Working women

I felt a post coming on today when I caught myself sounding just like my mother. The subject was women who choose to rely on their male partner’s earnings instead of going out to work themselves.

Although my mother did work periodically – on a part time basis, usually to “help” when money was tight, as long as it didn’t interfere with looking after the children – her main role was always to keep house and to be our mother.

Once or twice, she tried to kid me that it wasn’t so bad, being a mother and housewife. I didn’t believe her. It wasn’t the life I wanted and (apart from a brief wobble when as the mother of a young baby I suddenly wanted to be exactly that and never have to go back to work again) I’ve felt the same way my entire adult life. Maternity leave is the only time I have ever been out of work or off work, and it drove me crazy. It would be disingenuous to suggest that being off work was the only thing that made me crazy. But it didn’t help, and I am certain that it was getting back to work that saved me. Work isn’t a bowl of cherries but it is independence – and, of course, a break from domestic drudgery. In my case, Arbeit really does macht frei.

My mother, despite having been to work only now and again and only on a part time basis, is very quick to criticise women who do not work. She recounts, for example, the stories of her various friends’ offspring who have marriages that break up and is scandalised that ex-wives seek maintenance payments from their ex-husbands instead of going out to earn their own crust. I argue sometimes, and suggest that there might be lots of good reasons why a wife, especially a mother, could reasonably expect her ex-husband to help support her – not least because so many women give up their own careers and torpedo their own earning potential in order to look after their husband and children, to be that mother and housewife, to further the husband’s career and enhance his earning power at the expense of their own. As it happens, my mother is one of those women – she could have had a great career herself if things had turned out differently. She says that if she had been left to cope alone, she would have done, and would have gone out to work and done it all, and claimed not a penny from anyone. I believe her. But wouldn’t it have been unfair?

And yet…

There is something in me that reacts quite violently, reflexive and unthinking, on this subject. So often it is hinted or implied or outright said that a working mother is an aberration: the suggestion that my own “choice” to work (as if I even had one) is not valid.  So often I am told, directly or indirectly, that a woman’s place – and especially a mother’s place – is in the home looking after her family. Which is a lie. And when a woman reinforces that lie by actively choosing to take up that place, it pisses me off.

I am quite defensive on this, and not always wholly rational. If I manage to switch on my brain for long enough, I am not likely to hold it against the woman personally, because she is not the patriarchy. In particular, older women who married in the 1970s or 1980s or so – the generation of our mothers – get a pass on this. Serious job or career opportunities for women were so thin on the ground, and the training for motherhood and house-wifery was so intensive, that for most there was no realistic choice anyway.

But on the other hand, for my own generation, surely things are different? There is a glass ceiling, of course, and three-year-old girls still get Barbies from old men pretending to be Father Christmas – but we are a world away from the world in which our mothers grew up. These days, a woman who is perfectly capable of working but who chooses to rely on a man instead is (on the whole) making a genuine choice. Why? If there are no realistic job opportunities, I can understand it. If you have children and have made a pragmatic decision to take the risk of dependence on someone else in order to have the opportunity to be a full-time parent, fair enough. But there are women who just feel like it is the man’s role to provide, and it is her role to care for a man (and his children). It isn’t necessarily laziness, but it is the voluntary and unnecessary assumption of the passive role of female dependence. And that pisses me off.

It’s like not voting.
It’s like one in the eye for all the women who fought to free their sisters from household drudgery and servitude.

And – the longer we collectively assume responsibility for housework and childcare, the longer it will be before we kick away the idea that this is Woman’s natural place – and that men who “help” are somehow special. And that will keep the glass ceiling firmly in place, because practical equality in public life can never happen while there is practical inequality in private.

And that – as I think I may have mentioned – pisses me off.

 

The straw that broke the camel’s back?

Some time ago I wrote a post that proved rather more controversial than I was ready or able to deal with. This one.

When I wrote it I was feeling pretty disillusioned, frankly. Here was I, attempting in good faith to examine my own privileges, race, class, hetero(ish) and more… hoping to encourage other women to examine theirs, hoping to find useful insights and move forward to useful actions… and yet everywhere I turned there seemed to be blank looks, active discouragement. Why did these women, professing to be radical advocates for female liberty, fail to see any oppression but their own? I was fed up of seeing people around me, including people who I felt should know better, being so damned heartless.

Caveat: I am not talking about everyone or even anyone in particular, other than myself. Dear reader, it’s almost certainly not about you. I’m just saying that this feeling was there, for me, this disillusionment, exasperation. I’m just trying to explain. Explain myself. My naivety. My sudden disappearance, my disengagement from radical feminist circles. Where it all went.

So.

The “trans” issue, the fear – yes, fear – that some women seem to have, the fear that transwomen will damage or even shatter the peace of a woman-only space, this issue just happened to be the one that went nuclear: people I knew, people I considered friends, people who’d commented here before, people who’d never even heard of me or this blog until they saw a link somewhere, they all turned up to have a slice of the action. I’ve been sort of puzzled about how that issue happened to be the one that broke the camel’s back, the one that made me question whether I can even call myself a radical feminist any more. It’s an issue in which I have no personal involvement, no axe to grind, just one in which I had become sort of engaged. But, after all, perhaps it’s not surprising: trans-exclusion seems to have become one of the radical feminist touchpapers, the way abortion rights are a touchpaper in US politics. So I wrote some posts about it, and that was the one that happened to go nuclear.

I have learned a lot since then – from writing that post – from the frankly overwhelming trainwreck that ensued, spinning out of control quick as quick – and also from the rather more thoughtful responses I have read, some in comments but mostly by e-mail and on the blogs of women of many shades of opinion. I have read responses to and critiques of my post from all sides. (Hard to believe, but people are still writing about that post. And I’m still learning.)

Some things that I’ve learned.

I understand far more now about where women are coming from who wish to exclude transwomen from “women-only” spaces and services. And I recognise that the privilege of not being afraid is one that not all women have, whether or not they are trans. And I can understand some women born female not wanting anything to do with women born “male”. And from my place of privilege I am not going to blame them* or say that they are bad people, that would be unfair and untrue.

* I blame the patriarchy. Obviously.

Having a deeper understanding of the honest and heartfelt reasons some women have for wanting to keep transwomen out of women-only spaces hasn’t changed my mind about the issue. If anything, I am now even clearer in my mind, that the exclusion of transwomen is – just – wrong.

Feminists have, in general, come to realise that more privileged women must end their erasure and exclusion of less privileged women: of lesbians, of black women, of women with disabilities, of poor women, of young women, of old women, of pretty and plain and fat and thin women. If in practice we haven’t actually ended all erasure and exclusion, we do at least recognise that in principle it is wrong.

Some feminists who are not trans haven’t yet got to the same realisation when it comes to transwomen: some of us still try to justify a lack of concern for them (excluding them from women-only rape crisis and domestic violence shelters) by claiming that they are not women, by turning a blind eye to the rape and violence that they suffer precisely because they are women. On this issue, many women who are not trans still know too little, engage too little, listen too little.

When all is said and done, if I were writing that post again, I wouldn’t change a lot. I would amend some points of detail, and I would watch my language more closely. I would be a bit less tactless, less patronising and sanctimonious actually. I would also be less tentative about identifying transwomen as women. I would think more carefully about whether and why I still cast transwomen as “other” than women, rather than as simply a particularly category within class Woman.  I would be less fearful about upsetting my radfem friends, too; with notable exceptions on both sides of the divide, some of my radfem friends turned out not to be so friendly after all.

And, finally, if I were doing this again, I would put comments on moderation, or at least waded the hell in once it became clear that the thing was getting out of control. If i can figure out how, I’ll be putting comments in moderation for this post too – just in case.

Where does that leave me?

Older, wiser, and still here – now and then.
Still trying to work it all out.

 

Open letter to David Lammy

Youth violence is not about race – the problem is feminism

Dear Mr Lammy

I read with interest your article published today regarding the difficulties that young men often face in Britain, and in particular the problem of young men becoming involved in gangs.

There is however an aspect of your comments that I found troubling.

I will quote: “Some of the old images and expressions of masculinity are disappearing from society. Most obviously the relationship between men and their work has undergone a revolution. A model of work built on physical endeavour is slowly being replaced by an emphasis on intellectual and emotional labour. Women are beginning to break through the glass ceiling, displacing men as the principal earners for the first time.”

You go on to suggest that the solutions may include better male role models, funding for boys’ services, apprenticeships for young men – in short, new ways of helping boys to build up a new, healthier masculine self-image.

Firstly, I am troubled that you identify the disappearance of old images / expressions of masculinity, and women’s progress in the workplace, as causative of young men’s malaise. As far as women are concerned, many of those old images and expressions of masculinity only worked because they excluded and subordinated women: male-dominated workplaces; male-dominated sport; male-dominated homes and families; male-dominated politics; male-dominated life. If they had not excluded or subordinated women then they would not have expressed masculinity but humanity.

Is it fair to blame male violence on female advancement, on the lessening of female oppression? Is it fair to say that young men are giving up and turning to crime simply because they now have to compete with women for legitimate successes? Should we women give up our progress towards an equality not yet achieved so that young men will put down their knives?

I am sure you realise that when women are kept down in the workplace, women suffer. I am sure that you also realise that when women are given the default role of “secondary” earners at best, when husbands expect to earn more than their wives, women suffer. As a single working mother in a family with a now-absent father, I know the price women pay for being “secondary” earners – we pay it when we have a husband, and we (and our children) pay it even more after our husband has gone. I had no choice but to “displace” my husband as a primary earner, but I still don’t earn as much as a man would earn who had my skills and qualifications. I do not relish being “blamed”, as a woman who has taken a “male” job, for causing the disaffection and violence of male youth.

Still, what you say is, I think, absolutely accurate. If women gave up their progress towards equality in the workplace, in art and media, in sport, at home, in politics and in public life then men would feel more confident, more comfortable – and they may not feel the need to carry weapons to feel manly.

Nevertheless, I am troubled by your suggestion that the solution to violent masculinity, where knives and other weapons become symbols of male power in place of more traditional symbols such as male jobs, is to re-draw masculinity in a more “positive” way. In effect, you want to redirect masculinity, create new and less destructive definitions of manliness. Thus you want to recreate “traditionally male” jobs or other valuable and worthwhile “male” activities.

Yet I don’t see how young men can be encouraged into some valuable or worthwhile activity as an expression of masculinity – whether it is male jobs or boy scouts or anything else – unless you also deny women access to that same valuable or worthwhile activity. If women were allowed to do it on the same terms as men, then the activity would not be masculine. Redirecting young men’s energy into some “new masculinity” can only work if this glowing renaissance of masculinity comes at the expense of women. If the new masculinity isn’t about being better than women at violence, then it will be about being better, more powerful, more privileged than women in the workplace or in some other sphere of life where women deserve not oppression or discrimination but dignity and equality.

(And jobs are not male or female. Jobs are jobs. Women and men do them. Will young women be encouraged to go onto these apprenticeships? If not, what will they lose out on while young men are being encouraged to learn a useful “masculine” trade? How could encouraging boys instead of girls be justifiable under sex equality laws?)

So there is the choice – give men something good to do, which women may not do; or let men be bad.

I applaud you for wanting men to have something good to do: but not if you insist that it must be “manly”, because that means excluding women. However, the alternative is not to let men run wild: there is a third way, which is quite simply to discourage this idea that men must differentiate themselves from women at all – discourage this harmful polarisation of the sexes – abandon manliness in favour of simply humanity – embrace true equality.

In the past, when men were deemed indisputably superior to women, they were masculine and women were feminine. The sexes were utterly polarised. Now women are less submissive, less dependent, less traditionally feminine. Logically men have only two options – they can struggle to maintain the sex polarisation by becoming even more masculine, hyper-masculine in compensation for the lessening of femininity – or they can abandon sex discrimination and accept women’s equality as human beings.

Sadly, hyper-masculinity means, on the whole, that men become even more violent and even more domineering, often towards women. Wouldn’t it be better for all concerned if we stopped insisting that men be masculine and women be feminine, and just let them be human beings? If men didn’t feel such enormous pressure to be different from (and better than) women, then both of the problems we are concerned about would disappear. Men would not need to prove themselves with violence or rape. Women would not need to subordinate themselves to men in order to escape violence and rape.

The End.

 

A very tentative goodbye?

It’s been a long old time on this here blog.
I think I’m tired of the name.
I think I’m tired of the pattern.
The rut.

I think I want to start fresh.
Strip things bare.
Break out.

The name, the style, the blog was right, well-chosen a couple of years ago, but the time since then has been a slow metamorphosis of me.

Then, I was a slightly battered, still tottering girl-woman-newmother, writing essays to answer questions about questions, looking for certainties to cry out into the big void of the world, seeking – something – but without any clear idea of what. And that uncertain, rather diligent little creature has been quietly growing, changing – into – me – as I am now. And setting out in consciousness towards what I will be – when I get to infinity?

But as for now, the only thing worth grasping, how am I now?

Stronger, happier, better, freer. Crashing around the same as I ever did, but aware now more than before that I am crashing around and that it is me crashing around.

(Have I “found myself”? Is this what they mean when they say that?)

And that slow metamorphosis – where does it lead?
Not back here, surely not.

Time to move on?
to emerge?
and fly?

 

Not the worst possible mother

It would of course be lovely if I could be one of those amazing Gentle Parents who aim to act always by consensus, who empower their children to make good decisions for themselves, who never assume dominion or authority over their children – and all that.

Wouldn’t Ariel be lucky if she had a mother like that? A mother who would never shout or punish or say things like If you hit mummy again then mummy will hit you, and I’m bigger than you so it will hurt – let alone follow through with such a threat… A mother who would always be calm and reasonable, or at least wiling to apologise and admit that she’s wrong if she occasionally fails to practice what she preaches…

Well I do truly and genuinely admire people who can follow that model effectively, and in all honesty I do aspire to it, in my way. But I’m not capable of doing it, not all the time, if ever. It’s too hard. If I haven’t the energy or the time to discuss and negotiate, I just don’t. I assert my authority, I threaten, in the event of disobedience I carry out my threats, and I never (hardly ever) back down, even from the fights which in all honesty I wish I’d never started*. I do all these things, and I don’t even feel bad about it.

* Like the one over whether or not I’m going to get out of bed at 5am to accompany my perfectly capable Ariel to the toilet, just because she doesn’t fancy going on her own…

It would be so much better, I’m sure, if I could manage to be a Gentle Parent, but I’m not. I wasn’t brought up that way, I’m not made for it, I wouldn’t know how to do it and stay sane, and I’m not sure (now) that I would even want to try.

Yes, I am somewhat authoritarian. My name is Maia and I am an authoritarian parent.

It isn’t all bad. I am less authoritarian than my own parents and, if she chooses to be a parent, I am hopeful that Ariel will be less authoritarian than me. And I’m not, as the title to this post hints, the worst possible mother. For one thing, I am here: every day. Every day, I get up and I do parenting – some days I do it well, other days not so well – but every day I am here and I am doing it, I am being a parent. And that is not a small thing. It amazes me that so many people do it, because it is not a small thing.

Today is a day
to stand back and say
that this is okay.

So I’m making my peace with my mothering, authoritarianism and all. I’m accepting that there is only so far I can go in unlearning my earliest lessons in how to parent. I am steadily realising that I am not, never will be perfect, in mothering or in anything else – but that, as it turns out, this is OK. I’m OK.

It’s good to know. If nothing else, it’s one less worry to distract me from actually being the person, the mother, that I want to be.

 

A bed of one’s own.

Despite being a non-heterosexual woman-centred celibate woman, I apparently still get to go “He’s quite tasty!” when the moment arises. I tend to react that way (oh dear, how predictable) to rugby players, men in uniform or black tie, and a few Professional Ugly Blokes like Gerard Depardieu and Gordon Ramsey. I’m such a useless stereotype, it’s actually embarrassing.

The above is by way of being an introduction to a post about something else, because I had one of those kinds of conversations with someone the other day and it set me musing about this and that.

It should already be clear that my rating a man as tasty does not mean that I would like to have any sort of relationship, or even casual sex, with him… No way!!

For one thing, I learned from trial and error (oh, college days) that the best looking ones are always the most selfish, in bed and out, but especially in. No – you always go for the slightly nerdy-looking bloke with a twinkle in his eye – not the one who never pulls, but the one who just happens to have interests in life other than getting off with girls. Honestly. It’s not just the “he’s so grateful you even looked at him” nonsense, it’s also the fact that because he is neither drop dead gorgeous nor obsessed with sex, he hasn’t been trained since puberty to expect that women (girls) will throw themselves at him, hasn’t learned contempt for us, hasn’t learned to view us as entirely replaceable and to take our availability for granted. So he treats women – or is more likely to treat us, at least if he isn’t a porn monster (which, if you pick right, he isn’t) – like human beings deserving of, you know, consideration.

In any case, the moment some bloke – especially Some Famous Bloke – opens his mouth is usually the moment I lose interest, so I tend to admire from a distance, or with the sound turned off… I guess that’s why firemen and rugby players are good to choose, they don’t talk much while they’re on the job.

Yes it’s all very dysfunctional and somewhat laddish. I blame the patriarchy, or something. But all that is by-the-by. (This is clearly doomed to be a meandering post where I get distracted at every turn, and I must keep hauling myself back on track. The trouble with trying to write a post on sexxiness, or even a post that isn’t actually supposed to be about sexxiness at all, is that you end up going down all sorts of by-ways and unplanned diversions. OK, I’ll stop looking at Jason Robinson’s torso now.)

The nutshell I got to on Tasty Blokes was, more or less, that just because men may sometimes be quite sexy doesn’t mean I want anything to do with them… It’s not that all men are stinky and mean – clearly, that isn’t true, although if the cap does fit… Ahem. Nor is my decision to steer clear of men, however tasty, a political one rooted in some ideal of a far-off feminist utopia, although of course my chosen way of life is definitely rooted in the feminism that gave me the eyes to see it and the courage to live it.

As I was saying, it’s not that men are all horrible creatures from the deep, or that they are politically unacceptable to me. No. What puts me off the idea of having a (sexual) relationship with a man is the way they just take over your life.

Seriously. One day you’re an independent woman doing your own thing and enjoying every minute, the next you’re worrying about whether you have time to cook the lovely meal you have in mind cos you need to have a bath and get yourself ready for Stud Man. A month later you start taking an interest in his darts league; after a year you’re wondering why you never have time to see your friends any more; five years down the line and you’re a haggard wreck because you can’t cope with the fallout from his depressive mood swings or his mid-life crisis.

Screw all that.

Of course, it may not turn out quite like that every time. But what is true of all relationships – all the ones I’ve had, anyway – is that there is never peace. There is never time to just be; you are no longer a person but only part of a unit; suddenly somebody else’s problems all become your problems too.

It is what I think about when I see ants – when you disturb a nest they all run about madly, grabbing eggs and making a run for it, busy, busy, busy. But why should an ant, a worker who will only live for a few days anyway, waste its precious time saving somebody else’s eggs? Because the ant is not an individual; the ant is part of a collective, a mindless collective, an ant unit. Is that what I want to be?

I’ve been reading Possession and although it is seriously stagnant for most of the plot, there are moments that speak to me. There is talk of a clean, white bed. Another of the main characters writes of solitude as freedom, she uses intense privacy and voluntary isolation as her means to achieve freedom and independence – but when she allows a man to penetrate her solitude, when she allows herself to be blown off course by romantic love, it all comes crashing down.

Screw all that.

Just give me a bed of my own.
It needn’t be white, or even especially clean.
Just a bed, a space, a sanctuary, a time and place to be – something that is all my own.

 

Felting

What do you reckon? An abstract masterpiece?
Or – does it go this way up?

We felted by hand and then, because it was basically in shape but not “solid” if you know what I mean, it went through the washing machine and tumble dryer to see if that would finish it – which made no difference at all! Ho hum.

I think the problem may be that we were using alpaca wool and maybe some of it was – not kinky enough? The hairy bits sticking up are all straight hairs. We have a bunch of sheep fleeces to do next and they are definitely kinky enough! 😯 – the coloured merino wool felted beautifully, it was just the alpaca that was troublesome.

Possibly the verdict should be – not bad for the first attempt?

 

Blown away

Ariel and I went to Slimbridge today on a whim and saw ducklings hatching!

We went into the duckling room first thing to admire the ducklings and there were two eggs in the hatchery (a little warm box where it is a little drier than the egg incubator, to help the ducklings dry out once hatched, where the eggs are moved once there are signs of life). They were apricot silver calling ducks, I think. They looked very much like the one pictured, although a bit less wet and straggly!

The two eggs were both intermittently rocking a little and one had a crack where the duckling had started chipping at the shell from the inside. Duckling Woman told us that it can take many hours, even a couple of days, for an egg to hatch and that they were in the early stages, but that if we checked back later we might see a little hole in the egg rather than just a slight crack. Apparently it takes a lot of effort to break an egg with a miniscule little “egg tooth” (not a tooth, just a sort of bump really) so they often have a few little sleeps while in the process of hatching out.

When we went back an hour or so later there was a third egg which had been brought in and it already had a hole in it! We could see movement through the hole, the little beak chipping away, and feathers, and we could even see the movement of the ducking breathing. Apparently, the little air sac inside the egg gets bigger as the duckling uses up all the nutrients in the egg. When the littl’un is ready to hatch, it starts by breaking into the air sac at which point it begins to breathe! From that moment, even before it is hatched, the duckling begins to cheep. We couldn’t hear any cheeping as the 5-day-old Laysan Teal ducklings (rarest duck on earth) on the other side of the room were very noisy. But apparently they cheep to one another as they are all hatching together and this encourages them, hearing one another, and maybe it also lets mummy duck know what is going on. Anyway, it was really cool and we watched it for a while, the two original eggs had both progressed a little – the one that previously just had a little crack, had chipped almost all the way around while the other which was just rocking before had got some cracks.

A drink and a snack in the cafe later and we decided to go back and see the ducklings on our way out. All the eggs had progressed a little bit and the “middle egg” was catching up, with a visible hole although not such a big hole as the third egg. We went over to see the ducklings and just as we were looking at them and talking to Duckling Woman, someone cried out “oh look it’s come out!” and we rushed over to see the duckling hatch. It was the middle egg which had obviously got a wiggle on and overtaken its more advanced clutch-mate. It had its head out but not its feet and we saw it wiggling around and coming out – very ungainly, but just amazing to watch.

There is a little yellow sac thing that comes with it – like a placenta?? – but otherwise the egg is empty. The duckling, once unfurled, was huge compared to the egg! We got to have a look at it later on and inside the egg you could see the blood veins which had nourished the littl’un before it hatched. Duckling Woman had told us to expect that the duckling would just collapse in a heap and snooze after the mammoth effort of hatching itself, but it seemed to have plenty of energy left – maybe because the “birth” was so unexpectedly quick and easy – and spent a while just crawling around and trying to get onto its feet, rolling its fellow-eggs around and trying to cosy up to its own broken egg (return to the womb??) It was fab!

After that Duck Man came in and had a look. The third duckling – the one everyone thought would hatch first because it was ahead of the others – by now was trying desperately to push out of the egg even though it hadn’t chipped all the way around the edge yet. It was just pushing and pushing. I think (in my anthropomorphic way) that it was annoyed at having been overtaken, and encouraged by the now much louder cheeps of its clutch-mate, and possibly annoyed at the fact that the duckling was rolling the egg around as it tried to get on its feet – no wonder it wanted to get out fast!

Anyway Duck Man came in and decided to “help” by breaking the shell open a little (impatient obstetrician! episiotomy now!) I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing for the chick, and it didn’t feel right, to my wholly inexpert eyes, for him to interfere – however it had the unexpected advantage for we onlookers that we got to see the second duckling hatch as well. It came out within less than a minute of being “helped” and it too was completely amazing. It came out in one go, not head first and legs after like the first one – or legs first and head later like the cartoons…

Oh it was amazing! (Amazing!) I’ve gone on and on about this – I felt while watching it, so privileged and awed.

I kept relating it back to what I know about childbirth in terms of the length of the labour, the experience of the hatching bird / birthing child, the need for time and rest, and this probably coloured my reaction to Duck Man’s intervention. It was a thoroughly absorbing natural process and it was tainted somewhat by the intervention. But still.

What a surpisingly and wonderfully powerful experience: I was walking on air for a long time afterwards – it was a little moment of Joy.

 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

The other day I came across a report produced by the Advertising Standards Agency recently. They have done a survey of advertising compliance in the cosmetics industry and discovered that 93% of the adverts surveyed complied with the law. That may sound good – 93%! – but then even gambling adverts have a 99% compliance rate while food and drink advertising is at 99.2% – and both of these industries are held to special higher standards with tighter controls than is the case in the general law. There are seven times more non-compliant beauty ads than either gambling or food and drink ads. Skin cream adverts were the worst offenders with a 19% breach rate.

It interested me, so I share it.

I could go on a bit – I could refer back to The Beauty Myth and body fascism and talk about how horribly the cosmetics industry perpetuates and exploits women’s socially created insecurities, trying and too often succeeding at making us all feel inadequate and unacceptable for not being supermodels, blah blah blah. I could relate it to the woman and her two male friends who thought it was OK yesterday to make loud remarks (from a safe place on the other side of a high fence) about how unacceptable my tits are, my tits which do not even try to be “acceptable” and yet which still felt humiliation at having their inadequacy pointed out so loudly, pointedly, rudely, aggressively. Poor boobs. Lovely boobs. Stuff’em.

Or maybe I could go in another direction. I could get into an ASA groove and relate an adjudication I read about today on four TV ads for a gambling website, which featured the (self-)humiliation of a number of people with dwarfism. The adjudication considered at great length to consider whether or not the ads were juvenile and therefore likely to appeal to young people and encourage them to gamble. They were also careful to refer to the characters in the adverts as “persons of restricted growth” or “persons of short stature”. Which is all very sensitive – yet why is the horribly offensive nature of the advert – which features little people participating in stunts designed to belittle them, to humiliate them, to make them look silly, to use their bodies as entertainment, as entertaining (so reminiscent of the freak shows and the dwarf tossing of days gone by) – why is this overlooked entirely? I’m not sure to be frank whether to call this kind of advert “ableist” as it may depend on whether you consider dwarfism to be a disability… but surely, whatever you call it, it isn’t acceptable in a just society?

Well I could go on and on and on, following these little avenues or maybe some other avenue or – like – whatever.

The trouble is, I’ve been deep inside a place at the centre of me, looking out, pondering, looking in, allowing slow thoughts to come clear. Digging, thinking, working things out. Planting seeds and allowing them to germinate in their own good time. Gardening starts to teach you patience, starts to make you think, a little, of the long view. This is all jumbled up because it is that time when jumbling happens, when clear thoughts emerge from soup. Have patience. The seeds are here.

What I’m saying is that – in the scheme of things – skin cream? Skin cream?

People are dying out there. Women are dying. They are under boots and behind doors and inside the Woman’s Room. We are being beaten and tortured and imprisoned and starved and raped and ignored. All over everywhere. And I put on my boots and I dig in the soil and I look forward to harvesting – what? That sneaky “we”, it isn’t “we” at all… And I can talk about this guy, or this woman, or this company, or whatever and – it all comes back to – the woman looking in a soul mirror, a woman looking in her mirror and seeing blood. But not her own. Not my own.

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.

That oath. It was sworn long before me, long before my babe who lies safe, safely sleeping – yet both of us have the blood on our hands, our innocent hands. The oath sworn, before either of us, nevertheless binds us both, just as surely as it binds every woman and every man on this entire planet. I am not afraid of blood, but whose blood is it? And what can I do to heal the wound it came from, to unwind the oath and save the babe? Whose babe? Not mine, for she is safe asleep, with blood on her hands too.

Oh, and I want milk. I want milk.
But whose babe will go without?
And how much of this is menstrual poetry?
And how much of it is real?

 

Whose responsibility is it anyway?

I saw this poster on the bus today. In case you can’t make it out, there is an image of a punchbag set in a dishevelled kitchen, and the caption says:”A domestic violence victim will be beaten 20 times in the next year, unless a friend stops it sooner” with a line at the bottom saying “Enough. Call the National Domestic Violence Helpline for support.”

I did think for a horrified moment that this might be a campaign sponsored by Women’s Aid and/or Refuge, who I think run the helpline. It’s not. Surprise! It’s the Home Office.

There’s another similar poster where the image and main caption are the same, but the sub-caption reads: “If your friend is being hit, she’s probably too scared to do anything to stop it. So her beatings will just go on and on. Help her take the first step, call the National Domestic Violence Helpline for support.”

(Link to the similar poster – PDF)

Just who is doing the beating here?
These women – sorry, not “women”, “domestic violence victims” – are magically getting beaten by – who?
As usual in the case of crimes against women, the perpetrator drops out of the limelight.

I do get that a campaign encouraging friends to support those who are being abused has a place. I do get that perpetrators often seek to isolate their partners, to cut them off from the friends who may help them to escape – that encouraging friends to see through what is going on, encouraging friends to take an active role in helping victims is, on the whole, a good thing.

But.

Why do we have a campaign telling a woman’s friends that they are responsible for “stopping” the violence when they can do nothing to stop the violence and can only offer support to the victim who might otherwise feel or actually be unable to escape? And why don’t we have a campaign targeted at men to just stop hitting and abusing women? And why don’t we have a campaign targeted at men to stop their friends from hitting and abusing women? And why is it always the women (and her friends) who get the spotlight, when the people who actually can stop the violence, or influence the perpetrator to stop the violence, are offstage somewhere, overlooked?

Is it that we feel these men are so far beyond the pale, so monstrously twisted, so clearly unhinged that no campaign or well-meaning friend could possibly influence them to modify their behaviour? Because that aint so. Men who beat and abuse their partners are human beings, just like us. Human beings, not monsters. Maybe when we search our souls for solutions to the problem of domestic violence we should ask ourselves fewer questions about how we can help women to escape and a great deal more about why these men commit this violence and what can be done to make them stop.

To make them stop.