Fox (n): carnivore of genus vulpes; crafty person; scavenger; (vb) to confuse; -ed (adj): to be drunk.
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Showing posts with label feminist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminist. Show all posts

Wednesday, 11 January 2012

Good work, girls.

HERE are some recent events.

A woman was on national TV this morning because she had two vaginas.

Three women are on an oxymoronic 'celebrity reality' show on the basis they are frequently pictured naked or in swimwear.

A fourth is on the show because she is nationally reviled for having an affair with a married footballer, a fifth is famous for having yo-yoing weight, and a sixth for being a bit of a harridan. There are no other women on the show.

Last week a female TV presenter with a new job gave an interview to a national newspaper (agreed with her agent) in which she discussed how her breasts were not as large as those of her predecessor.

The 11-year-old daughter of two celebrities has been pouting for a fashion photographer in pictures published by her own mother on Twitter.

An actress who caused a row by stripping naked to play a dominatrix in a pre-watershed Christmas drama - adapted from a book in which the strong female character was not a prostitute - says it was "really empowering".

A female politician who has had arguably the most publicity and attention of any woman in the House of Commons bemoaned the fact woman are trivialised in a glossy photo-shoot with a men's magazine.

A 30-year-old who is probably the best-liked female in the country, after her grandmother-in-law, never speaks.


Now, I am no hairy-arsed right-on We-Hate-Clarkson fully-paid-up member of the Wimmin's Brigade. My gender comes in all shapes and sizes, colours and types, and I'm fine with all the ones which aren't morbidly obese, who in my experience are generally lazy and should lay off the cake because they're sucking money out of our health and welfare system and, more importantly, are taking all the cake.

I accept there will always be -isms of many kinds, not least between the genders, but so long as they fire in both directions and don't do too much harm they do not bother me much. Such is life.

But I was raised on tales of strong women doing their best in difficult circumstances - before they had the right to vote, when they fended for themselves in the wars, as they struggled for equal rights in the workplace and their own homes. Despite the fact it's the 21st century I've had to do the same, on occasion. And considering the popularity of this anonymous blog the fact you don't know what I look like doesn't seem to stop you judging whether or not you like me and what I have to say.

I don't know about you but I can't help thinking what Emmeline Pankhurst or Elizabeth I or George Eliot - all of them unpleasant people in their way, intolerant and autocratic, not great to live with but without whose achievements my life would be the poorer - would think, if they spent twenty minutes in our world.

I expect the first 10 would be spent being religious and asking what happened to petticoats, but the last half would involve trying to work out how to get back to their own lives which, as brutal and horrid as they were, generally gave women a jot more credit and respect than we get today.

I don't have a solution for it apart from turning off or away, nor anyone in particular to blame beyond random finger-pointing. I'm just boiling with generalised outrage, because I bet that if you think of the one woman that you most admire in the whole world, she would not put up with any of this shit.

But for some reason we are.

Thursday, 9 June 2011

I'm a foxy feminist.

PLAYBOY bunnies one minute and slutwalks the next: cue the outraged lining up to shout about something they just don't get.

The 'f' word. The dirty word. The word describing stuff that's taken for granted, is almost a joke, and used so often its power has eroded to almost nothing: feminism.

It's a subject I steer clear of, largely because I don't feel the need to do otherwise. I work in a job where being female is a bonus, where it gets you sent on jobs that males can't do and in which a flirty smile can get you stories. If someone else wants to be sexist I've always considered it their weakness and not mine.

That's not to say it's not around. Unlike my male colleagues I can't wear the same clothes to work every day; if I'm on a doorstep for 12 hours and need the toilet I can't go up against the nearest wall while keeping an eye on the front door; and I'm not even going to start on the logistics of menstruation. Yet I have to produce copy same as the men, and without any excuses. I don't much mind because it was my choice.

My grandmother was born in 1916, twelve years before all women had the vote. She was the first in her family to dye her hair and was thought 'fast' as a result; she bought a house when she married, which made her 'a bit above herself'; and she worked, while she could. And those three things were about the only choices she had.

When her husband came back from war a changed man whose random dark moods oppressed the house and her, who loved her until the day he died but still made her unhappy, she had no option but to be miserable at his side. She could not leave, she could not divorce, she could not get a job to pay her own way and raise her family.

My gran was one of the most brilliant, ballsy, fascinating and political women I've ever met. She was like Barbara Castle but without the privilege, so she got to sit only at the head of the dinner table rather than in the House of Commons. She taught herself to walk again after a stroke, but the one handicap she retained all her life was the belief that there were some things you cannot change. She was wrong.

When my mum left school in 1960 she was told she could be a nurse or a secretary. She didn't like shorthand so picked nurse, and on a night out with a friend from her first job met my dad. They married a few years later and thanks to the Pill she got to choose when and how to have children. But she never got to decide between family and career, or even whether to do both.

But when I left school in the 1990s the careers adviser asked me: "What do you want to do?" And that, right there, is what feminism changed. I got the right to choose.

My gran got the right to choose which politician to vote for. My mum got the right to choose when to have her family, and I got the right to choose my entire life. I can choose to get married, to get divorced, where and how to live, who to sleep with and when to do it.

There is one major wall I still hit my head against though, and that's the idea that women have to be one thing. That all women like pink, that they read books but not newspapers, that they are either whores or mothers and that if a woman asserts herself with any kind of spirit she is 'aggressive'; that a female must be passive, or she is not a proper female, never mind that every female icon in history has had balls of steel. If she ever uses the 'f' word to describe herself, she is a militant, hairy, lesbionic 1970s cliche.

Those descriptions do not fit me, they don't fit my mum or my gran or in fact any woman I've ever met.

Which brings us back to the Playboy bunnies and sluts. If a woman wants to dress in a satin leotard and get letched over by idiots that's up to her - I wish she had a higher aim in life, but so long as it's a free choice she can make it. The women protesting against it should - and largely do - remember it's not the bunnies they mind, so much as the 'dollification' of women in general. In this instance it's Hugh Hefner who is the anachronism, a man stuck in the 1950s with so little financial acumen he sold out his business empire and his mansion and now has to keep flogging his flaccid old man's dream simply to pay the rent.

We are not dolls, we are people. So if thousands of women, young and old, are going to assert the right to wear whatever the hell they like on a march through London on Saturday I think it's brilliant. I hope there's a bunny on it, and a woman in a niqab, and a hooker and some wannabe-WAGs. The slutwalk is not about being a slut; it's saying that rape is never justified, that women are many things, and that feminism is not a dirty word.

I can't go on the march, but I can say this: I am a feminist. I shave as necessary, dye my hair, flirt for a living, mong my feet up in high heels, enjoy fact as much as I do fiction, and am neither a whore nor a mother. Apparently I'm a member of the weaker sex, but I'm tougher and cleverer than most men I know.

I am many things, but in short: I'm a girl and I'm nails. And so are the rest of us.