate pubescent girl. If only the film were an iota as good as Nabokov or Kubrick.
I went into the film expecting to despise it. I went in expecting conservative propaganda, a Forrest Gump for this generation, and what I got was something more interesting and complex. It was a poor film about Thatcherism, but I left feeling uplifted. Maybe, just maybe, Thatcherism itself will end up sad and alone, marooned at the top of the stairs without even an imaginary husband for company.
Today in the UK, a person stands trial for distributing allegedly “obscene” DVDs. These DVDs contain scenes of fisting, watersports and some fairly hardcore BDSM activities, which are considered to be “obscene”. Now, these activities are perfectly legal to watch if you happen to be in the same room as the participants with their consent, but it is, for some strange reason, possibly illegal under British law to represent them on film. The outcome of the trial will therefore be very interesting–if the DVDs are deemed “not obscene”, this opens up an avenue for porn to contain such activities.
What is deemed “obscene” and “not obscene” is a thorny issue, and appears to be defined arbitrarily. In the current obscenity trial, one of the contentious issues is that the “four finger” rule was violated–usually, porn sticks to insertion of only four fingers to avoid the legal trouble full fisting entails. Likewise, the British Board of Film Classification has deemed films depicting female ejaculation to be problematic, ludicrously believing that squirting is the same as urine and is therefore subject to the same censorship as watersports.
It is curious to note that what is considered to be prosecutable under the Obscene Publications Act appears to be entirely content of a sexual nature. ObscenityLawyer lists the following:
·“sadomasochistic material which goes beyond trifling and transient infliction of injury”
·“torture with instruments”
·“bondage (especially where gags are used with no apparent means of withdrawing consent)”
·“activities involving perversion or degradation (such as drinking urine, urination[…] on to the body…)”
·“fisting”
This demonstrates our peculiar hang-up about sex. If one literally interprets the word “obscene“, it can be taken to mean “repulsive by reason of crass disregard of moral and ethical principles” or “disgusting to the senses”.
Here, I can count dozens of instances of things which I perceive to be obscene: indeed, half of day-to-day life appears obscene. There is the egregious the egregious, such as newspapers running a vast colour photograph of Gaddafi’s bloody corpse on their front page or triggering videos advising women not to get into an unbooked minicab or they will be raped horribly. Then there’s the low-level, less visible stuff which is dictionary-definition obscene nonetheless: consider that we have a government whose goal appears to be to tear the welfare state to pieces and redistribute the shreds to their rich mates. Consider rape culture, street harassment, the trivialising of violence against women. All crassly disregard moral and ethical principles, and all are utterly repugnant.
Yet none of this considered obscene, at least not by law. The law–and I again thank ObscenityLawyer’s brilliant post on the issue for this–states that the material must be likely to “deprave or corrupt”. This ambiguous definition is steeped in society’s aversion to sex but not violence. Therefore, a picture of a murdered man may be run on the front page of a newspaper where a big dripping cunt may not. Therefore, Michael Gove may cheerfully quietly privatise state education and the papers will report it as though he is doing good humanitarian work, while had he had a fist up his bottom most people would cry obscenity.
Yet the low-level stuff, the morally and ethical disregard can and does deprave and corrupt. It seeps into our vocabulary: suddenly “choice” becomes anything but, and basic right for every person to live in dignity becomes seen as a dirty word. It cannot be prosecuted because the legal system is a part of the same obscenity: for example, is it not obscene that it took 18 years to convict two (of more murderers) for a racially-motivated crime, while children participating in poverty riots were convicted in days?
The system looks at obscenity in porn through the lens of the acts itself, but here is nothing inherently obscene about consenting adults fucking on film, no matter what kinds of sex to which they are consenting. Yet we may critique things which are obscene–is there coercion and a lack of consent in some porn? Does some porn convey misogynistic attitudes? These instances are real obscenities.
So much of society is riddled with genuinely repugnant content, everywhere we look. And it’s far worse than a bit of fisting.
After the post where I pointed out some sexism in a TV show, I found myself being chided with the MST3K mantra: I was told it was just TV, and I didn’t need to worry about the ins and outs of it all. Some claimed that they were “embarrassed” to be women and/or feminists because I had pointed out some sexism in a TV show–the feeling here is mutual, and I am thoroughly embarrassed to share an identity with people lacking such a capacity for critical thinking.
It’s just a show, they told me. I should really just relax, they said.
And they’re wrong. I fail to see why one should not criticise something in the mass media for displaying problematic content. It does not mean one needs to disregard the entire thing because it is utter crap: this post at Social Justice League provides a handy guide to being a fan of things which are problematic. In short (though you should really read the whole thing, as it’s brilliant), one needs to acknowledge the problems and not make excuses for them; not gloss over issues or derail conversations about problematic content; and acknowledge other, less favourable interpretations of media you like.
After all, there are very few films, TV shows or books which are completely unproblematic. It is all produced within an oppressive system wherein racism, sexism and ableism prevail and therefore seep into popular culture. Cracked hit the nail on the head with their deconstruction of “Five Old-Timey Prejudices That Still Show Up In Every Movie“, and there are heaps more on top of this.
Should we therefore “really just relax” when we see something on the screen that we would never stand for in real life? Of course not. As for the defenders of sexism on screen, are they perhaps as willing to let oppression slide in the meatspace? I suspect that they may, and that worries me greatly, and strengthens my resolve to call bullshit where I see it.
The function of critiquing and drawing attention to oppression in mass media is made clear by MediocreDave (again, you should read the whole article, as it’s great):
My only answer is of course it’s ok to seek escapism, to watch things for pleasure without composing a political response. But that’s why we need to force improvements of our popular entertainment, so that it’s possible to watch them without having to confront the tiresome and horrific inequalities that define our daily lives. Art can only ever be so far ahead of the society that produced it, and is likely to be a fair way behind, and as such will always be riddled with problems which, in our ignorance and privilege, we may only be dimly aware of. If we attempt to deny ourselves and each other, explicitly or implicitly, the act of critical analysis of the art that we consume, be it by claiming that the work doesn’t warrant so sophisticated a reading or by declaring that offence taken is somehow not valid, we leave ourselves disenfranchised. If we value our ability to watch a television program unchallenged as higher than someone else’s ability to watch it uninsulted then we have probably picked the wrong side in a long established relationship of privilege and degradation. We may choose to sit quietly through the objectionable bits of a work of art, from time to time, even when it offends us, but we can’t expect other people to do so with us (even on Christmas day) and we must be prepared to acknowledge it when the things we like problematically contain things we have to hate.
Be angry if you feel angry. Listen to others’ anger. Perhaps, then, we will finally have shows where we can really just relax.
SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses the plot of Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia and the original source material, Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia.
It’s pretty ghastly when a story written over 120 years ago has better gender politics than its modern reimagining. With BBC’s Sherlock, this is exactly what happened. The most recent episode, A Scandal in Belgravia puts a modern spin on the Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia, and manages to engage in a horrifying mess of feminism-fail by the end.
The feminism-fail is hardly surprising when the series is written by Stephen Moffat, whose previous works include heteronormative, binary-obsessed Coupling and episodes of Doctor Who which include womb-magic resurrecting the dead and saving some trees among other horrors. For much of Sherlock, I was actually pretty impressed with Moff. Maybe, just maybe, he had finally managed to write a female character who was awesome.
And this is the thing. For at least 80 minutes, the character Irene Adler was really awesome. Irene Adler was updated from a controversial opera singer who had affairs with the nobility to a dominatrix to the rich and famous. As with the original, Adler was portrayed as incredibly smart–an intellectual match for Holmes himself.
In the original story, Adler is clever enough to fool Holmes himself and escape, not allowing a scandalous photograph of a Bohemian royal to fall into Holmes’s hands and sneaking herself out of the country. All in all, she is fierce, resourceful and clever. Holmes himself is impressed and learns that women can be clever. Given the story was written rather some time ago, this is progressive in a way which seems thoroughly sexist these days.
In Sherlock, for the first 80 minutes, the character of Adler is much the same. She is an intellectual foil to Sherlock, anticipating his every move in order to stop him getting hold of an iPhone containing scandalous photographs of what we can only assume is Kate Middleton in a ball gag. In the first scene in which she and Sherlock meet, Adler is completely naked. I read this scene as Adler being intelligent enough to know that Holmes has a nasty habit of reading all sorts of details about a person’s life from their clothes, and therefore gave him little to go on, although given the sexism towards the end, I may be optimistic in this assessment.
Everything goes horribly wrong at the end. Out of nowhere, Adler reveals that much of her security arrangements and her outfoxing of Holmes is down to advice received from Moriarty. That’s right. Irene Adler goes from being the fierce, resourceful, clever woman to being somebody who had to ask a man for help in order to succeed. She is not allowed to be brilliant in her own right, only through the advice from a dude who has some tension with the main dude in the show. In the space of a few lines, Adler is reduced from an active force to a passive pawn in Moriarty and Holmes’s ongoing cock-duelling.
It gets worse. We are shown what had appeared to be moments of affection between her and Holmes that we had been shown previously in the episode, and Holmes informs us that he was actually checking her pulse and pupil dilation, and he has concluded that she loves him. This is in spite of the fact that Adler has previously pointed out to Watson that she is gay. Holmes being Holmes, he is right. Holmes is such an uber-dude that a lesbian has fallen in love with him and thoroughly fucked up all of her security arrangements by the password to the only thing keeping her safe being an allusion to her crush.
Adler is left friendless due to her fluttery lady-emotions being her downfall, and we are solemnly informed that she has been beheaded by terrorists. Fortunately for Adler, in the last few moments of the show we are informed what actually happened: she was rescued from certain by Holmes. In the course of the episode, Adler goes from being a genuinely awesome female character to a damsel in distress who is propped up entirely by men.
While the original story was written over a century ago, none of this bullshit happened. Adler is consistently portrayed as strong and bright. Yes, she does what she does so she can get married, but here’s the crucial point: she does it all herself.
Not so for the recent adaptation. In this, we are shown that as women, we’re always going to need a man to rescue us. We just can’t do it on our own: were we to try, we’d end up losing vital documents and on the headless end of a jihadi-beheading. Once again, Moff has managed to put women in the place he want them.
I would gladly keep the sparkling, sexy, sharp Irene Adler of most of the episode, and cut off the end entirely. And if the BBC need to fill up the full 90 minutes, why not extend the scene where she is beating Sherlock Holmes with a cane? And perhaps, let’s see him beg for mercy. Twice.
Today, I found myself in a position I hadn’t been in since early 2010: I agreed with Nick Clegg. On the proposed tax breaks for married couples, Clegg said the following:
“We can all agree that strong relationships between parents are important, but not agree that the state should use the tax system to encourage a particular family form.”
I don’t take this to mean that Clegg has suddenly started talking sense. He has just spotted an open goal and managed to kick the ball in vaguely the right direction in a desperate bid to resuscitate his dead party, the political equivalent of slapping a corpse and screaming “PLEASE DON’T DIE ON ME, I LOVE YOU”.
He does have a very good point, though. The state should have no role in meddling with how a family should look. This suggestion has naturally pissed off some of the usual suspects like Cristina Odone and the bafflingly-still-alive Norman Tebbit. As always, when a socially progressive attitude towards families is expressed, they fall back on the favourite language: the language of being under attack.
It happens all the time. The notion of the family being somehow attacked crops up frequently in discussion of marriage equality, the rhetoric surrounding single-parent families, and more broadly in terms of socially progressive legislation. Put simply, they cry out THOSE SCARY HUMMUS-MUNCHERS ARE COMING FOR OUR CHILDREN. In fact, it is nothing of the kind.
The language of the attack on the family implicitly applies the capitalist narrative of scarcity to families. As with money, their line of reasoning goes, there is a finite amount of love in the world, and we’d better not let those scrounging single mothers or gays have any of it, lest there’s none left for anyone else. By their very existence, non-conventional families threaten the social order by apparently hogging some love which could better go to a family with a mummy, a daddy and 2.4 kiddiwinks.
Of course, this line of reasoning is patent gibberish. Love is infinite, and money is a fiction so the narratives fail to hold up in any way imaginable. I pity those who believe that a family with one parent, or four parents or two parents who happen to be of the same sex are in any way a threat to their wellbeing. They are hiding from an imaginary foe, terrified that the rug will come out from under them when that rug is perfectly secure.
Perhaps the fear is where all of this ends, yet I suspect that using the language of an external threat or attack serves a deeper, murkier function. When one is attacked, one has two options: to fight, or to surrender. While an unprovoked attack is generally frowned upon, few except the most peaceful of pacifists will have an issue with self-defence. Pretending that families are under attack therefore legitimises the genuinely coercive tactics that the state is using to regulate family structure. It stops being outright aggression and starts to look like reasonable defence against the phalanx of queers and single mums who are bogarting all the nice things.
There is no attack on the traditional family. If anything, it is quite the other way round: we are being gradually coerced into living in the way that suits the state. It’s so clear, even a Lib Dem can spot it.
It has come to the time of year wherein we cannot leave the house without an aural assault of jingle-riddled festive musical tedium. While most are equally intolerable, some merit special mention for the implicit horrors they conceal. These are the Christmas songs that can fuck right off.
Rampant consumerism ahoy!
Capitalism has done a fine job of co-opting Christmas, turning it into a festival of panic-buying and receiving things you don’t really want. It is hardly surprising, then, that one of the most-covered traditional Christmas songs is The Twelve Days of Christmas. In this song, a person is given a series of increasingly ludicrous Christmas presents from a lover, presented through the medium of mind-numbing repetition. The nameless narrator of the song tells us nothing about their lover except that they buy a lot of presents. By the end of the song, the narrator has received 12 drummers drumming, 22 pipers piping, 30 lords a-leaping, 36 ladies dancing, 40 maids a-milking, 46 swans a-swimming, 42 geese a-laying, 35 gold rings, 32 calling birds, 30 French hens, 24 turtle doves and 12 partridges in pear trees. Implicit in this is that there must also be 40 cows to be milked, 46 small lakes for the swans to live in and at least 42 baby geese to soon be hatched. Quite where the narrator is going to keep all of the birds is not explored. Neither is it ever discussed that perhaps sending people as gifts might be slavery, or at the very least prostitution.
It’s immoral, it’s impractical, and it’s a vision of the future the capitalists would like to see. Its bastard lovechild is clearly visible in this godawful Littlewoods advert wherein a choir of children sing about how brilliant their mum is because she bought everyone presents.
Merry Christmas. Buy things. Debt is love.
A woman is left in a horrible, horrible relationship
Fairy Tale Of New York is the Christmas song it’s cool to say you like, because it’s kind of ironic, has a catchy Irish folky riff and Kirsty McColl died tragically early. It features bitter lyrics of a life of hardship and alcoholism, but ultimately, in some sort of Christmas miracle they arguing couple in the song realise that they love each other very much, right? Actually, not quite. Listen to the resolution of the song, at around 2.48. The woman laments that the man “took her dreams”. He replies that he kept them with him, made them his own and can’t possibly live life on his own.
Now, this would be all well and good if he wasn’t consistently portrayed as a complete and utter failure with verbally abusive tendencies. So that woman’s dream-eggs are stuck in a basket of piss, vinegar and toothless uselessness simply because the man won’t let her go. She never gets the chance to point this out, as it immediately becomes a matter of utmost urgency to report on the song choice of the New York Police Department and a bulletin on bell status. After this, we can only assume she overdoses on cocaine as white as Christmas snow, hollow-eyed on the tinsel-strewn rotting corpse of her lover.
Happy holidays!
Let me sing my privilege to the noble savages
Bono is an unmitigated cunt, and when people talk of “the good things he did”, often they refer to his charity work. Bono’s charity work includes the single Do They Know It’s Christmas, and therefore his unmitigated cunt status remains intact. This is a song in which a crowd of mostly white pop stars patronise an entire continent with startling factual inaccuracies.
Africa, as portrayed by the song, is a uniform desert populated entirely by starving people who need Middle England to ride in with their wallets and fix everything. There’s no snow in Africa, not even on top of mountains. There’s no rain, not even in the rich rainforests. There’s no rivers, not even the sodding Nile, the biggest bastard river in the world. The dear little noble savage Africans apparently don’t know it’s Christmas because Africa is such an insufferable shithole, not because many Africans probably couldn’t give two hoots about Christmas what with being Muslims.
It’s a terrible song, with a hefty dollop of misinformation. It may have been done with the best of intentions, but it’s pretty fucking racist, and it seems to have pissed off a few people. Nothing says traditional Christmas spirit like a bit of casual racism with a sing-al0ng chorus.
The date rape song
Baby It’s Cold Outside is another song which can be categorised under “Christmas romance” and tells a tale even more chilling than that recounted in Fairy Tale Of New York.
It’s about rape. Straight-up, it is a song about rape.
A woman tries to leave a man’s house. He gives her a drink. It has some drugs in it. While still compos mentis enough to argue, the woman argues that she cannot stay, says “no” several times, lists people she knows who might be worried about her and again mentions that she cannot leave. We leave her having finally been forced to into sex with coercive tactics and drugs. We’re supposed to find this rape cute because it’s all Christmassy, and who wouldn’t want to be raped by charming crooner Dean Martin? Listen to the lyrics of the song and tell me it is not about that.
As it’s Christmas, I shall conjure up the happiest possible ending for the story. The next morning, the woman goes home. Her family enquire as to why she appears to be shaken and upset. She explains what happened, and her mother, sister and vicious maiden aunt are appalled. These women call round at Dean Martin’s house, just as he is about to pounce upon another trusting, drugged woman and intervene. They then chop off Dean Martin’s raping penis and use it as a Christmas tree ornament. Everyone is very lucky in getting away with this cathartically criminal act, as the police are currently occupied with singing Galway Bay over the frozen husks of a pair of addicts. With support, Dean Martin’s victims find themselves able to move forward from the incident and engage in community activism to try to build a world without rape.
That’s the happiest possible ending, and we still have at least one rape in it. Fills the heart with Christmas cheer, that does.
The song that is surprisingly awesome
I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus is a song which is intensely, intensely irritating. In all honesty, I would be happy if I never heard it ever again. The thing is, it has a surprisingly positive poly message hidden deep inside all of the twee faux-childish awe: the kid doesn’t give a shit that Mommy is necking with Father Christmas. In fact, the kid expresses dismay that Daddy can’t see the happy occasion.
Of course, Santa is Daddy, but the kid doesn’t know this. The kid is completely cool with Mommy playing with other people, and seems to think Daddy would be too. It is a glimpse at a non-conventional family set up which, for a twelfth of the year, gets played on loop. May the message one day sink in so we never have to hear that godawful song again.
Those are some of the worst, but let’s be straight here: all Christmas songs can fuck off.
Trigger warning for humiliation and forced undressing.
Sometimes, you see things which are almost too chilling to put into words.
In this video, a young woman protester wearing a tent as a costume is surrounded by police. We cannot see much of what happens; we see what appears to be a knife being passed along and the woman shouting “this is not consensual, don’t take my clothes off”. She is then left in her underwear, clearly distressed, sitting on the grass.
It is a genuinely horrifying scene. A woman is forcibly stripped and humiliated in public by people with more power than her. Most people who watch this video will surely be disgusted and appalled by such behaviour; it appears to be such flagrant abuse.
Unfortunately, we live in a culture where victims of such abuse are blamed for what happened to them. People are frightened of the notion that the police are not exactly a benevolent protective force, people are frightened that they might find themselves victims of humiliation or abuse. And so the circus of victim-blaming for this woman began.
A local news article is careful to point out that the police asked her politely to undress first. This is hardly surprising coming from a Murdoch-owned rag, yet it is mild compared to the bile thatcame fromself-professed feminists. Apparently she should have worn more than just underwear under her costume. Apparently she was “entrapping police”. The poor police cannot be to blame for forcibly stripping a woman in public.
No. What the police are doing here is utterly unacceptable. Any feminist should understand that it is never acceptable for some powerful people to strip a woman in public. Any supporter of the police should know that police guidelines involve them not making people strip in public. There is no justification for this whatsoever. It’s abuse, plain and simple.
I don’t want to live in a world where the police can forcibly tear my clothes of if they think my outfit is a bit silly. I don’t want to live in a world where people seek to justify that in any way.
This is wrong, thoroughly wrong. It must never happen again.
__
Thanks to @alxsm for linking me to the story and @Orbsan for the local news article.
Yesterday, millions of public sector workers went on strike. There was remarkable support for the industrial action–even the Daily Mail was polling 84% support. Most people, it would seem, are behind the idea that we should treat our public sector workers as human beings.
Enter Jeremy Clarkson, professional troll who is largely famous for driving cars and being a dripping fuckstain. Clarkson is not one of the vast majority who support the strikes. Quite the opposite, in fact. On never-watched light entertainment The One Show, he declared that strikers should be shot. He clarified with “they should be executed in front of their families.”
Naturally, the tosser brigade have leapt to Clarkson’s defence, declaring that it must be a joke, that he was being somehow “funny”, and the outcry was down to pearl-clutching from humourless hummus-munchers. It’s the last resort of the dribbling wanker, declaring that anyone who is not amused by a brazen display of utter dickery must be boring.
Rest assured, any hummus munchers who are not tickled by Clarkson’s “joke”. You are neither boring, nor humourless. The fact is, what Clarkson proposed flies in the face of what is actually counted as humour.
The truth is, we’re not entirely sure why (most) humans have a sense of humour and laugh at jokes. Evolutionary psychology suggests it’s because it gets us laid. Others suggest it’s a natural reaction to fear being relieved. Perhaps the theory with most research associated, though, is Incongruity Theory.
Incongruity Theory started with philosophy superhero Immanuel Kant, though has since continued into a rich body of research with many offshoots. It proposes that humour is the state of realising incongruity between a concept in a certain situation and the real objects which are thought to be related to the concept. To demonstrate, here are two potentially funny scenarios:
1. Jeremy Clarkson dies in a horrible car crash
2. Jeremy Clarkson is found dead following a tragic wanking accident with three quarters of a bicycle lodged into his rectum.
Chances are, you found the bicycle-bumming scenario far funnier than the car crash scenario. This is because the likelihood of Clarkson going near a bike, let alone incorporating it into an experimental wank, is highly improbable. It is incongruous, and the theory proposes that this is where humour comes from. Humour, according to this theory, can only happen when there is something unexpected, something surreal, something bizarre, something different from reality.
Clarkson’s declaration that strikers should be shot is not particularly incongruous with reality. History and the present are riddled with stories of people taking industrial action and ending up murdered by the forces in power, in precisely the way Clarkson lays out in his “joke”. In the present day UK, the likelihood of shooting strikers is becoming frighteningly more plausible. The police are already being authorised to use weapons of greater lethality in public order situations. Following the riots, a third of British people were baying for the use of live ammunition. Last winter, the police smugly backpatted themselves for not shooting student protesters. Shooting strikers is worryingly congruous with reality, and therefore thoroughly unfunny.
Of course, the joke may still amuse some. It will amuse those whose schema of reality cannot possibly perceive use of violence by the state to attack dissenters as a remotely plausible threat. It will amuse those whose minds are anaesthetised by endless rolling Sky News, growing fat on the lies fed to them by a dangerous system. It will amuse those with a vested interest in maintaining a system from which they benefit, counting wealth gained from forcing workers into ever worse conditions. It will amuse Clarkson himself, paid millions of public pounds, who will never have to face the terrifying possibility of ageing in poverty.
To most of us, though, this joke is not funny. It is a bleak vision of our future.
Regular readers will know that a particular bugbear of mine is evolutionary psychology and its persistent habit of throwing out hypotheses without ever bothering testing them. Hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen. I found an instance where they test a hypothesis.
The study, “DO WOMEN PRETEND TO ORGASM TO RETAIN A MATE” is rooted in the “sperm selection” hypothesis of female orgasm–that women have orgasms so their wombs act as a kind of jizz-hoover, and they’re more likely to have an orgasm when having sex with a man with good genes. Following from this, men evolved interest in women’s sexual pleasure so that they can be sure their lady-friend is keeping the little deposited parcel of spunk. Women might therefore fake orgasms in order to keep a man interested and stop him from straying. Now, there’s a lot of assumptions in there, building on the sperm-sucking uterus idea. Can this possibly translate into decent research?
In short, not really. What came out of all of this hypothesising was something which can kindly be described as shaky.
The participants were a reasonably decent sample of college-age women, all of whom had been in a committed heterosexual relationship for more than six months. Participants were asked two questions to assess their perceived likelihood of their partner cheating, and filled in a 104-item survey of “mate retention behaviours” such as calling to check where the partner is, dressing nicely to retain interest and holding hands to when other women are around. I have no idea why the poor participants were subjected to a 104-item questionnaire when there’s one which does the job for the far less tedious 38 items. Pretending orgasms was measured by two questions: “During sexual intercourse with your current partner, have you ever pretended you were more sexually excited than you really were?” and “During sexual intercourse with your current partner, have you ever pretended you were having an orgasm when you really weren’t?”
Astute, observant people may notice a problem with the measurement of faking orgasms here. So could a seven year-old. The first question does not measure faking orgasms at all. Despite this rather obvious point, the authors insist on averaging together scores on not faking orgasms with scores on faking orgasms throughout the study. This is further compounded by each item being measured on a ten-point scale ranging from “definitely not” to “definitely yes”. The authors insist on referring to this score as “frequency of pretending orgasms”, but there is absolutely no measure of time in here. It is more a measure of how sure the survey respondent is that they have done this.
Because of this silly wording of the question, I would expect most of the respondents to the survey to reply with either a very low number if they had not faked orgasms, or a large number if they had. Unfortunately, I will never know if I’m right here, as the authors opted not to publish the mean and measure of spread for the responses to this question. In fact, they’re rather shy about providing a lot of this rather useful information.
After gathering some questionable data, the authors proceeded to performing what the scientific community call a metric fuckton of correlation analyses. When someone does a lot of the same sort of analysis on a big data set, they are likely to get a significant result based on chance alone, unless they adjust for this, which the authors didn’t. Furthermore, if the data isn’t continuous, e.g bunched up at the edges like the orgasm-faking data probably was, you can’t really do a correlation analysis on it. It is possible that that’s why they averaged faking-orgasm data with a behaviour that was not faking orgasms–to smooth it out somewhat and make it more continuous.
The authors pulled out the big guns and decided to do mediation analysis to see whether mate retention behaviours, faking orgasms and perceived infidelity risk correlated in a way where they influenced each other. I will spare you the dry statistical details, but they used a method called Baron and Kenny which is awful, awful, awful and can’t show what it says it shows.
Of course, the press has crawled all over this tripe and gone with the authors’ intepretation of their dodgy, dodgy findings. We women fake orgasms so our men won’t stray. Isn’t that sweet in an adorable lady-neurosis way?
Let us imagine, for a second, that the entire study wasn’t completely FUBAR. They properly measured frequency of women faking orgasms, they accounted for statistical problems, and it emerged, solidly, that perceived risk of cheating correlated with faking orgasms.
It still wouldn’t show that women fake orgasms to hold on to a partner, as it’s a correlation. Nowhere have I seen an alternative possibility explored: that women perceive a greater risk of cheating when their partner is crap in bed, or there’s some sort of sexual incompatability which means they feel the need to pretend. Or, more plausibly, the relationships where there is a high perceived risk of cheating and sex that is so unsatisfying as to necessitate faking orgasms are probably ones which are somewhat broken anyway, and the two factors have a common cause which was not measured in the study.
Essentially, female orgasms probably aren’t a method for holding on to a man. It also doesn’t strike me as particularly plausible that the sole reason female sexual pleasure evolved was to more efficiently funnel semen where it needs to be in the first place. What we have here is a study which is flawed from top to bottom, yet the media springs on it as it confirms societal expectations of women: that we want nothing more than to hold on to a man, and our orgasms are important only for making babies.
These tired tropes are trotted out time and time again, repeated without criticism. Most are, with scrutiny, utter rubbish.
TRIGGER WARNING: This post discusses rape, and links to some possibly-triggering content surrounding rape.
This morning, I received an email informing me that if I didn’t do as TFL told me, I’d get raped.
Dear Stavvers,
I am writing to remind you that unbooked minicabs picked up off the street are dangerous and put you at risk of sexual assault. The safest way to get a minicab home is to:
Book it – by phone, email or in a minicab office to guarantee your trip is carried out by a licensed, insured driver and vehicle
Check it’s yours – ask the driver to confirm your name and destination before you get in the car, and check the driver’s photo ID
Sit in the back – and carry your mobile in case of an emergency
It looks like it’s that time of year again. The tinsel comes out, and women are blamed for getting themselves in trouble. The opening sentence of that email has the tone of a legal disclaimer, pointing out that I have been warned and that TFL will be in no way liable for any sexual assaults on me during the festive period.
In such a short missive, there is a lot to unpack.
The advice given is fairly decent personal safety advice for anyone getting in a car with a stranger. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the email was only sent to women and focused solely on sexual assaults: what of muggings, rip-offs, your common-or-garden non-sexual assaults? This advice benefits everyone, yet it was only sent to women. As @Cillygrrl14 points out, it provides a compelling reason to do away with ticking a mandatory gender box when filling in a form.
Of course, the reason it focuses on women and sexual assault boils down to the way society views rape: that it only affects women, is perpetrated by strangers, and women are in some way wholly responsible for preventing their own rapes.
The victim blaming in minicab rapes is hardly new. A high-profile ad campaign to “reduce the number of minicab rapes” ended up as little more than an exercise in laying responsibility for the rape solely in the hands of the survivor. The posters sternly declare that you are “putting yourself in danger”, prominently featuring a picture of a distressed, crying woman and an all-caps message which sounds like a sarcastic impression of someone being raped. I won’t even link the videos. They’re triggering and horrible. The message is clear: it’s your fault for getting in that cab, you silly cow.
The focus on unlicensed minicabs is also something of a red herring. As far as I am aware, doing The Knowledge does not entail a mandatory training course about enthusiastic consent. In fact, rapes perpetrated by licenced drivers can and do happen, such as the high profile “black cab rapist” case. The major difference between licensed and unlicensed cab driver rapists is that the former are easier to catch, though that smacks of stable doors and bolting horses. It also buys into the stranger-rape narrative wholesale. A woman, on leaving a Christmas party is far more likely to be raped by the charming friend-of-a-friend who offers to ‘see her home safely’ than some predator in a roving rape-wagon. Yet we don’t talk about this; there is no national campaign to point out that the majority of rapists are known to their victims. I use the term ‘victim’ here, as this campaign has made it quite clear I’m a victim just waiting to happen unless I take full responsibility for my own actions.
Ending rape is not the responsibility of each individual woman preventing her own rape. It cannot work that way: it is everyone’s responsibility. It is the responsibility of unlicensed minicab drivers not to rape, of the authorities to adequately work on preventing rapists from being able to rape, of every single person to look out for one another. It is all of our responsibility to thoroughly dismantle a victim-blaming, individualistic culture which allows rape to happen. Somehow, I doubt TFL will send me an email to that effect. It’s easier for them to absolve responsibility altogether.
Stopping rape is never going to be easy. The beliefs are entrenched, the behaviours entrenched, the excuses entrenched. Yet preventing rape is not about not getting in a dodgy-looking cab and keeping your phone in your hand. It’s about overhauling the whole shitty system. I think that’s a fight worth fighting.
Another angry woman 
