Category Archives: sexism

The myth of female gaze

Posted on by
2

“Secondly, the trend may shift from only sexualising females. Anyone see the new Bond, Skyfall? The first scene with the villain includes a very camp Javier Bardem feeling up an uncomfortable Daniel Craig. Would this scene have EVER been put in Sean Connery’s films all those years ago? Nope. In the changing word today, gay marriage is being legalised, there are homosexual leads – it’s being accepted. Quite frankly, the only reason only females are sexualised in games is because there is a stigma against homosexual male characters! But if games are heading the way of the movies, and with more story-driven gameplay, they most certainly are, then it is not unfathomable to think in the next few years we could see EVERYONE getting sexualised!”
(from a comment on this article)

This paragraph is sort of strange, and it reminds me of an anecdote I read on an author’s blog once. She came across a negative review of her book on a site that expressed distaste at the way the book “promoted homosexuality”. Baffled, because there was no such content in the book, she got in touch with the writer of the comment to discuss his view. The conversation eventually revealed that the concept of the female gaze was so foreign to him that when a male was described in sexual, or even sensual, terms, his automatic assumption was that there was something gay going on. Apparently the writer of this comment suffers from the same problem. You see, even though far more straightwomen than gay men play video games, we can’t possibly have a male character be sexualised unless it’s for the appreciation of gay male gamers. Because it’s more socially acceptable to market to the horniness of gay men than for straight women, or something.*

On a note that may be related only by virtue of also being discussed in that article in the comments, I’m not really sure that “offensive” is the right word to describe my feelings about the prevalence of sexual assault in not just video games, but pop culture in general as well. As a mostly female-perceived person it definitely makes me uncomfortable. As a writer and a reader it’s sometimes just plain boring. It’s a lazy shorthand to show or prove that a character is evil. Rape is bad = only bad people rape = this character is bad, so he should try to rape someone. But there are plenty of other, and often better, ways to show that. Hell, you can have a “bad” character who refuses to sully himself by touching a member of some outside group in that manner (for characters in cults or racial gangs, etc) – it’s still misogynistic, but on a different level to the casual assumption that if there’s a bad guy around, women gonna get raped. It’s individualised misogyny, the idea of this character that an “outsider” woman has the ability to dirty him – not an idea shared by everyone playing the game or watching the movie. Or you could have a character more into psychological shit who prefers to leave his captives waiting and imagining what might happen to them. Or maybe, harming the captives just isn’t part of the plan. They’re there for a reason – ransom, to prevent them from taking action against the villains, to coerce them into performing some particular task, etc – and pointless violence against them risks retaliatory violence on a larger scale from their allies which the villains have decided is better to avoid.

And that’s just in games that take place in a semi-realistic world where, yes, rape and sexual assault are pretty much endemic. In games in other genres, though, they don’t have to be. You’re making up a world with, I don’t know, magic and dinosaurs and different political systems, but it’s just too much work to imagine a different dynamic between the sexes than the one you were brought up with? Yeah, I’m calling bullshit on the idea that it’s “just realism” there, bud. That’s not realism, that’s laziness and the inability to think about the world from a point of view that isn’t mired in rape culture and male dominance.

*Note: I’m not explicitly including bisexual peeps since they’re, in the minds of people who think the treatment of women in video games is universally regarded as sexual, already catered for in some way.

A relationship in the nature of marriage

Posted on by
2

So the newest beneficiary bash involves extending legal responsibility for relationship fraud to the partner. So there’s been some discussion of abusive relationships, and in Question Time today Jacinda Ardern (I think?) asked about whether women in abusive relationships would have that taken into account.

In response, we were told that “an abusive relationship is not a relationship in the nature of marriage”.

This is an interesting position to take. There’s no specification of whether this means just for the purposes of this policy or in general, and if the latter, I would be extremely worried. In New Zealand de facto relationships have the same benefits as those who are legally married, for example, and especially regarding divorce and separation, many of the legislations set up were about protecting the partner who has been financially disadvantaged, usually the woman – especially in an abusive relationship. If abusive relationships hold a special category where they’re NOT regarded as similar to a marriage, does that leave grounds for someone to claim they don’t have to pay alimony? Particularly if the victim/survivor does not wish to lay charges, or if the abuse does not involve physical violence (or very little) – though I’m not confident about the government’s willingness to recognise the existence of emotional abuse – it seems like the main thing stopping people from doing this would be the implicit admission of abuse, but in my experience abusers are willing to do all sorts of seemingly self-destructive things purely out of bitterness if their victim finds a way to get away from them.

ETA: Further questions:

Does this mean that if someone is in an abusive relationship, they are allowed to tell WINZ they’re single?
What does this mean for the legal validity of abusive marriages? Does it render a divorce unnecessary?*

*This is clearly in a hypothetical world where an answer in Question Time is an accepted method of law interpretation rather than judges’ decisions.

CHILD CUSTODY rah rah FATHERS rah rah KIDS BEING STOLEN

Posted on by
1

The #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag is a thing of wonder. Aside from masculism being a ridiculous word, it’s been taken over by sarcastic non-MRAs saying things like “I want to be the first ever male President of this country” and “the lack of a Bechdel test for men is obviously discrimination by feminists” and “feminists keep flaunting their dead and injured when I express my hurt feelings”.

I made one submission before going outside to feed my rabbits, and lo and behold, when I returned I had a reply!

#INeedMasculismBecause I’m too lazy to look up the actual statistics on child custody court cases.

The response was telling me that in the US it’s 70% women, 10% men and 20% split. While I only have the New Zealand statistics to hand, I spent several tweets questioning what those US ones actually measured and giving the NZ ones as a comparison.

See, in New Zealand, of all the custody cases that go to family court, there are three different ways of reaching an outcome. 75% are decided through mediation. 20% are decided by a judge when one parent doesn’t bother showing up. 5% are decided by a judge when both parents do show up. Remember here, first of all, that these only go to court when the two parties can’t decide by themselves, so those 20% who don’t even show up is a pretty significant number who apparently can’t come to an agreement with their ex but once the legal system is involved suddenly don’t give a fuck. That’s eighty percent of the cases that go to a judge.

Of those that go to mediation and are decided on by both parents, 65% go to the mother, 11% to the father, 12% to a third party and 12% shared.

Of those decided by a judge, 19% go to the father, much higher than the 11% when the two parties decide by themselves.

The real kicker though is when you look at the percentage of male applicants and the percentage of female applicants who are awarded custody. That is, the person who brings the case to court because they want more than their ex-partner wants to give them. Of all female applicants, 69% are awarded custody. Sound like a lot? You might be surprised, then, to find that of all male applicants, 65% are awarded custody, nearly the same amount. (I suspect from the context that this is only a measure of sole custody, not shared, but could be wrong.)

According to these statistics, the argument that judges award custody to women willy-nilly despite the father’s earnest yearning to be with his kids is bullshit. Judges are much more likely to award the father custody than fathers are themselves in agreements between partners. If they don’t, there’s probably a reason – the children don’t want to live with the father, the father is not fit to be a parent, the father is constantly at work, the father has never once had a hand in their care before.

So it seems this argument in support of institutionalised misandry has a pretty simple solution. If you want custody, ask for it.

Myth and menstruation

Posted on by
Reply

Science reporting is shit.

This isn’t really a controversial statement. Basically everyone knows science reporting is shit. Journalists who don’t usually have a background in science are writing for generic media consumers who probably don’t have a background in science either, and when you add in personal or corporate bias and other such things, the chances of having any given mass media news article about a scientific topic accurately reflect the findings decreases dramatically.

So, I really don’t think that the people behind this study on PMS ever tried to imply that doesn’t exist, however much the chosen quotes seem to support the idea that it’s virtually non-existent. Hell, the article even says that 15% of studies have found a link.

I’ve seen quite a few people reacting as though it did, though, and even a few sneering comments directed at Dr Sarah Romans for having the presumed temerity not to experience any menstrual symptoms.

At this point I sort of have to question exactly what PMS is, exactly. To my mind it’s largely hormonal mood swings, though the bullet list at the bottom of the article notes that there are over 100 symptoms that “may be” due to PMS, including things that I would really consider mere correlation such as breast tenderness. Are physical symptoms like that annoying? Definitely. Do they make people grumpy? Hell yes. Are they PMS? Well…. I don’t know. Tiredness, poor concentration, irritability, and even headaches I do agree with though. Determining how many cis women (and trans guys/genderqueer) experience PMS seems to be down to how you define it though, and clearly that’s going to account for the difference between the 15% of studies that found a link between negative moods and the pre-menstrual stage and the 90% of female-bodied people who “get advance warning” of a period.

There’s a lot of misogyny tied up with menstruation. A lot. The idea that women on their periods are unclean, the idea that they can’t run anything of importance because of their mood swings, the assumption that any time a woman expresses frustration she must be “on the rag” and, on the flip side, the idea that some women simply use PMS as an excuse to be a ravening harpy. Attacking a woman for daring to publish a study exploring the idea that not everyone experiences PMS veers a little too close to that kind of misogyny for my liking. I know too many people who don’t get PMS and are constantly being invalidated because of it to be comfortable with that line of conversation. Some people seem to be really invested in the idea that part of being a woman is suffering, and that’s understandable in some ways, but it doesn’t make it okay to piss on anyone who doesn’t.

Stop it stop it stop it

Posted on by
Reply

I always find it funny how men call women emotional, but they flip the fuck out the second the rules they set for women’s lives inconvenience them. Like, don’t walk alone late at night, don’t get too drunk in public, don’t go home with strange men who say they want to watch a move at their place – but if a woman says no, I won’t have that drink you want to buy me, no, I won’t go home with you to watch a move at ten o’clock at night when I’d have no way of getting home and I’m not willing to walk, suddenly it’s “ARE YOU SAYING I’M SOME KIND OF RAPIST HOW DARE YOU CALLING SOMEONE A RAPIST IS AS BAD AS RAPING SOMEONE AND I WOULDN’T WANT TO FUCK YOU ANYWAY BECAUSE YOU’RE UGLY AND PROBABLY A LESBIAN.” I’m pretty sure all the women I know know exactly what I’m talking about.

Then there’s this. Did you know that a woman adhering to the cultural values originally placed on women by men is just like not allowing black people to sit at the front of the bus or drink from whites only water fountains?

No. No, it’s not. That is bullshit and you should shut the fuck up. You are not entitled to see an intimate, private view of a woman’s life, artist or not. She is allowed to set boundaries, and the fact that they are boundaries that men insist on because it’s easier to make someone else accountable for your own bad behaviour makes it really fucking gross when men throw a hissy about her putting them up. The comparison is especially gross because whether it’s true or not, many people see Muslims as a group that is largely non-white. (Despite the fact that there are plenty of white Muslims and brown Christians.)

The really interesting thing is that setting a boundary and seeing who gets unreasonably upset about it is actually a pretty effective way of finding out who’s going to be the most dangerous to you. I would hope that most of my male friends would read that article and nod and think, “Yes, I see where she’s coming from, that’s totally understandable.” Just as they’d think, “Of course a woman I just met who’s told me she’s already had enough alcohol doesn’t want me to insist she has more and might feel unsafe coming back to my house to watch a movie alone with me late at night.” Because getting upset that a woman won’t let you get her drunk and stranded at your house? Probably a sign that you were a little too invested in forcing that scenario. And I refuse to believe that the incredibly vague hints in that Stuff article were enough to convince you that your life would be fucking over if you don’t get to see this artist’s documentary. You just want to because she dared to say no. And that’s gross.

eta: Bear in mind also that even if you’re the most amazing stand up guy in the history of everything, if she did not place restrictions like this, there are other guys who might hold it against her. “You let strange men see you in an unacceptable (to me) state of undress = you are a slut who deserves whatever she gets.”

Another failed equivalence to rape

Posted on by
Reply

Comparison, allegory and metaphor are important tools for communication. When someone doesn’t understand something they can be used to link the subject to something they can relate to and empathise with. So it’s understandable that in many discussions of rape someone will try to come up with a narrative that those who don’t live with the constant threat of sexual assault can understand. Unfortunately, there are very few things that are comparable. One of the most common narratives that floats around is the equivalence between rape and being mugged – both potentially traumatic and violating experiences, yes, but still qualitatively and inherently different. To use this comparison to make people understand you not only have to get them to imagine being mugged, you have to make them imagine a whole alternate reality where there is a huge amount of baggage and shame that simply can’t be conveyed in a transcript of a police officer questioning whether the victim was at fault. Mugging is also primarily a crime committed by strangers, while rape is the opposite, so you also have to find another way to convey the loss of trust, the affect on ability to create and maintain intimate relationships, and the potential damage to a survivor’s future sex life. Most mugging victims don’t have to overcome trauma each time they later donate to charity.

Looping back to the present, Culture Map has an article up titled ‘The best response we’ve heard to Daniel Tosh’s “misquoted” rape joke‘. Read that and return.

I have problems with this piece. For starters, it implies that only women get raped (or at least, only people with vaginas). Also that all men have dicks. Further, while rape is a horrible, horrible thing, and this sentence should do nothing to belittle that, one of the insidious things about it is that there is no visible injury that comes about from rape itself. If there were, it would perhaps receive more sympathy than it does. Instead, victims/survivors are expected to simply get over it. And some can – maybe not fully, but over time they can take on the trauma and beat it into submission, which is why many people prefer the term survivors to victims in the first place. A victim is often read as helpless, someone who needs an external agent to save them. A survivor saves themselves (though perhaps with the help of a good support system). However, the article’s comparison of rape to castration fails to convey any of these subtleties. Someone who’s been castrated is visibly injured, and disabled, for life, and is no longer able to engage in the penetrative sex that is most likely to be what they consider the norm. No one reasonable would argue that one in five [people possessing dicks] wanted to be castrated, whereas sex is generally supposed to be pleasurable, leading to the overwhelming incidence of dismissing rape reports as morning after regret. Because people are expected to want to have sex. They’re not expected to want to have parts of their body chopped off.

As for the visible injury, another characteristic of rape survivors is that it’s not something you can discern by looking at someone. The statistics tell us that pretty much everyone probably knows someone who’s been either raped or sexually assaulted in some way – but because we don’t talk about it, most cis men in particular don’t know that. Now obviously since we don’t walk around naked, castration isn’t immediately obvious, but it’s not something you can hide from an intimate partner, and could cause problems in places like gym or swimming pool changing rooms if you didn’t want anyone to know. It would also affect the fit of pants, though that could be corrected by packing. So in this alternate reality presented, women would not find it as easy to be completely unaware of the issue as men do in our world.

The thing is, you don’t actually even really need to create these convoluted metaphors. Men do get raped in real life, and even moreso than women it’s presented as comedic, because men are supposed to want sex all the time and be strong enough that you can’t overpower them, so being raped is ridiculous, like if they were a woman or something! Hilarious, I guess. The line of reasoning applies whether the rapist is male or female, though obviously there’s also a lot of homophobia tied up in it when both parties are male. So instead of trying to walk men through a complete re-imagining of the world, it seems like it would be easier to ask them to imagine that they had been raped. I can guarantee they’re aware of the social attitudes towards male rape victims. And while they don’t have the burden of having to be always aware of the possibility, the impossible rules that women have to follow in order to not be blamed for someone else’s crime and the knowledge that even your own friends cannot be trusted not to turn on you, that’s a much smaller gap in understanding than any of the comparison scenarios I’ve seen provide.

Personally when it comes to articles about the issue of rape jokes in stand up, I prefer this one from a guy who used to make rape jokes himself. (Though I admit I’m leery of using a cis man as an authoritative figure on a subject that disproportionately affects women and trans folk.)

Rehash, repeat

Posted on by
Reply

Always interesting to see people’s reactions to a protest, depending on where the protest happens. There seems to be a huge NIMBY trend: if you protest overseas, good for you. If you protest in the commentator’s country or neighbourhood, you’re a whining whiner who probably doesn’t even care about the issue. In this case I’ve seen people wondering, for example, how many of those protesting are “actually students” and how many are “rent-a-commies”, which makes me wonder if they really think that no one who isn’t currently a student can care about the dangerous changes to tertiary education.

Something else which is slightly less universal, but still distressingly common, is criticism towards the protest organisers for their decisions regarding the safety of less privileged groups. I say distressingly common not to cast disapproval on the criticism, but on the need for it. There is a group heavily involved in today’s protest, as well as the previous one, that includes at least one cis guy who I’m told by several people is a serial sexual predator with a history in both Auckland and Wellington. Whether this is true (incredibly likely) or not (I suppose it’s possible there’s been some kind of conspiracy targeting him), it’s something that happens far too often in circles dominated by (as Octavia put it) Important Liberal Dudes, especially but not always white ones (and here I’m pretty sure the guy in question isn’t white, but probably several of his supporters are). It’s really easy for liberals to fall into this trend where, well, they’re liberal. You can’t go around accusing them of shit, they’re so much better than those rich conservatives that are the real problem! Or the idea that a liberal guy would never do something like that, so any accusations must be coming from a screeching harpie who just hates men, or whatever. At the kindest, there was just some kind of miscommunication. (Over and over and over.)

It’s pretty easy to see the result. Despite the fact that socially-focused non-profit work is overwhelmingly dominated by women (except in leadership positions), protests attract fewer women. Protests on women’s issues attract fewer women of colour. Protests on queer issues attract fewer lesbians, bi women (and while the issues aren’t always the same here with regards to personal safety and sexual assault, there is still quite a bit of misogyny in LGB circles) and trans people.

Does that matter? Do we need those less privileged voices? Well, yeah. You’re protesting something that negatively affects you. It negatively affects them, too, probably even moreso. Adding their voices shows the breadth of the problem, adds credibility and makes the whole group stronger. Adding diversity means adding people who might be able to see solutions or partial solutions that others would miss. Adding people who don’t look like you makes other people who don’t look like you pay more attention. But that’s never going to happen if you can’t be fucked making an effort to make things safe and welcoming for people who don’t look like you, even if that means kicking out the douchebag friend who’s making you all look like shitstains who don’t care about anyone but themselves.

The stand-up conversation

Posted on by
1

A few people are having this conversation again and while I’m here I realised I do, actually, have something to say. This post has some links in it to what others have already posted.

Basically, it started when a couple of my Twitter friends walked out of a Raybon Kan show when he started making rape jokes. I can only wish I’d have the guts to do that honestly – knowing me I’d be too scared to draw attention to myself, second guessing myself over whether I was being “too sensitive” or over-dramatic, etc – plus I’d most likely be there with other people and I’d be similarly too nervous to suggest it to them.

Instead, I just don’t go to stand up comedy.

Ever.

I mean, this is a pretty popular genre of entertainment we’re talking about here, especially when you count the panel and quiz shows that feature comedians (I do watch QI on occasion, though the white-meat-sausage-fest is depressing as hell and I do find myself having moments of “Not Funny” still). It’s also one of the genres of live show that’s still going strong in the age of tv and movies zapped direct to your computer. And yet, I doubt I’m not the only one who has a policy of just avoiding the whole thing, just in case.

For me, it’s not just rape jokes, either. Chances are pretty high that any given comedian I know nothing else about will use those. But chances are even higher that even if they don’t, they’ll use jokes where the punchline is “and someone was gay!” or “and someone was trans!” or “and someone was mistaken for being gay or trans!” or “haha, foreigners!” On a visceral level it’s the first ones that bug me the most, of course, because I’m lucky not to be directly affected by racism, but I sure as hell don’t find it funny even if it doesn’t make me sick and angry and ashamed at the reminder that there are significant portions of society who think I’m not worthy of being considered a person.

I don’t want to pay to be made to feel like that. And there’s never any guarantee that it won’t. Even when a comedian’s been good in the past. Even when they’ve challenged the status quo on another topic. Hell, even if they’ve challenged the status quo on that subject. It still happens.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against jokes about gay people, or trans people, or whatever. But there is simply a huge difference between a joke involving a minority, even a joke that revolves around being a minority, and a joke where just being a minority is a punchline. Apparently it’s a difference too subtle for these people to grasp, and until they can, I can’t trust them with my money.

“Awkward”

Posted on by
Reply

A note, first, that this post is going to be discussing domestic abuse and societal attitudes.

On the way into Te Awa o Te Ora where we do our flax weaving today, the radio was tuned to Mai FM. The DJs were discussing an upcoming show in Las Vegas where Chris Brown and Rihanna will both be performing, describing it as “awkward”. What else is “awkward”, apparently, is that Chris Brown has recently released a track with lyrics saying “Don’t [eff] with my old [B-word] / It’s like a bad fur / Every industry [N-word] done had her / Shook the tree like a pumpkin just to smash her / [B-word] is breaking codes, but I’m the password.” After this, Rihanna unfollowed him on Twitter, and he responded by doing the same and tweeting, “Assumptions! I didn’t say any names so if u took offense to it then it’s something you feel guilty about.” (from here.)

They went on to talk about how Rihanna is rumoured to be releasing a track soon with some blistering words directed at him, and how it was probably going to be a really epic zing, because women can hurt men with what they say than men can hurt women [with what they say]. You know, it might just be me, but I’m not sure what she could say that would hurt worse than having to listen to him apparently brag about how he beat and choked her to the point that she passed out, while yelling that he would kill her, in a song that’s probably going to do extremely well and be played on the radio a hell of a lot.

Actually awkward: really fucking clueless cis guys talking about things they really shouldn’t be talking about.

Culture shock/eugenics

Posted on by
2

Yeah, I’m still on this contraception thing. I’ve figured out how to phrase something else that was bugging me about it, helped by reading some other people’s posts, in particular one about the expectations of when one should start a family.

We all know that Māori and Pacific Islanders are disproportionately represented among the poor, right? Like, this isn’t something I need to go and find the stats for? From memory, over half the parents and carers on the DPB are brown. Because I’m not I won’t get too in depth about this – that should be for someone who grew up in that culture – but from everything I’ve learned, in Māori and Pacifika society, children are really important.

Now, National likes to talk about intergenerational reliance on benefits and getting people into work and blah blah. The thing is, when everyone around you is poor and no one in your family has ever been anything but poor, expectations are different. In my family, it was generally accepted that we’d all finish high school and go straight to university. In a poorer family, that doesn’t happen – the financial support isn’t there, the tradition isn’t there, etc. And because of racism, classism and similar societal attitudes, the kids have probably been going to school somewhere where they’re not given career counseling and uni information packets and everything like they are at better schools. It’s quite likely that school has been something you do until you’re old enough not to, and that that’s the message they’ve gotten not only from their friends, but their teachers and other school staff. (Incidentally, the Māori girl I went to the family group conference for hasn’t been at school for the last three years. She’s 15. Yeah.)

Basically, if they weren’t on the benefit, or weren’t relying on others because they didn’t qualify for the benefit despite being unemployed, they’d probably be in shitty jobs that didn’t pay much more than the benefit does anyway.

So, now, National’s saying, well hey, we’ll give you free contraception so you can wait to have kids until you’re off the benefit! And that’s all very well (except in the ways it isn’t), but when exactly is that supposed to be? What, they get a job, they’re earning a whole $50-100 more a week or whatever, then now they can have kids… but because it’s a shitty job they don’t necessarily have the benefits and job security to actually keep it when they need to start taking time off around birth or when they need to deal with sick kids. Yeah, everyone is supposed to get maternity leave and sick days, but they don’t exactly have much recourse if their bosses dick them over. So once they decide to have kids suddenly they’re that much more likely to just end up back on a benefit.

Going back to what I said about kids being important. Low income people aren’t stupid. They know their job prospects suck. They know they’re not going to university. They’re not in the position where it’s better to wait until you’re educated and established before you start a family. So for young women who’ve grown up in a culture where babies are one of the most important things you can do with your life, who know they’re not going to distinguish themselves by becoming CEOs or whatever, having a family is something they can do. And sending such an explicit message that women on benefits are not supposed to have babies is… kind of worrying, with all this context. Because social eugenics isn’t new to New Zealand – we’ve been doing it since white people got here. White families are desirable. Brown families aren’t. We’ve had several different ways of encouraging this, from tax cuts and perks that you could only get by living in a very Anglicised way, to policy that Māori only received a certain percentage of the benefits that Pākehā were entitled to, and of course the notorious land confiscations so it could be parceled up and handed out to homesteaders. Now it’s contraception targeted at a specific group of people that is disproportionately brown and who are extremely unlikely to be able to claw their way out of poverty due to National’s economic management.

Let’s face it – even if it’s not the intention, making sure no one on a benefit has babies means a lot less Māori being born suddenly. It doesn’t actually mean that the would-be parents are instead improving their lives, because under a right-wing government, there’s no where to go but down.