Image shared by ClickFlashPhotos / Nicki Varkevisser on Flickr via CC

Is this a title you didn’t expect to see on my blog? If so, why? Did I not seem like the ‘type to like romantic comedies’? Well let’s stop right there, shall we. Since when was it OK to dismiss a whole genre? I’d struggle to find even a sub-genre that I’d feel comfortable dismissing as universally rubbish, probably Snuff, though is that a form, not a genre? Sub genre of documentary? Anyway, killing people is fucked up. Stop it.

Back to point.

I AM SO BORED of the lazy dismissal of romantic comedies. I was having a discussion on Twitter yesterday about Space Westerns, I like the genre, and I thought I might try one, probably in a comic book collaboration I’m vaguely starting. Cue much self-satisfied snarking of ‘you mean like Firefly’ as if a) I had imagined I had invented the genre (srsly) and b) Firefly was the only one of its kind (try Star Trek (‘the final frontier’?) Star Wars, Halo Jones, Mass Effect, Cowboy Beebop, and they’re only some of the good ones). I tried to put this point to someone who suggested it could be nothing but a Firefly copy, by suggesting that had I said I was going to write a Romantic Comedy, he would not have suggested it must be a ‘Singing in the Rain’ ripoff. He responded that if that had been the case he would have considered it immediately rubbish anyway.

Though this made me facepalm, I’m willing to admit that there was, many a year ago, a point at which I would have agreed with him. That was the point, probably in my early teens and recognising something in society, I was in full-blown tomboy mode. I did not like musicals and romantic comedies because they were all rubbish, weren’t they? Why? The same reason I was imitating male clothing, academic ambitions*, sporting prowess. Because I have always wanted to be good at things, score high, understand how things work, learn. And what I had learnt from society was that ‘girl’ was not as good as ‘boy’. It was an insult. ‘You throw like a girl’. I bloody well didn’t, I bowled on a par with the boys and made it onto the school cricket team, I got the highest GCSEs out of the whole school, boys included**. And I won acceptance from boys for acting as they did. And Romantic Comedies, with their ideas of love and happy endings, they were uniformly feminine. And therefore, obviously, rubbish.

“There are the stereotypes – oh, the abundant stereotypes – about women, not me, of course, but other women, those women with their bad driving and their relentless shopping habits and their PMS and their disgusting vanity and their inability to stop talking and their disinterest in Important Things and their trying to trap men and their getting pregnant on purpose and their false rape accusations and their being bitches, sluts, whores, cunts. And I am expected to nod in agreement, and I am nudged and admonished to agree. I am expected to say these things are not true of me, but are true of women (am I seceding from the union?). I am expected to put my stamp of token approval on the stereotypes. Yes, it’s true. Between you and me, it’s all true. […] Not every man does all of these things, or even most of them, and certainly not all the time. But it only takes one, randomly and occasionally, exploding in a shower of cartoon stars like an unexpected punch in the nose, to send me staggering sideways, wondering what just happened. Well. I certainly didn’t see that coming.

These things are not the habits of deliberately cruel men. They are, in fact, the habits of the men in this world I love quite a lot.” Source

Romantic comedies do the worst thing a narrative can do – they typically have a female protagonist. Which means obviously they aren’t meant for men. Never mind that most other films have a male lead, never mind that the white, straight man*** is considered the ‘neutral’, that women are expected to watch all manner of in pretty much every other genre and have the ability to identify with their leads, but if a film has the temerity to buck this trend there’s no way it could be for a straight man.

There’s something called the Bechedel Test. It is not a measure of a good, or feminist movie, but rather is the measure of a movie that 1) has at least two women in it, who 2) talk to each other 3) about something besides a man. It is simply about the presence of women in a film/other fiction. There are plenty of excellent movies who fail this test. There are not enough movies that pass it. examples: here

I’m not saying that romantic comedies are feminist in any way, I bet most don’t pass the Bechedel test. Some might, but many reinforce anti-feminist ideas about needing a man, beauty, capitalism. But that they are universally dismissed as rubbish-as-default is the same as calling someone a ‘girl’, or ‘gay’ when you mean ‘not good’. You’re saying that a woman could never have something to say that might interest you. And that’s a problem.

If you’ve ever gotten all the way through my ‘about’ page you’ll know I did the flagship playwriting studies masters at the University of Birmingham, the one Sarah Kane hated, y’know. On that course several different playwrights ran our weekly sessions, including the course’s founder and eminently serious and political playwright David Edgar. Do you know what we studied with him? When Harry Met Sally. It’s fucking brilliant example of exposition-within-a-form – whenever the two male characters talk about their feelings they’re engaged in sport. It’s brilliant and hilarious

Here are some excellent romantic comedies:

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Pride and Prejudice
The Importance of Being Earnest
Singing in the Rain
Annie Hall
When Harry Met Sally
Stranger than Fiction
Scott Pilgrim
The Secret of Monkey Island
Juno
High Fidelity
Sleepless in Seattle
Wall-E
Amelie
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Groundhog Day

Comment with any of your own Rom-Com ‘must-watches’ (especially ones with a female lead, there aren’t enough in my list).

I generally don’t appreciate Hollywood Action movies. But I’m pretty confident that there are as many shit Action films as there are Romantic Comedies. And brilliant films in each. An individual film may not be to your taste, but if you find yourself dismissing a whole genre, just for second, it might be worth asking yourself why.

*male academic ambitions consist of believing you can be good at any subject but Home Ec.

**actually the boy I beat by one A* was my boyfriend at the time, is still a friend, and is the loveliest person ever.

***There are a few exceptions to this of course, see Will Smith.

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EDIT

I decided to try collating recommendations and comments that I’m getting on Twitter on here with Storify:

Image shared via CC on Flickr by Lamazone

I received this, today, from someone I met on a writing course a couple of years ago. I’m glad he shared it with me, and I thought you might be interested in reading it too.

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Hope you’re well. Thought you might like to hear about a bit of a back and forth we’ve been having at work. Feminism-related, and frustrating from our point of view (and probably yours). What with your interest in the topic I thought I’d share the anecdote.

I work in a Creative Advertising Agency, these days, as a Copywriter. One of our accounts is a major retailer (who shall remain nameless). The client is keen boost sales of technology-related stuff to women over the Xmas period, as they see it as an untapped market.

The idea the client came up with was a “Girl Gamer’s Survival Kit” – everything from fancy gaming keyboards/mice to xbox bits and bobs. They wanted us to design three A3 posters to be displayed in their UK stores, advertising the range of products.

Reservations about the name aside, we went out and spoke to any female employees (and occasionally customers) we could find in our local GAME, GameStation, HMV video game sections etc and found out that, without exception, they didn’t give two fucks about things being pink, they just wanted nifty gadgets, cool peripherals… just the standard stuff, really.

With this in mind we went back to the office and designed what we thought was a pretty good campaign. It was chiefly black in colour, shiny – we wanted it to look as ‘bad-ass’ as possible. There was a girl on it, mid-shot, wearing a plain black t-shirt, slightly alternative-looking. But yes. It was awesome.

We then sent it over to the client.

It came back with a one-sentence reply:

“I don’t get what this has to do with girl gamers.”

Over the course of the next few days (with a back and forth conversation between the client and our account managers) the advert gradually became more and more pink. And more and more sexist.

The final poster they’re going with features what looks like a scantily-clad bad CGI Lara Croft-style woman with enormous breasts holding a ray gun or something. It’s pink. As are all of the gadgets on it. Pink X Box controller, pink X box add-ons… everything.

Unfortunately the money only flows one way – and we’re there to do what the client asks us to. We can argue with it and fight our corner, but ultimately the advertising industry is subservient to the clients who foot the bill; and their fear of change.

I just wanted to write and say sorry.

We tried our best.

Luke

——

How do we send a message that we’re more than tits and pink? Is it time for some kind of petition? Some kind of ‘girl gamer’ movement that can raise its voice loud enough that the advertisers listen?

“A strong-minded woman! Much like her mother, eh? Wears green spectacles and writes learned books … She wants to upset the universe, and play dice with the hemispheres. Women never know when to stop … “ William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine.

A large part of the history of the struggle for women’s rights has been the fight for participation in the public sphere; for the vote, for a say in politics, economic rights, for a voice, and worth in the public arena. We hear again and again that technology is a powerful tool, that blogs and social networking phenomena such as Twitter are becoming more and more involved in politics, and that people gather, communicate, and agitate from online. There is no doubt that as a forum for discussion and a place to co-ordinate action, technology is an invaluable platform. New online tools are creating a new public sphere – in such a fast moving medium, we simply cannot afford to be left behind. Women need to be on the front line, both participating in and originating new technology, and whilst women represent roughly 55% of the people online, and a 2008 study by Tesco’s Computers for Schools initiative found that from as early as seven years old, girls are outstripping boys when it comes to computer literacy (Taherreport, 2008), this isn’t being born out in the tech industry itself:

While women influence 80% of consumer spending decisions, 90% of technology products and services are designed by men [...] Women make up approximately 20% (and sometimes less) of panelists at major tech conferences. Even fewer are asked to be keynote speakers. Furthermore, women in tech are rarely quoted and sought out as experts by the mainstream media covering technology. (Kapin, 2009)

Women are hideously underrepresented in the tech world, this is due to more universal problems encountered by women in and en route to the work place, but it is also down to the pervading myth (and it is a myth, but one that unfortunately one that is woven into our education right from the kinds of toys that children are given to learn from) that women just can’t do tech as well as men. What is largely accepted as true is that role models are one of the best ways to break down that misconception. Enter Ada Lovelace Day – A day named after the world’s first computer programmer – countess of Lovelace, Ada. Ada Lovelace Day brings bloggers together to share stories and role models of women that are important to the/their history of digital technology/computing.

There are plenty of excellent programmers and engineers which other people are going to do much better justice than I. The person I have decided to talk about is a bit different, but the kind of person who I think also makes a big difference. I’d have to, really, because she’s an academic.

Theorists are often seen as derivative of the do-ers, but Ada Lovelace, devoid of the hardware that could run her code, was in essence a theorist, some of the biggest imaginative leaps can cause the biggest scientific and technological pushes. This short blog post today is dedicated to Sadie Plant.

I discovered Sadie Plant first as a writer on the complex and revolutionary artistic ideas of the Situationist International – looking at how advance capitalism can be tackled by the revelation of the spectacle, before discovering that she founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, and then getting my hands on a (signed, no less, thanks go out to @toodamnninja for that find) copy of Zeros + Ones.

Zeroes + Ones is a magnificent piece of writing, a glorious, hubristic, and enthusiastic look at women in digital technoculture. It moves from science fiction, to the history of zero, to Freud, Frankenstein, and Ada Lovelace in her own words; tracing the history of women as portrayed in technoculture, and women as the body of digital tech. Plant looks at weaving and the Jacquard Loom‘s punched cards as a precursor to the analytical engine,  the notion of binary sex/gender, and how the way women have had to exist in the workplace places them ideally for the way workplaces are reconfiguring in a digital age. Through a complex and incredibly varied text Plant allows Ada herself to emerge as a kind of guide, the book progressing as an almost ode to Ada’s mind:

“‘nothing but very close & intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement’”

Plant looks at how women, given the task of interfacing throughout history – the secretary, the PA, the typist, the telephone operator – find themselves ideally suited to the future of tech, as well as woven throughout its history:

“When computers were vast systems of transistors and valves which needed to be coaxed into action, it was women who turned them on. They have not made some trifling contribution to an otherwise man-made tale: when computers became the miniaturised circuits of silicon chips, it was women who assembled them. Theirs is not a subsidiary role which needs to be rescued for posterity, a small supplement whose inclusion would set the existing records straight: when computers were virtually real machines, women wrote the software on which they ran. And when computer was a term applied to flesh and blood workers, the bodies which composed them were female. Hardware, software wetware–before their beginnings and beyond their ends, women have been the simulators, assemblers, and programmers of the digital machines.”

The first computer programming language was named Ada, after the founder of modern computer programming; Ada Lovelace. Women played a key role in code-breaking at Bletchley Park during WWII, in 1942 the ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic  computer) was programmed by six women and Grace Hopper, the second programmer, inspired the development of the COBOL programming language. Women are the majority of online users (55%) and tech consumers (80%).  When I speak to my programming friends they have no clue about any of this. The battle (as ever) for women in tech is reclaiming our past as well as our present.

Plant then looks to the future, touching on Donna Haraway’s Cyberfeminist manifesto and at ideas of consciousness and cyborgs in fiction, theory, and reality:

“Only the most highly coded and perfectly integrated machines are unable to see the extent of their own programming. The bladerunner’s blind conviction in his own humanity proves only how efficient the programming can be.”

Zeroes + Ones was written in 1997 and is an invaluable book for all people interested and working in the world of technology. Looking back, as well as far forward the ideas, facts, figures and concepts shifting under its covers slowly reveal a full picture, pregnant with the full potential of a powerful, feminine, digital age.

Buy it, read it. Laugh, smile, disagree, but above all, feature this fuller history in your mind and in your deeds, because, as an excellent blog post I read today puts it:

“the problem is […] thoughtlessness, a kind of – oh, God, I’m going to say it – institutional sexism, where nobody thinks to notice and object because nobody realises what’s happening. […] it’s not what we believe and value that counts. It’s not what we think in our head and hearts that counts. It’s what we do, often by mistake and often without knowing that we’re doing it. It’s what we do when that effectively runs counter to what we believe that needs attending to.” Colin Smith

My Ada Lovelace Day is dedicated to Sadie Plant, because nothing has shown me that as a woman I belong in tech – and that it belongs to me – better and brighter than this book.

Saturday the 6th of March was the Million Women Rise march. Scheduled the closest weekend to International Women’s Day, Million Women Rise brings together women from all over the country to march against violence against women – domestic and sexual abuse. For more on my thoughts on why it’s important for women to stand up agains VAW, and why it does require a different approach than violence against men, by men, see here.

This following quote was on a few placards, and really stuck in my mind:

“It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in armed conflict”
- Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former Commander of UN Peacekeeping forces in the eastern Congo (Source).

There was a really good turn out. You can see the F Word’s coverage here with links to @CTrouper and @Jester‘s  photo sets. Below see an audioboo I recorded just before we got going, a flickr slideshow of my snaps, and a couple of videos of speakers/singers at the rally after the march.

It’s difficult to get involved in domestic and sexual violence protest if you are male, because it’s often important that such spaces are ‘safe’ spaces for people who have been subject to such violence, and also that women are able to be seen to be powerful in their own right.

If you want to oppose male violence against women, and are male, you can start by recognising that women are not objects or possessions, oppose their portrayal as such in the media, magazines, music, your workplace, and your own home. You could also check out the White Ribbon Campaign, and support Rape Crisis Centres, Refuge, and Amnesty International‘s work in countries where rape is being used as a weapon of war, and state religion refuses women rights over their own bodies.

Image by Ricardo.martins on Flickr shared via a Creative Commons License.

Over the past couple of days I have been watching all 6 of the Star Wars films. I started at Episode IV, because, well, starting with Episode I makes me disinclined to continue. I’ve never seen all 6 in such close succession before, and I was seriously struck by how little had changed, and indeed how regressive in places the representation of women was in the modern trilogy. Sure Padmé and Leia are strong, and they fight well, but why are there no prominent female jedi? Why is the most lingering image of the entire series in pop culture Leia her dressed in a slave girl outfit?

Final Fantasy X-2 is another case in point – the idea was phenomenally exciting – taking the strong summoner of FFX and building a game around her and an all-female team of fighters. What did we get? Instead of the (admittedly opaque) Sphere Grid route to levelling up your characters –  you had ‘dresspheres’ and a ‘garment grid’. Yes, you changed fucking clothes to garner different abilities. 40% of all gamers are female, and this is what they think of us.

Likewise as strong fantasy and scifi characters are translated to the Silver Screen we find much of the same. Hermione pretty much saves everyone’s lives several times over in the Harry Potter series, she is strong, intelligent, and has emotional struggles on a par with her male counterparts – in the films she is over-emotional, passive, or emotionally motivated in her power. In the books Ginny is also strong, powerful, and an accomplished sportswoman – in the films she ties Harry’s shoelaces and feeds him mince pies.

Even the few things billed as pro-feminist – Firefly for example – let us down. Sure it contains strong, realistic female characters – but what do we really have? An upper class whore, a techy-girl, a crazy person, and a warrior woman, plus the odd head of tribe is female. This characterisation is only on a par with our CURRENT REAL WORLD. And when we saw them moved to the Silver Screen, we got a couple dress size thinner (compare Serenity Kaylee to her Firefly counterpart), more compliant female characters.

There are of course some notable mainstream exceptions - Halo Jones, most things written by Ursula Le Guin, Portal, quite a lot of Miyazaki – you could (to a degree) include the Alien films, but remember that Ripley was originally written as a male character, and when they changed the gender, they didn’t change the lines.

Part of this lack of strong female characterisation is to do with the appalling lack of women writing, directing and programming (or given money and the expectation that they will be able to do so) and part of this is to do with how fiction is billed and marketed – an awful lot of excellent fiction is dismissed as not of mainstream interest because it comes in ‘female’ format (romantic comedy is a case in point). Fiction with female protagonists or female-orientated central concerns are largely considered to be of interest only to women – whereas fiction with male protagonists (an overwhelming majority) are expected to have universal appeal. Female writers’ names are put on the front of books in gender neutralised initials so that men might pick them up, and the majority of sci fi and fantasy comic books and video games are populated replications of of contemporary gender relations, seen through predominantly male eyes. Likewise the argument is made than women just aren’t interested in scifi/fantasy/games/comic books. Ever consider that may have something to do with whose story they always tell?

People are exploring race, identity and white guilt through mainstream scifi – the alien, we are told, is the analogue for the Other. But I’m bored of looking at the Other from the eyes of the every-white-man. How about we consider than in a thousand years or so - gender, race, and disability relations may have changed. Yes we are writing/filming/programming for contemporary audiences, but the great power of other worlds is that we can use them to highlight and explore the assumptions of this one.

Further reading:

When Will White People Stop Making Films Like Avatar

Awesome Women in Comics Holiday Gift List

A list of pro-feminist scifi writing compiled by Cynthia Ward

Standard Troll Rebuttal Page #1: “Who cares? It’s just a game”

Once again the Tories are out in force applying gaffa tape and No Nails to the shards of our broken country. This time they are offering tax breaks to shore up shaky marriages, and to prevent marriage becoming the scourge preserve of the middle-classes. The Tory rhetoric runs thus: Britain is broken! Societal values have been degraded! We need a return to traditional family values! The sanctity of the family unit is something often championed as the route to fixing our so-called ‘broken’ nation. The idea of family being at the heart of society is certainly tenacious – and harks back to nostalgic ideals that belong the Victorian age. There you will find the Angel in the House – the woman as central to the family – the hearth, submissive, caring, doting, safe. Is this the ‘intact’ time that the Tories are harking back to? Perhaps the 50s, where children born out of wedlock were forcibly adopted, when women were beaten with impunity and expected to cook, clean care for children whilst quite often also having a job? Maybe the 1970s, where women still weren’t allowed to open a bank account without their father or husband’s permission? Or perhaps that of up to 1991, where spousal rape was not only commonplace (the majority of rapes are still committed by partners), but legal?

Contrary to the politicians’ rhetoric, the structure of the family is far less important than the quality of its relationships, as a recent Gingerbread report demonstrates. Source

I’m not going to argue that family is not important, it certainly is, along with our education and peers, our family is one of the key influences that shape our lives. What I certainly will argue is that the Tory definition of ‘family’ is both outdated and damaging, especially when they use tax incentives to try and engineer it.

And yet those good old Tory brains carry on ticking:

So only the middle classes are getting married – and they’re all quite happy aren’t they? I know! Let’s make those troublesome working class marry, and then they’ll  be happy too!

Marriage is a symptom, rather than a cause of social stability. Simply putting incentives in place to bribe quite unhappy people into staying together ‘for the sake of their children’ isn’t going to magically create social stability. That kind of logic is cargo-cultism, and it’s lazy, and it’s stupid, and it won’t work. Penny Red

There’s also some lovely science to support Penny Red’s assertion, too:

Professor Kelly Musick and Dr Ann Meier of Cornell University have carried out a study of children whose parents stay together for the sake of the kids. […] exactly the kind of people who would be glued back together by Cameron’s policies […] It turns out their children do worse than any other group – including those of divorcees or single mums. Source

We don’t need to try and rebuild a version of the perfect family that never existed, or that isn’t useful or relevant. We don’t need these units which mould around heteronormative visions of economically dis-empowered women perfecting their ‘recession chic’, which keep unhappy and abusive relationships upheld, and men apart from the formative years and full lives of their children. We need a serious revision of what constitutes a ‘family’, and the responsibilities that go along with being a part of one.

I am part of what is (leadingly, painfully) termed a ‘broken’ family. My parents are divorced. I wouldn’t change that for the world. I love my mum and dad, and part of that love is wanting to see them as happy as they could be. They are better, wholler people how they are now, than they were for years when together.

We’re told women should have children young, and that this is incompatible with a career and education. Women of childbearing age are routinely discriminated against and new fathers have only very recently started moving towards anything nearing decent paternity leave. We’re told the ‘best’ environment for children is two married, heterosexual people, one of whom stays at home (or who should feel mighty guilty for not doing so).

This conception of family is inaccurate and damaging for all concerned.

So how about we reissue the word ‘family’ to mean anyone who loves you? How about we consider childcare as something that is done by women, men, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Parenting is open source, there is no ‘natural’ knowledge, new mothers can feel so alone, they rarely speak to adults, their work and social lives have been removed, it’s scary. If family was wide, sprawling, even if a father wasn’t available there would be so many role models available. Too many relationships break down because the way parental leave is structured ostracises the working parent from the outset.

Let’s not talk about the ‘break down’ of family through marriage, if divorce was only concerned with the end of love and not a failure – if people separating wasn’t (still) a social taboo – it would hurt all concerned a lot less. If women could study, or work, as well as care for a child with the help of a social network (family) there would be no ‘ticking clock’ to service, and if men were able – indeed expected – to take an equal share in home-running and childcare, there would be far less discrimination against parents in the workplace.

Isn’t it a strength that we accept marriages fail, not because of wickedness or moral laxity, but because of ordinary human incompatibility? Yes, it brings some problems – but [the aforequoted] study underlines that they are far less than the problems of imprisoning people in dead marriages, and lecturing them it’s for their own moral health. Source

Leaving aside all of the misogynistic baggage inherent in the marriage state, very few relationships last a lifetime, but your family does. Family is what we should be protecting, not marriage, but it’s families, poor families, that these pro-marriage tax breaks will damage most.

Cameron’s policies would simply shift more power and money towards those who already have it. The Married Couples Allowance would be a big redistribution of wealth to people who don’t need it, paid for by slashing help to the poorest people who really do – from Tax Credits to SureStart to the Educational Maintenance Allowance. And all for a dysfunctional outcome. Source

Iceland was recent placed first in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index rankings. They are the happiest, healthiest, wealthiest and best educated people in the world. They also have the highest birth rate in Europe, the highest divorce rate and the highest percentage of women working outside the home (Source).

‘Patchwork families are a tradition here […] It is common for women to have kids with more than one man. But all are family together.’ Source

Now there’s a phrase, ‘patchwork’ – different in aspect, but together bound. I like that.

So be brave, politicians, legislate in that direction. Equalise laws, reform marriage and civil partnerships, incentivise parental leave for both employer and employee. Support social housing and sure start programs. Work towards improving on how things are, not towards how you fantasise that they used to be.

And have a lovely Christmas with your patchwork family.

There is an excellent campaign being run as part of this called ‘Take Back the Tech‘ – which is all about empowering women online, looking at safety, privacy, tech literacy, and using online tools to promote activism that opposes VAW.

I am very passionate about us recovering both the history of women in tech, and in women participating the building as well as the consuming of the new worlds we’re building.

I have written an article for the forthcoming issue of Subtext magazine on what I term the ‘Digital Ceiling’. To paraphrase a section from that:

A large part of the history of feminist struggle has been the fight for participation in the public sphere; for the vote, for a say in politics, economic rights, for a voice, and worth in the public arena. Web 2.0 and new online tools are creating a new public space – in such a fast moving medium, we cannot afford to be left behind. Women have also been erased from a male authored history; The first computer programming language was named Ada, after the founder of modern computing; Ada Lovelace. Women played a key role in code-breaking at Bletchley Park during WWII, in 1942 the ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic computer) was programmed by six women, and Grace Hopper led the development of one of the first modern programming languages, COBOL. Women are the majority of online users, and consumers of tech. But we are disgustingly under-represented in the tech industries, and that needs to change.

(The rest of that article can be read in the Autumn/Winter issue of Subtext, (coming soon)). Tech is also proving to be an invaluable activist tool, from trafigura, to the Iran election, the online world is uncovering and proliferating activists’ content like never before. We need to be in this.

Why else am I writing this blog? Because these 16 days of action are also about VAW. VAW is an incontrovertible fact, I’m not going to offer further evidence on that, but I do have a reading of the first draft of a play this Thursday, a piece called Eismas, as part of the ‘Littlepalooza!‘ festival, at the Crypt Gallery near St. Pancras:

Image reproduced with permission from Scary Little Girl Productions

“Feel the quick of the modern city fall away as you descend into the crypts below St Pancras Parish Church.  Discover some of the best new writers of contemporary gothic in this evening festival among the ancient graves and catacombs.  Music, theatre and story telling combine to make this a thrilling presentation of young blood amongst the oldest of bones.”

Eismas is a play about the violence done by monetising human beings. My Littlepalooza! piece is a half hour rehearsed reading from the second act and is being billed as:

A startling piece of spec-fic theatre, that imagines a future Europe in which a single child policy has shocking repercussions on the female population.

The piece will be read at 6.15pm and tickets to see it are only £3. Please do come and support both the Littlepalooza! festival (click the link for the full evening price, and other days’ events) and my piece in development. I would love any feedback on the play, and the massive twist that you may or may not gather from the first half hour. If you need more persuading, here’s a monologue from it – don’t worry there are no spoilers (read by me though, the actress has a much better accent!)

It would be brilliant to see people at the event on Thursday (though don’t look out for red hair any more, it’s much darker now!) and if you do make it, please come and chat to me after the reading, I’d love to hear what you think (good or bad) before I go into a massive redraft over Christmas.

And finally, do click below for more info and actions on Take Back the Tech:

Pass it on.

This is just a quick post to give you a feeling for the RTN march this Saturday – you can find all of the interviews, images and video I took over at this Posterous. It was a really brilliant, strong, and empowering event. Sadly, however, we were reminded how very necessary the march was at the same time as someone was sexually assaulted whilst actually on the march.

Keep fighting.

Image shared via a creative commons license by Open Democracy on Flickr.

I am going to preface this post with a defence. Why? Because this is how I have to have these conversations now. I am going to be attending the Reclaim the Night march on the 21^st of November. Reclaim the Night is a march against male violence with its roots in the 70s feminist movement.

A recent survey by the young women’s magazine More in 2005 found that 95% of women don’t feel safe on the streets at night, and 65% don’t even feel safe during the day. 73% worry about being raped and almost half say they sometimes don’t want to go out because they fear for their own safety.

In every sphere of life we negotiate the threat or reality of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. We cannot claim equal citizenship while this threat restricts our lives as it does. We demand the right to use public space without fear. We demand this right as a civil liberty, we demand this as a human right. Source

I understand that the second I say male violence, men reading this will have bristled. I profusely refute the idea that men are somehow innately violent, or unable to control their sexual desires. Rather I believe a culture that continually objectifies women, portrays them as sex objects, as things to be won and lost, and male sexual desire as something un-responsible and uncontainable, men will be taught that they are owed sex, and that women are to be bought and sold. They will be taught that with money, comes power, and power is the currency that males/female relationships are built on, transactional in essence, men must get their due.

Nearly a quarter of 14-year-olds [girls] have been forced to have sex or do something sexual against their will, and one in four 16-year-olds [girls] have been hit or hurt in some way by someone they were dating Source

Male violence against women is an inconvertible fact. Reclaim the Night marches against it. It is firstly an all (identifying) female march, and then followed by a rally with speakers and musicians (men are welcome to the rally), bringing together women, women’s organisations and unions, speaking out against male violence and reclaiming the spaces from which we are told we are not safe, not permitted, that we must be protected from.

How about we remove the need for protection?

Reclaim the Night stands up and says that women are never to blame for male violence, we battle against rape apologists who claim that women’s drinking, flirting, manner of dressing, or sexual proclivities mean they deserves it. We fight against rape myths that say one kind of sexual contact must lead to another, that say that women want it, that not saying no is the same as yes, and that women falsely report disproportionately to other crimes (“the allegations of rape that are false are exactly the same as that of any other crime i.e. 6 – 8%“ Source )

Britain has the lowest rape conviction rate in the EU, coming “bottom of 33 countries in the study.” Source

Likewise

In 2007-08, only 6.4% (43,970) of the 686,272 reported incidents of domestic violence reported to the police resulted in a conviction in court Source

I am told again and again when I stand up against rape and domestic vioelnce that doing so is somehow ‘divisive’. That old tune: ‘women commit violence against men too, and men hurt men too, this should be about all violence, not just one bit of it’.

Fuck you and the privilege you sailed in on.

In domestic violence cases between 2004-5 and 2008-9, “Convictions of men were up […] from 18,659 to 45,484” while “the number of women convicted of domestic violence is up […] from 806 […] to 2,968 “ Source

Male sexual violence against women is about power, and property. Male rape is also about power, but it is an inherently different offence (and much rarer – in the year 2005-6 0.4% of adult males were raped, and 5% of adult women were*), and requires a different approach in supporting victims. As does non-sexual violence.

The patriarchal construction of masculinity and the power dynamics within a society where women have for centuries been oppressed by men leads to men committing acts of violence and harrassment [sic] against women. Not all men do this, sure, but they are doing it in sufficient numbers to ensure that 45% of the female UK population suffer stalking, domestic violence or sexual victimisation in their lifetime. Source

With sexual violence on the rise, with already scarce rape crisis centres under threat, in a society where young girls are raped as punishment for their or their peers’ misdemeanours we need to stand up. We need to fight. Splitting hairs, trying to denigrate these facts by propagating myths and apologist rhetoric, or suggesting that to fight for one cause is to belittle another is at best ignorant, and at worst abhorrent.

1 in 10 women this year will experience some form of gendered violence (that is domestic or sexual abuse committed against them by a man). source

The lifetime statistic is 1 in 4 **

These are all reasons why I will be attending the Reclaim the Night event on the 21^st. I will also be tweeting, taking pictures, videoing, grabbing interviews, and otherwise amplifying the event to the best of my ability. Look out at @hannahnicklin for more news about my collating it, and to follow me on the day. I don’t get to anywhere near as many protests as I would wish, time is a factor, but it’s mostly not being able to afford the travel, so I want to make the most of my time there.

If you are in or around London, please do consider joining this year’s Reclaim the Night march. If you can’t, do check http://reclaimthenight.org for information of other marches throughout the country. If you can do neither, please challenge male violence in every way that you can. Challenge gender roles, challenge damaging views of masculinity, challenge rape myths and apology. This is our society, and we can stand up and make it safer for everybody.

* These figures are not strictly comparable on equal terms as the percentage is of each gender – so unless the female and male population were exactly the same the two percentages represent different divisions of total population – however as the female population outstrips the male, this doesn’t denigrate my argument.

** The 1 in 4 figure I used was a 2% rounding up of the 23% of women who experience (and report) sexual assault as an adult shown in this home office report the rounding up was just to get a easily divisible figure, and should be very easily exceeded by the amount of un-reported assult/harrassment (40% of adults who are raped tell no one about it – and YES you can reliably calculate these figures – one method is gathering the information from victims seeking support at rape crisis centres).

NB. When referring to women in this post I am reffering to people who identify themselves as women. Trans/other non CIS women are also subject to gendered violence, and often suffer a greater backlash for trading power structures.

What I really mean to say:

>>>“Government is not and must not simply reflect society. To even suggest that it should is simply moronic.”

I’m sorry, I don’t know if you’ve seen, I think your moron is showing.

>>>“I don’t need representating [sic] because of my gender, sexuality, ethinicity [sic], or anything else like that”

UM IS THAT BECAUSE YOU ALREADY ARE???

>>>“ Whether they’re male or female, straight or gay, whatever the color of their skin doesn’t matter. It’s entirely immaterial.”

If it is, then why are you complaining?

This is an argument we hear again and again. ‘oh but equal representation should never come at the expense of ability’. Ability, ability, fuck ability. More accurately: fuck your definition of ability which assumes it is in opposition to better representation of women (and BME) in positions of power.

I do think the way Harman’s language has been portrayed (READ: taken out of context) presents an unhelpful argument, both men and women are entirely capable of running things on their own, the point is that a government that seeks to represent a people should be representative of those people. Why? Because a government can and should not make decisions for an electorate that it does not understand. That does mean roughly 52% women, that does mean BME men and women. Of course in an ideal world you cannot and should not have to manufacture that balance – in a true meritocracy it would not be necessary. But the fact is that even if men are judged solely on their merit – women most certainly aren’t. Women who are just as worthy, intelligent, hard working and talented as men are throughout their careers not taken as seriously, in their ability, their commitment.

Jaqcui Smith’s first major speech on terrorism as Home Secretary was covered not as it should have been – as an attack on civil liberties to ward off one of the least of the dangers of our modern world – but rather on the cut of her top and the size of her tits. While these attitudes exist women will continue to be taken less seriously than men, and as thus you cannot say that women will be judged fairly on their ‘ability’ next to men.

It’s not elitist to say “I want to best people for the job to do the job”. But it is FUCKING SEXIST to assume that this precludes the equal involvement of women in government. It is a patriarchal society’s judgment of ‘ability’ which has heretofore been applied. A world where no matter what sense comes out of a woman’s mouth it is her looks, the cut of her clothes, and the man she stands next to which counts. This world where women are taken less seriously impairs them at every step – in education, in employment, in promotion, in experience. You cannot judge ability truly in an unequal context.
This is not a simple problem, and to tackle it once and for all there would need to be a massive societal sea change in how women are seen in the public and private eye. How likely is that? If it is achievable it will take years, it involves tackling the UK’s approach to family care, to female power, to objectification, and an address to the media, it needs a grassroots approach that encourages people to see that politics is real, alive, and relevant, not just the dour (largely male) faces they see droning on their television screens. It means a redefinition of core values, such as how we (as a society) fetishise ‘family’ (see this rant) It means that young boys and girls are taught that there is no such thing as a ‘boy’ toy or a ‘girl’ toy, that boys can cry and girls can play with cars. That boys can read books and girls can build mechano sets. Let’s say that happens, and let’s say, realistically speaking, that it takes about 3 lifetimes. roughly 225 years. (According to the 2008 Sex and Power EHRC report “A snail could crawl the entire length of the Great Wall of China in 212 years, just slightly longer than the 200 years it will take for women to be equally represented in Parliament.” – SOURCE) That is what we need to do before we can even begin to talk about ability. And how is that even to come about if there aren’t women in positions of power – who really understand the problems and barriers involved- working to make it happen?

I think all female and BME shortlists are necessary. I think that we need to use every means possible to get women and BME people into parliament. And I would argue that in any situation. YES EVEN IF WE LIVED IN A FUCKING MATRIARCHY AND WOMEN RAN THE WORLD.

One of the problems of privilege- of any kind, male, white, class – is that the nature of privilege means that it is something that is natural to you, it’s hard to understand and see that others are not. All female (or all BME) shortlists are not a perfect solution, but I fail to see how else we work for the better good. We live in an imperfect world, where often the choice has to be the ‘least bad’ for all involved. I think that getting more BME and women into parliament requires several different approaches, but I do think that all-female shortlists are one of them. They were all male by law up until 1945, it’s time we redressed the balance. Sooner rather than later.

PennyRed puts it really well  here:

“You may feel powerless, but equality agitators aren’t the reason for your lack of power. We aren’t the problem here. We took nothing from you – well, actually, we took one thing, and one thing only, and we’re still in the process of taking it: the right of people who are white, or male, or rich, or straight, in any combination, to gain preferment over and to expect to enjoy a better and safer life than people who are not. And yes, the fact that we stepped up and demanded that right back slightly decreases the average white man’s chance at a top job, decreases the average white man’s automatic right to status and power and respect, if suddenly he is competing against not only his own race, class and gender but all the others as well in a capitalist world where status and respect are finite. In short, we’ve taken nothing you actually needed.

Now, you may think that you NEEDED those things, those free passes to the top, that unspoken advantage over women and minorities, to get the good things in life. But trust me, you didn’t. I have met a great deal of white men and loved some of them very deeply: white men have the same potential as everyone else to prove themselves without the advantage of unfair selection which currently – still! – is weighted in their favour in almost every sector of work and citizenship. Trust me. You don’t NEED your privilege. Not half as much as we all need a fairer world.

Reducing unfair advantage is not the same as prejudice. Just because something inconveniences you doesn’t mean it’s about you.”
I urge you to read the rest of that piece, which puts my point far more eloquently.

Finally, if you want teh proofs: recent research by the Anita Borg Institute has found a correlation between the presence of women in higher management and financial performance of the organization, as measured to total return to shareholders and return on equity (ABIWT, 2009) Likewise “social scientists have long posited that groups that are too homogeneous were likely to suffer from “group think” and make worse decisions.” (ABIWT, 2007) DIVERSITY DIRECTLY BENEFITS A WORK ENVIRONMENT.

I think if we didn’t have a lazy right wing media that practically breathes male-privilege (IE, if the media actually addressed men as well as women, there wouldn’t be a need for the pathetic ‘women’s sections’) making a big deal about this whole ‘politically correct’ non-story they could be seen for what they are – an honest, though less-than-perfect attempt to redress imbalance. (by-the-by I think the media characterises shifts away from prejudice as ‘PC’ because they’re reminiscing about the days when they sold papers and when the Tory Party ran slogans like ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’ (1964))

I’m not asking you to apologise for your gender, nor for the privilege into which you were lucky to be born. But you should recognise that things are not OK and that while removing privilege can make people feel disadvantaged, it isn’t disadvantage, it’s the removal of unfair advantage, and it is necessary.

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