Poem: Permission

An International Women’s Day Poem. Cross-posted from my web-publishing site The Whippersnapper Press.

Permission

This is for the women who don’t ask permission
To be themselves.
This is for the women who are done with working on their contentment
And started working on their lot.

This is for the women whose posture says
“Fuck you, punk. I got this covered.”
This is for the women who’ve come too damn far
To waste time worrying whether you approve.
This is for the women who wear what they want, swear how they want,
Drink and fuck and love and fight and wring every ounce like it’s only their business.
Because it is.
And they’ve realised.

This is for the girl in class who’s done with playing dumb-
Yes, she knows the answer-
Yes no one else has put their hand up for the last ten minutes-
Yes the teacher is looking past her raised hand asking-
“Does anyone know the answer? Anyone… else?”
But she’ll be damned if she’s gonna hide her own light.

This is for the gaybar barmaids who know their regulars inside and out
And wear those memories proud, like diamonds.
This is for the sweet little old lady
With the dirtiest laugh in the nursing home.
This is for my Godmother Sara: terminal, regal, naughty,
And educating her doctors about the munchies.

This is for the liberated women who worked past violence and ridicule
To ensure their daughters never needed to be liberated-
Their daughters were never enslaved.

This is for the tough old birds and the earnest youngsters
Who know that life is too personal, too precious, too Goddamn important
To let the magazines take a slice.

This is for the women who’ve stopped counting calories
And started counting stars.

This is for Dorothy Parker’s forked tongue
Patti Smith’s horses
Boudicca’s chariots
And Rosa Parks’ tired feet.
This is for the women we could be, can be, will be
Just as soon as we stop asking permission
To be.

© Hannah Chutzpah 2013

Street Harassment or ‘How I Learned to Stop Loving Cat Noises When They Come from Creepy Dudes’

This post originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure – on 5 December 2012

I was walking home recently, across a busy bit of central London, after dark, when some dude made kissy noises at me, like he was trying to tempt a cat. He was two feet away, staring straight at me and smirking like an icky weasel.

Without thinking I responded in kind with a big, angry, I-will-slash-you hiss.

DESIST

He looked pretty taken aback.

I carried on my way and mused that I appear to speak feline like a mothertongue, but also I got to thinking: what the ever-loving crap?! Seriously, what on earth was he expecting from that encounter? What would a positive result have been? Surely that’s never worked for anyone, right?

Ah, street harassment. It’s been a few months. Usually my experience of you is relegated to when I’m wearing a summer dress (gender norms for the lose) but it sucks whenever it happens. It’s also antithetical to ever actually getting my interest because – no matter how many mad cat-lady vibes I’ve got going on – no one who thinks they can approach me like a pet is getting the time of day.

This particular encounter didn’t throw me much because I actually had a comeback – I walked away pleased with myself for thinking fast – but how you deflect it shouldn’t be the first point of call. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS?

Far more often it’s crap shouted from cars – which I find rubbish twice over because they’ve gone before you can say or do anything in response. (Come back right now, dudebro. I have a LOT to say about what you just did.)

A friend of mine recently had some jerk shout “nice tits!” at her from a car. She was (understandably) angry and upset for the rest of the day, but the guy shouting it might have told himself it was a compliment – some interviews with street harassers have revealed what is either complete ignorance or willing ignorance of the effect it has on women. Many of the men, when asked why they do it, say it’s a compliment and it makes women feel nice.

Maybe it is a compliment for a very small percentage of people – I cannot claim to speak for everybody – but I am yet to meet or hear of one person who’s had a catcall, wolf-whistle or similar and felt good about it. The thing about street harassment is, it’s not flirting. Street harassment doesn’t make a person feel good because it isn’t about a person: it’s boiling them down to their physical attributes (‘nice tits’, ‘nice ass’) and funnily enough that doesn’t feel great..

“News of your interest in my ‘nice butt’ has not made my day in any way.”

The other thing is, it’s almost never a conversation: mostly ’cause the objects of the harassment aren’t interested and want to get on with their day, and also because often it’s at a remove – stuff shouted from cars, or (to use the cliché) from scaffolding. The people doing the shouting don’t actually expect a response. This isn’t a tool used to chat up women: it’s used to silence them. Under the guise of a compliment it’s a one-way street of objectification.

And Objectification Street is a crappy street. Seriously, I looked at a flat there once. There were rats all over the place and it smelled bad.

Of course, if people are physically closer to the harassers it doesn’t exactly get better. The wonderful (and award-winning) Anti-Street Harassment UK campaign (ASH UK) was set up after its founder was harassed by a group of men who were initially shouting at her from a car, threatened to rape her, then got out of the car and followed her into a tube station where they assaulted her. The police (who did intervene) then blamed her for responding to them and said “boys will be boys.” SO. MUCH. FAIL.

Um… *cough* male readers – this is essentially Met officers saying your entire gender are all hopeless gropey asshats. Erm… *cough* I wouldn’t take that.

So -what can you do?

Well, the first step is breaking down the idea that it’s either normal or OK. It’s neither, and we need to spread the word. Thou shalt not take shit, and (not that our readers should need telling) thou shalt not dish it out, either.

Read up on it – from the likes of stopstreetharassment.org to this brilliant video on street harassment and women of colour

Check out Jezebel’s ongoing street harassment category, and call catcalling out for the asshattery it is.

Those who want some background on why people are often hostile to approaches on the street would do very well to read this blog post ‘Schrodinger’s Rapist’. (Heavy but a thousand times worth it.)

And in the meantime, don’t let that ‘compliment’ strawman argument derail you on your quest for gender justice.

And, since you’ve been such a good class of gender justice warriors today, I’m going to let you finish early and watch a video:

“Sweetheart, please stop perpetuating the patriarchial dividend – it’s so over” should be on a t-shirt. I would buy that shirt.

And that’s a wrap. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back to more important things – like buying cat food for my wonderful kitty – because some cat-calls are nice. The ones that come from an actual cat.*

*Not Schrodinger’s cat. Schrodinger is a meanie.

Found Feminism: Kulcha Jammin’

This post originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure – on 1 October 2012

This post is belated – I thought I’d lost these pictures on an old phone – but wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, I found them on my computer the other day.

Some time in 2010 or 2011 (I’m dating this by my handset) the Harley Medical Group started advertising plastic surgery on the tube. Images of pert models told women that they needed ‘new year, new confidence’. Plastic surgery is nothing new, but pushing that advertising on people as they go up the escalators was a new and unwelcome assault. “You’re on your way to work, by the way, have you considered that your tits could be better?” Then something wonderful happened: people started answering back. (Click on images for zoom.)

I was tickled to see a few with red printed ‘sexist shit’ stickers which I’d seen sold at a feminist event a couple of weeks before… but then more appeared. People were writing their own slogans on stickers and whacking them on as the escalator sped them past. At first I just saw them at Kings Cross where I commuted through every day. Then, little by little, I saw them in more and more places. More handwriting, more slogans. This was… a movement.

plastic surgery add with sticker on it which reads ‘gender is a social construction

And then, as the posters went away, so the stickers did too. I noticed there was a second wave of plastic surgery ads a few months later which seemed to have toned down their rhetoric a little. Still crap that unnecessary surgery was being pushed on women but something seemed to have twigged with the advertisers, too. This level of crap will not stand. I salute you, culture-jammers of London. Long may you reign.

Kickass Princesses, Part 2

This article originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure on 18 JuneMarch 2012.

When I think about everything about womanhood that hamstrung me with fear when I was thirteen it all came down, really, to princesses. I didn’t think I had to work hard to be a woman (which is scary but obviously eventually achievable). I thought I had to somehow magically – through superhuman psychic effort – transform into a princess instead. That’s how I’d get fallen in love with. That’s how I’d get along. That’s how the world would welcome me.

– Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman

Welcome to part two of Kickass Princesses – a look at some subversive female protagonists in children’s literature. You can read Part 1 here.

The more children’s books I read and the more princesses I come to know, the more I realise that ‘kickass’ probably wasn’t the best term to use. Some of these characters do kick ass, but the main feature is turning out to be simply that they make unconventional princesses.

As the archetype of a fairytale princess is so ingrained, it takes looking at a wide variety of ‘unprincessy’ examples to unpick exactly what some of our starting assumptions are. A closer look at the ‘unconventional’ princesses here, and in my previous post, reveals that these women and girls have agency, interests, and are more than just a beautiful, delicate, unsullied physical appearance. Sometimes they aren’t even beautiful at all. What they are – what, we realise, makes them ‘unprincessy’ – is often simply the fact that they are two-dimensional characters.

Ouch. This stereotype needs subverting roughly forever ago. On with the show…

The Ordinary Princess

Written and illustrated by MM Kaye, published in 1980 by Doubleday

At 107 pages, this one’s aimed at a slightly older age group than the rest of the books in this post, which are all picture books.

The plot begins when the seventh princess is born in the land of Phantasmorania, and even the fairies are invited to the Christening, despite the King’s reservations. The bad-tempered and seaweedy fairy Crustacea, pissed off by the bad journey in to the palace, gives the baby the gift of ordinariness. Instantly the baby cries for the first time, and becomes considerably less attractive. As she grows up, our girl Amethyst (known as Amy) doesn’t look great in fine gowns like her blonde, willowy, ethereal and frankly boring and unknowable sisters. Instead, she loves climbing down the wisteria which grows up the castle walls and sneaking out to the forest.

Thanks to her extremely ordinary looks, Amy turns out to be impossible to marry off. Oh, the shame of it all! Not that our girl is bothered, but the rest of the kingdom is. When she learns of a harebrained scheme to get her rescued from a dragon so a prince will be obliged to marry her, she runs away to the forest, where she lives happily until her clothes start falling apart. So, in need of money to buy a new dress, she goes and gets a job in another palace, living in disguise as an ordinary girl. Where she meets a prince – but I’ll leave some plot to those who want to read it.

The style of writing makes for a truly luscious fairytale, and the black and white line-drawn illustrations by the author are very pretty too (just the right side of twee). Plot-wise, this book is strongest in its treatment of Amy’s interaction with Crustacea, her Godmother, who is practical, warm-yet-tough, and advises her to get on with it.

It’s weakest – in my humble socialist opinion – when our girl loves every minute of working insane hours on the lowest rungs of the servant-ladder. C’mon, girlie, you’ve worked out it’ll take you roughly a year to earn enough to buy a new dress. Aren’t you a bit annoyed at the sucky pay? Also: the insinuation throughout the book that freckles and an upturned nose make someone undateable got on my nerves quite a bit. Freckles can be well hot, and don’t get me started on pixie faces…

(Interestingly, each book I’ve looked at for these posts has often pushed an idea of what a typical beautiful princess looks like, but none of them quite match.)

I was a little disappointed in how conventionally the ends got tied up, but I suppose how the plot came to be is more important than what came to be. Our girl has agency, there’s no doubt about it. And there’s nothing wrong with a happy ending.

Princess Pigsty

By Cornelia Funke and Kerstin Meyer, Chickenhouse, 1997

In Princess Pigsty our girl is one of three sisters, who live the traditional fairytale princess life:

Their beautiful clothes filled thirty wardrobes. They had footmen to blow their noses for them and ladies-in-waiting to tidy up their rooms, hang up their clothes and polish their crowns until they shone.

Every morning, three teachers taught them royal behaviour – how to sit on a throne without fidgeting, how to curtsey without falling over, how to yawn with your mouth closed and how to smile for a whole hour without taking a break.

Isabella, the youngest, despite being perfectly capable of walking the princessy walk, is not happy, and makes her feelings known by waking up the whole castle shouting:

“I am tired of being a princess! It’s boring, boring, boring!”
Her older sisters looked up from their feather pillows in surprise.

“I want to get dirty!” cried Isabella, bouncing around on the bed. “I want to blow my own nose. I don’t want to smile all the time. I want to make my own sandwiches. I don’t want to have my hair curled ever again. I do not want to be a princess any more!”

And with that she took her crown and threw it out of the window. Splash! It landed in the goldfish pond.

In the pitched battle of wills with the King that follows, Isabella is sent to work in the kitchens until she changes her mind. When she enjoys her work in the kitchens, learning about how their food is made and essentially having too much fun to relent, she’s sent to the pigsty – where she gets along with the pigs and enjoys their company even more.

Eventually, seeing there is no way around it, her father relents and says she doesn’t have to be all princessy if she doesn’t want to – but by now our girl likes the pigs and stays in the pigsty just as often as in her feather bed.

Though no mention is made of any innate unprincessy looks (beyond curled hair), Isabella rejects her princessy role in life quite actively. While Amy of The Ordinary Princess is a failure at traditional princessy things (but isn’t that bothered about it, either) Isabella has lots of guts and lots of agency, not to mention an upbeat and cheerful nature. Eventually her father is won round. The patriarch isn’t a baddie, and – once it’s clear she’s happier that way – he accepts her as she is. Tangled, mucky and doing things that interest her. Hip-hip hooray for doing what you want! Hip-hip hooray for converting people! Hip-hip hooray for male allies!

Shrek!

William Steig, Macmillan, 1990

Didn’t know Shrek started out as a book? It did, and it was… not a huge amount like the movie franchise. (Have the first part read to you by Stanley Tucci here, though sadly without pictures.) Shrek, in both media, is a famously revolting and ugly character, who delights in his own disgustingness (“wherever Shrek went, every living creature fled. How it tickled him to be so repulsive”) – but that’s where most of the similarities end.

The book is a very short picture book with a quest narrative. A witch tells Shrek’s fortune: “Then you wed a princess who/Is even uglier than you.” Shrek decides this sounds great, and goes off in search of this princess.

He strode in and his fat lips fell open. There before him was the most stunningly ugly princess on the surface of the planet.

When they meet they declare their love for each other’s revoltingness, and live “horribly ever after.” But if you’ve seen any of the movies, you’ll know this wasn’t quite how it went down when Dreamworks got their hands on it.

In the movie Princess Fiona (who has a name, unlike in the book) is only ugly after dark, – during the day she appears as a beautiful woman, and during the night she is an ogre, and she’s self-conscious about it. The only way to cure this is with “true love’s kiss” – and it’s initially an unpleasant surprise for her to learn that when the spell is broken she’s actually stuck with ogre mode constantly.

While the movie does feature a green monster called Shrek and an (eventually) ‘ugly’ princess – their unconventionality is treated as something they’re both self-conscious about. Fiona, especially, with all the princessy expectations heaped upon her, needs reassurance that she’s loveable.

Alhough the movie doesn’t mention weight specifically, one of the main factors of Fiona’s transformation (apart from the green skin) is that she becomes considerably heavier. Fiona is more of an everywoman – learning that she doesn’t need to be a size 8 to find love – and literally kicking ass. Caitlin Moran tracks the rewrite as part of a post-feminist trend:

In the last decade the post-feminist reaction to princesses has been the creation of alternative princesses: the spunky chicks in Shrek and the newer Disney films who wear trousers, do kung fu and save the prince.

While some cool people (I’m looking at you, Babette Cole) have been subverting these roles for a long time, it takes a while before the effect trickles down to a Hollywood blockbuster and the much wider audience that a movie like Shrek can reach.

While the original very short picture book is more about two people with unconventional values and no qualms or neuroses about them – a la The Twits or The Addams Family – the movie Shrek presents Fiona as someone extremely kickass, but with a fairly conventional narrative of body issues (though admittedly hers are mythical ones) and a postmodern self-consciousness about breaking the known conventions of the ‘fairytale’ wedding.

In this way Fiona is far more relatable (and has infintely more agency) than the nameless princess in the book, but part of me is sad that she doesn’t start with the self-assurance of our happily ugly picturebook princess. After all – if this is a world where gingerbread men can talk and cats can fence – surely we can have a princess who can just get on with her thang without worrying about being pretty enough?

Coming up next time:

“Rapunzel’s Revenge – Fairytales for Feminists”

Tatterhood

The Tough Princess

And more…

Kickass Princesses, Part 1

This article originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure on 28 March 2012.

Fairy tales! We all like fairy tales, right? They have both an air of comfort and adventure about them, and – as they’re something we first came into contact with as young children – there’s also an almost familial fondness for some of them. As they come from the oral tradition, folk/fairy tales have adapted slightly with each retelling to suit the world around them – but as Treasury Islands recently pointed out, the writing–down stage of most tales we know (i.e. when they became a little more set in stone) happened in deeply misogynistic times – and this carries through in even our most beloved fairy tales.

In the world of children’s books there’s a double-whammy of bad female role models and massive under-representation. There’s only one female character to every 1.6 male characters. One of the few regular traditional roles for girls in children’s literature is that of the princess, but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the traditional princess trope doesn’t give girls many positive or useful goals to aim for: look pretty, be born into or marry into hereditary privilege and… uh… that’s it. Happily ever after. Forever. Are you bored yet? I am.

Yet plenty of little girls are still obsessed with princesses and being a princess. It might not appeal much to the grown-ups, but the trope remains strong – as does the lure of pretty things. (Personally, I still have to suppress a twinge of jealousy when I see a kid going by in a really good princess dress – with the layers of skirt and the faux-stays bodice and WHERE WERE THEY WHEN I WAS SMALL, HUH? – but it’s fine. I’m not jealous. I’m writing this wearing a £3 Claire’s Accessories tiara so it’s all OK.)

So, as it doesn’t look like we’ll escape the princess trope any time soon, it’s time to play with it instead. There’s no need to throw out the castles, dragons and bling along with the bathwater – there are plenty of good children’s books out there featuring kickass princesses who do more than just wear dresses. In this post, the first of a three parter, I’m going to give you the lowdown on some good princess role models for your sprogs/selves (delete as age-appropriate).

Disclaimer before we begin:
These books are primarily working from the Western European fairy tale trope, so whilst they may kick ass, some elements remain disappointingly similar throughout – namely that the princesses are often ‘conventionally beautiful’, often blonde, always Caucasian, and in this selection the tales all revolve around the marriage trope. I hope to uncover a wider variety of ass-kicking later, but in the meantime here are some nonetheless very good children’s books.

The Paper Bag Princess

Written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Michael Martchenko, published in 1980 by Annick Press

The Paper Bag Princess is a short, snappy children’s book aimed at the 3-5 age group. (Click here to hear it read to you by a kindly librarian.)

The book begins with a typical princess called Elizabeth who “lived in a castle and wore expensive princess clothes”. She plans to marry Prince Ronald, but when a dragon steals away the prince and scorches all the kingdom (including all her pretty clothes) she doesn’t waste a moment: she dons the eponymous paper bag (the only unscorched thing she could wear) and goes off to rescue her man, defeating the dragon using her wits.

Munsch has explained that he wrote the book on his wife’s suggestion:

One day my wife, who also worked at the daycare centre, came to me and said “How come you always have the prince save the princess? Why can’t the princess save the prince?” I thought about that and changed around the ending of one of my dragon stories. That made the adults a lot happier, and the kids did not mind.

(Of course the kids didn’t mind – they don’t have such strong pre-conceived ideas of narrative yet!)

But as well as the princess doing the rescuing, there’s also a brilliant message about self-esteem and moving on. The Prince, once rescued, turns out to be an ungrateful asshat, telling Elizabeth off for looking a mess: “Come back when you look like a real princess.” Upon hearing this the princess doesn’t get upset or angry. She tells the prince, “Your clothes are really pretty and your hair is very neat. You look like a real prince but you are a bum.” (or a toad if you have the UK version). The final line – “they didn’t get married after all” – is illustrated with the Paper Bag Princess dancing off into the sunset.

This book is a brilliant, simple primer for just about everyone. It teaches people that being brave, smart and kind are more important than how you look – and that when someone is mean to you, you can be the bigger person walk away. That’s a double-helix of kickass for all genders, packed into a very short picture book.

Princess Smartypants

Written and illustrated by Babette Cole, pub. Hamish Hamilton 1986

Babette Cole has done a lot of awesome for children’s literature. Her drawings are warm, funny and just more than a bit gorgeous, and she’s also subverted Cinderella in Prince Cinders (and done plenty more amazing children’s books, but I’ll focus on this one.)

(Once again, you can have this book read to you on YouTube.)

Princess Smartypants (Best. Name. Ever.) is content with her own life: “She enjoyed being a Ms. Because she was pretty and rich, all the princes wanted her to be their Mrs.” Ten points to Cole for slipping in the Miss/Ms/Mrs thing in a fairly small, light way. Minus ten for having a princess who is both pretty and blonde.

However, wanting to put an end to the constant stream of suitors once and for all, Princess Smartypants says she will marry whoever can accomplish all the tasks she sets. This is where it gets badass – her tasks show her interests: gardening (an extreme sport when you see the slugs); feeding her monster pets; roller disco; motorbike riding – you get the idea. Princess Smartypants is accomplished, independent, and happy getting up to the stuff she enjoys.

Eventually Prince Swashbuckle does manage all the tasks, so this is where Princess Smartypants uses her plothammer card and turns him into a toad. Grumpy toad prince drives away in his red sports car, and no princes bother her again. (My plot spill is nothing without the illustrations – for the love of God, READ THIS BOOK.)

As with The Paper Bag Princess, the final frame page of this book combines the news that the protagonist doesn’t get married with an illustration of her looking very happy – in this instance, on a sun lounger, toasting the audience with a glass of something, and surrounded by her monster pets.

The message from both of these books is that you can create your own happily ever after.

The Practical Princess

From The Practical Princess And Other Liberating Fairy Tales by Jay Williams, Scholastic 1978

Princess Bedelia is given common sense as a baby by a visiting fairy (the other two fairies bestow the more expected gifts of beauty and grace), despite her father’s complaint of “What good is common sense to a princess? All she needs is charm.”

However, when a hungry dragon demands Bedelia to eat and a dragon slayer can’t be found soon enough, the King and his advisors decide they’ll have to give her over to be eaten. Our girl takes control of her own fate with a kind of weary resignation when she realises no one else is up to the task. She makes a dummy from straw and one of her finest gowns, and stuffs it with gunpowder. Bye bye dragon.

When a powerful but age-inappropriate and unwanted suitor turns up, Bedelia sets him near-impossible tasks using her extensive knowledge of the surrounding kingdoms – and uses her sense to catch him out when he cheats. When our girl winds up in a tower with a male Rapunzel/Sleeping Beauty-type prince, she uses her common sense to undo the spell he is under, and rescue them both.

This story isn’t my favourite of the lot – I found the heroine very slightly prissy, and the details and language didn’t really warm my cockles. However, the moral of the story is pretty much ‘don’t panic, keep thinking, you’ll find a solution’, and ain’t no arguing with that. Hip-hip hooray for brains!

The Wrestling Princesss

From The Wrestling Princess and Other Stories, written by Judy Corbalis, illustrated by Helen Craig, 1986, pub. Andre Deutsch

The Wrestling Princess takes place in a world where some gender roles are set in stone, but some are very altered. Princess Ermyntrude is either wrestling the guards or covered in axle grease, working on her tractors and helicopters – but the King tells her she has to find a husband for the succession. The princess’s resistance and her father’s weary insistence make for a good introduction to the debate on succession. Also, Ermyntrude’s father naming the ‘feminine’ traits she needs sets them up to be deconstructed/dismissed:

“To get a husband you must be enchantingly beautiful, dainty and weak,” said the king.
“Well, I’m not,” said Ermyntrude cheerfully. “I’m nothing to look at, I’m six feet tall and I’m certainly not weak. Why, Father, did you hear, this morning I wrestled with sixteen guards at once and I defeated them all?”
“Ermyntrude!” said the king sternly, as he rethreaded his needle with No. 9 blue tapestry cotton. “Ermyntrude, we are not having any more wrestling and no more forklift trucks either. If you want a husband you will have to become delicate and frail.”
“I don’t want a husband,” said the princess and she stamped her foot hard.

The ensuing prince/groom casting-call both plays to some gender norms (it’s a rule that the prince must be taller than her) and some non-norms (the prince must be able to match her in a face-pulling contest).

This princess does eventually get married, but to a short prince who has a shared love of mechanics and loves her for who she is, and vice versa.

“You’re too short,” said the king.
“He’s not,” said the princess.
“No, I’m not, I’m exactly right and so is she,” said Prince Florizel. “Then when I saw her pulling faces and shouting insults and throwing princes to the ground I knew she was the one person I could fall in love with.”
“Really?” asked the princess.
“Truly,” said Prince Florizel. “Now, come and see my mechanical digger.”

In this book, unlike the previous two, marriage doesn’t turn out to be a thing to be avoided – provided it’s with the right person. This story is about deconstructing the existing framework of helpless princesses and dashing princes – and it also becomes about two quirky, likeable people meeting and falling in love. And falling in love is totally punk rock.

Honourable mention: The Practical Princess

Written by Rebecca Lisle, illustrated by Joëlle Dreidemy, pub. Andersen 2008

I actually picked this one up by accident when friends were singing the praises of the other Practical Princess book (see above) – but I thought it would be worth comparing and contrasting these different practical princesses.

This book is far more recent than most on this list (the others all being from the 1980s), and it is not particularly feminist, but it does play with the trope a little.

Having read it, I’m not quite sure why this one has the name: Molly, our protagonist, is only a bit practical and she’s not actually a princess. Molly is an ordinary (read: extraordinarily beautiful, but non-royal) girl who wants to be a princess, so she enters a casting-call to find Prince Percival a bride. Her farmer parents help her by making and buying pretty clothes and shoes at great expense, and her lovely boyfriend Stan makes her a crown.

That’s right, she has a boy back home who loves her already, and – though he doesn’t want her to go – he helps her because she has her heart set on becoming a princess. He even drives her to the competition. POOR LOVELY STAN.

I don’t want to go overboard in my criticisms/analysis of children’s books here (not like the Freudian interpretation of The Cat in the Hat – no, that would be silly) but ignoring her current relationship is massively problematic for me. As is the remarkably unsisterly attitude Molly displays towards the other (real) princesses in the competition. They’re all painted as vacuous fashion victims, but I find this attitude in the writing to be uncharitable and a little lazy – as if the other competitors’ one-dimensionality will add more depth to the protagonist by default.

That said, to give her her due, our girl does realize over the course of the book that there isn’t much to recommend becoming royalty and that Stan back home is kinder and cuter than Prince Percival. When the glass slippers moment happens, Molly sticks her toes out so the shoe doesn’t fit, and defenestrates herself to escape back to her old life and lovely, long-suffering Stan.

The plus points for this book are it has a trajectory which begins in the same place as a lot of the readers (‘I’m not a princess but I want to be one’), and the conclusion – that riches and status are hollow compared to people who really care about you – is pretty universal and good. I just wish there’d been less mention of tiny waists throughout the book (no girl ever needs more indoctrination on that shit) – and our protagonist doesn’t really ‘kick ass’ so much as ‘avoids falling into the same traps as the other women.’

Also: poor Stan! You’re not good enough for him, Molly. I’ll take him off your hands.

There will be more kickass and subversive princesses from children’s books in future articles. Hannah has a few on the list, but if there are any you think she should know about/make sure she doesn’t miss then let us know in the comments section!

The Spinster Book

This article originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure on 28 February 2012.

This was going to be a very light and fluffy post, raising an arched eyebrow at an interesting find, but over the course of writing this article I made some discoveries which made it seem less of a frippery. But more on that later. Let’s start at the beginning: I was browsing in a charity shop when I found a 1901 book (okay, fine, the 1903 reprint) with the incredible name The Spinster Book. Even brushing aside, for a moment, the hilarious and wonderful title – it’s amazing.

Published in New York by the Knickerbocker Press

I mean, just look at it. Look harder! It’s all lavender and embossing and gold leaf and a looking-glass (wonderfully implying ‘it could be YOU’). It’s an absolutely sodding gorgeous book: rough uncut paper edges on two sides, gold leaf on the top, strange red-and-black printing on the pages which reminds me a little of the Kelmscott Press facsimile I own (made by William Morris. The most beautiful books since illuminated manuscripts. OHMIGOD read his Chaucer… *cough* Excuse me, I seem to have bibliophiled all over the place).

On closer inspection, The Spinster Book is basically a dating/courtship guide, which very much assumes that one should never, ever attempt to talk to the opposite gender like a normal human being. Indeed, it even seems to suggest that too many friendships with men put a woman in the ‘friend zone’ forever:

“To one distinct class of women men tell their troubles and the other class sees that they have plenty to tell. It is better to be in the second category than in the first.”

It’s a bit like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, but due to being 111 years out of date it’s even more laughable. (And I absolutely love dated dating advice anyway.)

The chapter titles are a treat in themselves:

• Notes on Men
• Concerning Women
• The Philosophy of Love
• The Lost Art of Courtship
• The Natural History of Proposals
• Love Letters: Old and New
• An Inquiry into Marriage
• The Physiology of Vanity
• Widowers and Widows
• The Consolations of Spinsterhood

(… note that even in 1901 courtship was considered a ‘lost art’. When precisely were the good old days, anyway?)

“There is nothing in the world so harmless and as utterly joyous as man’s conceit. The woman who will not pander to it is ungracious indeed. Man’s interest in himself is purely altruistic and springs from an unselfish desire to please.”

- Chapter 1, Notes on Men

Why I am I still unmarried? Enquiring minds want to know

Buh. Duh…. whu? A man being self-centred is actually selfless, because he’s only doing it to be adorable. So lighten up and adore him some more, regardless of how conceited he is? Can… can I get an irony check on this?

My instinct when dealing with writing from the past (rightly or wrongly) is to assume the chance of satire is reduced the longer ago the text comes from (Jonathan Swift, forgive me). However, for most of The Spinster Book, I’m realising a grain of salt is the way forward. This book does appear, at times, to be Jane Austen-wry, and puts forward some things with a fanciful glibness:

“After the door of a woman’s heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it. A storm is apt to displace the brick, however – and there is a heavy spring in the door. Woe to the masculine finger that is in the way!”

- Chapter 4, The Lost Art of Courtship

But at the same time, it treads the difficult line of mocking some concepts whilst also giving some advice very seriously. I mean, come on, we’re playing for keeps. ‘Do you want to be a spinster? No? Then listen up. No talking at the back. It could be you. It could be YOOOU.’

There’s also a lingering assumption throughout this book that both parties are playing a pretty nasty game of chess:

“He who would win a woman must challenge her admiration, prove himself worthy of her regard, appeal to her sympathy – and then wound her. She is never wholly his until she realises that he has the power to make her miserable as well as to make her happy, and that love is an infinite capacity for suffering.”

- Chapter 4, The Lost Art of Courtship

(Also: lucky girl. Jesus.)

A lot of the book has this kind of masochistic, ‘love is pain’ tone throughout – sometimes in understandable ways and sometimes completely out of the blue. Advice, advice, advice… misery and masochism sneak attack! For example, the final sentence of the ‘love letters’ chapter is “So the old love letters bring happiness after all – like the smile which sometimes rests upon the faces of the dead.”

So, yes, I was unsure what to make of this tone. Then our lovely editor Googled the author, Myrtle Reed, and some more information fell into place. By all accounts, Reed was well-known and admired in her own time. She was the author of some thirty books, which included cookbooks (published under the name Olive Green) and novels under her real name – the best known of which is probably Lavender and Old Lace.

Quick Bio:

1874: Born
1899: First novel published (she continued to publish at least one a year, sometimes more)
1901: The Spinster Book was published when she was 27
1906: Married James Sydney McCullough, a penpal, at the unusually late age of 32
1911: Died of a deliberate overdose of sleeping pills/powders aged 37.

Her suicide note, addressed to her maid, stated “If my husband had been as good and kind to me and as considerate as you, I would not be going where I am”. Horrible and sad, but also increasingly eerie from an author whose most famous epigram is this:

“The only way to test a man is to marry him. If you live, it’s a mushroom. If you die, it’s a toadstool.”

- Threads of Gray and Gold (pub. 1913)

No one on the outside knew of anything bad within their marriage. Indeed, according to Annie, Myrtle Reed’s maid, she “had never heard Mrs McCullough [née Reed] quarrel with her husband during the four years she had been at their home.” It’s useless to guess what lay behind it, at how much was a depressive tendency (which certainly seems to show in The Spinster Book), how much was a bad relationship and how much was a clearly intelligent and ambitious woman feeling desperate and trapped in a society which didn’t have many roles for women.

I don’t really know how to end this post. It started with a brilliant charity shop find which had me so hyped I that was reading passages aloud to my flatmate on the tube until he pretended he didn’t know me… and it’s ended with a bit of a reality-check, I suppose.

Although she never states in as many words that she herself is a spinster, Reed was writing the book at age 27 – five years past a woman’s usual marrying age. By the standards of her time, she was now a spinster, and was presumably preparing herself for the future. The advice I saw as laughable – that being a spinster isn’t so bad as a woman might yet find herself a nice widower – was, presumably, Myrtle Reed’s actual hope.

The chapter ‘The Consolations of Spinsterhood’ does mention “the dazzling allurements offered by various “careers” which bring fame and perhaps fortune”, but it quickly goes on to show just how little consolation Reed considers these to be:

“The universal testimony of the great, that fame itself is barren … it is love for which she hungers, rather than fame…. If she were not free to continue the work that she loved, she would feel no deprivation.”

Although she was a successful and prolific novelist in her own time, the stigma of spinsterhood would have seemed to erode the achievements she had rightfully earned. Reed implies heavily in The Spinster Book that she would have traded it all in for a husband. Except that when she did eventually marry, that clearly didn’t make her happy either.

As much as I love mocking dating advice (old and new) for any hint of gendered assumptions, Myrtle Reed didn’t ‘opt in’ to play by those rules. In 1901 there wasn’t an ‘opt out’. And shame on me for finding the topic so hilariously trivial in the first place. Check your 21st century privilege, Hannah. If I’d lived in a time and a society where marriage was my home, my job, my finances, my legal rights and my love life all rolled into one – you bet your arse I’d agonise over it. I’d probably buy a few books on the topic too. For every snide, ironic, 21st century reader, there were probably dozens of contemporary readers poring over this book’s advice and worrying about their futures. I do have freedom and choices and don’t have to play nasty games to secure a man to secure my future stability – but you don’t have to go back even half as far as Reed’s time to find women who did have to work within this crapshoot of a system. Whilst artefacts like The Spinster Book make interesting time-pieces, we should never forget that many of us who stumble across it now are the lucky ones – and that our privilege is incredibly rare.

And I guess that’s one of the main reasons why I’m a feminist in the first place.

• The full text of The Spinster Book is available on Project Gutenberg.

Exercising and Exorcising: on Fitness and Fatness

This article originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure on 24 January 2012.

This article began as a reply to the Guardian’s call for responses on body image, but I had more to say than would have fitted into their 200-300 word limit.

For starters: I am overweight and I am not fucked up about it. Here are some of my thoughts on a lifetime of body-based bullshit – a lot of which I only started to realise and address when I joined a gym for the first time this year.

I’m going to focus on the body shape and exercise side of things here because food and loathing is in itself a subject which would take more word count to tackle than our lovely editor has time to read through. Suffice to say that due to being raised right I have always known how to eat healthily, and that ‘diet’ is a four letter word. I’ve sometimes felt a bit left out of the whole dumbass ‘detox fat flush carb starve blah blah fad’ being discussed around the water cooler, but I’m also profoundly grateful that self-hatred regarding food has never been my mother tongue. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly confident about my body, but crucially it’s never been the main thing I measure my self-worth by. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that I dodged that bullet.

I have always been overweight (to varying degrees), but I’ve also always been pretty active (my post-viral fatigue syndrome years notwithstanding). For the last few years I’ve been swimming around a mile a week (sometimes more), I do some yoga, and every couple of years I start working out for a bit. Often people do a double-take when they find out that I swim a lot. ‘But you’re a size 16. Does not compute!’ As Health at Every Size can tell you, fat and fit are not always a dichotomy, but nonetheless the cultural assumption is that a big person must be stationary.

However, since the beginning of November last year, I started exercising a lot (I’m unemployed/’freelancing’ and needed something to get me out of the house) and as I started to ‘tune up’ physically I found myself – despite wanting to move up a gear to the next bit – really dragging my heels about ever moving the exercising out of the privacy of my room. I found myself looking up exercise tutorials on YouTube and then trying to figure out how to supplement the equipment they used with something I had lying around. (Water bottles filled with sand instead of weights because owning weights is for, y’know, them… and I’m not one of them.) However, at a certain point I realised that there weren’t many workarounds left for the machines I was genuinely craving a go on – I needed an actual real-life gym.

Swimming (like I say, my physical activity of choice) does involve wearing a swimsuit, but this is one activity I was raised with, and something about being submerged once you’re in, about not ever getting sweaty, about not having to make eye contact with anyone else, made me think of it as the exception to the ‘exercise is scary’ rule. Gyms remained terrifying to me.

Previously known only as the Valley of Horrors

I’d never been inside a gym before this year, and I was convinced that it would be stuffed with supermodel-beautiful people. I was sure the moment I walked in the music would stop playing and everyone would turn and stare like I’d walked into the wrong saloon in a bad western.

When I finally just bit the bullet and went, I was relieved to find out it was full of a range of shapes, sizes and ages, and I did fine on the machines. The guy who did the induction just talked me through how to use each machine, set a goal and left me to it. No hectoring, shouting, or close-ups on unflattering areas like they do on the TV all the time.

I realised later it wasn’t my own performance I was worried about (I know I’m pretty fit these days – I barely got out of breath), but an internalised shame about being a larger person being seen doing exercise at all. I realised I saw exercise as a ‘thin person’ activity.

I get that if you’re aiming to get fitter, thinner or both, then a gym sure as hell helps, but still I was reluctant. It didn’t seem to make any sense – but then I realised: all the shame and embarrassment I was feeling wasn’t about me, it was a response to a lifetime of others’ assumptions. Experiences like being laughed at if I got pink-faced after running somewhere, or always being picked last for the teams in PE (despite being pretty good at football back then – fuck you, my Year 5 class), or a school bully cackling loudly when she overheard me say to a friend “yeah, sure, I’ll meet you after dance club”. My own abilities didn’t put me off exercise – other people’s (conscious and unconscious) group shaming did.

In fact, avoidance of embarrassment has been seen to be one of the largest factors inhibiting girls in the UK from doing PE. The WHO’s own study has noted that:

It is important to recognise the significance of girls’ early experiences of physical activity and it is often within the context of physical education lessons where understanding of individual sporting identity is developed … what were initially regarded as lesser concerns for school governing bodies, such as specific uniforms for physical education lessons and the standards of showering facilities were shown to be significant aspects in girls’ actual enjoyment of school sports.

[...] in sports there are many occasions where the body is literally displayed and this has the potential for the individual to be exposed to negative emotional experiences of shame and embarrassment.

Can I get an amen, sister? I’m writing this a few weeks away from my 26th birthday, but I only very recently realised that I am still haunted by the memories of the Nelson Muntzs of my school years pointing, laughing or making bitchy comments.

Anyone who does any sports or goes to the gym will tell you: you will get sweaty – that’s how it works – but in my teens (and even before) how well you did at PE wasn’t half as important as avoiding the indignity of getting sweaty, red-faced or out of breath. As a chubbier kid, I was an even easier target for the standard crap.

In a world dominated by the RED CIRCLES OF SHAME from Heat magazine and the like – drawing attention to any perceived imperfections, sweat stains, funny creases and so on in even the most highly-regarded beautiful people – is it any wonder that the perceived embarrassment of getting hot, sweaty or out of breath is prohibitive to many people? The Surgeon General in the ‘States has drawn flak for suggesting that the extra haircare required might be a small contributing factor in putting many women off exercise, and in a world where a bad hair day for some celebrities can make it to the press, is it any wonder that the trickle-down effect has been to make ordinary women even more self-conscious about these things too?

Fat-shaming is not just a shitty way to treat people (duh) – it’s also utterly counter-productive. To be honest I only ever felt moderate embarrassment about my figure, but I felt acutely ashamed of my body in relation to exercise. I felt that because of my body shape, certain doors were closed to me. Ironically, most of those doors were ones that led to better fitness and possibly even changing my shape.

In an inverse-snobbery retaliation I’d decided that explicit, gym-type exercise was for horrible/vain/stupid people. When I started exercising, I started working through all the years of rubbish I’d accumulated in relation to physical activity – and my self-image has done far more of a reshape than my body has over the past three months (though the body’s coming along nicely, thanks for asking). While I’ve been really enjoying exercising under my own steam, I’ve also been exorcising the ghosts of schoolyards past.

Some of the things that kicked me into upping my exercise ante were finding friends of mine were into certain sports and realising that exercising was actually a pretty normal thing that pretty normal people do. Not everyone who goes to the gym is either a supermodel or a wanker. And some exercise can be pretty badass (I’m still looking for boxing lessons locally – I really want to hit things).

So, uh, morals. Well, the moral of the story is don’t be scared of new stuff, and if you are trying to get healthier then for God’s sake don’t worry about other people. You’re not at school anymore and no one gives a crap. That haw-haw Nelson Muntz kid from the playground isn’t here. They’re grown up, somewhere else, and would probably be embarrassed to remember they were that mean. That toned person sweating on the exercise bike next to you? They’re much more worried about their own abs than yours, and are probably mentally compiling shopping lists as they go. No one cares, and no one should be judging you anymore. This is about you and your body. You’re the one that gets to live in it.

Sororror Show

This article originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure on 11 January 2012.

Ladies and gents, I have a confession: I watch the crappiest, most sensationalist reality shows and ‘documentaries’ – as long as I think no one’s looking. However, my latest one is so bad and so compulsive that I’ve forced at least three friends to watch episodes with me. It’s car crash TV, it’s Two Minutes Hate strung out for 45: it is Channel 4’s Sorority Girls.

Described by one friend of mine as ‘hate crack’, Sorority Girls is a reality TV show based around five girls from American sororities doing the standard reality TV show whittle to find their perfect ‘sisters’ in the UK and form Britain’s first ever sorority. That’s right: it’s The Apprentice for female friendship. Didn’t realise you had to jump through hoops, sing songs and outperform others to be friends? Think again.

What Are Friends For

In the ‘Greek system’ of sororities (sisterhoods) and fraternities (brotherhoods), people in colleges in the US can apply to join a sorority or a fraternity (each is represented by various Greek letters) – a combination of accommodation and social activities which – they keep telling us – is where you make friends for life.

However, obviously not everyone wants to be friends with everyone – so there’s a selection process. In Sorority Girls it begins with an interview in which each potential new member (or ‘PNM’ – this thing has more jargon than a pick-up artist convention) is interviewed about themselves by the five, identically-dressed, rictus-smile-wearing members. Questions include “Can you talk me through your outfit?”, “Can you show us your best dance move?” and “Do you think we’re heading for a double dip recession?” Seriously, WTF? EXPLAIN WHY YOU WORE THOSE CLOTHES! DANCE FOR US, MONKEY! NO, HONEST WE’RE INTELLECTUAL!

If you get through this hoop, you’re allowed (gee, thanks) to pledge your loyalty to the sorority, and you become a ‘pledge’ – not to be confused with a fully-initiated sorority sister. YOU HAVE AGES YET TO GO. REPEAT: AGES.

At this stage, you get the hazing. Interestingly, Channel 4 avoided the h-word for the whole series. Fraternities especially are infamous for their often-dangerous hazing – usually mixes of brutality, alcohol and stupidity – and stories of student deaths are sadly all too frequent. However, though sororities are not completely free of violence, in the main their selection processes are known for being far more about judgement, humiliation, and policing each others’ behaviour. All for the grand prize of… being friends.

Don’t know about you, but I don’t want friends that’d do that to me.

Past and Present

Pledge Pin for pledges (non-initiated sisters)

Though bitchiness and drunken stupidity have probably always been facts of life at universities (as elsewhere), the focus on controlling each others’ behaviour wasn’t always what sororities were about. My grandmother was the chair of her sorority (Delta Phi Epsilon, known as ‘Dogs, Pigs and Elephants’ to those that didn’t like them) when she was at NYU in the 1940s, but in the 1940s, after some pretty mild/vaguely titillating humiliation for a week (be a sorority sister’s ‘slave’ for one day, dress up ‘French’ – i.e. short skirt and a beret – the next) you were in the club. And then you had a home-from-home at a time when most women at university were still living with their parents. It was more… necessary, if that’s the word. Its role was mostly in facilitating female students having some freedom in a safe space (once people were in the club they went out drinking and dancing frequently).

By the 1970s (when my mother was at university in the States) sorority and fraternity membership was waning and seen by many as old fashioned and uncool, but from the mid-1980s onwards a revival has been going on, in much the same time period as the rise of the Christian right wing. Though religion and politics are never explicitly mentioned in Sorority Girls, the girls do seem to be preoccupied with furthering a socially conservative (chaste, sober, uncontroversial) set of values under the disguise of helping the pledges ‘develop’ and ‘improve’ themselves.

In The Club?

In the selection process of Sorority Girls, pledges are admonished for wearing too much make-up, for having two drinks in their hands at once, for having a hint of ‘attitude’, for being too loud, for being too quiet, for not getting on well enough with the specially-shipped-in frat boys, for getting along too well with the frat boys… In other words it’s the worst of Queen Bee girlie bullying behaviour. The worst put-down these girls have seems to be ‘that’s inappropriate’ – but at the same time, what is appropriate isn’t particularly clear. One girl got thrown out for questioning why, if fake eyelashes were banned, fake nails were still allowed.

It’s Mean Girls. It’s The Heathers. It’s high school crap, but in my experience, by the end of school (and certainly by uni) social groups had diversified enough that we were done with that shit. If the Queen Bees didn’t approve of me at age 13, they could try (and often succeeded) to make my life miserable. If they didn’t like me by age 17: Meh. Shrug. Fuck’em. I had friends and interests far away from their spheres, and likewise I think they’d often also either grown up or moved on, because all of a sudden we were all just people. Classmates with more going on in our lives than our clothes, deportment or how we wore our hair. I see most of the behaviour on Sorority Girls as a flashback to the bad old days of my early-to-mid-teens, and it depresses me beyond words that so many young women willingly submit to this – putting themselves through this self-esteem grinder – in the hope that they will be let into the club so that they too can become as composed as their frenemy tormentors.

There are also elements of the induction on the programme which appear to be cult-like brainwashing (regular sleep disruption, fake kidnappings, physical trials, deliberately bringing people emotional highs followed quickly by lows) as well as possibly encouraging a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. One ritual involves the girls holding Greek letters made of ice to their hearts until they’re melted – ‘as it burns you, so Sigma Gamma will always be burned onto your heart’. At one point (in front of their families) the would-be members pledge their commitment to the sorority above family, and by the end, cheerfully chant and praise and dance at the drop of a hat.

A "sorority rush" queue on Purdue University's Panhellenic Association Sorority Formal Recruitment day. Apparently even if you can pronounce all that in one go without stumbling, you *still* don't necessarily get in.

Also, let’s talk about males and double standards. Fraternities are famed for their heavy-drinking, womanising, loud & loutish behaviour, while sororities are famed for their bitchiness and ladylike reserve, but at the same time – despite their apparent lack of shared ground – sororities and fraternities view each other as safe and approved. By definition, it seems, frat boys are ‘nice boys’ no matter what their (individual or group) behaviour says to the contrary.

Frat boys were drafted in at one point in the show to ‘kidnap’ the girls (sling them over their shoulders and run off with them), get the girls drunk and hit on them. The girls who then seemed to enjoy their company too much were admonished for their ‘obscene’ behaviour. However, the one girl who wasn’t a fan of the frat guys and didn’t mingle with them was told off for being ‘cold’ and ‘unfriendly’.

In another stupid task the girls were taken to a town centre and told they had 20 minutes to find a ‘date’ for an event that evening. Regardless of attraction, they needed a man because they had been told to go find one – fast. Some of them already had boyfriends, and some of them had to ‘make do’ or bargain that they’d buy the guys lots of drinks. This was not about any woman’s happiness or enjoyment so much as about proving to the other women around them that they were desirable to the opposite sex. The one pledge who made the cardinal sin of taking one of these dates back to the sorority house was in a lot of trouble: you’re not supposed to be sexually available, only sexually desirable.

This worldview sees women as gatekeepers of virtue who are whores if they say ‘yes’ and unfriendly if they say ‘no’- leaving them to walk a tightrope of chaste, respectable (never flirty) friendliness upon pain of losing their ‘friends’ if they are not representing the sorority well. Oh, yes – you’re always representing your sisters. Your actions are never yours alone but a representation of the whole group, and therefore anything you do is up for analysis (‘you’ve let me down, you’ve let the sorority down, but most of all: you’ve let yourself down.’)

Friendship Is Magic

The final episode of Sorority Girls revealed the final five UK ‘sisters’ of Sigma Gamma, and rang especially hollow. The grand prize each girl had won was…. four ‘friends’. Four friends who had been selected by committee. Throughout the process the most interesting and lively girls were often cut. The American ‘sisters’ cited Kate Middleton and Jennifer Aniston as their ideal sorority sisters, and that blandness carried through. Nothing against Kate Middleton and Jennifer Anniston personally – I’m sure you’re nice – but these are women who are often photographed but rarely heard, and best known for marrying much more famous men. Surely you/I/we can all do better than that?

So, Sorority Girls: hard to tell how much was TV producers deliberately creating a young version of The Stepford Wives (surely they didn’t look that dead behind the eyes on the first take) and how much was ‘real’, but I’m pretty sure any sorority would never want yours truly, and likewise I would never want them.

So why the hell can’t I stop staring?!

Cruel Comedy: A Lower Low

This article originally appeared in Bad Reputation – a feminist pop-culture adventure on 21 April 2011.

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: THAT’S NOT FUNNY!

I love live comedy, honest I do. I spent two weeks at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last year and I’ll be there for the full three weeks this year. Some of my best friends are (very good) comedians. However, as a scene: live comedy has a problem. I haven’t been an aficionado for many years, so maybe it was always there – but if recent articles are anything to go by; it seems to be growing. Increasingly, the search for ‘edgy’ material is translating into a scene where the recoil laugh – the I-can’t-believe-you-just-said-that laugh – is the only one aimed for. The targets are ‘soft’ – minorities and marginalized groups – and the jokes prod at the same old prejudices. The numbers of times I come home from a comedy gig wanting to dry-clean my brain is rising.

My hackles were finally raised enough to write this article after an especially bad gig I went to recently. A sketch group of white, able-bodied young men performed a series of female grotesques which were so consistently unpleasant that – though cheerily presented – the unmistakable undercurrent to the evening was ‘we really don’t like women much.’ Most sketches involved a member of the group donning a plastic wig to ‘be a girl’ – and every female character was a Lolita, a whore, a woman giving birth or a mother who hated her children. The punchlines ranged from coat hanger abortions to incest to rape to paedophilia. At my table, from about halfway through, we didn’t laugh so much as look to each other for reaction shots and a reality check. Had there not been other people on the bill who I really wanted to see, I would have just walked out.

The problem is more widespread than just one shit comedy troupe. People more eloquent than myself have pointed out this return to the bad old days. It seems like the decades of hard-earned progress, a basic standard of ‘don’t be a shit to the marginalised’, is being discarded because now it’s apparently ironic. Sexism is increasingly tolerated (after all, everything’s sorted and equal now, so just lighten up, bitch) and other kinds of prejudice are also creeping back, too. ‘It’s not racist, it’s just un-PC, and no one likes political correctness. So, while we’re at it, what about those immigrants, homos, and the disabled, aye?’

Increasingly comedians who get pulled up for saying genuinely unpleasant things (I’m looking at you, Frankie Boyle) have taken this to be their selling point and then upped the ante in general douchery. While Jordan, the gossip-magazines’ favourite glamour model, might seem a fair target, when exactly did her disabled son become fair game, too? Let alone in a joke about incest and rape. I’ll repeat that: an incest-rape joke about a disabled eight-year-old child.

While I’m sure there has always been some truly unpleasant comedy around, its apparent mainstream acceptance is a new trend. The Frankie Boyle joke aired on Channel 4. This worries me because our words do carry a power – they reflect how we see the world, but they also set our standards for what is normal, acceptable, okay. The trickle-down effect has real-world consequences. The rise of the rape joke can be a horrific trigger for those who have experienced it. In increments, these themes – packaged as entertainment – normalise these horrors and dismiss their seriousness.

This is not an argument for censorship – I had fervent arguments a few years ago with Daily Fail-reading colleagues about whether Jerry Springer: the Opera should be shown on TV (yes, yes, a thousand times yes!) – but there is a huge middle ground between Mary Whitehouse prudery and comedy which is getting pretty close to hatespeech. Please, guys: self-regulate a little by engaging the brain.

Some would argue that if I don’t like this brand of comedy, I just shouldn’t watch it. To some extent they’re right, and I do try. When I saw a poster in Edinburgh for a standup show called ‘The Lying Bitch and the Wardrobe’ (I see what you did there) I had a pretty strong inkling that this wouldn’t be my kind of thing and I didn’t go. But on a mixed bill (as almost all small live comedy gigs are) there’s rarely any warning what each person will do – so while you might have gone along because you recognise one name that you like, there is no disclosure until you’re hearing it that the third act, Joe Bloggs, will be your prejudiced asshat for the evening, berating you all with a microphone for at least ten minutes.

Oh, and you paid to see this.

I don’t think anything should be off-limits – but some topics are so unpleasant (not to mention increasingly over-mined) that if a comedian wants to tackle them they will need to be so damn funny, so ingenious, original, tactful – that 80% of comedians just shouldn’t bother. Needless to say, the 80% that aren’t up to speed don’t get this, and the 20% that can do it well often have better things to do than prod triggertastic subjects and tired old clichés with a great big stick. They’re off crafting material that makes you belly-laugh (and think) rather than just titter nervously in disbelief.

James Ross - more sensible than he looks

As my friend James Ross, who runs the consistently wonderful Fat Kitten Improv group and the Better Living Through Comedy night put it: “From a purely technical standpoint, shock humour suffers acutely from a law of diminishing returns: the audience build up a resistance to it, and that alone would be good reason to limit its use.”

Fat Kitten Improv - wonderful and non-bigoted

I think the thing which is missing (besides originality) is a measure of basic empathy. In the increasingly desperate search for ‘dark’ and ‘cutting edge’ material, comedians forget that a lot of their lazily-picked targets are people. Real people. People with feelings and also (self-interest alert, guys:) people who go to comedy gigs.

The rising amount of ‘ironic’ misogyny is not creating a particularly friendly environment for a certain 50% of punters. Last year I went to the Comedy Store to see twelve different comedians being filmed for The World Stands Up. I wasn’t entirely sure if the person who’d invited me along had intended the evening as a date or not, so it was potentially awkward already. Then, as the evening unfolded, four out of twelve comedians used ‘bad fellatio’ as the bedrock of their sets. One standup spent his whole set mocking his wife for not pleasuring him correctly. In the narratives that we heard that night, women’s main role was as dispensers of sexual favours – and we couldn’t even do that right. Thanks, guys. I haven’t been back to the Comedy Store since.

For another example, I was once out with a group for a friend’s birthday when a standup did a set about making a mess in the disabled toilet and blaming it on a disabled person. While he wasn’t to know that birthday girl, sat in the front row, had cerebral palsy – why did he think this would be a good topic in the first place? How many times has he encouraged the able-bodied to laugh at this disadvantaged minority’s expense?

Catherine Semark - smart, funny, feminist

One piece of etiquette that people seem to be riding roughshod over is whether you have a ‘claim’ to your material. While there aren’t (and shouldn’t be) any rules about who is allowed to talk about what, whether or not you’re on the receiving end of a prejudice can make a huge difference to whether or not you have the empathy, warmth, and originality to do it well. Richard Pryor, Omid Djalili, Sarah Silverman, or Goodness Gracious Me on race: usually very good. Jim Davidson on race: enough said.

This isn’t an argument for ‘nice’ comedy. Some of my favourite comedians are pretty darn dark and twisted – Bill Hicks, Dylan Moran, and I heartily recommend Loretta Maine and The Beta Males – but the ‘type’ of twisted is crucial. Jokes are about status – people use them every day to agree boundaries of what’s acceptable, and with that comes a certain amount of responsibility. When activist comedians such as Mark Thomas or Kate Smurthwaite use humour to mock people in power for making bad decisions, that’s something very different to a middle class standup laying into ‘chavs’ for talking funny and drinking cheap booze.

Anger and humour are very often interlinked, but where you aim that anger makes all the difference. Aim it ‘up’ at deserving, more powerful targets and it’s subversive, it can hold people to account – satire has a long and proud tradition. Aim that anger ‘down’ at the underdog and it’s tired, old and – frankly – it’s bullying.

Review of Delusions of Gender: Here Comes the Science Bit

This article originally appeared in Fat Quarter on 16 November 2010.

Cover of Delusions of Gender

I’d only read the introduction to Dr Cordelia Fine’s book Delusions of Gender (Icon) when I found myself listing people I wanted to make read it at gunpoint: the list began with two exes, and the boss that wouldn’t shake hands with women, but within a few minutes included “every teacher, policymaker and year 10 child in the country”.

This is a book with such a large scope that it’s near-impossible to overestimate its importance. Much like The Spirit Level did for socio-economics, this book ropes together decades’ worth of studies on gender differences and casts a cool, calm eye (and an arched brow) over them all.

Fine (daughter of Bill’s New Frock author Anne Fine) begins by framing her argument within the historiography of accepted scientific truths: she quotes some now-hilarious Victorian pronouncements on the innate weakness of women’s charmingly delicate minds and bodies to point out just how easily dated most ‘common sense’ assumptions can be.

Then she points out just how deeply flawed the methods of many gender difference studies have been. Though she does take some obvious, Bad Science-esque pleasure in debunking such studies, you’d be hard-pushed not to smirk too at the news that, though one study appeared to show women’s brains reacted more than men’s when shown images likely to trigger empathy – another scientist found much the same result when they ran the same MRI scan on a dead salmon.

Once a lot of the ‘science’ has been debunked, the most vocal ‘experts’ on gender differences appear almost as dubious as creationist scientists. It would be hilarious except that some of these people campaign, off the back of these studies, that these ‘innate’ and ‘scientifically proven’ differences mean the genders should be educated separately and differently.

The book also explains the concept of the ‘stereotype threat’ – an impressive array of studies demonstrate that once you have been told you will not be as good at something, your performance suffers. Differences as subtle as ticking a box to indicate your sex at the beginning of the maths test, or gendered décor in the exam room, were shown to have a small-yet-palpable effect on performance when people felt they were up against a negative gender stereotype. If you add up a lifetime of such instances the lack of women in traditionally ‘male’ jobs and vice versa becomes pretty obvious.

Another welcome addition to my vocabulary was the ‘gender fallback’ argument – “when things are so equal now, it must be innate that my little girl loves pink.” However, as Fine argues, with wit and warmth, children are very good at picking up what they ‘should’ do – whether they were instructed deliberately or unconsciously. Studies have shown mothers often overestimate their male toddlers’ physical abilities while underestimating their girls’ – so how can we possibly assume the differences we see are set in stone rather than self-fulfilling societal prophesies?

This book will cast a light on gender assumptions you didn’t know you had, and it’s hilarious – with chapter titles such as ‘We Think, Therefore You Are’ and ‘Sex and Premature Speculation’ Dr Fine is a brilliant tour guide – making light, fun and engaging work of the research. By debunking the rubbish, this book opens up possibilities for a (slightly) clearer vision of the future. Not to be missed.