Category: media bollocks

Pecking over scraps and calling it feminism

Spoiler warning: if you have been asleep since 1997 and only recently woken up, this post will contain Buffy spoilers.

Lately, I have been watching a lot of Buffy.

I adore Buffy. It is far and away one of my favourite shows. The characters are wonderful (except two-eyed Xander), the dialogue crackles, the fight scenes are awesome and generally I love it. It is also rather refreshing to have something which passes the Bechdel test with flying colours–a lot of conversations between the multitude of female characters revolve around “how do we kill it?” instead of shoes and boys. Buffy herself kicks arse, as do Willow and Faith and Anya and even Buffy’s mum sometimes gets in on the action. Buffy also gives us good female villains, ones that subvert the traditional dull femme-fatale-villain role. The creator of the show self-identifies as a feminist. Surely, then, Buffy is a feminist show?

Except it isn’t. A lot of people more eloquent than I have explained exactly why it is not. For those not click-inclined: the arsekicking strength of the female characters tends to come from supernatural means rather than their generally being awesome. The show has a strange attitude to sex and female sexual agency: Buffy’s sexual actions make Angel turn evil and Spike turn into a rapist, for example. There are rather a lot of scenes of women being attacked by hyper-masculine monster figures–and most of these women do not have the magically-bestowed powers of Buffy: Dawn and Cordelia fit into the trope of women who need to be rescued far too easily for what is supposed to be a feminist show.

In short, it is problematic as hell.

I also rather love Lady GaGa. Catchy pop music is something of a guilty pleasure of mine. GaGa has been declared a feminist icon by some, including Caitlin Moran. GaGa certainly subverts the usual sort of narrow sexuality found in pop music videos and acts: she takes “sexy” to such an extreme that it becomes thoroughly ridiculous. You are not really supposed to fancy Lady GaGa. She is there to shock, instead. GaGa works hard campaigning for gay rights. She writes her own music. She seems strong, independent, in control of her personal brand.

Lady GaGa is not a feminist icon. She has a nasty habit of appropriating cultures and disability in order to shock. She is still a cog in a machine of objectification of women. She recently came out with this quote:

“You should wait as long as you can to have sex, because as a woman, you don’t even begin to enjoy it until your mid-twenties. When you’re 17, you don’t even know how to operate what’s going on down there and you shouldn’t try.”

Like Buffy, Lady GaGa is too problematic to represent feminism.

Why do we do this? Why do we leap upon something so flawed and stick the label of feminism on it? I think the answer may be because there is nothing else out there.

The film, television and music industries are run by men. They are patriarchal institutions which produce patriarchal goods. Feminism, to these industries, is thoroughly unmarketable, as the point of women is to scream, get rescued and look cute in a little skirt, or to fall deeply, madly in love. Media for men, by men. Media for women, by men.

Every so often, they throw us a bone of apparent female empowerment. Buffy. Lady GaGa. Perhaps even Sucker Punch was an industry attempt at female empowerment. It was one of the worst films I have ever watched. If they were aiming for empowerment, they missed the mark by miles.

Often, we jump on the scraps, the little thing that they give us, because there is nothing else for us to have. When we switch on the TV and see a woman kicking arse, it is a damn sight better than the usual sight of her screaming. When we see a woman wearing a dress made out of meat at an awards ceremony, it is a refreshing change from the standard-issue floor-length Dior gown.

In the mainstream, there is precious little for feminists to enjoy, as it has all been processed and greenlit by the patriarchy. It is like how Fox allow The Simpsons to put in the odd joke about Fox. Permitted subversion that is not subversion at all.

And yet we take what we can get. We delight in GaGa’s speeches about gay rights, or Buffy fighting the forces of capitalism with a hammer and sickle. We delight because there is nothing else to delight in. We push the twinge of cognitive dissonance to the backs of our minds, minimising the flaws just so we have something to enjoy.

It has been this way since time immemorial. Consider Jane Austen, who is generally thought to be somewhat feminist. Her feminism is said to be down to writing novels where the female characters are presented as intelligent and independent. Despite this, they still spend an inordinate time talking about men. The addition of zombies makes Pride and Prejudice far more tolerable, demoting the guff about marriage to a subplot, and promoting Lizzie Bennet to an arse-kicking heroine. Nothing has really changed since Austen. We still seize what we can and call it feminism.

Here’s the thing: being a feminist does reduce enjoyment of music and films and TV, because so much the media is so horribly problematic. Sometimes I watch Buffy just to watch some women talking on TV. Once, I even ended up watching Sex and the City for that purpose. There was a small moment in SatC where they were talking about neither clothes nor men that I rather enjoyed (though for the most part I find it utterly insufferable).

It is gratifying to find something better than the usual bollocks that is out there, even if it itself is riddled with questionable content. We take what we can get.

With the bulk of production lying in the hands of the patriarchy, it is unlikely that this will change. Almost two hundred years have passed since Jane Austen began writing, and people are still vociferously defending her fluffy rom-coms as feminism. What comes out today is no different.

It is good that these small scraps get us talking. To discuss whether Buffy is feminist requires discussion of what feminism is, and flawed as these things are, discussion of feminism becomes more mainstream. The subversions of tropes become tropes themselves–Buffy brought us the arse-kicking woman; Austen brought us the intelligent, witty woman; GaGa brought us the beautiful freak. They still play by patriarchal rules, but slowly we talk. We discuss what the fuck that meat dress meant, or what the hell the writers are doing with the Buffy/Spike rape scene.

Outside the constraints of these media, ideas can grow. As we realise that nothing mainstream will be any good for us, we can work to change this. Change can take place in non-mainstream art, or by attacking the root cause of the lack of mainstream feminist media: smash the patriarchy.

In the end, Buffy taught me something very important: a gang of sufficiently determined women and allies can change the world. Who wants to join the Feminist Scoobies?

__

Special thanks to Jed for conversations which helped this post happen.

In which I rant about Torchwood and queer stuff

Like any good geek, I stick with my shows, even when they’re thoroughly awful.

Take Torchwood. I think I might have hated Torchwood much more than I ever liked it, yet I have stuck with it even as it moved to the States. I feel the urge to vent something that has been bothering me about the latest series. This post will contain spoilers up to episode 3 of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I think, though, that the experience of watching the bloody thing is much worse than the experience of being spoiled.

I have watched Torchwood since it started. I enjoyed the fact that it was essentially Doctor Who fanfiction with a standard fanfiction-inspired dose of slash. All of the characters were at least a little bit queer. It was one of the central tenets of the show: sexuality, for most of the characters was flexible. The gay-or-straight narrative simply did not apply to Torchwood. Most people were somewhere in between. I cannot think of another programme where bisexual characters are so visible.

Even though I find Captain Jack Harkness a gratingly annoying character, I very much appreciated the idea that he came from a future where people had stopped giving a shit about sexual orientation and anything goes. I would love to go and live in that future (except for all of the haunted libraries with shadows that come and eat you).

And here is the problem: Torchwood stopped being queer. I think the rot set in towards the end of season two, when they killed off Toshiko, a main character who happened to be a bisexual woman. Captain Jack begins a serious relationship with Ianto, and stops flirting with everything that moves. That is understandable, I suppose; he has gone monogamous. In the end of season three, Ianto was killed off, another bisexual main character. Ianto died because he had been written into the role of Love Interest Of The Hero, a role usually reserved for a woman character. The trope played out just the same.

After a purge of all of the mortal queers, Torchwood went American. With that, it stopped being anything remotely resembling a queer-friendly show. In the second episode of Miracle Day, the characters are on a plane. There is an air steward there, a well-groomed man. For the entire duration of the episode, the nameless air steward is repeatedly mistaken for gay, presumably because he is well-groomed and an air steward. This “joke” is so tired and hackneyed that it was used in such cinematic masterpieces as Snakes on a Plane.

In the first two episodes, this is literally the only mention of anything remotely pertaining to sexuality: HAHA! LOOK AT THE CLEAN MAN! HE MUST BE A GAY!

By the third episode, the writers have remembered that Captain Jack is supposed to be queer, and throw in a thoroughly unnecessary sex scene between him and a nameless bartender. I will give the show credit where credit is due: the scene is more graphic than one would expect from an American TV show, and safe sex is mentioned. However, this does not make up for the whole of the episode before, which was such a homophobic cliché that I’d been sure it would have been leading up to some kind of humorous subversion. It did nothing of the sort. All the gratuitous bumming in the world can’t change that.

I had always joked that Torchwood was the only fandom not requiring slashfic because it was sufficiently queer all on its own. This is no longer the case, and it makes me a hell of a lot less forgiving of the fact that the writing is terrible, the plot makes no goddamn sense whatsoever, and all of the characters are irretrievably irritating.

To summarise: don’t bother with the new series of Torchwood. I will keep you updated if it improves.

Why should we give a shit what the press thinks of us?

I am sitting among feminists. I am sitting among radical lefties. I am sitting among activists. We discuss ideas for action. Every time, no matter what the action, the whisper will come around, and it will piss all over the nascent plans we had developed. “But that will look bad in the papers. They’ll use that against us.”

Every time, the same. Ideas are aborted purely because of the fear of what the media might think.

The same thing happens in the aftermath of a protest. After March 26th, for example, the left descended into an orgy of backbiting: black bloc made us look bad, UK Uncut made us look bad, UK Uncut need to say they had nothing to do with black bloc so our media overlords will be sated. It was the worst orgy ever.

At the moment, this obsession with how the media views activism is apparent in the squabbling over Jonnie Marbles and a pie. There is still squabbling over that bloody pie. In the initial half an hour post-splat, much of the hand-wringing was over how a parliamentary process may have been disrupted. When it became apparent that the show went on completely as advertised, it shifted. This will look bad in the media, they chattered, Murdoch will come across sympathetically. We must call for a purge of the left, starting with Comrade Marbles. 

I have seem more people worrying about sympathy from Murdoch in the media than actual sympathy for Murdoch in the media.

At any rate, why should what the media think about us matter at all?

Our newspapers and television channels are owned by a small bunch of rich white men, and represent pet projects for disseminating their rich white male views. They have a vested interest in maintaining their own power, and anyone who challenges their position is ultimately viewed as a threat. To the media, feminists, socialists, anarchists, environmentalists, those who suggest that the rich white men who rule the world, are dangerous.

They do all they can to defame us: feminists become paranoid man haters; environmentalists, smelly tree-huggers; anarchists violent mindless thugs. This will happen whatever activists do. If Cthulu rose and was defeated by me, the Daily Mail would probably run a story about how I only vanquished the monster-god because he was male, and anyway I’m a massive slut, and isn’t that terrible?

No matter what we do, it will ultimately be used against us in the media. Why should we march to the beat of their drum? It makes us no better than the politicians. Look at Ed Miliband. He provides no real opposition to government because he is so hell-bent on satisfying the media. Look at the discourse surrounding the deficit. Politicians are not supposed to point out that we do not really need to bother with getting rid of the deficit, because the media has jumped upon the idea that if we do not reduce it, Hitler will ride out of hell on velociraptor. Look at discourse surrounding immigration. No politician will say “Actually, why don’t we talk about how immigration is not A Bad Thing at all?” This is because they must all play into the media narrative, that forrins and darkies are taking over the country and OH MY GOD THIS IS TERRIBLE WHY CAN’T CHURCHILL COME AND KILL THEM WITH A SPITFIRE?

Instead of attempting to appease those who we should actively be trying to challenge, we need to disseminate our own narratives. Trust in the mainstream media is low. Talking, pamphlets, direction to good readings, and more talking to people. That is how we spread our message. We cannot get it across through the mainstream media. They will not let us.

It is time to stop caring what the media thinks of us, and time to start telling the world what it is that we stand for.

More Magazine, male-centred sexuality and kissing girls

Let me start by saying, I did not buy More magazine. I found it, and out of sheer curiosity, I read it. I sort of wish I hadn’t.

Imagine my horror, as a queer woman, a feminist, and a person with a tendency to get a little bit angry to be greeted with this article:

How would your man feel if you kissed a girl?

How would your man feel if you kissed a girl?

Apparently this is the most important issue in the world when it comes to discussion of kissing women. Whether it turns men on. In the text of the article, there is absolutely no acknowledgement that perhaps queer women may exist. Kissing women is, according to More magazine, exclusively something that women do in nightclubs “in front of an appreciative male audience”.

The article provides the opinion of two men. One man declares that it is “seriously hot” and that he “can’t help but fantasise about joining the party”. The other man thinks that it is “just attention seeking” and “ugly” and “insecure”. Both men are falling prey to objectification.

What is perhaps worst about this, though, is that no opinions of women are sought. From the title of the article and all the way through, how a woman might feel about kissing another woman is not mentioned at all. This is because, to More, sexuality is constructed as something which is entirely male centred.

The magazine is utterly riddled with such articles. A story about Victoria Beckham’s post-birth weight loss is framed as “POSH SHAPES UP FOR DAVID”. An interview with a pop star which largely discusses her music and her weight is titled “I LIKE MY MEN RUGGED”, as if that were the most interesting thing about her. A story about Cheryl Cole casts her as a passive bystander in the crossfire of a fight between two men. The horoscopes page provides horoscopes for “your man”, so the reader can discover whether the line up of stars will make her boyfriend a little grumpier than usual this week.

The phrase “your man” occurs repeatedly. More‘s construction of sexuality is entirely monogamous: you get your man, and that is who you have sex with. More provides a “position of the week”, which explains “what’s in it for him”. If you are worried about him cheating, it is perfectly acceptable to look through his phone. Beauty products and clothes exist to “wow your man”. The most important thing about a woman is “her man”.

There is no space in More for anything outside of this heteronormative monogamous relationship. You are either in one, or you are seeking one. Someday your man will come. Perhaps you can tempt him with a little bit of girl-snogging?

The picture of sexuality presented in More is as unrealistic for many as the position of the week, which starts with “stand on the edge of your villa’s private pool”. For many women, the heteronormative ideal is undesirable or unattainable: it makes women who wish for the heteronormative ideal feel like failures for being unable to “bag a man”, while queer women may feel invisible and marginalised. It is also bloody awful to suggest to women that their boyfriend is the most important and interesting thing about them, as this is categorically untrue.

Sexuality is so much more than impressing a man or pleasing a man. I do not expect a mainstream women’s magazine to provide good detailed advice on polyamory or lesbian practice (though it would be brilliant if they did). What I would like to see, though, is some acknowledgement that ultimately, one’s sexuality should revolve around oneself: not about “what your man might like”, but about what you might like or want. The things that make you feel sexy.

Perhaps that is kissing women. Perhaps that is fucking women. Hell, perhaps it is kissing another consenting woman just to turn men on. Personal jollies, rather than constant thought of existing solely in relation to men.

It is so thoroughly miserable that even a magazine targeted to women will maintain the patriarchal notion that a man’s opinion is the alpha and omega.

And this is why I am adding More  to my library of publications to burn.

I blame the pietriarchy

Unless you have been thoroughly cut off from any news source for the past 24 hours, you will no doubt have seen that at a select committee inquiry, Rupert Murdoch narrowly escaped a pie to the face, defended by his wife’s quick reflexes. There has been the usual lefty squabbling over the pie, and I will not go into it. For what it’s worth, I think it was bloody hilarious, although Jonnie Marbles’s timing could have been somewhat better, but really, we shouldn’t spend too long arguing over pie when the government sneaked in privatisation of a chunk of the NHS. These two articles by Laurie Penny and Tim Hardy sum up how I feel about the matter rather beautifully.

In his deconstruction of the pie, Tim says:

The role of the clown is to show the ridiculousness of power.

This was pulled off beautifully in the pie-stunt for the most part, but of course some nasty stuff crawled out of the woodwork with it.

The reaction to Wendi Deng’s pie-defence has a strong whiff of sexism to it. The Telegraph saw fit to run a series of pictures of the woman in question, for no real reason other than it had an excuse to run pictures of a woman, the Torygraph being one of those newspapers which pretends to be above frantic masturbation over the female form. The Guardian ran a piece about how Wendi Deng’s action had lifted the image of Chinese women.

Then there is this blogpost, “TROPHY WOMEN ALWAYS PROTECT THEIR MAN“. In six short lines, it manages to convey a range of stereotypes about women who marry rich men. That is all Deng is, apparently. A trophy wife.

The stench of racism also clings to the reaction, with numerous tweets referring to ninja skills and karate moves, explicitly referencing Deng’s ethnicity. It is a pity that something as gleefully silly as a pie can draw out such unpleasant opinions. Perhaps they would be less jarringly offensive if they mentioned the pie, highlighting the ridiculousness of such opinions.

On the other hand, patriarchal constructions have been somewhat harmful to Murdoch. Our media is, ultimately, steeped in the beliefs of the oppressive system that spawned it. For a powerful man to be defended by “his” woman ultimately reflects badly on the powerful man: it shows his weakness.

It is ridiculous that this sort of thing could in any way damage Murdoch, but such is power and such is patriarchy.

It started with a pie. What will come out next?

Wrong on so many levels

Sometimes a broken clock tells the right time twice a day. Other times, the broken clock is so thoroughly fucked that it manages to so completely tell the wrong time that space distorts around it.

This article is even more thoroughly and completely broken than the metaphor above.

The story is short: a man went to donate blood. He was turned away from the blood donation centre because the staff thought he looked gay. There is much to be angry about here.

It is wrong that the blood donation centre failed to even bother screening a potential donor, following good practice. Every time I have ever given blood I have been given a questionnaire which asks about prior sexual behaviour. I am sure that practice is not that far removed on the other side of the pond. If it is not, that is something which must be changed. That is because it is also wrong to believe that one can gauge a person’s sexual orientation from their “appearance and behaviour” as the staff in question did in this incident. There are no magical markers of homosexuality. A heterosexual man may moisturise. A gay woman may wear frivolous shoes. To say there are visible indicators of sexual orientation is to fall into an unpleasant well of stereotypes. In this case, the man was turned away for being “noticeably effeminate“. It would seem that only gay men are allowed to display any kind of feminine traits. This is grubbily unfair to all men.

Ugly generalisations of groups aside, another incredibly fucked up thing about this situation is that men who have sex with men are barred from blood donation. This blanket ban is highly discriminatory: the ban currently applies even to men who are in monogamous gay relationships or those who practice safe sex. It is a product of crude Bayesian statistics, and could easily be rectified by fine-tuning the screening procedure. Furthermore, in the UK, more heterosexuals than gay people have HIV. The move in the UK to lift the ban for men who had sex with men more than a decade ago is not good enough. Completely banning a group of the population from giving blood is wrong.

The wrong does not stop here, though. I wish it did.

The title of the article gives a clue as to what another layer of wrong is: “STRAIGHT MAN TURNED AWAY FROM BLOOD DONATION CENTER BECAUSE HE “LOOKED GAY”.

The actual sexual orientation of the man is thoroughly irrelevant to the story; to reference it shows a nasty pile of distasteful attitudes towards gay people. It makes it seem as though it is worse that a man is labelled as a homosexual than it is that a clinic is failing to follow good practice, falling prey to stereotyping and is a cog in a wheel of systemic oppression. It is sad that a man being mistaken for gay is what makes news, rather than the millions of men who are actually gay facing this sort of bullshit every single day of the year. Unfortunately, that is how society is.

It doesn’t help that the man who was turned away is a bit of a weeping syphilitic chode himself (as are the writers of the article and those who thought it fit to publish). Not only is he so mortally offended by being mistaken for gay that he told his story to a magazine, he also displays prejudice against another group of human beings:

Pace told the Sun-Times he felt “humiliated and embarrassed.” “It’s not right that homeless people can give blood but homosexuals can’t,” he said. “And I’m not even a homosexual.”

Those dirty homeless people, with their AIDS and their promiscuity! They’re worse than the gays! Did I mention I’m totally not gay, because that would be thoroughly icky!

The article tells the story of a cornucopia of wrongs in our society, and its write up reinforces prejudice. I would be impressed at how wrong it manages to be in less than 200 words were I not so thoroughly disappointed that this shit is still roaring on in 2011. Isn’t it supposed to be the future now?

Reasons to hate Topshop

I do not have real, human enemies. There are, however, institutions which I hate as deeply as though they had crapped in my shoe. In fact, what they do is a lot worse than crapping in any shoes.

Take, for example, Topshop. There are so, so many reasons to hate Topshop.

Firstly, I have an almost Pavlovian reflex to quickly utter the phrase “pay-your-tax” following the word Topshop. A quick history lesson for the uninitiated: Topshop is owned by a company called the Arcadia  Group. The Arcadia Group’s business is run entirely by one Sir Philip Green, who is also, coincidentally, a government advisor on which public services to cut. Despite Green’s active role in the company, Arcadia is registered in the name of Green’s wife, who happens to be a resident of Monaco. In Monaco, one does not have to pay tax on personal tax. By exploiting this loophole, Arcadia have avoided paying approximately £285 million of tax. In December, Topshop was targeted by activist group UK Uncut, who exist mostly to point out how thoroughly unnecessary any cuts to public services are, when one could just ensure that the super-rich paid all of the tax they are supposed to pay.

That Topshop do not pay their fair share–no more than anyone else, just the amount they are supposed to pay–is thoroughly unfair when vulnerable groups are disproportionately affected by government policy. To put this into perspective, from £1.2 billion pounds, no tax was paid. The £285 million tax bill avoided would hardly make a difference to the Greens, and push the full dividend to slightly less than a billion pounds in one year. Despite this, they decided to grow richer. £285 million on its own is more than one could reasonably spend in a lifetime, yet it is equivalent to a year’s pay for 20, 000 NHS nurses. This money could mean the world to many.

In order to further maximise their profits and procure Philip Green yet another yacht, Topshop and the Arcadia Group use sweatshops for labour. This report suggests that workers who manufacture clothes sold by Arcadia are paid about 40p per hour. For comparison, the unpaid tax bill alone is worth more than £32, 500 per hour. This horrifying exploitation of people–human beings–in the name of allowing the already-rich to grow even richer is unjustifiably wrong.

Then there is this image, which until yesterday was featured prominently on Topshop’s website:

The model is so slim, it seems as though it has been photoshopped, like the classic botched airbrushing in which a Ralph Lauren model ended up with hips smaller than her head. I do not know whether the image has been doctored or if it is a photographic trick, or if, indeed, the model really is that thin. I am disinclined to believe the latter, as in all of the other photographs, the model does not look that unrealistically thin.

The article which managed to catch the screengrab before Topshop took it down calls for discussion over whether such images are a risk for eating disorder, but such a discussion is not necessary: science has cleared up the matter [article sadly paywalled]. A large number of studies have been conducted to understand whether exposure to “thin-ideal” pictures in the media is linked to eating disorders. Some have found that it is, while others found that it is not. In order to work out what the “true” effect is, the authors in the study above took all of the available data and put it together in the same spreadsheet. This is called a meta-analysis, and basically means turning a lot of small studies into one huge study. The authors found that exposure to images in the media like the image Topshop thought appropriate to use was linked to body dissatisfaction, internalising the thin-ideal, and effects on eating behaviours and beliefs about food. In other words, these images are dangerous. While they may not be sufficient to trigger an eating disorder on their own, they are certainly a contributing factor. For Topshop to run such a picture is therefore highly irresponsible.

Not only could this picture possibly facilitate eating disorders, it also represents some fairly tired gender stereotypes, selling women the ability to look “ladylike”. “Ladylike” is one of those unpleasant words used to regulate women’s behaviour. Being ladylike is submission, being ladylike is to accept the role prescribed for you, and, apparently, being ladylike requires buying Topshop’s products. Make sure you stay polished, ladies! That the words were run next to that picture speaks volumes: to be ladylike is to be feeble, frail, fragile. It is not enough to capitulate to docile femininity. You have to buy your own oppression. It is, frankly, fraudulent.

But perhaps you don’t care about how Topshop is a case study in the interplay between the foul side of capitalism and murky misogyny, with just a splash of dangerous body policing. Maybe you don’t care because this sort of thing doesn’t bother you much. Perhaps you don’t care because it is not like Topshop is the only company doing this. Let’s face it, they’re all at it. We just have the numbers and brazen evidence for Topshop. Even if you don’t care, there is still reason enough to hate Topshop.

Their products are really awful quality and terrible value for money. They are not built to last. They are horribly overpriced for what you get. I should know. Before I declared Topshop my nemesis, I bought clothes from there. It was always dimly disappointing.

I cannot go in there any more. I have participated in UK Uncut actions in Topshop, I have tweeted vitriol about them with my name and my face, and the last time I tried to enter a Topshop I was told politely by security to leave. By Topshop security’s standards, I understand that this was fairly lenient treatment.

I do not feel a sense of loss. I do not feel like I am missing out on their sub-par clothing, or their Stone Age attitude towards women or the opportunity to donate to Philip Green’s yacht fund.

If anything, I am relieved. I do not have to waste my energy on a boycott.

A weekend in activism

This weekend, I have been busily chipping away at the state.

On Friday, I went to a demo outside News International’s HQ to point out that we hadn’t won just yet and all of the rot needs to be cut out and purged with fire. Metaphorically speaking. I had a thoroughly enjoyable shout into a megaphone, and according to photographs have started advertising biscuits.

On Saturday, I went to a pro-choice demo. The atmosphere was lovely–women and men alike came out in support of abortion rights, pledging resistance to the imminent attacks on such basic human rights. I suspect in the next year, we will be seeing more of these as the government start to move against bodily autonomy.

Finally, on Sunday, to mourn the passing of the filthy, vile, racist, misogynistic News of the World, I went to a funeral. I am very proud of this. It was a truly collaborative effort every step of the way.

Anyway, enough about me. How did you smash the patriarchy or state this week?

Small victories: battling the Hydra

Heracles had the misfortune of being born the bastard son of a god with a terrible marriage. The scorned wife, Hera, hated the boy, and hated the man he became, and strived to make his life a special kind of suffering. Life was a losing battle for Heracles, plagued by a series of unbeatable foes.

He found himself, one day, striving to kill the unkillable. The Hydra. Many-headed, it dwelt in a foul swamp and bled poison. Heracles went for the obvious solution: he took a sickle and chopped one head off the beast. Its head landed with a satisfying thump. This will be easy, Heracles thought. One of my twelve labours over before tea-time. He kicked the head aside.

When he looked up again, he realised the magnitude of his task. Two heads had grown back where moments before there had been nothing but a bleeding, fizzing stump.

Fuck, thought Heracles.

Heracles was nothing if not persistent, though. He happened, with a little help from his nephew and wise Athene, upon a solution: kill it with fire.

Each head was hacked off, and the neck cauterised with flame.

The unkillable was slain. Heracles prevailed.

Today, we have beheaded the Hydra: the News of the World, the vile, filthy rag, has closed down. It was, as I had hoped only hours ago, slain by its own rhetoric.

It is only one head of the beast, though, and this head will grow back twofold. As the News of the World dies, another member of Murdoch’s empire will ascend. Murdoch now owns less of the UK media than before, so it becomes more likely that he will be able to finalise his purchase of BSkyB, filling our televisions with yet more of his tawdry, spiteful pap. Another Murdoch Sunday paper will spring up: the Sunday Sun, perhaps, or the Sun on Sunday, or even, given the tabloid’s love for terrible puns, simply the SUNday. It will rise up unless we cauterise the stump.

Even then, it is still a many-headed beast. There is the rest of Murdoch’s empire to take on. And beside those heads, there is that of the Daily Mail, hissing poison and hate. Next to the tabloids sit the broadsheets, chattering vitriol, appearing composed.

And it is more than just the media, this beast. What of the police, with whom money exchanged hands in the News of the World scandal? What of the government, who enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the gutter press?

Most importantly, what of the system, of which these scandals are merely symptoms? Rags like the News of the World would never exist in a world without grasping, greedy capitalism, or misogyny, or racism, or rampant, intrusive voyeurism. These heads need chopping off and purging with fire.

Today we have witnessed something a tiny victory. It may not even be a victory without more of a fight.

Like Heracles, we must keep burning and hacking. He persisted. He had a happy ending. If we keep fighting, so might we.

Girls, pitchforks and media feeding frenzies

I write this piece with a tickle of glee on the inside as I watch the News of the World eat itself and the rest of the media circle to peck over its corpse.

It was not a sudden realisation by the British public that they had been fed crap–vapid crap, dangerous crap, misogynistic crap, downright boring crap–by the News of the World that sparked the fury. It all started with a teenage girl.

I am going to assume that you have read the paper at least once this week, and are aware that the News of the World hacked Milly Dowler’s voicemail, interfering with a police investigation and giving false hope to her worried family. Even by tabloid standards, this was pretty low, and later revelations in the ensuing feeding frenzy showed it was even worse. It is hardly surprising, though.

It took a tragically murdered young woman to make this story interesting. It took a tragically murdered young woman to make this story front page news. It took a tragically murdered young woman to make people care.

This is not surprising in the slightest, either. We have been trained by our media to react when something bad happens to a young woman. Take, for example, newspaper reporting on drug deaths. Such reporting is horribly distorted, with deaths from “media fad” substances grossly overreported, while those from commonplace, “unsexy” substances go unreported. In particular, drug deaths of teenage girls, are hugely, disproportionately reported [article sadly paywalled]. This distortion has an effect on public opinion.

Young women are “ideal victims”. Due to benevolent sexism, when something bad happens to a young woman, it becomes much more shocking and the ensuing moral outrage will be stronger. The media know this, and use this to push their agendas. They may use it as an excuse to name and shame paedophiles, or to campaign against a drug. A bogeyman becomes infinitely worse when he has harmed a young woman.

Trained by this, it took an old story about a murdered young woman to provoke anger at a tabloid which has behaved exactly as it always has.

I feel a frission of schadenfreude as I watch the News of the World strung up by its own rhetoric. It had spent so long trying to shape our opinions by using young women, that it seems fitting that its own undoing was caused by their involvement in a tragic story.

Do I feel uncomfortable that we are playing the tabloids at their own game, sharpening our pitchforks as we, perhaps, capitalise on a tragedy? Of course.

I do, however, want to see the vile, misogynistic, hate-fuelled rag burn.  I am glad it is by the tools that they sold to us.