queer issues – Page 6 – Another angry woman

When #ibelieveher goes out of the window

Content note: This post discusses rape, transphobia, apologism and the effect of not being believed when reporting one’s experiences.

We are seeing a slow shift how we think about survivors, guided by the phrase “I believe her*”. It inverts the status quo; politically siding with survivors, a statement of undoing the way things are by believing the story of a person who we are socialised into not believing. Disbelief in the accounts of survivors of rape, of domestic violence, of child abuse creates the conditions of silence necessary for such abuse to continue. Fear of not being believed is a weapon, wielded by our culture to keep our lips sealed and prevent anything being done about it. It is an attempt to create a safer space.

It is gaining momentum, this culture of believing survivors, and has been broadly adopted by many groups striving for social change. Sadly, while the ethos of believing survivors is perhaps becoming increasingly accepted, the practice itself is often not. We have seen this, for example, too often amid left-wing groups who will happily say they believe survivors until it turns out one of their mates might be a perpetrator, and cognitive somersaults begin in order to justify what is going on.

We see it too when people talk about their experiences of microaggressions. While it’s easy to believe when women talk about gendered microaggressions, those times when we are made to feel less than human by something which is often dismissed as trivial by patriarchal society, this is not extended to women experiencing intersecting oppressions. We see, for example, trans women talking of feeling invalidated and attacked by high-profile cis women to a reboant chorus of dismissal. Far from being believed in these scenarios, trans women end up being on the receiving end of the same old apologist tropes: the victim blaming, the trivialisation, the gaslighting and the flat-out denials. We see similar things happening to women of colour, to disabled women, to sex workers and queer women. Suddenly, it’s not “I believe her”. It’s a demand for a case laid out, meticulous documentation of “evidence”. If evidence is produced, it is thrown as an overreaction or not really evidence at all. Or perhaps everything is explained at the survivor having somehow “brought it on herself” by not behaving exactly according to some unwritten, unknowable, ever-shifting code.

It’s the same tune played on a different instrument. Whatever happened to “I believe her” in these situations?

As a cis white woman, sometimes I find it difficult to recognise where exactly the problem lies. I am not sensitive to some microaggressions, because I am not subjected to them day after day after fucking day. I am never on the receiving end of cissexism or racism, and, as such, sometimes I fail to recognise very veiled abuse. Which is precisely why, when a woman of colour or a trans woman says it is happening, I believe her.

As a cis white woman, it’s not my place to explain that something isn’t racist or cissexist, because I don’t get to define what these things are, and what is crossing a line and what is not. So, when I listen to a survivor, I believe her.

I feel like this is the least I can do. I’ve had experience with not being believed, I’ve had experience of being on the wrong end of victim blaming, I’ve been gaslit and dismissed when I talk about horrible things which have happened to me. I know how awful it can be, that sense that either the world will end or you will, that you’re mad and you’re wrong and you’re twisted and disgusting. I also know that feeling of the light coming in as you hear the magic words “I believe you”. Not being believed hurts like fuck, and being believed makes the pain more bearable, like you might just be able to get through it. It’s helpful when someone else sees the gas go down, too, even if they don’t quite understand it as well as you do.

And so these are the principles I use. I believe those who talk about microaggressive abuse. I believe those who talk about rape. I believe survivors. I believe her.

*This is not to say abuse does not happen to people who use male and non-binary pronouns. Of course it does, and the sense of belief ought to be extended to anyone reporting such experiences. However, this short phrase also encapsulates the gendered nature of such abuse.

Fears for the future of queer liberation

So, we’ve done it. We’ve won. Everything is OK, let us cheer from the rooftops and celebrate.

Same sex marriage has been voted into UK law, and apparently I’m supposed to feel happy about this.

And yet it leaves a fairly bitter taste in my mouth, niggling anxieties about the future, a deep unease that far from this being better it may actually make things worse for a lot of us.

I get that some of you are delighted by this, and I’m happy for you. Your kink is not my kink, but your kink is OK. If that’s what you want to do, that’s fine. Just please think about the consequences, both concrete and mere possibilities.

First things first, let’s not call what passed into law “marriage equality”. It means that a relationship between two people of the same sex can be legally recognised as the same as a relationship between two people of the opposite sex. To some, this might sound like equality. These people are not recognising the vast and complex forms that human interaction may take, the sheer breadth of family structures that are possible (and, for many, a lived experience). Marriage is still as inaccessible today as it was yesterday to so many of us–and the resulting perks.

It gets even worse for some trans people. Included in the law is a clause which can spell disaster for trans people: the spousal veto. In order to have your gender legally recognised, you need permission of your spouse. These statistics from@zoejrobinson, via the Coalition For Equal Marriage should demonstrate why this is such a problem. Marriage requires signing over a basic human right to a spouse, and grants the spouse a power to deny you the right to legal recognition of your gender, if they don’t like it. And this problem only applies to a certain set of the population. Yet they are ignored and thrown under the bus, utterly erased by the complete misnomer of pretending this thing is “equal marriage”. No matter how many times they say it’s equal, it doesn’t become so.

And yet, there is a pervasive mentality that we’ve won. It is being treated by many as a glorious victory in the last great battle. For some, it is exactly this, and they are the lucky ones. I fear that we will lose momentum entirely now that same sex marriage is law, having lost these loud voices who have got what they wanted. I fear that there will be no further demands made with the level of resources that were poured into achieving this demand, which is on a par with getting a cat to shit in the litter tray: something which should have been happening all along.

I fear that any movement towards queer liberation will halt. Examine this tweet and image from charity Stonewall. Many prefer to call the organisation S’onewall, due to its complete erasure of trans people. Look at them eagerly thanking the lovely kind state for throwing them a pitiful scrap which they have climbed over a mountain of fellow queers to grasp at. Remember what they named themselves after, and laugh a bitter, hollow chuckle as you remember whose name they appropriated, whose history they all but deny.

There was once a time when we demanded liberation rather than equality. We demanded expression rather than assimilation. The chorus of celebration of same sex marriage rings loudly, and silences these demands that some of us still wish to make. I don’t want equality within a fundamentally flawed system. I want to be free. I want to be able to be myself, to live and love without constraints. I want to exist free from coercion into a certain living arrangement which does not suit me, one which the state is increasingly attempting to force me into. I want to live without fear.

I worry that same sex marriage may have devastating consequences for those of us who choose not to marry. There will be financial and material consequences: machinations are underway to further incentivise marriage with a carrot in among the sticks. There will likely also be social consequences. It is hardly news to people in marginalised groups that those who are able to assimilate are those who are most accepted. Legally speaking, there is now nothing standing in our way of riding the relationship escalator in exactly the same way as straight people. Will those of us who do not be penalised? I don’t doubt that we will, and it frightens me that I am one of these freaks of society, one of those who will not be grudgingly accepted by the heterosexist mainstream because I am not marching to the beat of their monotonous drum.

And I fear that many of my GLb comrades will no longer care about those that have been left behind in this relentless pursuit of assimilation at the expense of liberation. I fear a loss of solidarity, of being told to swallow what I was given because this was my choice just as countless bigots have told us before. Heterosexuals and gay people alike have, all along the way, policed my articulation of my concerns. I do not feel like they would support those of us who have been left behind in their journey. I fear that everything will stop, even as there is so much more to do both locally and globally.

I would love to be proved wrong. I would love for this to have been just a muster in a bid for liberation. Yet again and again history has proved that things do not happen like this. So I remain unrepentantly unhappy with this state of affairs, groping in the dark for comrades who will have my back. Plotting revolution, plotting freedom and fervently hoping that in this broken world that I stay safe and survive.

Dear Aiden Russell

Dear Aiden Russell,

You’re a bellend. A big, throbbing, cheesy bellend. You are a suppurating boil on the arse of humanity, a yellow stain on a white vest on a hot day, an eggy guff on a morning commute.

Also, you are a massive bigot. Yes, I said it. I can almost taste your tears from here, and it’s enough to make me want to gag, tasting as they do of wet dogs and anchovy-brine. You don’t like being called a bigot, do you Aiden? I’ve seen your picture of you whinging about being silenced. It must be hard for you, being dealt the cruel hand of being a massive fucking bigot and also not even having a semblance of a clue.

You see, Aiden, you are a bigot. It’s not silencing you to say that. You are free to go about your day, being a bigot. You can go about ineffectually seeking to deny dignity to queer folk all you like, desperately promoting some sort of right to refuse service to us as you and the handful of other bigots try to unionise to an almost-complete public indifference. You can run your sockpuppet account expressing your pride to be heterosexual: goodness knows, you have nothing else to be proud of. And you can try to blame the fact you’re a bigot on Muslims, because you’re probably a racist, too. Bigotry overlaps, you see, Aiden.

You’re more than welcome to do this, Aiden, because of free speech.

But guess what? We’re more than welcome to call you out on it, because of free speech. And you’re homophobic, Aiden. You’re very, very homophobic. You want to deny rights to people because of their sexual orientation. And you’re allowed to think that, but it makes you an enormous, pulsating ballbag.

And as time passes by, your views are becoming outmoded. More and more people are wising up to the fact that you and your ever-decreasing ilk are chatting shit. Hell, even a lot of bigots have evolved beyond your point, moving instead to more insipid ways of oppressing queer folk. You’d be almost quaint, Aiden, if you weren’t such a rampaging nipple.

For someone who has been silenced, Aiden, you are remarkably loud, and this is because you know you haven’t been. You are just, like others of your kind, terrified of accountability and so therefore casting yourself as a victim.

You wouldn’t know hate if it booted you in the head, straight man.

I do not doubt that you will consider the fact people think you’re a gnawing cockcanoe to be more evidence of silencing, but this betrays just how little you understand what free speech is. It isn’t just for you, you see, Aiden. It’s for us. And it’s what lets us speak out against you. Do you hate free speech, Aiden?

Yours, with contempt,

Stavvers

Is the same sex marriage bill shit on purpose?

Today our parliament votes and debates on the issue of same sex marriage yet again. Watching the last debate was just slightly better than having a chisel inserted under my toenails to a soundtrack of Enya, so I’m more likely to be watching this today.

The whole debate lays bare a lot of ugly prejudices still rampant in our society. Most obvious–to the point where the normally-oblivious mainstream media and many normally-oblivious politicians have noticed–is the homophobia from the opposition to the bill. They dress up their concerns in the language of protecting the institution of the family or fretting about the relationship with the church, as though a family can only be defined by a very narrow heterosexist standard and the church weren’t just an antediluvian bunch of poorly-dressed ringpieces. Indeed, the prejudice is so naked, I am surprised there are no petitions on change.org to protect our children from seeing its rude bits.

It’s so easy to spot–and argue against–the bigotry of the opposition that the more insidious nonsense coming from supporters of the bill gets overlooked. Supporters of the bill have been gleefully throwing poly people under the bus once again, setting us up as a deviant bogeyman in a common trick used in this sort of discourse.

The bill is also bad news for trans people. Sarah Brown has compiled a non-exhaustive list of some of the myriad problems that the proposed legislation might bring for trans people. At best, it does little to ameliorate the minefield trans people must negotiate in order to win recognition for their relationships. At worst, it makes things actively worse, bestowing a power of veto on a partner’s transition.

For these reasons, I cannot call what is being proposed marriage equality. It is nothing of the sort. Let us call it same sex marriage, for that is what it is.

On top of all of this, there is a growing sense that even those putting the bill forward want it to fail. An amendment was added to the bill–quite possibly a wrecking amendment–to bring in heterosexual civil partnerships. I am fairly indifferent to this amendment, much as I am to the entire law. However, it seems about as harmlessly inconsequential as same sex marriage itself. It has driven those who put the bill forward into a frenzy, actively threatening to pull the bill based on really shaky reasoning: it might cost more money, and nobody wants it anyway. The cost argument looks fairly nonsensical, as if they have just pulled a bunch of numbers out of their arses like a string of magician’s handkerchiefs. Further arguments against this come in the form of crying about how it will damage the institution of marriage. In short, it is all of the same crap which is bandied about in arguments against same sex marriage.

And this is because society has a pretty dreadful attitude to how relationships should look. It lays bare the true function of same sex marriage: as a reward for the same sex couples who have successfully managed to behave in the way society deems appropriate. These lucky few can be welcomed with open arms into what is deemed normal, as they have danced all of the correct steps and followed the designated live script. They are not like those queers, those fags and those dykes and those queens who will not conform. And so the state throws them a little bone because heterosexism is rife and they are relieved to have their prejudices relatively unchallenged.

I have said a thousand times before that I would sooner see the entire institution of marriage crumble to allow us to be truly free to define how we love. I do not believe that this law being debated will do much positive to many, but on the other hand, it is unlikely to actively increase prejudice. There are some–those privileged few who seem to control the discourse–who will claim the battle is won, and good for them. Perhaps this means the rest of us can now fight our battles without our voices drowned out, and reclaim Stonewall from its name profaned by an organisation which gladly sweeps so much of our history under the carpet. Perhaps we can fight to be treated like humans and love as we fucking well please.

So in my own way, I am rooting for this bill to go through as it will piss off some fairly obnoxious people. At the front of my mind, though, is the knowledge that it is not enough. Nowhere near enough.

When silencing isn’t silencing and sisterhood isn’t sisterhood

A few weeks ago, I expressed some fear that perhaps the cis supremacists might be winning. Nothing has happened since then to allay these doubts: in fact, if anything, I am even more convinced that feminism has an enormous problem in its camp that some are doing all they can to keep raging.

Once again, I am not going to name names or link links, as the climate in which I write this post is somewhat sour, and it feels like any attempt to address the shit that is in our backyard is automatically taken as some sort of unsisterly “attack”, and cries of silencing abound.

Well, the thing is, when expressing some opinions, people should feel silenced. This is definitely the case with bigotry. Compare the rallying cry of the Daily Mail commenter, whining that one “cannot say anything any more” with how some cis feminists have reacted to being called out . It all comes from the same place, a sense of entitlement to being able to crap all over other people, because you and yours are clearly the most important people in the world.

And accusations of being unsisterly are just as absurd. As Stillicides so eloquently put it, sisters don’t have to get on. The belief that unpleasant opinions should not be challenged–and that it some kind of attack–if they are put forward by a woman is patently bollocks. Is it really OK for Nadine Dorries to poke around in our uteruses just because she is a woman? Should we just let her keep on going with this just because she is a woman? Of course fucking not, because it’s fucking dangerous rhetoric and absolutely should be challenged.

But, just as Dorries complained of victimisation because of our uterine missives, we see a lot of complaints of vicitimisation at calling out privilege and behaviour which–whether intentional or not–oppresses other women.

Being called out on bigotry may make you feel a bit bad. Hell, it might ruin your fucking day. But what it is you are being called out on ruins lives. Cissexism/transphobia, racism, classism, whorephobia, all of these oppressions are shit that a lot of women face on a daily basis from society at large, and then also from within feminism. It’s hardly sisterly to make these women feel like shit repeatedly just because you don’t really want to critically examine how you could be contributing to making them feel like shit.

And it’s hardly fucking silencing to have to shut the fuck up and apologise once in a while. What is silencing is telling a lot of women–women already struggling uphill–that their problems do not matter, that your own privileged freedom of speech is far more important. It is strange how listening to a diversity of opinions in feminism does not include listening to why bigotry is just not OK.

The people who are actually silenced and alienated by such challenges are precisely the people who need our help the most, whose voices we need to amplify rather than silence: trans women, women of colour, queer women, disabled women, women experiencing the diverse and horrid rainbow of intersectional oppression.

I am not sure why there is such a prolific belief that bigoted and problematic views cannot be challenged when articulated by a feminist. I understand fully that it is quite, quite horrible to realise that you’re actually part of the problem, but there are two ways to resolve this dissonance. The first is what too many people are doing: pretend that all of this criticism is unfounded. The second is what will actually make feminism stronger and help it to include all women: accept the criticism and try to change.

We have thrown far too many women under the bus already, when in fact what we should be doing is hijacking that bus and driving it at full throttle into the barrier marked KYRIARCHY.

Call-out week: a semi-coherent series of things on my mind

Same sex marriage and heterosexism in the UK

Later today, the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill will have its crucial second reading. This legislation would give same sex couples the same marriage rights as heterosexual couples.

I’ve written before about why I find same sex marriage to be an inherently conservative demand, and I suspect this bill will ultimately go through precisely because of this. It doesn’t make any structural changes to the existing social order, rewards gay couples for behaving in a way which society deems palatable, and manages to appear progressive. It’s a win all round for the powerful.

Despite this, antediluvian bigotry still exists: up to 180 Tories may vote against the bill later today. There’s no good reason for doing this, given the benefits the Tories can reap from bringing in same-sex marriage. It’s just plain homophobia, dressed up in concern about the meaning of marriage and other such nonsense. This tripe from Philip “porn throne” Blond and Roger “cockend” Scruton exemplifies some of the best intellectual argument against same sex marriage from the right, and it’s just circular rubbish, because it’s not a rational position. It’s also telling that the party has decided to make the vote on this bill a free vote: this way they can have it both ways. They can appeal to the bigots while still appearing to be the heroes of gay rights. It’s a smart move, politically. The whole thing has been expertly stage-managed.

I will be watching the debate with interest, though. Despite the stage management, this bigotry is still very real, and I would like to get the measure of exactly who it is so set in archaic prejudice that they cannot even vote through this piss-weak bit of legislation. Every single one of the fuckers who votes against this is nothing more than a common-or-garden bigot, worthy only of contempt and a shower of glitter.

When the bill passes, though, it is not a sign that heterosexism is dead in the UK, and that we can dance until we expire in an ecstasy of celebration. Far from it. This symbolic piece of legislation is merely cheap wallpaper pasted onto rubble of a house that had fell down years ago. Heterosexism is alive and well in the UK, we’d just rather not think about its victims.

Take, for instance, this story from yesterday. The UK Border Agency demands proof of sexual orientation from asylum seekers fleeing persecution for being gay. Because of this, asylum seekers are feeling like they have to film themselves having sex to prove that they are gay. And if they’re unable to prove it, they are sent right back off to face violence and persecution. In fact, there’s actually no evidence to suggest that even the sex tapes are considered adequate proof of sexual orientation, and it’s entirely possible that these people, too, were sent away. This system, by the way, is seen as an improvement on how it was three years ago, where gay asylum seekers were sent off and told to “behave with discretion”.

The entire thing is inhumane, and absolutely steeped in heterosexism. The assumption that there’s an objective proof that you’re not “normal”. The probing, invasive ways of trying to find out what it is that makes these people different. The idea that there’s a way of being “properly” gay in the first place. The implications for those sent back, after having been submitted to a “gay test”. It’s humiliating, degrading, and I’m finding it hard to articulate exactly how disgusted I am by the fact that this is still ongoing. I find myself wondering if they’ve thought at all about this policy, and I don’t know if it’s better or worse if they have.

Yet because this heterosexism intersects with racism and the violence of the state, we’re not hearing a peep about it from the mainstream charities who ostensibly campaign for gay rights. It’s just a lot easier for privileged people to give a shit about other privileged people getting married than it is to think about intersecting oppressions.

Stories like this are far from uncommon, but they don’t happen to the nice, presentable face of the movement, so it’s easy to forget how utterly broken the whole stinking heteroheap of society is. Scratch the surface, and oppression is still rife. All the gay weddings in the world aren’t going to fix that.

So you’ll forgive me for not having the champagne on ice, ready for when the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill gets a little closer to being passed later today. It just reminds me of how much further we have to go before we’re free.

I learned the word “heteroheap” here, and I recommend you watch this deliciously queer extravaganza as a perfect antidote to my general parade-pissing today.

Please, media, separate kink (and its problems) from 50 Shades of Grey

I wrote a while back about how the media have got all excited over 50 Shades Of Grey because it portrays a view of sexuality which is not too far removed from the patriarchal norm, yet is a little bit titillatingly different. With the book having sold approximately 19 billion copies, and it having been read by everyone who has ever lived or died, from the smallest amoebae to sentient gas nebulae, this media dribbling is showing no sign of abating.

This week, I have seen two stories about legal cases, where the words 50 SHADES OF GREY have been breathily splashed in a headline-grabbing bonanza.

First, there is the case of Steven Lock, who was cleared in court of actual bodily harm for whipping a sex partner. From what information is available about his defence, it seems that he and his partner read the book, and decided to play in a Master/slave relationship. In the incident brought to court, he beat the woman with a rope, and she did not safeword, saying:

“I knew there would be pain involved and I knew I wasn’t going to like it but I’d agreed to it and had to follow it through.”

Two problems spring to mind here, neither of which is being discussed at all by the mainstream press as they’re a little too excited by throwing in pop cultural references wherever they can. First and foremost is a possible issue surrounding safewords: sometimes people don’t feel able to use them. Of course, sometimes people don’t want to use them, and playing without a safeword can be very fun with a trusted partner. However, it’s also very important to build an environment where the bottom can choose to end the encounter if they want to, when they want to. That consent can be withdrawn whenever a person wants to withdraw consent. Anything other than this is abusive.

The second issue here is that it has not been reported who brought the complaint. Unfortunately, apart from that one quote, it’s not been possible to discern the woman’s side, with much of the information being provided coming from Lock and his legal team. As I understand it, the charges don’t have to be brought by the survivor of actual bodily harm, but by someone else. The implications of whether the woman or someone else brought the charges are stark: were it the woman, it’s a fucking travesty that this guy got off. Were it someone else, it’s entirely possible that this is a problem faced by the kink community: criminalisation of consensual sexual behaviour. Even consensual bruises can be criminal if someone chooses to police it. [EDIT: comment from jemima101 provides more information, which suggests that this is a plain old abuse case, and not the latter. So it’s a fucking travesty of justice that the state thing someone asked for due to not understanding the issues at hand.]

It would be far easier to formulate an opinion on this case were the media bothering to ask these questions and address these issues rather than focus on a popular book.

Still, at least that case was actually tangentially related to 50 Shades of Grey, unlike this horrible thing which happened in Sweden, where a woman died during an SM session. From her diary, it appears that the play that she and the man accused participated in was not consensual on her part. At no point in the story is that popular book mentioned, yet this is inexplicably the headline, the first line and the picture of the report on the story in the Independent.

Abuse in kink is an issue which needs to be addressed, just as abuse in any community needs to be addressed. By the looks of it, this woman’s death was an instance of abuse which had nothing to do with 50 Shades of Grey and everything to do with plain old abuse that doesn’t sell newspapers.

Unfortunately, to the media, kink and that fucking book are inextricably linked which means that an opportunity for honest discussion of issues within a community in the mainstream is sacrificed at the expense of a desperate attempt to be relevant. They ignore the diversity of sexual experiences–both positive and negative–at the expense of something which they know will grab attention.

It’s only on the fringes that the discussion of experience, unclouded by sensationalism can take place. This is hardly just true of kink, it’s an entrenched problem as the traditional media becomes increasingly irrelevant to many. To save itself, the media must catch up and try to listen to the voices of those who have greater knowledge of the issues at hand.

In which the police do nothing but endanger a survivor

The police have been watching Youtube, and spotted a video of a young man being homophobically abused by a self-styled “Muslim patrol”. In their keenness to prosecute, they have done something unforgivably awful. The man who received the abuse has not come forward, so the police have released his picture in an attempt to get him to do so.

This is vile behaviour on a number of levels. There is absolutely no respect for the man’s decision not to come forward, a decision which many survivors of many crimes of structural violence make. These decisions are often made for good reasons: the police are pretty fucking awful on taking such crimes seriously for the most part, and as a result, many people who experience oppression mistrust the police. Maybe the man who has had his picture out there did not trust the police to treat what happened to him sensitively or effectively, and the benefits of engaging with the police vastly outweighed the costs.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that the police actively harm and harass people who are already on the receiving end of a whole heap of structural violence. The police are just another gang of oppressors, albeit worse-dressed. I doubt putting this man’s pictures everywhere is going to endear the police to him, when it strikes me that this is nothing more than another form of using their power to harass.

And what if the man was not out? What if he wanted to remain anonymous for the simple fact that nobody knew of his sexual orientation and he preferred it that way? What if he has good reasons for not being out–such as not wanting to be on the receiving end of further violence? What if the police just outed someone because they felt that whatever they’re trying to do is more important than respecting this person’s privacy?

What the police have done here is betray a staggering lack of respect for the private life of an individual they are disingenuously pretending to be helping. A part of me hopes that this was simply that they didn’t think things through, because the alternative is too grim to consider. Did they do this, knowing how dangerous it would be for the man in the picture, in the hope of ratcheting up the abuse and forcing him to come forward?

What they have done here is demonstrate, once again, whose side they are on. It is not the side of survivors, but their own side, and they’ll shit all over survivors to get what they want.

On Jodie Foster, coming out, and privacy

At the Golden Globes the other day, Jodie Foster gave a touching, heartwarming speech, looking back on her life so far and forward to the future [transcript here]. She spoke with a rare kind of emotional honesty about living in the spotlight, and how things might change now that she’s fifty and had finally publicly announced that she is gay. It was a very sweet, and I kind of welled up a bit over it.

Foster touched on some very interesting issues in her speech, in particular, this:

“…be a big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers and then gradually, proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now I’m told, apparently, that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show

…

“But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy.”

While the speech was treated as a “coming out” speech, it actually wasn’t anything of the sort. Jodie Foster was hardly in the closet, she just didn’t want to make a big public announcement. And that’s perfectly OK, as it’s her life and it’s none of our fucking business how she lives it. From her speech, it sounds like it has been a happy life, with a lot of love, and I suppose I’m happy for her for wanting to share that, but if she didn’t want to reveal details of her personal life to billions of people, that’s perfectly all right too. It’s her life.

Unfortunately, the Guardian, desperate to retain its high from the Suzanne Moore and Julie Burchill linkbait trolling exercise, decided to publish a piece with a rather more unpleasant line. Enable an ad-blocking add-on if you want to click, they’ll probably be able to tell from their metrics.

Poor little Patrick Strudwick is rather upset by the speech, and seems to believe that by not press releasing every detail of her life, Jodie Foster has got people killed.

But I could not ignore the message forming in my head from a careers-worth of interviewees – from Jamaican lesbians “correctively” raped, from Cameroonian gay men tortured by police, from the mother of Matthew Shepard, murdered by homophobes and left tied up in a Wyoming field – the message bellowed out: you had choices. You could have left acting at a young age, already rich and cosseted, to live an authentic life. You could have had that privacy if it were that important to you. You could have come out, easing the way for others like you. Instead, you chose your career, and you lied by omission about your orientation.

…

It is every gay public figure’s social responsibility to be out, to make life better for those without publicists and pilates teachers. Those who cry, “It’s none of your business! Who cares who I sleep with?!” shirk their public duty, and deny the shame that keeps the closet door shut. Do straight people consider their orientation private? You cannot skip the tough part of a human rights struggle. I long for being gay to be nobody’s business, to not matter, but we’re a long way off. You either do your bit, and in the case of an A-list actor, that means blazing a trail for other performers, or you remain concealed, bleating about privacy.

There is so much wrong with this argument that it is difficult to know where to begin. Let’s start with Strudwick rehashing that tired old line that the media love to use to justify their grotesque invasions of privacy: that if they choose to be famous, they’ve agreed to have their privacy invaded and every single detail about their lives is fair game. By agreeing to act in films, this argument goes, they have also consented to long-lens photography of family holidays, and so forth. It’s a feeble justification for some vicious behaviour, yet the media rather like to get their scoops on who has gained weight recently and would rather not see this changing any time soon, so will continue to say this over and over again as if they had to wait for someone to make the choice to share information with everyone they would likely sell fewer vile rags.

Coming out, and being out are very personal decisions. Forcing people to be out is just as bad as forcing people to be in the closet: the decision of who to tell should be down to the person and them alone. The talk of a duty to be out is frightening and reprehensible. It’s not a duty, it’s not a responsibility, it’s a decision for each person to make and choose what’s right for them. Being queer sucks enough in this heterosexist environment; we don’t need the gay police explaining exactly what we have to do, if we don’t want people to get killed.

The fact is, nobody was killed because Jodie Foster didn’t throw a big “I AM GAY EVERYONE LOOK AT ME I’M GAY” parade 30 years ago, inviting all of the world’s media to document the occasion. The problem is structural oppression, which is the exact reason many people in the public eye may be reticent to come out in the first place. In this heterosexist society, anyone who does not live a life according to the heterosexual script is seen as somehow weird. At worst, there is outright aggression and violence. At best, queer people become an endless source of fascination. Had Jodie Foster press-released her sexual orientation earlier in her life, I imagine that there would have been a far greater invasion of her privacy–and that of her family–in the vein of OH LOOK THIS IS HOW LESBIANS RAISE CHILDREN. I can imagine that suddenly she would be unable to get roles as a female romantic lead–one of the few roles available for women in Hollywood–because of OH LOOK SHE’S A LESBIAN KISSING A MAN SHE MUST FIND THAT ICKY. I can see why she wouldn’t want that, and her life was no less authentic for having made this decision.

We have no right to hear details about someone else’s sexual orientation. Heterosexism just pretends that we do. This is why “coming out” is a thing, and why nobody has any obligation to do so.

How to be better: on intersectionality, privilege and silencing

It’s been brewing for a while. The backlash is on, and this time it’s coming from inside what is nominally “our” camp. The problem? Some people, it seems, just don’t get intersectionality. They hate it when they’re called out on privilege, and they try their best to shut down or derail any of the discussions. It’s hard to work out where it started, but I think it’s something to do with the festival of rightful criticism thrown at Mehdi Hasan (thinks he has a right to peek into our uteruses) and Caitlin Moran (more on her later). Those with the double whammy of privilege and platform have all closed ranks, and entered onto the offensive.

First of all, we have Vagenda Magazine, a feminism-lite blog with a platform in the New Statesman. Vagenda today published a defence of Caitlin Moran. It wasn’t exactly a very good defence, as they completely neglected to explain why Moran was being criticised, which includes but is not limited to that awful, awful book, casual transphobia, comparing gay men to sea monkeys, liberal use of words like “retard”, and, the latest offence, saying she “literally couldn’t give a shit” about representation of women of colour in the media. All of these actively contribute to the oppression of people. Some of these people will, inevitably, be women.

But no. Vagenda Magazine think it’s unfair to criticise Moran for this, because taking an intersectional approach to feminism is too hard. It’s too academic, apparently, and one could never go into a school and explain, Vagenda complains. Yes, they actually said that:

Going into certain state comps and discussing the nuances of intersectionality isn’t going to have much dice if some of the teenage girls in the audience are pregnant, or hungry, or at risk of abuse (what are they going to do? Protect or feed themselves with theory? Women cannot dine on Greer alone.)

So much wrong with this sentence it’s hard to work out where to start. They’re repeating a tired old criticism which has always been levelled at feminism–that people won’t understand it and that it’s too academic. We all know that argument is bollocks. Vagenda have also managed to imply that young women at a state comprehensive are somehow too stupid to understand intersectional feminism, which is again patently bollocks.

The thing is, intersectionality is fairly intuitive when one experiences intersectional oppression. Things suck harder. I only learned the word for the fact that things suck harder when you’re not just a woman, but also black, or gay, or trans, or disabled, and so forth fairly recently. And it delighted me. I was glad there was a name for this phenomenon I’d noticed. I also only learned the word privilege fairly recently, and the word “cis”, and do you know what? Again, I was glad, because there was a word for these little things I felt that actually gave me a leg up in life.

It’s not difficult at all. In fact, one can think about a four-way junction (or, as the Americans call it, an intersection). One road is not being male. Another road is not being white. Another road is not being able-bodied. The last road is not being cis. Now, if you stand in the middle of any one of these roads, you’re going to be dodging traffic. But if you stand right in the middle of the junction, you have cars coming at you from four ways, and you’re going to have to do a fuckload more dodging than you would have if you were just in one road.

I don’t know if that’s why it’s called intersectionality, but if not, it should be.

Vagenda think we shouldn’t be too hard on Moran, though, because:

Caitlin Moran may not be perfect, but she has come closest thus far… Moran at least speaks a language that we all understand

If by “we”, they mean the privileged women with a national platform, then yes, they understand it. But not if you’re one of the groups Moran doesn’t give a shit about. At best, it’s dismissive. At worst, it’s actively oppressing others. I mean, fucking hell. Imagine if Jeremy Clarkson had said some of the shit Moran said. Imagine if David Cameron said it in a speech. We’d be rightly yelling at them, at best.

Vagenda didn’t like the criticism they received, though. They were dismissive, saying it was “the same clique of angry people“. They wanted me to shut the fuck up explaining intersectionality in under 140 characters, so said I should email them instead…

Which brings me on to the other ghastly article about privilege I’ve seen this week. The Guardian ran a piece entitled “Online bullying–a new and ugly sport for liberal commentators“. What is this online bullying from liberals, you ask?

It’s publicly calling someone out for using problematic language or forgetting to check their privilege, apparently. Basically, the author thinks that we should always criticise for email rather than publicly, we shouldn’t be angry, and we should stop suggesting to put trigger warnings above potentially triggering material, because she’s trying really hard. Again, imagine for a second Jeremy Clarkson had written such an article. We’d be nailing his balls to a wall for such a tirade.

It’s ultimately a method of silencing criticism, of pointing out unchecked privilege. Now, bullying in my book has always involved someone exerting their power over another. And here’s a relatively privileged woman using a national platform to silence people who are levelling rightful criticism from those with less privilege. Not cool.

There’s good reason for criticism to be public. If the problem is public, why shouldn’t the criticism be public? While banging my head against the wall with Vagenda earlier, a fair few people saw my tweets and thanked me for explaining what intersectionality was in 14o characters or fewer. We all learn from one another, and criticism of something public can and should be public.

As for the tone policing, I’m always aghast when people don’t want to understand why others are angry. Guess what? Oppression is kind of infuriating. Furthermore, the anger often comes from frustration: from hitting a brick wall where a privileged person says “yeah, well I don’t see that so you’re wrong”. It’s OK to be angry. It’s natural to be angry. It’s not cool for privileged people to say you have no right to be angry.

I’m fucking furious, and proud.

Ultimately, I don’t get why some people don’t want to hear criticism. There is a huge difference between criticism and personal attacks, between criticism and misogyny. Criticism, if we learn to embrace it, makes us stronger. It is not the job of others to check our privilege for us, but it’s our own, so it’s, frankly, a fucking favour when people call us out on it. And if we listen and engage, it will make us all the better.

And what does that entail? It’s actually fairly simple. It involves a willingness to learn–not to say you don’t give a shit about something you don’t know about, but to want to learn about. It involves thinking about your own privilege, watching your own language, and not getting pissed off at others when you slip up. It involves knowing when to shut the fuck up.

Yes, we all fuck up, and nobody’s perfect, but embrace that criticism and learn from it and it will make you a better person.

Sometimes it’s hard to confront your own privilege, particularly when your life sucks because of one form of oppression you experience. But know that there are other forms of oppression that you are lucky not to have a fucking clue what the experience is like. Fuck the radfem mentality, or the privileged queer “let’s get married, everything else is fine” mentality, or the “no war but class war” mentality. All of these oppressions overlap, and fucks people over in different ways.

It’s telling that those rejecting intersectional oppression also happen to be the ones who probably don’t experience it. It’s also hugely fucking unfortunate that these are the people controlling the discourse.

In terms of the life lottery, I can hardly say I’m a winner, but I’m not doing too badly all things considered. Yes, I’m a woman and I’m queer and I have a chronic medical condition, but I’m also cis and white and thin and have enough money to survive. I think I’m reasonably aware of my privileges, but I know I’m not perfect. So if you see me fuck up, if you see me cissplaining or using problematic language or failing to check my white privilege, then call me out on it. Publicly, if you want. Loudly, if you want. I will do my best to understand how I fucked up and try to be a better ally.

Calling out privilege isn’t a threat. Intersectionality isn’t a threat. Instead of calling for unity around the privileged few to stop the infighting, why don’t we try to mitigate privilege and try to be better?

Further reading:
Flavia Dzodan: My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit
blackfeminists: Dear Vagenda editors…
sian and crooked rib: It’s not infighting to call each other out
Boldly Go: “Liberal bullying” nonsense
Interview with Kimberle Crenshaw on intersectionality. She coined the phrase, and it was referring to roads!
Ally Fogg: Intersectionality? It’s been a privilege.

Mad propz to Mediocre Dave for the Clarkson analogy. It’s a very good way of thinking about it and I like it so much I put it in my blog.

Also, I left a comment on the Graun article, and I’m disappointed that it hasn’t been upvoted as much as I’d like, so if you love me, get clicking. /shamelessselfpromotion