Independent Women, Part III

I was 11 years old when the soundtrack from the 2000 film Charlie’s Angels was released. Independent Women by Destiny’s Child was arguably the film’s only saving grace, pleasing critics and audiences where Charlie’s Angels could not; it paid tribute to women making it on their own and called for their independence from men, portraying the female gender as strong, determined and just as capable of making it in a man’s world as Man himself. For an 11-year-old girl, this was a wonderful message. For a girl not even halfway through her education, with aspirations of someday being a famous author, and discouraged from the institution of marriage by the poisonous relationships between men and women that existed around her, this song was inspiring, uplifting... and really quite catchy.

As a 24-year-old woman, I am no longer all that inspired by the song’s message. My formal education is complete, I am not yet a famous author and I could happily live with or without marriage. The line “All the honeys who makin’ money throw your hands up at me” doesn’t fill me with quite the same sense of empowerment that it used to. I don’t make a lot of money (a lot of the time I don’t make any money), and while I may not be dependent on any man to provide for me, I can hardly claim that “The house I live in (I bought it), the car I’m driving (I bought it)”, because I am simply not in the financial position to buy a house or a car, and I am certainly not in the position to say “The rocks I’m rockin’ (I bought it)”. Kudos to those women who are able to say such things, and I do not doubt their fantastic work ethic and refusal to give up or give in, but I still consider them to be part of a lucky minority, and suggesting that a woman is empowered only if she is financially stable on her own is isolating and damaging to women not privileged or fortunate enough to be able to say the same of themselves.

This culture of associating female empowerment with financial or material worth has only accelerated over the last 13 years, and is reflected heavily in the music industry today. Nicki Minaj, whose fanbase consists largely of teenage girls and young women, infuriatingly assigns her own worth to the money lining her pocket. On Check It Out, her collaboration with will.i.am, she boasts, “Mad cause I’m getting money in abundance, man I can’t even count all of these hundreds. Duffle bag every time I go to SunTrust, I leave the rest just to collect interest”, while on Muny (Material Girls), a kind of tribute to Madonna’s 1984 hit Material Girl, she says, “Top five tax bracket in the population, hatin’ and I know they got a reason why, I ain’t got to wonder if I want to lease or buy.”

Of course, a love of money and materialism in the music industry is not reserved exclusively for women, and this is something that plagues male artists’ music as well, consequently influencing the young listeners who buy and download their records. Often these male artists (though I’m sure sometimes with the best of intentions) reinforce these attitudes, commending the “independent women” whose independence is quantified by the money she earns: women who are presented as sexy, beautiful and desirable only if they “bought it”. Perhaps this interest in money comes from the relative poverty these musicians came from, and bragging about climbing out of the depths of deprivation inspires those still living in the midst of it to work harder and try harder, as the capitalist ethos would urge you to do. However, it is simply impossible for every person in the world to achieve the same levels of success as the members of Destiny’s Child, Nicki Minaj and Madonna, as well as anyone else who brags along to a nice little tune about how big their swimming pool is.

I find it sad that we have been taught that validation comes from earning a six-figure salary, and it is detrimental to the aims of an all-inclusive feminism to preach to young women – especially in a society already heavily saturated with a kind of submissive sexuality that caters to patriarchal fantasies – that the only way to be truly successful or happy or have any worth as a woman is to have money. Yes, with money comes power, and as long as that money rests in the bank accounts of mostly white men from privileged backgrounds, women and other oppressed groups should certainly be pressing for and celebrating an equal spread of the world’s economic wealth. However, to suggest that this is the only way to be a strong and empowered woman is a damaging argument to make to those who will probably never be “independent” by these standards.

Can we please have less focus on the money, and less judgement passed upon the majority who don’t drive a Benz or have every finger wrapped in diamonds. Can we please instead have more focus on a strong and united sisterhood.

Dear Nadine Dorries

Dear Nadine Dorries,

I don't make a habit of listening to you usually (because you associate yourself with the Conservative Party, which in turn associates itself with arseholeness - and arseholeness generally angers me, and anger sorta interferes with the whole incense-stick-burning/ peaceful meditation thing I have going on at the moment), but just lately some of your comments and opinions about other women's uteri have been trickling through onto my Twitter feed. I can't help but feel that you are alluding to my uterus, Nadine, what with me having one and everything. And so I thought to myself: Hey! Maybe Nadine would care for a formal introduction!

This is my uterus:

Cute, isn't it?

When my gynaecologist told me that I have "a heart-shaped uterus", my initial reaction was, "Aww, that's sweet." But apparently, having a "heart-shaped" (or "bicornuate") uterus isn't all that sweet, as Mr Gynaecologist eventually explained to me, after I spent a solid two minutes sitting on (well, squatting over) the hospital toilet emptying my raging bladder. "No, no," he said to me. "You iz fucked." Well, those weren't his exact words, but his expression was pretty grave as he told me that my chances of carrying any future bambinos to full-term were very slim and likely to be littered with complications, and my risk of miscarriage significantly higher than most women's.

I wasn't too fussed at the time. Y'see Nadine, I was 15, my biggest worry was if I would survive my GCSEs and whether my new set of hair straighteners were any good, and the only reason I was there having my uterus scanned in the first place was to ascertain why it always hurt so sodding much, and why it insisted on bleeding profusely for four months straight without any kind of interval, eventually resulting in a kitchen floor covered in blood, me almost passing out from the pain and my mama having to call for an ambulance. My uterus hasn't given me an easy time of it over the years, and I don't expect it to let up any time soon! As I near the grand old age of 24, with my uterus persisting in being a pain in the arse (sometimes literally - do you ever get period cramps in your backside, Nadine? Hurts like a bitch!), and with kindly doctors urging me to consider "starting a family" earlier than I may have otherwise planned (y'know, in case the first few handfuls of pregnancies don't work out so well), the reality of my possible predicament becomes ever-increasingly frightening. I don't know if I want children, truth be told. Yes, I want them, but I don't know if I want to endure a whole bunch of miscarriages in the later stages of pregnancy before I might, just might, finally get one. I've never coped so well with disappointment. I mean yeah, sure I'll think about it and see if I can get my vagina on any decent sperm before I make my decision, but at this moment in time, I'm pretty protective of what goes in my uterus. It's bad enough not having any say in the presence of big juicy clots.

And so, Nadine, I ask you kindly to please reconsider your views on my uterus. Y'know the uterus you just met, like two minutes ago, and will probably forget all about in about half as much time? My uterus and I would be very grateful.

Laterz!

Martha

The Role of Men in Feminism

I have a hard time finding a man happy to identify himself as "feminist" or "pro-feminist", or even a man happy to admit that he sympathises with the feminist plight. When the floor opens up to feminist discussion and I raise my hand and proudly declare, "Yo, feminist right here", here's what I usually get: I get eyes rolling; I get genuine surprise that I, a woman though I am, identify as feminist, followed by eventual "Oh, that's cool... I guess"; I get banterous "But everyone knows men are better than women" or "Oh, so you hate men", and sometimes I get legitimate disgust. So when it's this much of a struggle to get men aboard the whole idea of feminism, why should we, as women, subjugate, isolate or reject the voices of those men who do actually sympathise with us? Well, I'll tell you why:

I want men to be interested in feminism. I don't really care about semantics, and whether a man chooses to identify as "feminist" or "pro-feminist" is really beside the point, so long as he is supporting the cause - but most importantly, supporting the cause in a practical way. The whole point of feminism is to fight against the fact that the gender "female" is viewed and very often treated as inferior to the gender "male", and acknowledging that this, frustratingly, manifests itself in various ways. It manifests itself economically: women overall still earn less than men. It manifests itself in crime: women are still overwhelmingly victims of street harassment, sexual assault and domestic abuse. It manifests itself in the media: the sexualisation of girls who have barely hit puberty, and the objectification of women who are only viewed as "tits" and "arse", and not as "human being"... But you've heard this all before, guys, I know you have. So how about this:

It manifests itself in language: the worst thing you call a person, a "cunt", is just another word for the female genitalia, after all. It manifests itself in the assumption that men should be the breadwinner and women should look after the children, and it manifests itself in the judgement that is passed of a man when he answers the question "What do you do for a living?" with "I'm a dad". It manifests itself in the pressure a man feels to be "macho" or strong. It manifests itself in the very idea that to be female, to have female traits, to be in any way associated with anything female, unless you're either a) protecting her, or b) shagging her, is a negative thing.

It is not a negative thing to be female.

Nor is it a negative thing to be male. But the sad thing is that we as a society have come to associate supposedly "female" traits with weakness. "Stop being such a girl" as opposed to "Man up"; "You throw like a girl" as opposed to "Grow some balls". We live in a world where women and men are disempowered by the disempowerment of women. If we want equality - yes, equality; I'm not talking about a world governed by misandry - we need to start promoting the female gender as the amazing, strong and beautiful entity that it is. This doesn't mean that we need to slam and shame all men at every given opportunity, but it does mean that we need to be honest about our experiences without worrying about offending or upsetting those men who have never hit or sexually assaulted a woman, or shouted "SLAG!" after the woman who refused to give him her phone number. Men, we are aware that you are not all rapists, that you don't all wolf-whistle or cat-call, or truly believe that a woman's place is in the kitchen making you a sandwich. Men, we like some of you. A lot. Maybe we even love some of you. But please, we need to love ourselves, as well.

We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half.

- Emmeline Pankhurst

 

We cannot empower humanity without empowering the female gender. We cannot let people, all people, be who they truly are - complicated, dynamic, strong and emotional, aggressive and sensitive - without saying to the world, "It is OK to be a woman." And men, you have to let us say it.

 

We are afraid of walking home late at night on our own; when it comes to Reclaim The Night marches, let us reclaim the night. Your voices are overwhelmingly dominant over ours in the media; let us speak about issues which affect us. A couple of years ago, when I was commissioned to write a piece about sexism in football for a feminist website, my piece was dropped because it was felt that a male author's take on the issue was, apparently, "more relevant". This is not to say that I believe a man should be silenced or discouraged from engaging in the feminist movement, but rather that he needs to know when, where and how. Do not tell us that we are wrong, because until you have lived in our shoes and had the experiences that we have had, how could you possibly know?

 

Men, if you are truly supportive of the feminist cause, you have to support it by giving the oppressed voice room to speak.

 

My Sexuality Is Mine

If you'd asked me not so long ago how I felt about women who use their sexuality to get ahead in life, I would have probably told you that it was counterproductive to the aims of feminism, would have been fully aware of the danger of contradicting some of my "we need to stop sexualising everything" rants, and would have told you that I choose not to enter into any of that stuff, personally.

But things change. Experiences change.

Without going into any sordid details about my personal life, I've come to understand that regardless of how I view myself and my sexuality, the world will always have its own separate perception. I was barely a teenager when I first started receiving attention from adult men in the street who would comment on my apparent "growth"; I was intimidated by teenage boys who attempted to physically assault me when I refused to go out with one of them; I reported sexual harassment to the police when I was 14; I had a middle-aged man come onto me at a deserted train station at midnight when I was 18 (barely relevant, but I've always looked about two or three years younger than my actual age). I wore jeans and jumpers, flat shoes and long coats. I didn't start wearing makeup until I was 18, and through all of this, regardless of how I looked to these strange leering men, I still felt like a child.

These experiences alone made me aware of the desperate need for the continuation of feminism long after the days of bra-burning, but for a long time, my experiences of having my "sexuality" infringed upon were carried out on the streets, by men I did not know and reasonably assumed I would never see ever again. They weren't men I worked with, or men I assumed to be friends; they weren't men I was in a relationship with, and their impact on my world didn't extend beyond my freedom to walk down the street without being harassed (still not acceptable, but you know what I mean). I felt reasonably safe thinking that so long as the door was closed and bolted and I knew everyone standing behind it, I was safe. Sexism and the exploitation of my sexuality lay on the outside world, not on the inside.

But then it crept in, slowly, with small gestures at first, but from men I saw every day: innuendo they didn't think I got, or hands accidentally slipping... And then I got a stalker, someone who would not leave me the fuck alone, and who seemed to thrive on the fact that I saw him every day and yet felt too afraid to tell him to leave me the hell alone or, more suitably, punch him in his fucking face. Men who claimed to love me saw me as putty in their hands: soft, fleshy putty. And gradually, over time, you begin to realise that the exploitation of a woman's sexuality is not just carried out in the media on young, thin celebrities; it's not just carried out in the street, and it doesn't matter if you're wearing a PVC playsuit or the attire of an Eskimo. As far as the world is concerned, by the very nature of being a woman, I am a sexual object.

And you can do a number of things with that piece of information:

1. You can ignore it, as I was before. But ignoring it won't make it go away.
2. You can fight it, and kick the shit out of anyone who crosses the line between acceptable and being an arsehole. But eventually you might get arrested, or they might fight back, and in a world populated by an estimated 3 million men, assuming that at least 10% of those men are arseholes (and that's being generous to blokes, as my experience dictates), you can only really conceivably kick about 100 out of a possible 300,000 dickfaces. That's a poor ratio.
3. You can take advantage of it.

I argue all the time that feminism is about gender equality, not about promoting female as superior to male. I argue that feminism benefits men, and that there are men in my life whom I love. I stand by these arguments, but one thing I cannot stand by anymore is being idle and passive in my own sexuality. I cannot stand by and allow my own body to be used against me, to be made to look in the mirror and hate or blame myself for the violation I have endured. I know what my boundaries are and I respect the boundaries of other women who either wholeheartedly agree or relentlessly disagree with me. I refuse to be intimidated, mocked or exploited. My sexuality is on my terms, and if Man wants a sexual creature, he can have one - but he sure as hell won't be the one to benefit from it.

We're all a little bit slutty

A woman walks into a bar (this is not a bad joke, I promise) wearing a short skirt, fishnet tights, a low-cut top and stilettos. She is coated in fake tan, has spent the last two hours doing her makeup, and it looks likely that she has had a boob job. She flirts casually. Her friends might tell you that she has had more than a few sexual partners in her time, and she appears loud, gregarious and looking for attention.

She is no more a slut, a bimbo, a slag, a tart or a whore than you and I.

She is a product of our world, of images like these, and "news" articles like these. She has seen Katie Price being lauded as a "businesswoman", has established the link between glamour and success, and perceived "unattractiveness" and mockery and shame. Men find tits and arse sexy, and this appreciation feels like validation. She likes sex (God gave women the clitoris for a reason, no?), and when the whole world is talking about it, showing it and selling all conceivable consumerable goods with it, why are we surprised that she does?

Why do we affix derogatory and degrading labels to women who satisfy the culture we have created? Why do we worship women like Madonna and Rihanna on the one hand, hold them up as icons for women all over the world, and then pass off the women who attempt to emulate them as "sluts", "bimbos", "slags", "tarts" and "whores"? The woman in our bar is not surrounded by an army of security who will rugby-tackle the man who gropes her without invitation, and the chances are she can't afford weekly salon trips for professional spray-tanning, or an on-call makeup artist with 20 years' experience. Maybe she hasn't had more than a few sexual partners; maybe that's just what she lets people assume. But then again, maybe she has, and if she has, why are the men who regard her as something dirty and classless also the very men who don't mind dipping themselves into more than their fair share of honey jars?

We have been raised in a world where sex is always on the menu, where women are not regarded for their intelligence, wit or talent unless you might want to f**k her too. We buy into this culture, and then we criticise those who fall victim to it.

If she is a slut, we must be too.

Reevaluating my views: Feminism

Looking back over old blog posts, one thing I've realised is that my views on feminism have changed somewhat in the last year. While I feel that the "glass ceiling" debate is no less important than it once was, and that women should certainly be able and encouraged to achieve the same high-ranking professions as men, it is far from being at the crux of my passion for feminism. Perhaps this is because the world in which I now exist is different from the world I existed in a year ago: I can scarcely call myself a "recent graduate", and when you consider that most "recent graduates" in these desolate times find themselves exploiting their newly-acquired wealth of knowledge behind the counter of their local McDonald's, a career in the boardroom is hardly on the cards for me. Male or female (but still largely male), a career in the boardroom now tends to be reserved solely for former private school students and Oxbridge graduates... But that's a different argument entirely.

I recall, seven-and-a-half years ago, uttering that sentence opening that now causes me to (metaphorically) bang my head against the wall in frustration: "I'm not a feminist, but..."

I grew up on the Spice Girls, with a mother who had a kind of montage of feminist postcards framed and pinned up in the hallway, and who left her diary (pictured above) lying around the flat for impressionable girls' eyes to fall upon. I threw out peace signs like it was Christmas and challenged the boys in the school playground to races (I was a freakishly fast runner... y'know, for a girl). I pulled people up on their casually sexist remarks from the age of seven, and I knew that I was just as smart and just as capable as any boy. And yet, feminism was a bad word. To be a feminist was to be angry, hairy and wear dungarees.

It took going out into the world and seeing the injustices women face (and that I would now invariably face) with my own eyes to change my mind. It took being pushed and shoved on buses and tubes because I am smaller than 50% of the population and therefore less likely to start a fight; it took, not just being sexually harassed more times than I can count, but becoming so accustomed to sexual harassment that I began to expect it, and then barely think twice about it when it happened again; it took being criticised for taking an interest in football instead of fashion; it took finding myself growing up awkward and imperfect whilst being held up against impossibly perfect images of women and being told that I am not good enough if I am not like them; it took being 15-years-old, haemorrhaging my way through the worst period I have ever known, and being told by a (male) doctor that I must be having a miscarriage, there was no other explanation for it, in spite of the fact that I had told him repeatedly that I was a virgin; it took being used and exploited by men, or being treated as something fragile instead of something strong. It took expanding my mind and allowing myself to be unafraid of stigma to accept that, yes, my thoughts and my views and my attitudes make me a feminist, whether I choose to shave my legs or not. I am happy now to admit that I was wrong, just as I am happy now to admit that I was misguided a year ago. Feminism is much bigger than I thought it was.

Every woman (and man) will have their own individual relationship with feminism, whether they recognise it or not, but we have to see past our own relationships if we are going to get anywhere. For some, for the more privileged, that relationship will be "Can I make it to the top?" Will society ever stop assuming that "doctor" is male unless "female doctor" is specified, or that "nurse" is female unless "male nurse... I wonder if he's gay??" is specified. I might be one of the more privileged, because for me, I often find myself wondering if I will be one of the illustrious 17% of playwrights who happen to be female this year, and I get arsey when people address me by the title "Miss" instead of "Ms". Lucky me to have such a concern, I guess.

For others, the corcerns will be "How can I afford to have a child when I can barely afford to live myself?" and "I am being assaulted every day in my own home." For the majority of us, rape is something we fear when we are walking home late at night on our own, and the messed-up world in which we live tries to tell us that we are somehow more vulnerable, or somehow more at fault, if we are dressed in a certain way, and that perhaps if we hadn't gone down that alleyway, we might have been able to prevent it. For others, rape is something to be feared when we wake up in the morning or go home in the evening. It is not just a fear; it is a guarantee, and an unbreakable cycle. Conviction rates are still pathetically low.

Feminism for some is the right we in Western society have come to accept as our most basic: the right to healthcare, the right to our own bodies. If we want an abortion and if the pregnancy is early enough, we can have one; we have access to contraception, and whether practice is the same as principle, we can refuse sex if we do not want it; we do not lose "value" at the loss of our virginity and we are not told to marry against our own will. This is a reality for some that we are guilty of turning a blind eye to in favour of the "glass ceiling", and just as the more privileged feminists try to convince men that feminism benefits them too, we must also remind ourselves that feminism is working to free more than just the white, more than just the middle and upper classes, more than just your mother or your daughter or sister or niece.

Feminists, if we want to free ourselves, we must also free our sisters.

Poetry: Man

Man

Man, you do not make me.
You may spread your seed like a dandelion weed,
but you do not hold me, grip me by my roots and
pine for me to grow.
I am the wild flower in your eye,
the white lily crushed between my thighs,
and I wonder if I would have been so frail for you
had he not failed for me.

Man, you do not fool me.
I do not buy the fresh succulent pink of timid flesh,
nor will I be the lonely princess in your tower,
waiting to be saved.
I have outgrown the sinister tales
devised by cowardly males
who want us to regress from meek girls
to tragically weak women.

Man, you do not own me.
My body cannot be made a commodity,
a blank canvas upon which you can stain yourself
a man’s mannequin.
My breasts cannot be made tits;
my arse, like yours, farts and shits.
I will not be weighed in gold as you wish,
nor will growing old diminish me.

Man, you do not know me.
I am not the pleasant smile to your beguile,
and being fucked around does not make me crazy –
it makes me mad.
I am not the column in your magazine
which believes that you, man, could be the man of my dreams.
I will not believe your desperate plea which does not see that
man, you cannot stop me loving me.

By Martha Everitt
December 2012

Defending Feminism... Why??

A few days ago, I wrote a poem with an anti-patriarchy theme. It would probably help for me to share the poem to demonstrate just how, exactly, it argues against patriarchy, but when you want to get your work published, sometimes, you have to hold off giving it away for free. Just sometimes. But take my word for it.

I shared the poem with a few of my friends (some male), and only a handful of (female) readers seemed to get where I was coming from. Perhaps the poem didn't make its point as strongly as I had hoped it did, but what did become evident as I was talking to people was how much men, usually, struggle to distinguish between an attack on men and an attack on patriarchy, and when arguing my point, I felt as though I was having to defend feminism.

I am not anti-men. You will probably find that most women who proudly identify themselves as "feminist" have fathers, sons, husbands, boyfriends, brothers, uncles and nephews whom they love and want to see looked after by the world; they see how feminism benefits men.

Yes, feminism benefits men.

If we lived in a truly post-feminist world, men could stay at home to raise the children. It would not be expected that it is their duty or role to win the bread, or that they must be the "protector". They could cry when they feel sad without being called a pansy or told that they are gay, as if being gay were somehow a bad thing. They would be entitled to longer paternity leave, and would not be expected to pay for meals when they go out with their girlfriends or wives, or always be the one to hold open doors. They'd probably have better sex, as numerous studies have shown that men with "feminist" partners report that they find sex more enjoyable than men whose partners aren't. They would be able to go into careers usually looked down upon or seen as "women's work", such as nursing or midwifery, and if their wives were earning more money, there would be a greater household income overall. Feminism benefits the world.

This is as close as I will come to defending feminism. Yes, sometimes I will have to make my point rudely and aggressively, and if someone says or does something fucking idiotic, I have no problem telling them that they are fucking idiotic. When our society is being dictated by powerful rich white men, I will challenge the views that are being filtered down, if those views are detrimental to every single person's right to freedom and equality.

I will not apologise for being a feminist.

My Feminism, Your Feminism

One thing that anyone with an opinion (which is pretty much everyone) is guilty of doing, is trying to force that opinion onto other people. It's natural. We think we are right; we want to be recognised as right; we want to operate in a world where things happen our way, and the only way to achieve that (besides running a dictatorship) is in getting people to agree with us. And so we state our argument as best as we can and hope people's minds are changed.

I have been trying to force my political opinions upon the wider world since I was a child (been telling people they're sexist since 1996), but I know that there will always be a group of people who will never hear me. Our views tend to come from our own experiences, hence why the majority of people who classify themselves as "feminist" are women; these are people who experience on a daily basis gender-based discrimination. Until a man is regularly wolf-whistled at in the street, physically violated by strangers (and non-strangers), feels that his access to healthcare is under threat or that he is, for some unfathomable reason, not being given the same pay, respect and opportunities as his female counterpart, he will never really know, just like I can never really know some of the struggles other women face.

Earlier on this year, I was approached by a theatre company who wanted me to write a short play on the theme of "international protest", and I had only a couple of short weeks to write it, in-between working full-time and working on a BBC project. Due to time constraints, I went with what type of protest I thought I knew best: women's protest; feminism; exploring the discrimination and fight women face internationally. So I did some research on female genital cutting, and it was only then that it really occurred to me just how little I know and understand.

In the years that I have been reading feminist literature, writing feminist columns and engaging in feminist protest, it has always covered the same topics: female objectification, largely in the media; UK-based crime where women are usually victims; lack of positive female role models; "the glass ceiling"... And while these are all very valid issues and we should certainly be fighting our corner against them, I do wonder if we, as feminists, are isolating our sisters; I wonder if we are only presenting one "type" of feminism, a feminism which occupies the thoughts of your white middle-class, educated feminist. Yes, we should care about the numbers of women in the boardroom, but we should care equally as much about women who cannot afford childcare, women whose health and freedom is threatened every day in other countries.

Feminism is not just for me and women like me. It's for every woman and girl alive; it's for every man and boy who doesn't yet realise that freeing women means freeing all of humanity.

The trouble is, I can't tell people this. I have not been subjected to genital cutting, have not been told I am not allowed to vote, or that I have no right to an education. I have not been denied access to contraception or healthcare, have not had my body sold, or used for profit. I have not had to choose between family and career, or been criticised for that choice. The women who have need to be given as great a platform to speak as we have taken for ourselves.

"Guys, it's my body."

For the last year, I have been writing a play about a young woman’s decision either to keep or abort a pregnancy. About a month ago, I wrote my final scene, pulled everything together, stayed up till the early hours of the morning and read through it, from start to end.

When I reached the end, I realised that I was far from finished.

The thing I had overlooked all year long when I had been writing the play was the very message I wanted to put across at the start. I had spent so long deliberating whether the character should or shouldn’t terminate this unplanned pregnancy that it began to feel like it was me, and not Gemma (my main protagonist), making the decision. Kind of ironic given my standpoint on this issue.

I have never been pregnant, let alone experienced an unplanned pregnancy. You get some pro-lifers who concede that “Yeah, I guess if she’s raped then that’s different, maybe abortion is okay then”, but I consider that argument irrelevant. There are near-infinite reasons why a woman might want to terminate a pregnancy: it was conceived through rape; she can’t afford it; she considers herself too young or too old; she doesn’t think she’s ready; she’s afraid for hers or the baby’s physical or mental wellbeing; she does not want children... The reasoning does not alter the effect. If a woman does not want to donate her body to another being for nine months (and then some; the effects of pregnancy don’t cease entirely after birth), is that not all there is to it?

Very often in life, you try to see things from another’s point of view by saying to yourself, “What would I do if I was in that situation?” I am sure there are plenty of women who would or who have continued with a pregnancy which was conceived through rape, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with those who choose to do that. That is their choice. I have known women who have fallen pregnant accidentally and gone on to have a baby, and there is nothing wrong with that choice. But what is right for those women might not necessarily be right for every other woman on the face of the earth. Do I know what I would do if I fell pregnant tomorrow? I know what I might do, but how do you ever truly know what you would do until you are in that situation? You only have to look at history and at places where abortion is illegal to see the damaging effects this has on women’s health; spend any length of time on the web and you will find countless personal stories of women who have suffered or even died as the result of the unavailability of abortion clinics. In fact, I’ll start you off with this one.

I don’t agree that men shouldn’t have opinions on abortion – after all, I have opinions on all kinds of stuff that don’t directly affect me – but there’s a difference between opinion and dictating. I might think that my friend painting her bathroom pea green is a poor choice, but I’m not going to march into her home with a pot of paint and a roller and paint over it blue. (Weird analogy, but you get my point.) Ultimately, abortion is an issue that will never directly affect men. Men do not have wombs, nor vaginas, nor breasts (well, not the kind that lactate, anyway), and yet more than three-quarters of MPs are male. These are currently the people making decisions about women’s reproductive rights, and that, if anything, is wrong.

A Case For "Ms"

I am going to give the world the benefit of the doubt, and go on the assumption that, like the woman I was speaking to a few days ago, the majority of people don't really know what Ms means. The alternative is to put everyone down as misogynistic bastards with values in line with that of a prehistoric dinosaur. No offence to dinosaurs.

The way I see it, Master and Miss are for boys and girls under the age of 18, respectively; Mr and Ms are for men and women over the age of 18, respectively. I don't see why we need to start defining women by their marital status, as if, somehow, being a Mrs makes you more or less important. I imagine that back in the day it was a way of branding women, of saying to other men, "She's mine, assholes. Back off." Much like the engagement ring, it's like whipping out your piece and taking a piss on someone, just so everyone knows "Bob woz ere" - and if a dude is gonna piss on you ladies, then you need to piss back. When he gives you an engagement ring, give him one back. When you change your title to Mrs, he should be changing his to Msr (or something more phonetically feasible; I dunno, I haven't really given the technicalities a huge amount of thought yet).

A few weeks ago, I was filling in a CRB application and, as I always do, I checked the box Ms. When I got to the end of the application and tried submitting it, it wouldn't let me - not until I had filled in the box Previous surname. Of course, I couldn't do this, because I have only ever had the one surname. Reluctantly, I had to check the box Miss instead.

Even when, bureaucratically, a system allows you to choose between Miss and Ms or Mrs and Ms, very often the reality is that you can only be a Ms if you are married, divorced or widowed - in which case, we are still defining women by their marital status. In what world is that OK? In what world are men men, and women simply accessories to men?

In this world, apparently.

I think there was a film about this once. It had a happy ending.

Being a woman is hard.

That isn't to say that I think men have it easy. I would hate to live life knowing that if I were to have a bad day and as a result broke down crying in the middle of the office at work, that everyone's level of respect for me would hit the ground and never get back up. I would hate to live life knowing that if I ever had a child, I would be assumed to be the secondary caregiver, and that the school would always contact "Mum" before "Dad", regardless of the fact that "Mum" might be out of town on a business meeting, and "Dad" might be at home making the beds and fixing dinner. I would hate to live life knowing that if I took time out to be a dad, when people asked me what I did and I answered, "I'm a stay-at-home dad", the looks I would receive would be different to if a woman answered the same question with, "I'm a stay-at-home mum." I would hate to live life knowing that I must shave my face every morning or else risk looking like sasquatch, though I suspect I might have to anyway once the menopause hits. I would hate to live life with testicles. Those things look like they get in the way.

But I do think that women have it harder. Just sayin'.

There's biology, for a start: hormonal rollercoasters every month, blood gushing out from between the legs, doctors shoving things inside you every few years to check for pre-cancerous cells, childbirth, saggy stretch-mark ridden skin that will never be the same ever again, swollen milky boobs that are destined to wind up pointing south, the capacity to be a parent having a time limit, hot flushes, to-HRT or to-not-HRT... From the onset of puberty until we leave the world, we put up with regular shit, and that's just biology. There's also society, and society is, if anything, the biggest bastard of them all.

We live in a world where women are all of the above, and yet we are told to be something else entirely different, or at least to pretend to be. We are hormonal and suffer from occasional (and sometimes constant) low self-esteem, yet we are told to be confident and beautiful, or else we are crazy and high-maintenance. We have periods every month (sometimes more frequently), which more often than not come equipped with debilitating pain, yet we are told to get on and go to work, look yummy and not speak about it - and don't let anyone see your tampons! Our bodies are put through massive rapid changes during and after pregnancy, and yet we are told that we are meant to "glow" when pregnant, and are expected to look like these celebrity mums who personal-trainer their way to anorexia six weeks after giving birth. We are told breast is best, and yet the length of maternity leave in this country doesn't really allow for the government's current recommendation of two years, nor do people feel comfortable seeing a woman breastfeed in public, because apparently breasts are not breasts, they are tits. We are told we can achieve the same high-paid professions as men, and yet can we? Or do we have to choose between babies and career? Or do we wait, and run the risk of finding out that our eggs have gone bad and it's now too little, too late? We are expected, as "sexi ladiez", to fill the bars and clubs while filling our stomachs with cheap promotion alcohol, and yet are told not to travel home late at night by ourselves because we might get raped - and if we do then it's actually kinda our fault because we shouldn't have been wearing that dress, and really - what do we expect? When we hit 40, we have to choose to become either "past it" or "a MILF", because for some reason the option to be a "silver fox" or "distinguished" is reserved solely for men.

The world wants us to be confident, beautiful, intelligent, classy... and up for it. There is something intrinsically wrong with us if we're not. Apparently.

Every time I walk into a newsagents these days I see women's magazines with eye-catching headlines like "HOW TO GET THE PERFECT SUMMER BODY" and "HOW TO TURN HIM ON" and "HOW TO GET FLAWLESS SKIN". You know what I would really love? I would really love it if we stopped asking ourselves the question "How do I do this?" and instead start asking ourselves "Why the hell should I?"

Feminists can be sexist, too.

There's something I need to get off my chest.

I know that sounds like an introduction to some confession of some sort (I cheated on you; I was born with a penis; I ate the last slice of cake... None of which are true, by the way. Well, except for maybe the last one), and I suppose that in some ways it almost is a confession. In some ways it is a confession that one of the causes which I so strongly support and dedicate so much of my writing to is still subject to one massive fundamental flaw.

The cause? Feminism. The fundamental flaw? The fact that the force which is fighting its corner, my sisters, my fellow feminists, are at times themselves misogynistic perpetrators of the enemy we are trying to defeat: sexism.

But I believe that if you support something and if you want something to succeed, then at times you will have to challenge it. You have to drag it up where it has made mistakes, tell it, "Oi, you're being an arsehole!" and set it on the right path. So that is exactly what I am doing now.

You see, a few months ago I published an article on sexism in football. If you haven't already read it then I encourage you to do so (because it's pretty damn amazing), but to summarise, in case you're short on time, it focuses primarily on the presence of sexism at the top of the game, with powerful people like the President of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, claiming that female footballers should wear "tighter shorts"; the pigeonholing of female supporters as "socerettes" (a scantily-clad, attractive woman who, if she knows anything at all about the game, is not encouraged to share her opinions) or WAGs, and the overarching isolation of female fans: the idea that football is for men; if a woman is there then it is only because she fancies Cristiano Ronaldo, and the attitude that "she may as well hold my beer while I pop to the loo". Whether or not you care about football, whether you appreciate the artistry and comradeship in it or simply think it's a stupid sport which promotes prima donna millionaires, is pretty much irrelevant. All that is relevant at this moment in time is the fact that I, among many other women, I am sure, identified sexism within football and felt the need to address it. And so I wrote this article.

I wrote the article back in November 2010. Why then, did it take me until July the following year, a full eight months later, to finally publish the article? Do I suffer from literary shyness? Am I so lazy that it took me a full eight months to copy and paste a chunk of text from Word into my blog? Nope, none of those reasons are responsible. While I may be shy, I have never been shy in my writing; in fact it was writing which always gave me the opportunity to get my thoughts and my feelings out there when my mouth was too timid to open up and utter a few words. And while I may enjoy the odd lie-in from time-to-time, I've never had a employer, teacher or professional describe me as "lazy" (and yes, I am kissing my own arse right now). So what was it that held me back from publishing the article, even when, in January this year, just two months after my article was written, Richard Keys and Andy Gray were making headlines when their sexist tirade of comments were caught on tape? When the rest of the world was talking about sexism in football, why did I hold back and leave my article gathering dust for eight solid months?

Stupidly, I now realise, I didn't believe the article was mine to publish. A month before the Richard Keys/ Andy Gray saga, I had "promised" my article to a well-known, reader-contributed feminist blog. I'd exchanged email correspondance with the editor who, following my pitch, told me "that does sound very interesting" and gave me the date of the following deadline, which I met without a hiccup.

I was fully aware when I handed over my article that it might have taken months before I saw it in print, but that was a sacrifice I was happy to put up with knowing that my work would be read by thousands rather than, say, ten. However, when just two short months later the headlines were being bombarded with what I already knew to be true - that football commentary is laced with misogyny and sexism - I expected my article to climb out of the editor's inbox and onto the web.

It didn't.

In fact, what I saw instead was a very recent (and I knew it was recent because it mentioned events which had happened in the preceding few days) article, written by... a man.

"That can't be right," I thought to myself. "Maybe they'll publish my article later on in the day."

But they didn't. My article went unpublished, not just for the next few days or weeks, but for months. Even when I emailed the editor, kindly but firmly asking that she confirm whether or not she wished to use my article, as I felt I could find a place for it on the web elsewhere if she chose not to, I heard nothing. Nothing appeared on their website, and no letter of recognition, even, appeared in my inbox. A feminist website, a website which is supposed to promote the voices of women in a world in which we are far too often silenced by patriarchy, ignored the voice of a woman, and instead gave room to the voice of a man; more than that, they gave room to the voice of a man in a realm which is already heavily-dominated by men. Perhaps they thought that if a man says it is sexist then it must be so, whereas if a woman says it is sexist... well, she could just be complaining again.

In some ways I blame myself for allowing my voice to get lost in the midst of the jumping-on-the-"Sexism-In-Football"-bandwagon and for not speaking up sooner. It took me eight months to take my article back, at which point I fiddled around with it, injected a little bit of stuff about the Richard Keys/ Andy Gray saga (because it would have been 'irrelevant' without it, it seemed) and published it on my own blog which, while perhaps not having a following of thousands, is at least mine and says the things that I wish to say, as opposed to some dude who is probably heard enough as it is already.

For the record, this blog post does not wish to shoot down other feminists and it does not wish to shoot down men; what it wishes to do is to demonstrate how easy it is to shoot down your fellow sisters and thus damage the very cause you are fighting for if you are not careful.

#StupidGirlsAreNotAllowed

I frequently find myself getting irritated by Twitter or, more accurately, by people on Twitter – but no more so than I found myself this evening, when I happened upon the worldwide trending topic, #UglyGirlsAreNotAllowed. I don’t know why I bothered clicking on it; I don’t know why I ever bother clicking on the frequent sexist and racist crap that decorates Twitter like a tacky set of Christmas lights, but I think a part of me must be in disbelief that such ignorance and cruelty is allowed to permeate so freely through a social networking site used by the masses. And sure enough, there it was: a list of things “ugly girls” are not allowed to do, including “play hard to get”, “have a boyfriend” and “not give head”. I believe in freedom of speech, but there is a point when freedom of speech becomes bullying, and even when names are not used and the guilty culprit argues it is just a general attack, it is still an attack. You do not have to name names to be guilty of racism, homophobia or xenophobia, and you do not have to name names to be guilty of sexism; if you are guilty of any of the above things, you are a bully.

Singling out one person as a target of bullying is obviously damaging; I’ve been a victim of it myself, and while those responsible may have refused to identify themselves as “bullies” or seen their actions and their words as “a joke” or “a laugh – stop being so sensitive, gawwwd!”, the isolation, the self-hate and the fear that I felt as a result tells another story. And the effects are the same when you bully a group of people. I am not saying that there is such a thing as “ugly girls” (because who are we do judge what beauty and what ugly really is?), but there is certainly a belief in most girls and young women out there that they are ugly. Maybe not every day and maybe they don’t hate everything about themselves, but there will always be moments when they look into the mirror and see flesh that they don’t think should be there, spots which other people don’t seem to have and bits of them which are either too big or too small. In their minds, in that moment, they are ugly. The airbrushed, carefully made-up models that drape themselves over the front covers of the magazines which litter their desks stare back at them, and the voices of these thoughtless, ignorant tweets creep into the pages and talk to them: Ugly girls are not allowed to have boyfriends. Ugly girls are not allowed to play hard to get. Ugly girls are not allowed to not give head. And what does this ultimately result in? Not ugly girls, but insecure girls, underselling themselves, caving in to every little pressure heaped on them and believing that the crap they get is as much as they deserve. Funnily enough, this works a treat for certain pig-headed men without much going for them, whose only real chance of getting laid is in preying on someone a bit vulnerable. Strange how that works out, huh?

This is exactly why it makes no sense for women to be attacking other women; in doing so, they are inadvertently making it a whole lot easier for men. Instead of standing together and waving the two-fingered sign of Girl Power (trademark of the Spice Girls, probably), they turn that two-fingered salute around and say “Up yours!” to their fellow sisters. It is done out of insecurity, of not wanting to be the one who stands out and of wanting to be accepted by those who hold all the power (men), but it only serves to place them further back. I am tired of belonging to a group which men happily identify as “bitches”; of course, they want us to talk badly about one another and vie for their attention as if winning their attention is somehow the equivalent to winning a nice, big, sexy slice of chocolate cake – but in calling us “bitches”, they are able to disregard us; they are able, with the help of you “bitches”, to silence us. And ultimately, in silencing women you are silencing yourself.

Where Did 'Girl Power' Go?

A few days ago I stumbled across a quote from my favourite former Spice Girl Melanie C, on the ever-increasing emphasis on sex in mainstream music and how artists such as Rihanna need to take greater responsibility for the image that they put out. This is what she said:

People have to take some responsibility because we’ve got to a point where over-sexualisation of young children has gone too far... I think music is a big part of that. Women in music, very successful women, are extremely sexual and they have young fans. It is inappropriate... Rihanna has responsibility and although culture’s always changing, it’s changed too much. It needs to be dealt with. It’s reached saturation point, we owe it to our kids to protect them.

From The Mirror

I didn't blog about it at the time because I thought that Sporty had said it all, but after reading this article today, I feel the need to clarify a few things.

The author implies that the Spice Girls were socially damaging for young girls, citing their (or, rather, Posh and Ginger Spices') donning of PVC in one music video, and while he admits that Sporty was one of the more modest Spices, there's the suggestion of hypocrisy on Melanie C's part, undermining her argument completely.

I've heard a lot of negative feminist commentary on the Spice Girls, but speaking as someone who was an impressionable young girl at the time of their reign, I found them to be nothing but a positive influence. When the Spice Girls were at their height, I was 8-years-old, and I was challenging the boys in the playground to races; I was campaigning at school for the girls to get as much football time as the boys; I was proud of who I was, and proud to be a girl. And while some feminists might argue that Ginger, Posh and at times Scary were heavily sexualised (for their time, anyway), I argue this: there was always choice with the Spice Girls. That's precisely what made them such a roaring success. If you reckoned yourself to be a bit cute, there was Baby. If you were feisty, there was Scary. If you thought you were more the classy kind, there was Posh. If you wanted to be sexy, there was Ginger. And if, like me, you liked football and trainers, there was Sporty. Being a fan of the Spice Girls didn't just mean that you were a fan of their music; it meant you were a fan of yourself. You, as a girl, were represented. You were told that it was OK for you to be cute, to be feisty, to be classy, to be athletic, and it was OK to be sexy, without ever indicating that to be sexy was the only way to be successful. These were normal women, with normal bodies and admittedly quite normal vocals; they were never the unobtainable, impossibly perfect and highly saturated pictures of women that we see on TV, in film and in music videos today.

As a young girl, I enjoyed a freedom I don't think young girls get to experience today. My morning battle with my wardrobe revolved around which tracksuit went best with which trainers, and the biggest problem my hair ever encountered was whether my ponytail was high enough. Now, I see girls as young as five being sent off to school in the winter months in just a little skirt and pair of socks, and it's easier finding a bikini for a young girl than it is finding a regular swimming costume. Why do we encourage this fashion upon young girls? Why are girls slapping on makeup with such inexpertise from as young an age as 11? Why are there so many pre-teen girls posing in front of their bedroom mirror in basques and then posting these photographs on social networking sites for the entire world to see, clearly oblivious to just who might see them? There are probably a lot of reasons why, but these few reasons in particular jump to mind: because it has become mainstream; because everyone else is doing it; because successful women they admire and aspire to be like are doing it; because we are not presenting these young girls with choice anymore. Sex sells, and kids have bought it.

Then the problem continues like a vicious circle: as popstars get younger and younger, with notables such as Willow Smith and Rebecca Black making the charts and the headlines respectively, we run the risk of exposing these already heavily-influenced kids to a darker reality. Tell an ordinary school-going young teenage girl to fit in, and she will likely put on a bit of makeup (badly) and wear clothes intended for a twenty-something. Tell a young teeange popstar to fit in, and she will likely turn into Miley Cyrus. Case in point.

But it's not all doom and gloom. There are probably almost as many Spice Girl-type role models as there are Rihanna-type role models: P!nk, Jessie J, Adele, Katy B and Kelly Clarkson to name just a few. The only problem is that sometimes we choose to watch a mute, expressionless, half-naked woman grinding herself against a fully-clothed male artist before we listen to the honest lyrics of those worth watching and listening to.

You Need Balls To Play Football

My love for football, I suppose, is rather contrary to everything I stand for. In theory, I can’t understand why a group of men skilled in ball-kicking are worth the huge salaries and lavish lifestyles they enjoy, nor what it is they do that’s so fantastic they should merit the adoration of millions of children and inebriated grown men. In practice, however, I like to attend football matches and chant “OO AR’YA!” at the away fans in a thick cockney accent. (And I don’t even have a cockney accent; somehow I think I’ve been conditioned to drop consonants and make use of glottal stops whenever my team scores.)

People always look at me funny when I tell them I like football. I don’t think it’s necessarily because I’m a woman, but more to do with the fact that I’m a small woman, and probably ‘traditionally’ suited to ballet or, I don’t know... baking fairy cakes? (They go even more cross-eyed with confusion when I tell them I also like the occasional boxing match.) The responses usually range from “I didn’t have you down as a football fan!” to “It’s because your brother likes them, isn’t it?” all the way to “Oh yeah, Fabregas is soooo sexy, isn’t he?” Sometimes they’ll test me and get me to recite the offside rule, because apparently that’s a hard one for us women to get our heads round.

The ironic part is that initially I was reluctant to like football, because I thought it would somehow threaten my femininity. I was nine-years-old when my mother, a lifelong Gooner, wanted to watch the 1998 FA Cup Final between Arsenal and Newcastle United. She needed to keep me quiet for the afternoon, so told me we’d get the men out of the house, make some popcorn and make a ‘girly day’ of it. I obliged, but on my own terms: I insisted on wearing a dress, and decided that Emmanuel Petit would be my favourite player, because his long blond hair made him look almost like a woman. (Y’know, from behind. If you squinted.) Unfortunately (and I say ‘unfortunately’ because, thirteen years down the line, I’m not sure it was worth all the disappointment and heartache I’ve since had to suffer at the hands of Arsenal FC), by the end of the match, I was standing in the centre of the living room screaming in delight at my newly-adopted team’s victory and declaring my love for Marc Overmars. I was in it for the long haul from that moment on, and this is what I learned very quickly: football doesn’t really cater for women.

Yeah, you can buy the jerseys specially fitted for women, football grounds have toilet facilities for both sexes and women like Gabby Logan have begun to pave the way for female football presenters – but it’s all still largely male-oriented, and I don’t really buy the argument that this is because boys are born with a predisposition to appreciating the Beautiful Game while girls are born with a predisposition to appreciating all things pink and fluffy.

Where women are included in the world of football, they are also excluded. The first (and last) time I watched Soccer AM (a popular Saturday morning magazine-style football show) a couple of years ago, I was appalled to find a segment of the show dedicated to ‘Soccerettes’. This is the concept: a female football fan will turn up in her favourite team’s shirt... and little else. She will stand there compliantly, smiling cutely and flicking her hair seductively, and we the audience (the audience being a crowd of jeering men) applaud her, not for her love for or knowledge of football, but for how tanned her legs are, how toned her bum is and how big her boobs manage to look through a two-sizes-too-small football shirt. You can even log onto the Soccer AM website and rate these women out of five; just in case objectifying them on national television wasn’t degrading enough, let’s put it out there on the internet, as well, and all little girls watching the show on a Saturday morning with their (mum and) dad and bowl of cornflakes will decide either that “Football is a man’s sport and I’m best off playing with my Barbies” or “So that’s what I have to be if I want to like football.” Meanwhile, the men on the show sit about cracking jokes and talking about the real nitty-gritty football stuff. Of course.

This isn’t the only occasion Sky have been guilty of either encouraging or turning a blind eye to sexism, either: until their recent dismissal, both Richard Keys and Andy Gray had been decorating football punditry with their snide misogyny for years. It was only until earlier this year when both were caught with their microphones switched on while they were tearing into female assistant referee Sian Massey that action was taken against them, and I don’t think I’m being unfair in suggesting that their dismissal was more a matter of keeping up appearances than taking a moral stand against sexism. (In case you were holidaying on Mars at the time and missed it, here’s an audio of their conversation.) Frankly, I don’t believe these networks really care; after all, it’s not like football wants women, is it?

That is a question I have often wondered. Does football want women? Football wants money, we know that much, and essentially, excluding an entire sex from your following seems a bit of a daft thing to do if you want to rake in more money, but are the people running the business – men – really interested in getting us on board?

I don’t think so. Belonging to a club is like belonging to a tribe, and with it comes fellowship and foes. If you freeze-framed the crowd at a London Derby, the picture you would get, I would imagine, would look somewhat like a scene from Braveheart (except maybe without all the horses). It’s a battle. A war. There’s blood, sweat and tears (losing to your club’s closest rival is, after all, about the only acceptable time in a man’s life when he can cry without being called a pansy), and women don’t go to war, do they? They don’t get their hands dirty, ever, through fear of breaking a nail. Apparently.

I remember my brother once saying to me that men never ran out of things to talk about, because if all else failed there was always football. Maybe it’s a male bonding thing, and a woman talking about football is like a man talking about his first period. Maybe they want to keep just enough of us around so that they have something nice to look at during halftime, or so that they have someone to hold their pint while they nip off to the loo. And the big fellas at the top aren’t exactly offering any useful suggestions as to how we can change this, either. As the Guardian reported back in 2004, when the President of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, was asked what could help women’s football gain more prestige, he kindly suggested the following: 

 “They [women footballers] could, for example, have tighter shorts. Female players are pretty, if you excuse me for saying so, and they already have some different rules to men - such as playing with a lighter ball. That decision was taken to create a more female aesthetic, so why not do it in fashion?"

Of course, his comments were deemed outrageous enough to make the headlines, but where’s the backlash now? Great waves have been made to kick racism and now homophobia out of football, and rightly so, but where are the ‘Kick It Out’ campaigns for sexism?

Perhaps Sepp Blatter is right. Perhaps a more scantily clad female footballer would attract greater attention to women’s football than one wearing the same kit as her male compatriot, but isn’t that a bit like telling Paris Hilton she’ll sell more records if she rolls around semi-naked on a beach in her music videos than if she dresses up as polar bear eating biscuits? (Actually, I think I would like Paris Hilton a bit more if she dressed up as a polar bear eating biscuits.) People will watch the video, but that won’t make her music any more bearable. (Personal opinion. Please don’t let your Chihuahua eat me.)  

The problem with the Paris Hilton analogy is that women’s football is actually a respectable sport: women footballers can actually play football, and yet they don’t get the recognition they’re due because... well, why? Because they’re not sexy enough? Because they’re intruding on a man’s world? Plenty of people will religiously follow a Conference side obviously not as skilled as the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea or (yeah, you guessed it) Arsenal, but few will follow their club’s women’s team, regardless of that team’s success. If you want to argue that you’re in it for the quality of football and that men’s football is of a higher quality, with all due respect, why do people support Crawley when they could support Chelsea?

I won’t exaggerate here and suggest that football is totally discriminate towards women; when I go to watch my team play I enjoy the game just as much as the next man sitting next to me, and it’s not like I’m hounded by sexual harassment from all angles, but as a female supporter you are always aware of the assumption that you can’t care as much as a man about the result, or that you aren’t as aware of what’s going on down on the pitch as a man is.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to win a competition to meet one of my favourite players, and so I went along to a big London derby with my brother (another avid Arsenal fan) to claim my prize. While we were waiting for the players to come out onto the pitch (me bouncing up and down with excitement and him banging on about how jealous he was) one of the women waiting with us turned to me and said, “Why don’t you let your brother meet him instead?” I was so appalled by the suggestion that I could barely open my mouth to utter a response, but my brother simply laughed it off and told her, “She wants to meet him just as much as I do. Trust me.” Of course, someone I had lived with my entire life was bound to know how much a moment like that meant to me, but the assumption from a stranger that it should mean more to him than it did to me, because he’s male and I’m female, infuriated me to no end, and the fact that it should come out of the mouth of another woman was beyond baffling.

Unquestionably, there is a huge assumption that football means more to men than it does to women, and while I find it slightly amusing that some people like to turn the fandom itself into a kind of competition (e.g. MY VUVUZELA IS BIGGER THAN YOURS!), I have to hold my small, feminine hands up here and admit that many women really are in it for the tanned muscular legs. But as long as there are those women more interested in the players’ underwear than they are in their silverwear, there are just as many men claiming to support a club just to feel affiliated to something. It’s like a prepubescent boy who’s just found his first sniff of bum fluff, who refuses to shave it off no matter how ridiculous it looks because it marks how much of a man he is. Among a lot of men there seems to exist the belief that you are not a real man unless you can stand in the pub with your pint and wave your fist in a suggestive manner at the referee and call him derogatory names. In reality, I think a lot of them would rather be sitting at home watching EastEnders. Of course, this is not all men, just like not all women started following Manchester United when they discovered David Beckham or Cristiano Ronaldo, nor do all women at football matches aspire to be WAGs.

The WAG culture itself is something else entirely, and though it’s been done to death, I can’t talk about sexism within football without bringing it up. So here it is:

It’s nothing too extraordinary to think that a woman might fall in love with, marry and have children with a footballer, but what is extraordinary is the fact that we as a nation can probably name more WAGs than we can name female footballers; we associate the names Colleen McLoughlin, Abbey Clancey, Melanie Slade and Alex Curran with football before we do the names Jayne Ludlow, Mia Hamm, Kelly Smith and Birgit Prinz. It’s not at all surprising that more and more young women these days seem to be aspiring to obtain WAG status than they are seeking female footballer status: one comes with money, fame and glamour, and the other comes with some old man telling you that you need to be wearing tighter shorts because you’re just not interesting enough as you are already. Go figure. And if you’re unlucky enough to fail in marrying the bloke, not to worry: just hang around the players’ hotels in your Soccerette eveningwear, and after the two of you have enjoyed a night – sorry, a minute – of passion, be sure to contact a tabloid newspaper of your choice and let them know all about how Mr England cheated on his wife, and if he dribbled before he scored. Then us women reading the gossip magazines can gossip to our friends about his poor beautiful wife and the ‘skank’ he went off with, while the men can jeer for five seconds before returning their focus to what’s going on inside the penalty box.

Of course, I am generalising here, but in a sport which pigeonholes all female supporters as ‘Soccerettes’, ‘Wannabe Wags’ or generally clueless glory-hunters, where’s the harm in a little more stereotyping? I guess I better go study the offside rule now...

It's a Girl/ Boy Thing.

Earlier on, I was in two minds as to whether being 'girly' is a good thing or a bad thing. Then I realised that there's a third mind: It's neither a good nor a bad thing. It's just a thing.

I was playing this Through the Keyhole -ish game with my mother, the aim being for her to speculate my gender and age based on my bedroom. Showing no regard to my various Arsenal monuments, she immediately went over to my bookshelf and said, "Girl. Student." This is based entirely on the fact that I own both the Twilight series and the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, among other similar dorky books on the English Language and awful chick lit specially reserved for a certain time of the month (the chick lit, that is; reading about English idioms doesn't tend to get my serotonin levels soaring). The student part is wrong, of course: I graduated a year ago, but because of the aforementioned dorkiness, I've kept all my books for ease of reference. And yes, I do still refer to them: a couple of weeks ago I did some reading up on commas. *Cucumber impersonation.*

Anyway, I'm getting off the point. What was my point? Where is my point?

Oh, it's over there. I'll go fetch it.

Got it.

So. My point was this: why does 'one' automatically defend themselves when accused of being 'girly'? If you're a dude, OK, maybe you want to be a dude, and having a hoo-ha, generally, implies that you are without a ding-dong. So I get that. (Just about. A hoo-ha is so much tidier and more discreet than a ding-dong.) But what's with all the negative girl connotations?

You throw like a girl.

I was screaming like a girl.

Stop being such a girl.

What's wrong with the following?:

You throw like a penguin.

I was screaming like one of the Bee-Gees.

Stop being such a scaredy-cat.

These are much better, in my opinion. The same point is made, only here we are replacing the attack on girls with attacks on penguins, cats and the Bee-Gees - and quite frankly, it's about time that the Bee-Gees took some responsibility for all those bloody awful haircuts.

But it's not just the apparent lack of aim, the pitch or the bravery of girls which is the issue here; it's everything else. Why is it considered silly to like the colour pink? Why is it a bad thing to have a (large) number of Beanie Babies lined up on top of your wardrobe? (Guilty). Why is it that all the behaviours associated with women - or girls - is laughed at or ridiculed? And why do we, as women, feel that we have to defend the things that we like, or worse: pretend that we don't actually like them - as if they are somehow inferior to men's things: cars, beer, football and a drawer full of screwdrivers and dead batteries?

All this occurred to me as I was looking around my bedroom at all the little things that give away clues about its occupier, and it was only until I remembered my mum's words - Girl. Student. - that I realised you can never make judgements about people based on one, two or even a handful of things; she looked at a few books and made an incorrect assumption that I'm a student. If she'd looked at my Arsenal posters she might have thought I was a boy; if she'd looked at my DVDs on the Vietnam War she might have thought I was a pensioner; if she'd looked at my yoga mat she might have thought that I was something more than the lazy bugger that I actually am.

The reality is that no one is one thing.

I'm a girly-girl: I like the occasional trashy book, I wear a bit of makeup and my room is painted purple.

I'm a tomboy: I like football, I can't walk in heels and nail polish scares me.

I'm mature beyond my years: I have books on English grammar and my own filing system.

I act my shoe size, rather than my age: I have books on people and places with rude names, and I think lying about somewhere is a well-used whoopee cushion.

I am a mish-mash of all kinds of things. We all are. And none of those things, be it girl, boy, old or young, are in any way superior or inferior to any of the others.

The Stupid Girl Culture

A few nights ago, I was on YouTube watching videos of farting horses, when I stumbled across the music video for Mickey Factz and Marsha Ambrosius's For The Culture. Now, as hilarious as flactuating horses are, there's only so long you can watch these kinds of videos before the howling laughter eventually simmers down into this kind of pathetic, forced chuckle. So I thought to myself, Enough of farting horses. Let's check out this music video.

And it's not the best song in the world. I mean, it's alright, but it doesn't really show off Marsha's voice. The thing is, I happen to be one of those people who always reads the comments on YouTube. I think it's because I like to laugh and shake my head at the ridiculous stuff people come up with, and the 'inventive' new spelling and grammar rules they like to apply to their sentences. Itz Partiklily Funni Wen Dey Say Sumfin Lyk Shez A Stoopid Ass Bitch Al Da Wile Dey Tipe Lyk Dis. (I just think it's interesting that the only words these kids are comfortable spelling independently these days are swear-words. Just an observation.) So I read the comments. Here's a small selection of them, for your convenience:

SHE IS OGLY.

she is a man or a women

she looks like a old reck, i mean what is she, 50 ?

LOL...this ugly bitch looks like gonzo from the muppets but not as cute and her teeth need to be filed down...

What pleasant human beings they are. And I bet you're expecting to see a real monster, aren't you? Well, see for yourselves:

The eye makeup isn't that great, but so what? Maybe this is a bit of a pointless question, but why is there so much talk about one woman's face? Why not talk about Mickey Factz's face, or even better, talk about the song? Why is music no longer about music, but instead about aesthetics, about bodies and bums and boobs? Why is it image selling music, and not music selling music?

Going back to what I said a few days ago about young society's fascination with the term 'hater', I find it extraordinary that you're not able to criticise the actions of someone like Beyonce, while it is deemed perfectly acceptable to make comments such as the ones above about the physical appearance of someone like Marsha Ambrosius. What do these women have in common? They're both talented. Where do they differ? Beyonce is 'bootylicious', and Marsha Ambrosius used to be overweight. Hypocrisy, anyone?

I call this The Stupid Girl Culture based on the 2006 song by P!nk, Stupid Girls, which I frequently direct people to as a point of reference (i.e. You're a twat. Look at this. This is you.) The ironic part is that these 'girls' - the famous ones, anyway - aren't actually stupid; they're actually pretty clever, because they know that the fastest way to success is through their image. Stephanie Germanatto didn't get anywhere until she reinvented herself and became Lady Gaga, and Lady Gaga would have disappeared into some hole somewhere long ago if she hadn't kept upping the weirdness by donning meat dresses and one-thousand-inch heels. Rihanna wouldn't have become the superstar she is today if she'd kept churning out comparatively innocent songs like SOS, and Beyonce would be fully eclipsed by both Rihanna and Lady Gaga by now had she not decided to star in post-watershed adverts, bleach her hair and allegedly her skin, too. They're smart women who promote stupidity, and for not-so-smart girls being brainwashed by these music videos, photographs and adverts every day, the effects are obviously damaging. That's why now we can't have someone like Marsha Ambrosius on a song without the majority of the comments being in reference to what she looks like. The same is true not only in music, but in literature, too. As a writer, I can't begin to describe how frustrating it is to walk into a bookshop and see the shelves lined with novels apparently written by Katie Price. I may never become a published writer, and the knowledge that this might not be true if I had bigger boobs and was happy to show them to the world, disgusts me.

I think we need to ask ourselves if this is what we really want, for ourselves, for our sisters, our daughters, our mothers and our nieces. Do we want to live in a world where what a woman looks like and what a woman does with her body is considered more important than the skills, talents and thoughts she has to offer? Because in embracing this Stupid Girl Culture, not only are you closing yourself off musical talents like Marsha, but you're also closing yourself off to great female writers, scientists, artists, politicians and philosophers. And that would be a real shame.

Haters to the Left

Has anyone else noticed the progressive use of the word 'hater' in the last couple of years? Is anyone else irritated by this progressive use? Cos I am.

I think the word 'hater' was borne out of honest intentions. Probably. Rather than looking inward and thinking, "I'm a big freaking loser and no one likes me because she called me fat and ugly!", people (mostly girls) began considering the possibility that those who tried to put them down were just jealous and that their opinion wasn't worth regarding. The latter became known as 'haters'.

The trouble now is that if you express dislike or disapproval towards someone or something for a valid reason, you are immediately labelled, without hesitance, a 'hater'. I am not allowed to say I find Lady Gaga an unoriginal attention-seeking copycat without her fans calling me a hater; I am not allowed to say that some of the sentiments of the likes of Rihanna and Beyonce's lyrics or music videos are socially damaging without being told I'm a hater; I am not allowed to think Madonna is just plain crap without having hater-shaped blades thrown at me. I am, according to the world, a hater.

And yes, while it is true that I am easily irritated by a lot of people and a lot of things, I don't consider myself a jealous person who looks for the worst in everyone. I think Stephanie Germanotta (known to the world now as 'Lady Gaga') and Beyonce are two incredibly talented individuals, but that it's not talent that they promote: it's controversy and sex, respectively. I don't think Rihanna is a bad person; I think she's young and possibly doesn't realise the full extent to which she impresses on young girls. As for Madonna.... Alright, maybe in her case I am a hater.

The term 'hater' doesn't just exist in the celebrity world anymore; it now plagues the youth of today. It promotes the idea that anyone can do anything they want and never be told to consider the implications of their decisions; it promotes the idea of "I'm right, you're wrong and that's that"; it promotes naivety, self-importance and arrogance. I am all for being yourself, "I am who I am" and all that jazz, but we need to start taking responsibility for our actions. Maybe sometimes we do need to look inwards.

We need to stop promoting arrogance and start promoting intelligence and healthy debate; if that means we have to promote 'hating', then so be it.

Why feminism is still important

There are some things in this world that we don’t really need anymore, or if we do need them, we only find a use for them once every five years or so. We don’t need cassette players because everything is either on CD or download. We don’t need telephone boxes because we all have mobile phones now, and telephone boxes always smelt like urine, anyway. We don’t need Emmanuel Adebayor because we’ve got Robin van Persie (when he’s not injured, that is), just like we don’t need feminism because we’ve got...

That’s the part that I struggle with: working out what it is that has come in and replaced feminism – because I look around me now and all I see is young women and girls shoving chicken fillets down their bras and queuing up to buy a former page 3 model’s latest novel, whose contribution to said novel probably didn’t extend past the main character’s first name. You ask these girls and young women what their aspirations are in life, and either they won’t know what ‘aspiration’ means, or they’ll tell you they want to marry a footballer or go on The X Factor.

How people choose to live their life is their own business, and not for a second would I wish a woman to sacrifice her happiness for a job with more prestige just because it’s more ‘respectable’. The problem is that I don’t believe many of these girls are happy. How can you be happy if you live your life striving towards an almost completely unobtainable goal? How can you be happy if you want to be a singer but can’t sing, if you want to marry a footballer but the only ones who will look at you play for a Championship side and already have wives, or if you want to be a model but your breasts are too small?

You can have surgery, of course. Surgery seems to solve most of the world’s problems these days. You don’t really need to be able to sing if your face and body can do the job instead (going back to what I said earlier, I guess we don’t need Aretha Franklin because we’ve got auto-tune now), and if you’re a B-cup and only attracting attention from Championship footballers, move up to a DD-cup and I’m sure John Terry or Ashley Cole at least might throw you a bone (pun not intended). But what happens when you’ve had the surgery and that’s still not good enough? Do you keep going? The breasts are bigger but the bum is still too small; you’ve fixed your nose but your chin is still a little wide; your ears have been pinned but you’ve still got that mole under your eye; your tummy has been tucked but your lips are still too thin. When you’ve finally exhausted all of the above, then you can move onto labiaplasty (if you don’t know what that is, it’s when they perform plastic surgery on your labia to make it look prettier), and then maybe go out to a club with nothing but a belt covering your nipples, and hey presto: you’ve made it! (Or at least until the next talentless nobody comes along and uses her HH-boobies to barge you to one side.)

Just because women won the right to vote doesn’t mean that we can all hang up our knickers and call it a day, but according to some, that’s it now: mission accomplished. Apparently, we now have all the rights and freedom men have. 94% of rapes go unconvicted in the UK, but that’s OK because ‘sexi ladies’ get free entry into clubs before 11pm; men earn 27% more than women, but what the hell are we complaining about? We get to dance round poles half-naked because it’s fun and empowering and we’re taking control of our sexuality!

The thing that saddens me most about my generation is that it does not know what feminism is and therefore cannot judge whether or not we need it. We’ve all heard that feminists are lesbians, have hairy legs and hate men; it’s funny, because 300 years ago, any woman who went against the status quo was accused of being a witch and burned at the stake. Obviously these days we can’t go around murdering women just because they happen to be capable of independent thought, but call her a feminist and people will automatically assume she’s nuts and disregard anything she says, so at least in that sense little has changed since the times of witch-hunting. But just for the record, let me set one thing straight:

Feminism does not care if what makes you happy is being a doctor or a model, a lawyer or a singer, future Prime Minister or stay-at-home mum, but feminism does care that you are happy, and that the decisions you make about your life are based on what you want, and not what our patriarchal society has led you to believe is important. Put ten teenage girls in front of this article and I bet you that nine out of ten of them will tell you that they know their own mind, but the reality is quite different. If you are one of those ten and you often find yourself dreaming of fame and glamour and men falling in love with you, ask yourself this: are you happy?

Now tell me we don’t need feminism anymore.