"Have you ever been raped?"

NB: This post is more a series of connected thoughts than a coherent argument. I was just struck by some links between random areas of my life.

For a long time, I never referred to myself as a feminist. I preferred to say I was an egalitarian, as I believe men and women possess some different and some similar characteristics but you should never assume someone's gender automatically determines their actions. In addition, just because a man may act one way and a woman another, it doesn't mean that either course of action, or the characteristics that lead to them taking it is more valuable. Societies are unequal when acting in a certain way or displaying a particular characteristic is seen as preferable and normal. Being egalitarian seemed to confuse people, so I eventually gave up and started calling myself a feminist.

I never subscribed to the argument that, physically, women could ever be as strong as men. It can happen, but from all the time I've spent fighting men in Judo, I know it's not that common. But, as a woman, I can move faster, I'm more flexible. And depending on the build of the man I'm fighting, I can be stronger. In short, everything is relative. If my technique is better, I can win. If I fight more intelligently, I can win. In Judo, it's possible, because strength is not paramount. In boxing, however, I would never feel comfortable fighting a man in a proper fight. They'll always be able to hit harder than me, because more of their body consists of muscle. A certain amount of power in the punch comes from your legs. My legs are bigger than most guys I've boxed with, but I store fat there, they just have muscle. Where they have pecs, I have breasts. They don't tone up so well, even if I wanted them to. Unless I all-out body build, I reckon a bloke the same weight and height as me will always hit harder.

It seems I'm not the only one who has noticed this unwillingness to admit the differences. In his latest, really excellent A Point of View", Clive James points out the importance of democracy to feminism by celebrating the election of the first four women MPs to the Kuwaiti Parliament. You have to install RealPlayer to listen to it, but it really is worth it. He gently criticises those feminists in the West who think liberal democracies are not liberal enough.

He makes the point that where violence holds sway, rather than argument, women are always worse off. Even when violence is not the ruling force, you can't argue away the differences. Listening to this broadcast in the car on the way home, a lot of thoughts that had been swimming idly around in my head like lazy tadpoles suddenly coagulated into a shoal of thought with some purpose.

Mainlining The Wire on DVD lately has frightened me because, for the majority of characters in it, death is a constant threat. I know they exist in a world that is a) not necessarily real and b) not mine, but it reached the point where I started feeling the only reason I was alive was because no one had decided to shoot me yet. I haven't done anything to deserve being shot, that I'm aware of, but the frequency of death in the show brought home how fragile life is. There are not many female characters in it, but it does show at times that, give a woman a gun and she can murder indiscriminately with the best of them.

I also recently finished watching Firefly and the last two episodes gave me pause for thought. In the penultimate one, a band of whores fights attempts by a local man with money to try to steal a baby from one of them. They are presented as legitimate business women refusing to kneel under the yoke of a male oppressor. Again, give a woman a gun and she can murder, though this time discriminately, with the best of them. It's all relative. Guns take away the advantage of strength. Clive James makes the same point.

In the final episode, a bounty hunter lands on Serenity and breaks into the ship. He knocks out the captain and sets about disabling the crew in one way or another. In a truly horrible scene, he says to Kaylee, the ship's female mechanic "Have you ever been raped?" in the same way you might say "Have you ever eaten Thai food?" It got me thinking, if someone spoke to me like that, discussing it casually, making it sound inevitable, what would my reaction be? Would I fight them? Would I acquiesce? Patrick and I had a discussion a long time ago about whether we'd be murdered or raped. As I recall, he could come to a definite answer. I really couldn't.

The bounty hunter even says at one point "Men are always stronger than women. Yet it takes a woman to make a child, what's that all about?" No one answers him in the show, but thinking about it, perhaps I'd say you don't need the same kind of strength to make a child as you do to kill someone. It's all relative.

Clive James mentions in his broadcast how some of the first female MPs in Iraq were murdered by men to make an example of them. In a situation like that, when someone tries to kill you, they're frightened of what you represent. Change.

I'm not really sure what my conclusion is, except that I don't want to need a gun to defend myself. Being a feminist or an egalitarian or whatever I am can some times be difficult in a liberal democracy, because it can be hard to distinguish between the important things to get upset about and those that can really just wait. I know for certain that I'm very lucky. I think the TV episodes made me uncomfortable because they made me realise just how cocooned and special my liberty is, compared with a lot of other women out there. I wish there was more I could actively do to help them.

When feminism goes bad

There is almost nothing about this article that doesn't piss the tits right off me.

If you thought all feminists were man-hating lesbians, then you might just have found the ultimate one. Arg. I know feminism is diverse by its very nature and hey, all of us sisters don't agree on everything all the time. But I especially don't agree with almost all of this. In fact, I'm too enraged (also tired) to write a proper dissection of it. But just read it and say arg quietly to yourself a few times. And you know, then go commit some domestic violence like the brutish, Nazi-style oppressors of fragile womanhood that you truly are. Yes, male-things, I'm talking about you. With your penises and your oppression and your all-heterosexual-sex-is-basically-rape style of foreplay and intercourse.

Srsly, it's things like this that make me ashamed to be a lesbian.

Benevolently sexist.

So, I've been meaning to write a post on feminism for ages, but it's just too big a topic. I've had a few conversations about it with various people over the years, and I still don't know exactly where I stand. Internet-based discussions of the issues run the full gamut from "lively" to "warlike", and the situations being discussed are important enough to those involved to cause massive emotional outbursts if approached in the wrong way. Hence, rather than trying to do one big post trying to explain all of the various thoughts I have on the subject, I'll try and do occasional posts approaching smaller related topics. This, I hasten to add, is the first of those.

I read a blog post at work today (during my lunch hour, I assure you...) describing a woman's reaction to being asked whether she needed help carrying a saxophone case outside her apartment. On the one hand, the author makes a good point - if the guy who asked her if she needed help would not have asked a man in the same situation, then he was probably exhibiting sexist behaviour. On the other hand, I also disagree with a couple of the points she makes.

Firstly, she assumes the guy wouldn't have offered help to a man in her situation. It's splitting hairs, maybe, since I agree with her that the prevailing social attitude would support offering a woman help but not a man in the situation, but ultimately she doesn't know what the guy would have done if it were a man carrying the sax. The only reason I mention this is that the comments discuss more active responses the author could have attempted, all focusing on chastising the man to a greater or lesser extent for being so patronising. It seems to me, that unless you know that he would have done something different if it were a man standing there, to essentially accuse him of double standards is unfair. Again, I agree that in general, were they to make this accusation they would probably be correct to one degree or another, but they couldn't know it, and were judging the man's actions based on percieved motivations based on his gender. And I'm not entirely sure I agree with that.

The author then moves on to talk about the differences between this situation, and one in which she offers to help a woman struggling to get bottles off a high shelf in a supermarket. She says that the distinction between the two scenarios is that while the man offered her help when she was perfectly comfortable, she offered help to someone who was "obviously struggling". She then advises "I want to be clear that I’m not saying that people shouldn’t help each other out. I’m saying, don’t assume people need help when they’re not really looking like they need it."

The problem with this is that she's leaving the judgement to the observer. If I'm not sure whether someone needs help or not, should I help them? According to her, unless they are "obviously" in need of assistance, I shouldn't ask if they need a hand. The inaccuracy present in the subjective interpretation of "obviously" combined with the intrinsic inaccuracy in trying to determine need from an external observation of a stranger, leaves us in a situation where we are encouraged not to offer help, for fear of causing offence. We are encouraged to wait until we are asked to help, ignoring the potential for people who need help to be nervous about asking a total stranger for assistance.

Personally, I will try to continue to offer help if I think it might be appreciated, and apologise if it is taken as patronising. To do anything else, would seem to me to be assuming too much sociological and analytical ability on my part.

In any case, having read this article, I was very careful for the rest of the day to ensure that I didn't offer any help to a woman that I wouldn't offer to a man in the same situation. Evening came, and I was walking through Victoria with a friend. As we were waiting for the lights to change at a crossing, we noticed a woman maybe 20 feet away to our left being shouted at fairly aggressively by a man standing right next to her. She didn't seem to be responding, and seemed to be mostly ignoring him, and with the distance and traffic noise, we couldn't tell what he was saying. As the lights changed, and we started to cross the road, he walked off, still shouting, and she disappeared, separately, into the crowds of pedestrians.

So, what should we have done? Was she "obviously struggling" with the situation? Should we have tried to intervene? Or would to intervene have patronisingly assumed that she couldn't handle an argument with an aggressive looking man much larger than her?

As it was, it was over too quickly for us to really make anything other than a gut decision (to stay out of it), and as we walked on, we discussed it and realised that both of us had internally decided to go over only if he became physically abusive. Were we right in that decision, or is verbal abuse enough to warrant intervention? I can imagine people expressing displeasure at strangers intervening if it was a personal dispute, and with someone looking as agitated and angry as the man did, we were both unconsciously worried that such displeasure might be expressed in a physical manner. In other words, we didn't want to make the situation worse.

It also reminded me of a time a year or so ago, when I was sitting on a tube opposite a couple having a fairly heated and very one-sided argument in a foreign language. The woman would occasionally try to speak, but the man would cut in quite aggressively, interrupting her, and going into a long tirade, accompanied by fairly violent hand movements. I didn't think it would be appropriate at all to intervene in an argument I had no way of following or understanding, but there were a couple of moments when I thought the man was going to hit the woman. I was wrong as it turned out, but it certainly felt in my mind as though the threat was there. Different situation, same question - would intervening have been acceptable? How about if he had hit her? Should one assume that in both situations the woman is perfectly capable of dealing with the situation? At what point does it become "obvious" that she is not?

How would I have reacted if it was a man verbally abusing another man on the street? Who knows - I don't believe you can predict your reactions to a hypothetical situation particularly accurately. In any case, I feel like often real life situations cannot be boiled down to easy rhetoric, and sometimes arguments and discussions online can rely too much on the abstract and the simplistic.

Apologies if some of that is garbled or rushed. I'm pretty tired, and didn't want to spend too much time this evening writing and rewriting it. In any case, I'm sure no one's ever regretted not choosing their words carefully when disagreeing with a feminist online.

Is this song about rape?

Joan Armatrading is one of my favourite and only recently-discovered-by-me artists. She is a black, female singer of incredible vocal prowess who writes beautiful, moving and articulate songs, displaying an economy with words found among the very best songwriters.

The lyrics below are for Water With the Wine, which you can listen to here. The music for this song sounds happy, cheerful and celebratory. It was only today when, for whatever reason, I really listened to the words that I picked out "got no strength to make him stop" that I was thrown.

Met him on a Monday
And he said he loved me so
Walked me to my door
Before I knew it to my living room

I thought there was no need for worry
When he took me in his arms
Drank some whisky
Hung his coat upon the stand

That's when the music started
I heard the light switch click
I stumbled on a lost shoe
The fever's starting

This man was getting hot
I got no strength to make him stop
I guess it's too late
But I'll know next time
To mix some water with the wine

The sun came pouring in at five
Upon my face
I felt the taste of last night's love
Upon my lips
I wasn't sure if I had dreamt it
Or had not
But there across the pillow was the face
I had forgot

That's when he said he loved me
Could be the truth this time
He put his arms about me
Fever's starting

This man was getting hot
I got no strength to make him stop
I guess it's too late
But I'll know next time
To mix some water with the wine

So my question is, is this song about rape? Or at least, about sex someone doesn't really want but feels unable to prevent, which many feminists would class as rape? Or is it deliberately ambiguous? Is she just messing with my mind, writing a song with a chorus in a major key so that it sounds feelgood but actually isn't?

Ok, so this isn't one of life's Big Questions^TM, but still, I wondered.

Pulp Feminist

Via various links today I came across the Bechdel Test, a set of criteria to determine whether or not a movie is "worth watching". The criteria are as follows:

1. It has to have at least two named female characters in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something besides a man.

and originate in this comic strip.

An interesting idea, and though no better or worse than any other way of determining a film's watchability, the scarcity of good examples does highlight a serious issue in how women are presented in film. I'm not an expert on either women or film, but I'm struggling to come up with well known (or, say, high budget) films that satisfy these conditions.

That is to say, I was struggling, until I remembered Quentin Tarantino. With Death Proof and Kill Bill volumes 1 and 2 under his belt, he's a regular feminist filmmaker. The realisation was inspired by this post (which contains minor Death Proof spoilers).

I can't think of a huge number of other films at this hour (though I'm sure there are at least a few), and am struggling to get far past Thelma and Lousise (which is kind of a cheat, and which I haven't seen) and Tideland (which I didn't care for).

Ooh, also, The Village and Sin City (just) which are at least films I have seen and do like.

Can you think of others? Or can you think of other ludicrously simplistic criteria for determining "watchability"?

The House of Bishops

While my Christian credentials may be somewhat dubious, I am nothing if not a feminist, in the truest sense of the word. To me, feminism means simply this: that you believe in equality between men and women. Not subjugation of men by women, not compulsory castration of men by women, but a world of equal rights, equal pay and equal freedoms. Where women don't ever have to be afraid of men and women's behaviour is not limited by male expectation or prejudice.

That's not an all-encompassing definition and could probably use a little work, but it's the best I can come up with on the fly.

In the light of my feminist convictions, and my mother's professional vocation as a chaplain, I would like to bring this to your attention. In a large part because of what she has achieved and had to put up with in her professional life, there is no one I have a higher regard for than my mum.

It's a petition for lay members of the Church of England to be submitted to the House of Bishops asking that they appoint senior female clergy to bishoprics. In my view, the idea of women bishops was effectively sanctioned when they allowed the first women to be ordained. If you're going to let them in at the lowest rung of the ladder and apply a meritocracy, it's inevitable that some will eventually become suitably qualified for such positions.

I'm not saying you have to sign it and for some of you, it might not accord with your own religious beliefs, or lack of. But I thought I'd throw it out there and see what happened...

(cross-posted to An immedia reaction)