I bought a couple of Sharpe DVDs a few days ago, because Sean Bean.

But which Sean Bean is best? Sean Bean as Boromir: fighter, forthright, a leader, but felled by the Ring? Sean Bean as Sharpe: witty, wily, brave, courageous and not afraid of anything? Or Sean Bean as Lord Eddard Stark: noble, loving, loyal, but leading his family to ruin.

Boromir of Gondor, Richard Sharpe, or Eddard Stark?
Lord of the Rings | Sharpe | Game of Thrones

The ultimate test: marry, shag or chuck off a cliff.

The same test for another British actor: Helena Bonham-Carter. Helena Bonham-Carter as the tempestuously charming and changing Lucy Honeychurch? Helena Bonham-Carter as the practical Queen Elizabeth, supporting the man who never thought to be king? Or Helena Bonham-Carter as the villanous Bellatrix Lestrange?

Lucy Honeychurch, Queen Elizabeth or Bellatrix Lestrange?
A Room With A View | The King’s Speech | Harry Potter series

And in a further twist, my daughters have just introduced me to shipping, making the OTP (one true pairing) between two characters. Is it St Elizabeth (Stark and Queen Elizabeth) or Honeysharp? Borotrix or Bellastark? Or perhaps it’s Starkerssharp, or Lizzystrange. Of the 15 possible combinations, which ones are OTP?

Hoydenizens may recall that two of these characters have featured previously in Marry, Shag or Chuck off a cliff.  Bonus points for remembering who, and the company they were keeping on those outings.

So what would you do? We’re all agog! Or you could just talk about your favourite entertainments, since this is just a hook to hang some pop culture on.

Related posts:

1. BFTP: Marry, Shag or chuck off a Cliff: Boots of Revenge & High Adventure edition
2. Marry, Shag or Cliff? Hogwarts villains edition
3. Marry, Shag, Cliff: Classic ER

Content note: discussion of sexist and misogynist slurs,
includes quoted examples.

Current discussion in the mainstream press of social media trolling has considerable relevance for the conduct of Australian public discourse. Since before the election of Julia Gillard in 2010 I have observed a tendency for a very gendered treatment of the Prime Minister that goes beyond the natural interest in the first elected female leader of this country.

In my analysis of the 2010 election (in Simms and Warhurst, 2011) I observed that the media tended to focus on her having special responsibilities for maintaining and repairing relationships with other political figures (such as Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott) that no male politician would be expected to do. From that point on there has been a marked decline in the discursive treatment of the PM about which Hoydenizens are very well aware.

Thus the recent “discovery”of the anti-social aspects of the social media by the commercial news organisations did appear to have some promise, but if its fixation on celebrity scorn and encouragement of tighter government regulation of social media has the hallmarks of a classic moral panic that’s likely to move through the issue-attention cycle quickly and take the oxygen out of a more useful dialogue about civil discourse.

This is unfortunate because the pseudonymitypseudo-anonymity offered by social media does reduce some of the social controls on public behaviour around civility and the notion that reciprocal respect is necessary for meaningful dialogue. If the debate about online language (and the wider discourse about gender and public life) is to have value, we need to take stock of the extent and nature of the behaviour concerned. This will allow any corrective or regulatory discussions to be a little more grounded than they have been to-date.

From work I’ve been doing for a forthcoming book on new media and Australian politics, I have some useful data that may partially inform this discussion in the form of Facebook wallposts from 600 Australians collected before this recent debate took off (late 2011). In recent days I’ve reanalysed this dataset to shed some light on the treatment of women in the social media space.

Method

The research was a simple content analysis of the 600 users’ wall posts. On average each user had 24 posts captured (for a total of 14,069 posts). Stratified sampling based on locality was employed to match the population and gender distribution.

In the coding frame two key concepts were coded: Misogyny, drawing upon Armstrong’s operationalised definition (2001) to include references to assault, rape and murder; and sexism (“any phrase that may be interpreted to be treating men and women differently, simply on the basis of their sex”) based on the work of Boxill, et al to include references to social, workplace/professional and sexual instrumentalism (1997: 114-5). In addition, misandry was included in the coding frame.

Given the nature of language, even in the comparatively simple communicative environment of Facebook wallposts, the ability to definitively identify and recognise these three concepts is limited. A conservative approach to coding was taken where the reference appeared unambiguous in nature. A different coder would have made different decisions (the frequent use of “cunts” and “bitches” to describe men by men was not included, but it could be argued that this use of derogatory slang to denigrate men through comparison with women/women’s genitalia is an endemic form of sexism).

Findings

The findings are interesting, but possibly not surprising.

At the most extreme end of the spectrum, there were very, very few misogynistic comments identified (0.021% of posts, all from men). An example of this would be the group “cutting your mum’s car breaks[sic] when she cooks a bad dinner”.

The vast majority of identified content was in the form of sexist posts. These took two forms. The first (0.092% of all posts) were sexist statements about women’s social position (an example of which being “babe I promise to listen to you if you shut your piehole, permanently”). The second, and far more prevalent was statements about women as sexual objects or their sexual instrumentalisation (0.391% of all posts). These latter posts ranged from the classification of women as sexually available (sluts) to more graphic expressions (i.e. “The thing I love most is cumming on your face, suck it bitch!”)

While the quantum of posts of this nature is comparatively small overall, it is quite marked that almost 11% of all posters in the sample group made one or more of these posts in the sample period. While men where the most likely to post this content (13.5%), women were also well presented (8%) as regulators of the gender.

The role that social media plays in this is significant, beyond simply the pseudonymity offered by being behind a computer screen. Importantly the majority of sexist statements are not personal utterances, but come from the membership of Facebook groups. This shows the role of social proof (support for individual bahaviour assumed from others’ participation in the same) in driving along these types of sexist attitudes: very, very few of the posts were direct articulations by the sample group members but liking or joining groups with sexist titles and/or objectives.

Interestingly, in comparison to the recent controversy around broadcaster Alan Jones declaring that women are “destroying the joint”, there were no sexist statements in the sample that focused on the professional competence of women in general terms. Here we see that advances in the professional standing and workplace participation of women appear to be at odds with the pornification of society in the saw sexist attitudes are expressed.

Proving its a man’s world, misandry was not seen in the sample (though, stretching the definition to it’s widest, one post may have qualified).

How does this compare with other “hate” online? In the sample I also coded racists statements to see the extent to which we see casual racism online. Here Australia compares comparatively well, particularly given the recent history of moral outrage against asylum seekers and a general back-pedalling on multiculuralism. Only 0.037% of posts contained casual racism (negligibly higher from men than women), with less than two percent of the 600 people sampled engaging in this types of statement in the sample group.

References cited

Armstrong, Edward, 2001, “Gangsta misogyny: A content analysis of the portrayals of violence against women in rap music, 1987-1993”, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 8(2): 96-126.

Boxill, Ian, Claudia Chambers, Eleanor Wint, 1997, Introduction to Social Research: With Applications to the Caribbean, Kingston: Canoe Press.

Chen, Peter John, 2011,”The new media and the campaign”, in M Simms and J Warhurst (eds), Julia 2010: The Caretaker Election, Canberra: ANU e-press.

Related posts:

1. Media Circus: “trolling” panic swamps drug law reform debate
2. Media Circus: new polling lows, media asks why nobody likes either side?
3. First Rule of Holes: expensive social media strategy failing edition

About a week ago, the ABC aired Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote, a documentary about women’s suffrage in Australia. I’d seen a few positive mentions on Twitter and Facebook, so this afternoon I went and hunted it down on iView and watched it.

The documentary opens with the narrator, Dr. Clare Wright, stating that:

These days, we all enjoy equal rights and seemingly endless choices. But just one hundred and fifty years ago, women were far from equal.

It’s nice that she thinks inequality is in the past, but she’s deluding herself. It would be facile to list all the groups who don’t enjoy equal rights in Australia (same-sex couples who want to marry being just one current and obvious example) but even if we limit ourselves to women’s rights and choices, it’s far from true. Women still earn about 15% less than men for the same work; abortion is still illegal or effectively so in Queensland; and take a look at the sort of misogynist crap that’s flung at Julia Gillard, Gina Rinehart, or the latest victim of a popular footballer’s rape if you want to see what attitudes to women in our country are really like.

So, no, Utopia Girls, the smug “we all live in a 21st century feminist wonderland” attitude doesn’t exactly fly with me. It’s not just inaccurate, it’s dangerous. Should we really be telling women there’s nothing left to work or fight for, or giving anti-feminists reassurance that women’s current concerns are unnecessary?

If that was all that Utopia Girls had wrong with it I’d be annoyed enough, but it just gets worse. The main focus of the documentary are the stories of a handful of middle class, white Anglo- and Irish-Australian women and their work for women’s suffrage in Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia. I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of the subject matter or the period, but it’s obvious even to me that there are voices missing here.

It might have been nice if Utopia Girls, rather than just telling us about Vida Goldstein — who had “charm and intelligence” and was a “dignified, private-school educated young beauty”, as the documentary points out — going doorknocking in the slums of Fitzroy and Collingwood, getting poor and working class women to sign a petition for suffrage, could have let us hear from those women themselves. As well as telling us about Caroline Dexter — “Paris-educated” and a bloomer-wearing promoter of dress reform — coming out to the goldfields just days after the Eureka Stockade and connecting her radical politics with what she found, it might have been nice to know more about women who were already there. Instead we just see silent pictures, with the sole exception of “May Howell, gentlewoman, 1855″ who talks about how independent she was in Australia:

“No-one to control or dictate to you, going where you like, doing what you like, no relation laying down the law or chalking out your path for you.”

Well, that’s nice for you, May Howell, but firstly you are wrong (since, for starters, you can’t vote, can’t own property, and can’t divorce your husband even if he deserts or beats you) and secondly, even if you do feel quite independent, your experience is hardly representative of Chinese women who came here as economic refugees, sex workers in Sydney and other cities, Aboriginal women on cattle stations, the convict women who were still being transported until 1868, or (presumably) the vast majority of Australian women at the time.

Over the rest of an hour, Utopia Girls works through a handful more middle-class white women, their activism, and the various legal wranglings that brought about women’s suffrage first in South Australia and then in other states. At last we come to the turning point, when in 1894 South Australia passed an act to give all women — including Aboriginal women — the right to vote and to hold seats in Parliament. Then, in the leadup to Federation, South Australia demanded that no person who already had franchise should lose it, which in effect meant that they demanded women’s suffrage at the national level as a condition of joining the Commonwealth.

Sadly, this was done at the cost of Aboriginal voting rights; they were thrown under the bus to maintain and extend white women’s suffrage. Aboriginal Australians didn’t regain the right to vote until the 1960s. How does Utopia Girls present this issue? The camera pans slowly over the 1902 “Act to Provide for a Universal Federal Franchise” while Dr. Wright tells us that Australia was “the international benchmark for democracy”. Then, almost as an aside, she mentions the retraction of Aboriginal suffrage — it gets two whole sentences, or a little less than 30 seconds — before going on to talk about Vida Goldstein’s world tour as a suffrage superstar, visiting Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK and Teddy Roosevelt in America. We end on a high note, patting ourselves on the back for how forward-thinking and progressive we are.

A lot of people have mentioned that they found Utopia Girls inspiring and have been encouraging others to catch it on iView while they can. The fight for women’s suffrage is certainly an inspiring and important story, but it’s stupid to act as if the fight is all in the past, and it’s downright offensive to ignore the state of all women’s rights in this country — including Aboriginal women, non-white immigrant and refugee women, working class women and women living in poverty — at the expense of middle-class white women’s triumphs.

Related posts:

1. “Pardon me for being born into a nation of racists”
2. Girls Gone Wild or Wild Women? or: We Never Had Nasty Sluts When I Were A Lad
3. Contraceptive implants for disabled Aboriginal 12-year-old girls

Joanna Russ is one of the mighty legends of the science fiction field that everyone needs to know about. As well as writing many important novels and short stories, she was a brutal literary critic, a brilliant academic, an unflinching feminist, and a devastatingly articulate commentator on gender, not only in science fiction but in the history of culture.

“Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.”
Joanna Russ

Portrait of Joanna Russ from Wikipedia | CCL

Other works of her fiction include The Adventures of Alyx, which exploded the expectations of fantasy heroes and female characters in fantasy fiction, and We Who Are About To, which examined the way that humans in survivalist mode will fall back on old and damaging gender ideas. Her short story “When It Changed” is about a planet happily populated by all women, and what happens when a spaceship full of men (and women from a society dominated by men) come visiting.

Joanna Russ is remembered for her anger and her brilliance, but anyone who knew her as a person, or has read her work, is quick to also mention how funny she was, a living breathing rebuttal to the idea of the ‘humourless feminist.’ She wrote with authority on all manner of topics from gothic literature (in the brilliant essay “Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband”) to slash fiction, when she took a keen interest in later in her life.

Despite the many ways Joanna Russ contributed to academia, literary criticism, popular culture and literature, by far her most important work is the slender volume How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is taught in universities across the world (and should be taught in all of them).

This calm but incisive work outlines, chapter by chapter, the many ways in which our society devalues women’s writing, by systematically coming up with excuses to not consider it worthwhile. (She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it, she wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art, she wrote it, but she shouldn’t have, etc.) It’s one of the most useful and mind-blowing books I have ever read in my life, and one that I find myself most often referring to in day to day conversation. It’s a short, funny, wry rebuttal to the entire canon of western literature, and the way it has been taught.

The worst thing about Joanna Russ’s work, How To Suppress Women’s Writing in particular, is that it was written in 1983 and it is still a relevant and useful text.

To learn more about the astounding Joanna and her work, check out:

• On Joanna Russ, by Farah Mendlesohn (Wesleyan)
• We Wuz Pushed: Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-telling, by Brit Mandelo (Aqueduct Press)
• Matthew Cheney: Joanna Russ 1937-2011
• Galactic Suburbia Podcast: Joanna Russ Spoilerific Book Club

Related posts:

1. Friday Hoyden Quicklink: Dr Auntie Ruby Langford Ginibi 1934-2011
2. The Conversation: Guest Post by Laughingrat
3. Friday Hoyden: Ursula K. Le Guin

Guest Author: fuckpoliteness, who lives in Sydney and wants the world to make more sense.

I’m inclined to set down my thoughts on The Hunger Games. First, I should clarify that I’ve read the three books, but I haven’t seen the movie. Second I should say that I’m no literature critic – I was vaguely aware that it was not a book where I fell in love with the language, but rather that the plot propelled me through to the end. I’m not arguing for where it should stand in some Great Ranking of the Best Books of All Time. I’m interested in addressing it as an instance of popular culture that again has kids tearing through books, hungry for more, at the controversy and ‘moral panic’ that it seems to be creating, and in looking at the elements of what, for me, made it something out of the league of the ‘Twilights’ of the world.

I will say that I had to push through Twilight as if walking through molasses. I felt vaguely nauseated by the prose, I felt frustrated by the slow pace, the action only picking up in the last chapters, I hated a lot – I hated the ‘romance’, I hated the guilt, I hated the incessant ‘I’m so helpless and hopeless’, I hated the revolting pregnancy and birth, and I hated the imprinting. While much of this contributed to my sense that these were ‘bad books’, it’s also worth expanding out into the critique of the representations of gender, love, sex, commitment and politics or ethics. It was also not like reading The Da Vinci Code where I was happy to try to stick to the plotline but kept feeling as though his descriptive language was jarringly striking me as awful, awful, awful. The prose is quite stripped back, quite sparse, and is arguably mediochre, but I just did not care. For one thing that terseness fitted the voice of the character to my mind, but more importantly, I was driven on, compelled by the fate of Katniss, her family, the others from District 12 – what would happen to them, what would she be forced to do, would she be able to live with it?

Likewise, I’m sure it is possible to critique the ways in which a books’ ‘world’ is set up and criticised. It at times felt a bit simplistic in the way ‘evil’ was represented etc. But at the same time I thought it did a much better job than, say, the Harry Potter novels of examining motivation, perspective, politics, gender, love, commitment and ethics. As for the Twilight series, The Hunger Games simply blew it out of the water.

Here we have a female protagonist – much as I love Harry Potter, the frequent ‘Harry and Ron roll their eyes about Hermione’s girlish perspective’ (never mind that Harry and Ron were frequently idiots and Hermione was much more frequently able to see the reality of the situation) grated my cheese. Harry was the protagonist, Ron was the favoured side-kick, Hermione was valued to some extent, but was marginalised and/or mocked quite a bit. And let’s talk about Mrs Weasley, Ginny, Fleur and Tonks in terms of marginalisation of women, and Mrs Weasley and Ginny in particular for being written as representing women as irrational, jealous, petty. Again – hands in the air. I love the series, I read them again and again, I like Ginny etc…but the tendency to set the female characters up to laugh at their silly female ways shat me to tears.

In this book it was all about Katniss. Katniss dealing with her fathers death, and her mothers’ withdrawal. Katniss blaming her mother, but grappling with the fact that maybe she’d judged her too harshly. Katniss trying to protect her little sister. Katniss the family provider. Katniss the hunter, finding skills that sustained so many, that she enjoyed, that she was good at. Not supernaturally good like Buffy, not ‘gifted’ from on high, but skilled though a combination of talent and practice. Katniss, friend of Gale, Gale criticising the Capitol in the woods, her only reprieve from political control. Katniss, aware that there might be ‘something else’ between her and Gale, but too busy working and surviving to bother ‘working it out’. Katniss, suddenly in danger. Katniss reacting in ways that surprise her. Katniss defiant, Katniss scared, Katniss surviving, Katniss making friends through alliances, Katniss grieving those she was supposed to fight and kill. Katniss negotiating being forced to ‘sex it up’, Katniss negotiating being told to ‘play the relationship angle’, Katniss working out that there might be more than ‘play’ now, but again, being too busy to have the time, much less the capacity to ‘work it out’. Katniss finally rebelling. Katniss being caught back up, again and again. Katniss surviving, just hanging on.

For once (in terms of the Big New Thing) we had a female protagonist who was a fully fleshed out character – she had a past, she had emotions, she had will, she had strength, she had vulnerabilities, reactions she couldn’t explain, she was thrown back on her own resources and she didn’t get saved by supernatural skills thrust upon her, or by the ‘hero’ (characters saved each other). For once we had a girl who had boys in her life that she liked, and maybe loved, but did not get corralled into ‘This person is the love of my life, amen’. She felt love for both of them, she had no idea what was happening – she reacted to where she was, what was happening. She was coopted back into other peoples’ power plays again and again, and she fought hard for a solution she could in some way live with.

The recent scaremongering over the levels of violence in the book surprised me. The violence was disturbing – but to my mind it was not ever presented in the way that leads to a desensitisation, except possibly in the final parts of the last book in which things are happening so quickly it’s hard to keep track. To my mind the entire point of the book was a critique of violence, control, and the worst aspects of capitalism and consumer culture – some living lives of luxury while those who produced their goods starved and worked under oppressive conditions with little freedom, entertainment based on exploitation, a ridiculous fixation on appearances at all costs, the corruption of power, the politics of control. It’s to be applauded, to my way of thinking, that a book would deliberately provoke teenaged examination of these issues – you simply cannot read The Hunger Games without both being appalled at what happens in Katniss’ world and bringing it back to the world we live in – it seems just an extreme version of our own world.

The final tipping point for me was a recent review in the Sydney Morning Herald which claimed that: the books perverted heroic rebellion, that survival ‘justified’ killing, that characters are ‘desensitised to sexualisation’, there was ‘no love’ in The Hunger Games, only ‘selfish mockery’, that ‘feelings replace right and wrong’, and an allegation that the book cannot critique the sensationalism of violence when it ‘does the same itself’. Like the criticisms of Harry Potter for ‘making children want to be wizards’ it seemed impossible to come out of these books with this simplistic a view of them unless you went in to reading them determined to find these issues.

No, Katniss is not some ‘uncomplicated hero’. She has grown up restricted and controlled, she’s seen death and deprivation, and she survives – she is thrown in to extraordinarily gruesome and violent scenarios and has to ‘do the best she can’. The idea that she’d be a better hero if she’d sat passively in protest in the middle of the arena and died swiftly is ludicrous – how can you explore power in the ways The Hunger Games do if you simply protest and get shot in the face in the first chapter? Beyond that somewhat facetious point, the point of the whole series, it seemed to me, was how you grapple with the things you need to do, how you cope with the guilt of being implicated, how you manage to find a way through, to survive, let alone how on earth you can rebel when power is already always one step ahead of you ready to coopt any rebellion you manage for its own purposes. Katniss is not represented as purely virtuous, as the simple ‘Harry’-style ‘good’ to the Capitol’s ‘Voldemort’-style evil. The book tries to explore the difference in perspectives of the citizens of Panem in general and the citizens of the Capitol. Whether it always manages what it aims for, the series, to me is a commendable attempt to examine manifestations of power, control, violence and oppression, and the fact that it is impossible in any world to simply be outside and ‘above’ the ugly aspects of your society.

Nor do I think it ever ‘justified’ killing – again the whole series involves the examination of how Katniss will cope with what she will need to do, the different approaches of Katniss, Peeta and Gale, the understandable shift in Gale’s attitudes, but the exploration of where a hardened attitude of vengeance leads, and an examination of various approaches to trying to maintain an idea of ‘self’ when you are forced into situations in which you do the unthinkable – vast tracts are devoted to anguished self examination, and Katniss never finds herself ‘blameless’, in fact she reckons on a high culpability for the body count, even of those she tried to save.

The characters explicitly address their revolt at being ‘sexed up’ to murder each other. Katniss repeatedly talks about her preference to leave her own body alone, her hatred for the plucking and soaking and sprucing. The exploitation of appearance, bodies and sexuality is explicitly addressed, particularly in the later books – I’m not sure how much more explicitly the books could have objected to it.

The claim that there is ‘no love’ is frankly laughable – did the author read the same book? Where Katniss wakes screaming for her father, where she volunteers to take her sister’s place, where she is gripped with fear for and grief over characters she didn’t know that well, where she loves and makes sacrifices for Peeta and Gale, as well as for many less central characters? Katniss explicitly addresses the horrors of being pushed into a ‘fake relationship’ for gain, and the confusion of actually caring for that person. There are long passages again addressing her confusion about these two boys in her life, how central they both are, how she loves each of them, but is unable to define exactly ‘how’, how she might have felt about them had her life been her own, and the fact that her emotions have been taken and manipulated again and again for the entertainment of others. Katniss, quite frankly is a character full of love but who has far more pressing things on her mind for most of the book – but her love, her concern, her sense of loss, her desire to protect are all through the series.

As for whether feelings replace right and wrong, I don’t think that they do in the series, but I think you have someone trying to make sense of just how wrong things are when she’s a child who has nearly starved to death, then been the family provider, and then has been thrown into a situation where she’s being constantly hunted – I don’t think Katniss has had much time for, assistance with, or access to, great works of philosophy on the concepts of right and wrong – perhaps the author would have preferred it had Katniss stopped to take lessons from the bible while being hunted. Lord knows that book has no violence, weird sex or horror.

Finally, there may be some element of truth to the issue with violence – by the end of the series you’ve read through so much horror and the final stages do seem a little ridiculous – I wasn’t really able to keep track of the losses through the tunnels and I felt that some of the deaths were for a final shock value. I did think at the same time that it would have been unrealistic to have only one or two losses of central characters, such as in Buffy, and I did think that right to the end this pulled through the themes of power, corruption, what you’ll do if you’re pushed to it in order to survive, the ruthlessness of gaining control, and Katniss’s opposition to violence. Not in an uncomplicated way – she’s not allowed to be someone with ‘clean hands’ – she kills to survive, but she keeps herself accountable, and she does what she needs to do to ensure as best she can that the cycle of horror stops. Does the series use violence as entertainment? It’s arguable – to my mind it uses violence to make a point about violence, and there’s no doubt that the books were gripping. But I don’t see that as necessarily exploiting violence for entertainment purposes and then simplistically criticising the same. I think it’s okay to represent a world where violent control is made constant and explicit, and to critique that and to engage with how you can remain yourself while trying to survive in that world without being told you are doing exactly what you are critiquing.

No, I don’t think the series is without fault, nor can it comprehensively cover all of the most subtle contemplations of power, politics, ethics and existence. But I do think that it stands as a series which encourages readers to engage with a critique of the Capitol, of a politics of control and oppression, of an unequal distribution of wealth, of entertainment relying on the distress of others, on ridiculous and perverse obsessions with appearance and bizarre grooming standards, and I do think it actively encourages the reader to engage with extending those criticisms to society now. We’re represented in the book as the selfish, greedy, destructive forerunners to the Capitol. I think that it’s a good critique of the extremes of capitalism, of ‘entertainment’, and I think it offers a strong female character without any of the usual ‘I met my one true love and now I am his forever’ bullshit. I think it encourages young adults to read and to think. I’m happy to listen to critiques of the series that actually engage with what is at stake in the series, just not a ridiculously simplistic critique based on misrepresenting the very point of the series.

Both my son and my stepdaughter have read the series and each of them was gripped to the end. Both of them have talked to me about what they like, what they think of the politics. Neither of them appear to have been ‘desensitized’ to the violence, or to have decided that violence is fantastic and sexualisation is fun. They are both able to enjoy a series, to critically engage with it, and to discuss it on its merits, something that seems to have been beyond the author of the critique published in the Sydney Morning Herald. By all means take aim with whatever problems you find in the text, but don’t misrepresent the themes and content to fit the simplistic critique you want to make. Anyway – that was my rant on The Hunger Games – I’d love to hear yours.

Related posts:

1. Quick Link – Tropes vs. Women in Video Games by Anita Sarkeesian (recovered)
2. When Fandom goes bad.
3. When the author doesn’t take you along…

Being an Asexual Ally

 Talking about asexuality in discussions of feminism (and all its intersectionalities) is not the easiest task. As a recent thread at the high-profile blog Feministe has once again shown, attempts at any form of meaningful discussion around asexuality and feminism tend to degenerate into 101-style questioning which then rapidly becomes hostile, challenging asexual people to prove or legitimise their identity or denying it outright.

This is such a frequent occurrence because asexual visibility is still very limited, even in feminist and queer communities. I know that I certainly didn’t know asexuality existed until a few months before I started identifying as asexual myself. But even the people who do know about asexuality don’t always know how to be proper allies to asexual people.

As such, I’ve put together some thoughts on how to be an ally to asexual people, especially in the feminist blogosphere. I can’t say that my views will be shared by every asexual person out there, but the more general guidelines are based on what I have read in general discussions on AVEN and other writing on the topic, such as swankivy’s ally series.

Being an asexual ally means knowing that asexuality exists as a legitimate sexual orientation, with estimated 1% of all people being on the asexual spectrum. Asexuality isn’t a fad, a medical condition, repressed sexual feelings or the result of abuse. If you want to understand asexuality as an identity, the best place to start is AVEN. After that, you could check out Asexual Explorations, swankivy’s YouTube channel, and Sciatrix’ masterlist of Carnival of Aces (an asexual blogcarnival).

Being an ally means talking to people about asexuality and accepting their identity as they describe it. It means asking questions only when you’re genuinely interested in hearing the answer. If your mindset is already fixed at “I don’t quite understand x, therefore asexuality cannot be valid,” then do everyone a favour and just walk away. In discussions focussing on asexuality and intersectionality, think about and respond to the issue at hand and stick with it. Don’t derail the discussion with intolerant or uneducated 101 comments. This is not the place.

Being an ally means recognising that behaviour doesn’t equate to orientation, especially when it comes to sex. Asexuality is a lack of sexual attraction to other people. Sometimes that manifests as not having or being interested in sex; other times it means that people are happy to have sex for reasons other than sexual attraction, such as pleasing a partner, or simply because sex can physically feel good. All the sexual people out there: can you really say you’d only ever have sex if you were completely sexually attracted to someone?

Being an ally means thinking about the way that sexuality and sexual attraction are positioned as central to “the human experience,” and how damaging that can be to asexual people. No one likes to be told that they’re less human for not experiencing sexual attraction, and yet we see it all the time in blanket statements about “healthy sex lives” and sex as “an integral part of life.” Allies need to start decentralising sex from the concepts of love, intimacy and relationships, and realise that those can all be legitimate without sexual desire. Likewise, allies need to think about the conflation of sexual attraction and all other types of attraction, and recognise that sexual, romantic, emotional and even intellectual attraction can all exist independently of each other.

Being an ally, especially a feminist ally, means not being threatened by asexuality. Asexual people are not against sex. Some see themselves as sex positive. Some are genuinely repulsed by sex. All that doesn’t mean that we object to your identity as a sexual person. When feminists accuse asexual people of pandering to the patriarchy they’re simply being ridiculous: just because I don’t desire sex doesn’t mean I want to condemn everyone else to the same idea! Surely believing that people have the right to as much (consensual) sex as they want without being shamed includes being happy with very little sex, or none at all.

Being an ally means understanding that asexual people are just as diverse as heterosexual and GLBTQ people. We aren’t a monolithic body and we can’t all speak for each other, so listening to everyone’s stories is important, not just a one.

And finally, being an ally to asexual people means recognising that asexual people suffer oppression in the form of invisibility and intolerance every day. Our whole society is so centred on sexual desire, so intensely focussed on sexual behaviour as the central aspect of our identities. We’re lucky if we can come out to someone and that person actually knows what “asexual” means without us having to explain it. In the public eye, we’re pretty much invisible all the time. And where we are visible, we’re often marginalised by people telling us that our identity doesn’t exist. That we’re sick, repressed or just scared. That we’re only asexual because we have issues resulting from abuse or trauma. Even the more well-meaning arguments we hear are hurtful, the ones that tell us “I don’t think you’re asexual, you just need time” and “everyone meets someone some day.” We’re asexual people inhabiting a sexual world. So saying that the frustrations of an asexual person are nothing compared to your frustrations about expected behaviour as a cis, straight* woman? Take it to another discussion. Right here, it’s really not cool.

Comments and feedback are very welcome, as long as they are in line with HAT’s commenting policy.

*This one’s just an example that I had thrown at me recently, I realise that not everyone reading this is cis and straight.

Related posts:

1. Nugget of Awesome: You Need To Get Off My Foot
2. There is a difference between sexualising and sexuality
3. Linkfest

The Ada Initiative, a group promoting women in open source and open culture, had their first AdaCamp in mid-January. In order to save some money, and because I like food to be inclusive for everyone, Brianna and I volunteered to do all the baking ourselves.

There were requirements for vegan, gluten-free and fructose-free. This is what we baked, and the order we baked in to prevent cross-contamination of allergens. I’m a bit paranoid when it comes to gluten-free baking when I don’t know how intolerant someone is. I rewashed everything I was going to use in hot water with a new sponge before starting. You also want to use things like margarine that doesn’t have bits of toast in it.

Lemon and Poppyseed muffins (vegan, gluten-free, fructose-free)

I made this comment on my blog the other day, but reliable information on the Internet about what you can eat when fructose free is swamped out by utter garbage that seems to contradict the truth. In the end I read some articles by Sue Shepherd, who seems to be the expert, plus this datasheet and designed a recipe myself.

I took Steph’s lemon and poppy seed cupcakes recipe as a basis and then substituted some ingredients to come up with:

2 cups GF self-raising flour (I used White Wings)
1 cup glucose syrup
1 tsp baking powder
80g of nuttelex
3 tsp no-egg powder (dry)
3/4 cup rice milk
4 Tbl lemon rind
1/4 lemon juice
poppy seeds

Glucose syrup is not as sweet as sugar, and the Internet suggests a 2:3 ratio when substituting sugar for glucose syrup. I made everything as a double batch, so I actually ran out. The result being these weren’t really sweet enough. I probably could have cut a bit of white sugar in (most people with fructose malabsorption are ok if there’s more glucose than fructose), but I wanted to play it safe.

Glucose syrup is also weird to work with. It’s really viscous. Like, more viscous than treacle. More like peanut butter. I held the jar upside down for a bit and nothing came out. Ended up having to microwave it and use a spoon. Messy.

I feel like I nailed the texture of these muffins. I’m quite happy with that. I used plain flour because that’s what I bought, and then cut it with extra baking powder at 2 tsp/cup flour.

Blueberry muffins (vegan, gluten-free)

I used another of Steph’s recipes to make these. Made by the book. They were a little more stogey/gluey than I would like. I suspect the addition of soy flour was possibly unrequired with the White Wings GF flour. Used frozen blueberries, leaving them frozen makes them easier to stir in without them bursting and turning your batter blue.

Chocolate, Peanut Butter and Cloudberry Jam muffins (vegan)

Originally, I was going to make this recipe but I realised I’d forgotten to by any jam to top them. So it became peanut butter and cloudberry jam (that’s what was in the house).

Recipe almost entirely as is, but with about a cup of peanut butter stirred in at the end, and no jam to top.

This recipe makes 12.

Banana bread (vegan)

Somehow I never took a photo of this (sad).

Something I love about the Sydney Rd grocers: you can ask for overripe bananas and get them. This is great because they’re wasting less food, and you don’t have to think ahead a week to make banana bread.

My grandmother has a really amazing banana bread recipe, but I’ve never managed to successfully veganise it (nor did I ever really do it justice in the milk and eggs days) so I decided to use this recipe I found via Google. Worked well, produced a dense but well textured banana bread which was very popular (and my favourite).

Made the recipe as is, but substituted soy milk for rice milk, because I had an open rice milk and I didn’t want to have to open another soy milk just because, plus you never know who might be soy intolerant.

350 degrees is in Fahrenheit (obviously), so 180C. Well, I say obviously, it took me a second to realise when my oven didn’t go to 350C.

~

There were about 35 people in total. I made a double batch of everything above. Besides baked goods we served fresh fruit (hooray for Sydney Rd) and biscuits (all vegan, some also gluten-free). Most of the baking got eaten, and a reasonable amount of fruit. Probably would have been perfect had the day been fully attended. Lots of biscuits left over though. Thought people would take packets into the sessions or something. I was wrong. At least they’re in packets.

Related posts:

1. Weekend womanscraft: winter warmers
2. Weekend womenscraft: Eat your art
3. Weekend Womenscraft: Wrapping your presents

This is a voluntary survey being undertaken by Dr Peter John Chen of the Department of Government at the University of Sydney.

I’m writing to ask for a favour. I’m currently working on a book on Australian politics and new media. As part of this I want to do a small study of blog readers, using comparative data from explicitly political and not explicitly political blogs. As such, I’m contacted a few of the more highly ranked blogs to see if they’d be interested in participating, and Hoyden About Town agreed to post my call for participants.

The survey is open to readers of the blog who live in Australia. The survey will be used in a forthcoming (2012) book on the internet and Australia.

The survey will take only 10 minutes of your time, and all responses are anonymous and confidential.

The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Australian_blog_readers

Hoyden About Town bloggers will have access to a summary of the initial findings, and may choose to post the summary on the blog.

Thanks for considering this request.

Related posts:

1. Blog comments problem
2. Friday Hoyden: Sady Doyle
3. Call for Guest Reviews: 2012 Australian Women Writers Challenge

[The following takes place between 12:00am and 1:00am, and also specifically focuses on individuals' choices to be vegetarian and attend Christmas family gatherings.  Obviously the principles in question are not unique to vegetarianism or Christmas; and in other situations other considerations/context may apply.]

I was at a loss for a post this evening, and went in search of any NZ media touting Christmas ZOMG OBESITYTURKEY panic.  I’ve always thought it’s a cruel joke of nature, to lumber Southern Hemisphere women simultaneously with Christmas – and associated Enjoy The Season of Gluttony But Don’t Actually Enjoy It headlines – and summertime – with associated Beach Bikini Body Blubber-Blasting sidebars.

Anyway, my search went happily unrewarded as far as anything interesting, text-based and quickly snarkable went.  But this popped up instead.

It’s the New Zealand Vegetarian Society’s Christmas 2010 page on dealing with your family being shits to you because you don’t eat meat.

I don’t intend to hassle the Vegetarian Society here as I think they’re offering some good, calming advice to their members.  I just want to provide the more bolshy advice on stuff like this:

most people choose to graciously ignore the worst behaviour, and engage only in discussions where both parties will be listened to. If you’re challenged politely and a conversation would be productive, it’s a great opportunity to educate people. In other times, agreeing to disagree is the easiest way to extricate yourself from a confrontation.

1.  You do not have to ignore bullying

Because that’s what it is, even when it’s your family and even when you’ve internalized a lot of bullshit about how your choices are “weird” or “abnormal” and how “regular people” cannot be expected to understand.  Or show, you know, basic fucking manners.

Of course you can be gracious if you like, and you can make that compromise, because that’s what we all do; it’s basically impossible to live a life without ever letting a principle go or choosing your battles or whatever.

But it is bullying.  And you have every right to say “Gee, Uncle Tony, that’s really rude and I’d like you to not comment on my choices.”  Or, alternatively, “Gee, Uncle Tony, why don’t you just have a nice big mug of shut the fuck up?”

2.  You do not have to educate anyone

Your life never has to be a teaching moment for other people.  Again, if you have the energy/time/spoons and the desire, go for it.  But we’re looking at this in a specific context, with family pressure and social narratives and sodding Christmas fever everywhere.

The people who will listen to you about your food choices aren’t the ones still bringing it up over the dinner table.

3.  You do not have to fucking agree to disagree

These are your fucking food choices, not abstract philosophical wank.  It’s your fucking mouth, not the town square.  When people “disagree” with you being vegetarian, they are implicitly demanding a change in your behaviour.  By “agreeing to disagree” you implicitly allow them to feel entitled to do so.

4.  The Big One:  Christmas is not fucking special and neither is family

When I was little I loved Christmas.  I loved seeing my family.  I always knew my mother didn’t feel the same way.

But over the last few years as I’ve become A Proper Adult and started to be a little … blunt about some things, I’ve stopped enjoying it so much.

Then a few months ago my mother explained that not only did she not enjoy family Christmas events when I was little, she would regularly be in tears afterwards.

I related this to my partner.  Who gave me a “duh” expression and said “Hun, you always come home and cry after seeing your family for Christmas.”

I do love my family.  I do enjoy catching up with them.  But there is clearly something demonic about the combination of family and Christmas.  The pressure to fulfil tradition, to prove to the universe we all not only love each other but really, really love each other, to make everything perfect.*

There’s so much stress that for a lot of people, clearly, Christmas doesn’t leave them feeling like they’ve caught up with their relatives and had a good time; and Boxing Day is for working off the hangover and declaring “I’m not sodding doing this again next year!”  Which of course you do.

Point?  If it’s not worth it, it’s not worth it.  If the exhaustion isn’t the good, happy fatigue of having done something hard but fulfilling, if the hangover isn’t the good-yet-annoying hangover of staying up till 3am catching up with people whose lives you deeply care about, if the leftovers don’t taste any good because every mouthful reminds you of another dig Auntie Mary made about your weight … well, fuck tradition.  Fuck sacrificing your happiness so other people can tick their My Family Is Normal box.**

It is never a good thing to come home and say “Well, I had a shit time but at least I’ve seen the family.”

Neither the Spirit of Christmas nor the demands of family are worth your happiness.***

5.  The chaser:  bullies do not deserve your delicious food.

The Vegetarian Society also suggests:

Providing your own beautifully presented and yummy dish is an excellent way to quell any ongoing comments.

Which could totally work.  But if your family really are such fucking tools that they simply have to harass you on family occasions about your nothing-to-do-with-them food choices, they do not deserve your delicious food or the time you take to present it beautifully.  They’ll probably just keep making obnoxious comments about how it could be improved with real butter or how much they just cannot believe it has no meat in it.

Make your delicious, beautiful dish.  Take it to a friend’s place.  Or hell, set the table nicely, take a photo for your Facebook or Flickr, and then eat that damn delicious veggie dish straight from the serving plate with a big spoon in one hand and a good book in the other.  In front of a roaring fire.  With some angry punk music playing.  Whatever floats your boat.

ETA: Related post:  It’s okay not to holiday at FWD/Forward.

~

*See also weddings.

**And ain’t that just problematic on so, so many levels.

***Let me get there before you, detractors:  yes, this is a very selfish wee rant.  I don’t fucking care.  We get one life on this planet and wasting it because This Is How Things Should Be Done is a really shit idea.

Related posts:

1. Femmostroppo Reader December 24, 2010
2. Silly Season post 2 – Christmas etiquette
3. AFA selling burning-cross Christmas decoration

Clearly the media meme of the month is “won’t someone think of the children, and the imaginary innocence we ascribe to them in order to justify our lack of openness about basic anatomy because it’s ~icky~?”

First up there’s a lovely example of modern journalism at work, where Elizabeth Binning decides to take the story of a young woman who was given good, comprehensive sex education with an emphasis on consent and full information about alternatives to cock-in-vag intercourse, who was then “taken advantage of” by an older man while drunk …

and turn it into SEX EDUCATION WILL KNOCK UP YOUR CHILDREN!!!!!!!

Students may wish to pay special attention to the interesting line Elizabeth Binning wants to draw between some mythical, pure “sex education” and the Disgusting Filth That Is Indoctrinating Our Children, particularly with the use of this quote:

When my mother signed the consent, she thought it was signing her way to her child knowing about reproduction and the actual human anatomy side of reproduction, not the methods on how it’s done.

Forgive me if this is a little TMI, but in my household, “actual human anatomy” and “how [sex is] done” are pretty much intertwined.

This is the panic: that we’re no longer presenting Innocent Children with sterile, confusing, infantilizing and denn da man puts his peeeenis into da wumman’s va-jay-jay and denn da babby comes out* “education”.  We’re actually acknowledging that they have bodies and that doing certain things with their bodies feels good and that there’s a fuckload more to it that some disembodied cock in vag in a vacuum = babies.

Fuck me, so to speak, it’s almost like we’re acknowledging that puberty is a thing where, in general, hormones do shit and incite emotions and things get a bit confusing, and maybe we can help kids through that by being simply honest about the reality of sex.

[And just to restate the obvious, that bland, safe "sex education" that we're apparently missing?  Doesn't do sweet fuck all for trans kids, kids dealing with same-sex or bisexual attraction, etc etc.]

Elizabeth Binning was clearly in the “middle-class outrage stories” seat this week because yesterday the story was all about the tragedy of a father discovering his son had been taught about … the clitoris.  Why, the class went so far as to insinuate that playing with a person’s clitoris can be a fun thing for both parties! [Though as LadyNews points out, it's not *all* good.]

The high point of that one is lumping together “learning that oral sex may not always lead to intercourse” (gasp, faint), “learning that anal sex is an option” (when we all know the anus only has nerves because God wants us to be reminded of our disgusting biology every type we poop) with this particular horror:

Students also lay on the floor together with their eyes shut imagining the world was predominantly gay.

Followed immediately by the sentence:

The father said his son was too young to be given such graphic sex education and had come home upset.

Yep, that’s graphic all right.  Challenging society’s rampant heteronormativity by getting the kids to visualise, probably for all of a minute, a world where the hets aren’t in charge.  Truly, that’s some scary stuff right there.

Cue the entirely-coincidental Kiwi Party press release:

“Do you want your 14 year old daughter or grand-daughter to be taught in our schools how to apply “yucky and sticky condoms to a black plastic penis?” asks outraged grandmother Simonne Dyer deputy leader of the Kiwi Party after reading the lead story in this morning’s Herald.

One merely raises a sardonic eyebrow at the specificity of the black “plastic penis” (normal people call them “dildos”).  And I’ve got to say, I share some of this outrage.  The boys can bloody well learn how to put on condoms too.

You can guess how it goes from there, permissive society, parents’ rights, yadda yadda.

But these are simply the facts:

Teenagers are going to fuck.

Teenagers who fuck have every right to be aware of their options to protect themselves from sexually transmitted disease including and unplanned pregnancy.

Teenagers who manage to get to the fucking stage without already having absorbed ideas about their bodies being disgusting and their pleasurable feelings being evil?  Deserve a pat on the fucking back along with their comprehensive sex education.

And when teenagers like the young woman in the first story are taught about the importance of consent, and then are “taken advantage of” by older men who presumably didn’t get that memo in high school, I don’t think it’s her attitude I’m going to have a fucking go at.

Oh, and “grubby dad”?  Your son thinks girls are “yuck”?  I can’t imagine where he picked up that attitude.**

~

*Simmer down, quiltbaggers, only heterosexual cisgender people have intercourse.

**QoT has no fucking time for the notion that boys and girls are naturally repellent to each other during puberty.

Homework:  consider the links between the idea that we should never discuss icky sex with our children, and the continual refrain of “save families from filthy prostitution” from the same wankstains.  Sex: to fundies, just acknowledging it happens a lot (or at all) makes you a big fat sinner.

Related posts:

1. Tony Abbott Makes Rape Joke, MSM frames it as “sexist gaffe”. Guest Post by Napalmnacey
2. Peter Hayward’s Homeless Adventure. [Guest post by Napalmnacey]
3. Whoydensday: Ace (Guest Post from Chally)