International Women's Day

Chances are you've already seen this, but loving this video for International Women's Day:



1. You get to look at Daniel Craig.
2. You get to listen to Judi Dench's voice.
3. It's very short.
4. You get to hear why, alas, we still need an International Women's Day, and you don't crawl out the other end feeling patronised or bored.

I've heard a few people asking why there isn't an International Men's Day. There is, it's on November 19th. Perhaps you can get a video of Angelina Jolie in a really nice trouser suit talking about teenage suicide statistics. Or indeed a rerun of this excellent Rachel Stevens public service announcement:

Novel covers: a gripe

Today I am mostly: irritated by book marketing. As in patronising, gendered, and belittling of women's work.

Let's examine a case study: 'The Sorrows of an American' by Siri Hustvedt. This is an important, elegant, intelligent literary novel whose scope includes the Scandinavian immigrant experience in early 20th Century America, the uses and limitations of psychoanalysis, stalking in its many forms, the love and silences between parents and children and brothers and sisters, art, photography, the cult of literary personality, and the ache of grief that comes with the loss of a parent or partner. It is brilliant, as is the other novel of hers I have read, 'What I Loved'. I have no idea why Siri Hustvedt is not on all those 'Great American novelist' lists with the likes of Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen.

Here is the jacket of The Sorrows of an American:



Pretty. Maybe slightly sinister, given facelessness of girl, and the serpentine seething at the bottom of her dress. Quite appealing.

But I don't think you'd guess from this cover that the narrator of the book is a tall, forty-something male Norwegian psychologist mourning the death of his father.

But wait! There are some female characters in the book! Maybe it is one of them? narrator's love interest - who is black, and has short hair? No. His sister - a serious academic writer, just shy of fifty, given to smart suits? No. His elderly mother? No. The strange, reclusive old lady who holds a secret about his father's past? No. The friendly, overweight undertaker who favours elasticated slacks? No.

No, it's just a pretty, or at least slim and flowing-haired, girl in a slightly strange but pretty dress who bears no relation to the novel whatsoever. But women like books with girls in pretty dresses on the front don't they? So it doesn't really matter, as long as women buy it?

Any more ideas as to why why Hustvedt isn't taken seriously as a great American novelist?

There is really definitely no ageism at the BBC, honest

I didn't watch Children In Need this year, but I was on Twitter while it was on, and was struck by the following tweet from Caitlin Moran (aka @caitlinmoran, who you really should be following if you're on Twitter, as she is very funny.) (You must like very funny or why would you be here?) (Don't answer that.)

"Does Fearne Cotton SEE that she, too, will be culled as a presenter when she hits 37? DOES SHE THINK SHE WILL ESCAPE THE FATE OF ROSLIN?"

It is notable, at a time when the BBC are quick to refute all accusations of ageism (see the cases of Moira Stewart, Arlene Philips, Miriam O'Reilly etc) that Terry Wogan is permitted to carry on presenting Children in Need as he gets older and older, but the blondes standing next to him mysteriously stay the same age.

The first Children in Need broadcast was in 1980. Terry Wogan (then 42) hosted with Sue Lawley (then 34) and Esther Rantzen (then 40). Two years later, Sue Cook, (then 33) took on co-hosting duties for the next thirteen years, leaving at the age of 46. Gaby Roslin took over in 1994 when she was 30, and continued as the co-host until 2004 (age 40). In 2005, Natasha Kaplinsky (33) took over, just for a couple of years. Then in 2007, Fearne Cotton (then 25) joined the hosting team. There was a blip in the downwards age trajectory in 2008 when Tess Daly joined them both, at the ripe old age of 39. But then, she is a lingerie model on the side, so not exactly greying and turning to fat. Terry Wogan, in case you've lost track, is still the main anchor. He turned 72 this year.

Is it possible to imagine a reality in which Sue Lawley or Esther Rantzen had remained the host of Children in Need for the last thirty years, joined by a succession of young, sexy men?

While we're on the subject, can you picture a Strictly Come Dancing hosted by a grey-haired 82-year-old woman with Vernon Kay as her sidekick? In fact, can you imagine any mainstream TV programme being hosted by an 82-year-old woman with grey hair? Or any woman at all with grey hair?

A spokesperson in the case brought by Miriam O'Reilly (sacked as Countryfile presenter age 52, alongside three other woman presenters in their 40s) described the idea that the BBC was ageist as "absolute nonsense".

Hmmm.

That old romcom dinner cliche

A film which is much better than you might expect, though not exactly braving the dizzy heights of "good", is Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous. Mainly I liked it for the following reasons:

- I have a bit of a weakness for Sandra Bullock doing funny (as opposed to Sandra Bullock doing serious, which sends me screaming to the hills.)
- Funny Sandra Bullock gets to wear a lot of exceedingly stupid outfits in this film.
- It's a romantic comedy with no romance. SB's character is not rewarded by social acceptance in the form of love at the end of the film, as per every other movie about women; instead she has a make-under, dumps the stupid outfits, goes back to wearing trouser-suits and sensible hair, and makes friends with her equally unglamorous female bodyguard.
- There's a scene set in a Las Vegas bar filled with female impersonators.
- The presence of William Shatner and Abraham Benrubi.

Not enough to get your running to the DVD shop I agree, but say you were ill, and it was being repeated on ITV2, you could do worse than switching it on and seeing if anything in the first twenty minutes made you laugh. Laugh might be too much. Smile, anyway.

Having said that, I couldn't help but notice the egregious inclusion of the one scene that no romantic comedy is complete without: the moment early on where the woman goes back to her empty apartment and eats a lonely dinner while miserable music plays. Think of any romantic comedy you like. Say Sandra Bullock again in the otherwise great fun Two Weeks' Notice, so pathetic that her local Chinese takeaway knows her order by heart. Or Jennifer Lopez in The Wedding Planner with her obsessive compulsive meal, perfectly neatly presented with hospital-corners-folded napkin. (Now seems as good a time as any to mention that The Wedding Planner is so awful I cried at the end from the sheer futility of living a life that had included watching it.) I can't be bothered to list them all, but once you notice, it's impossible to unnotice, and now my heart sinks when the female lead closes the door of her apartment, says hello as often as not to her cat, and the weepy music swells as she opens the fridge.

They have to play the weepy music, because otherwise there's a risk that you might notice that the female lead has a really cool apartment in the centre of a really cool American city - New York, or San Francisco say - and it really doesn't seem like such a miserable option to sit down in front of her really cool product-placement flatscreen TV and stuff her face with delicious food. In fact some might argue that one of the perks of being single and living alone is that you get to eat exactly what you want, when you want, and there is no such thing as table manners. If I ever make a romantic comedy, there will be happy, joyful music when the heroine eats alone, and we will only graduate to the weepy stuff when the batteries of her vibrator have run flat or some heavy boxes need lifting.

Sexist Come Birthing

Sorry, it's another feminist one. Just coincidence that it's two in a row.

Dr Denis Walsh, one of the country's most senior midwives, has published a paper saying that fewer women ought to have epidurals. Here's the piece about it in the Observer. I am not a doctor or a midwife, and I have never given birth (although I am somewhat more likely to do so than Doctor Walsh), and so I will not comment on what he writes about risk factors such as lengthening the labour process, the positioning of the baby's head, increased need for interventions etc. No doubt he is right about those. Indeed the risks are well-known and several of my friends have chosen not to have pain relief during their labour because of those risks. I entirely support them in that choice. But note: "chosen". "Choice".

No, what I want to take up with Dr Walsh is the following:

"A large number of women want to avoid pain. Some just don't fancy the pain. More women should be prepared to withstand pain... Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby.

"Over recent decades there has been a loss of 'rites of passage' meaning to childbirth, so that pain and stress are viewed negatively." Patients should be told that labour pain is a timeless component of the "rites of passage" transition to motherhood... Pain prepares women for the demands of motherhood.

This is guff. The reason childbirth huts so much has got nothing to do with rites of passage and priming women for motherhood. Labour pain is biological, it's like any other pain. If you look at the evolution of apes into hominids (and I have studied this at degree level), one of the key differences is that humans are bipedal (walk upright) and apes walk in a knuckle-drag stance. This is made possible by the unique positioning of our hips - in line with our torsoes, not out to the sides. Because of this, human labour is much more complex, painful and difficult than ape labour. In fact studies show that in you examine monkey and ape gestation, for a human baby to be born at equivalent development, size and alertness, it should have a gestational period of one year. However, the size of the baby would make it impossible for it to come out of the human birth canal without killing the mother. On the other hand, if a baby is born too small, it will have all the complications of prematurity, leading to a huge increase in infant mortality. A human baby, gestated for nine months, is as large as it can be without killing the mother: it's an evolutionary compromise.

So back to this crap about preparing women for the responsibility of childbirth: that is not what labour pain is "for". Labour pain isn't "for" anything. It's just pain. Do people really think that if women have pain relief they are more likely to mistreat their children? Think about the people you know who've had epidurals: is this remotely true? And how should we prepare men for the awesome responsibility of having a baby? Knee them repeatedly in the nuts over several hours? Or do we think they are capable of being responsible and loving parents without undergoing extensive pain? The latter, obviously.

In short, giving birth hurts because you are pushing something out of your vagina which is the exact largest it can be without tearing you in half. Make your decisions about pain relief in accordance with advice over medical risk, but please, do not allow yourself to be bullied into a natural birth because of this misguided emotional blackmail.

Sexist Come Dancing

It's a bit early in the year to be discussing Strictly Come Dancing, a show that's essentially one long sequined advent calender for Christmas, but I could not resist discussing news that Alesha Dixon is to take over from Arlene Phillips on the judging panel.

You can read an entire article about it here.

The essence of the story is that Arlene Phillips (66, professional choreographer, wrinkly, much given to making comments about male dancers' hip movements) has been sacked from Strictly and replaced by Alesha Dixon (30, singer, the winner from a couple of years ago, flawlessly beautiful, no real knowledge of dancing at all) in order to "refresh the brand". The "brand" took a nasty knock last season when John Sergeant walked out mid-series, a decision which may or may not have been related to the judging panel's bullying comments, many but by no means all of which were ascribed to Arlene. Alesha is likely to be a nicer presence than Arlene. But lots of people could be a nicer presence than Arlene, and there are things Arlene brought to the table that Alesha can't provide, the most obvious one of which is having any proper understanding of ballroom dance technique.

It doesn't take the most paranoid of feminists to ask questions about an older, opinionated woman being knocked out of the panel in favour of a younger, more agreeable one, particularly when that panel is already weighted 3 to 1 male to female. Last season, Strictly fell behind in the ratings against X Factor, who had "refreshed" their brand by replacing older, opinionated Sharon Osborne with younger, more agreeable Cheryl Cole. The obvious difference is that Cheryl Cole, no matter what you might think of her, is a working professional singer, whereas Alesha Dixon, charming as she is, is just someone who once won a reality dance show, with a lot of help from her professional dance partner.

Ah yes, the professional dance partner. If they really did want to appeal to the Cheryl Cole demographic, why not move one of the professional dancers across, who is young and sympathetic but who can also provide informed commentary to the audience and advice for the contestants?

But Jay Hunt, the controller of BBC1, batted away accusations of ageism by saying "the average age of the BBC1 viewer is 52, so why would I take older women off the channel?" (although what exactly is the average age of the Strictly viewer - and what age would they like it to be?) - so it must just be coincidence that the new judge is so young and gorgeous. If Alesha Dixon has not been chosen because she's young and beautiful, what has she been chosen for? Hunt says: "Alesha has lived through it, we've still got all the experts who understand the technicalities of the Argentinian tango."

In other words, she's been on the show herself, so she understands what it's like, and she hasn't been chosen for her expertise but for her empathy. Which means she's there to be the most sympathetic, likeable and uncritical of judges.

But having the only woman on the panel be the one who is there to be sympathetic, likeable and uncritical is just as bad as having one there for eye candy. It's 2009. Are we still so frightened of a woman with an opinion?

I Need A Hero. With A Screwdriver.

Have been Twittering about the filing cabinet of doom but this is deserving of a real blog post.

Perhaps it seems strange that I would want a filing cabinet. But I am self-employed and work from home and I have a lot of paperwork. Those Polish book contracts need to go somewhere. Also have been all excited reading a book called Getting Things Done - in life, I dearly aspire to be the type of girl who Gets Things Done - and one of the key instructions in Getting Things Done is that I need a decent filing system.

So I ordered a filing cabinet form John Lewis. Looks innocuous, doesn't it? Also, expensive. But there's a lot of metal in there - 32 kg of metal, and 32 kg of metal costs. And I am willing to invest that money in Getting Things Done, because if this were a Mastercard advert, Getting Things Done would be priceless.

This is not a Mastercard advert, and what is actually priceless is having 32kg and £259 worth of filing cabinet in 214 pieces on the floor of my study. I have self-assembled before. I am an Ikea veteran. But this is above and beyond. There are bits you have to glue. Glue, I tell you. And the pieces are all referred to by five-digit numbers, except those that have one or two letter codes. There are 15 pages of instructions. There are 27 diagrams each with an average of four sub-diagrams. There are ten different types of screw. That's a whole Kama Sutra of DIY right there.

Here is what the book Getting Things Done has to say on the subject of assembling flat-packed filing cabinets:

That's right. NOTHING.

Meanwhile, I am just a girl with a screwdriver. Not even a sonic screwdriver (wherefore art thou Doctor?) And I am manifestly not going to Get This Done.

I made a pitiful call to John Lewis. I believe that the words "I'm a single girl" may have passed my lips. I have no shame. (My mother pointed out that saying "I'm a single man" would not have helped my cause in quite the same way. First sign of DIY and my feminist credentials go flying out of the window.) I explained about the 15 pages of instructions and the 214 parts. I reminded them that this thing cost me £259 already. I swore that I was not inexperienced in flat-packing, but that I had never seen anything like this in my life. I think I finally broke them with the mention of glue. The nice woman on the phone is going to discuss it with her supervisor. I am hoping they will send me a man with a screwdriver. Second hope: they will allow me to return it despite torn packaging. Otherwise I am going to have a mountain of Not Got Done metal on the floor of my study until the end of time.

Another day, another depressing serial rape story.

Only weeks after taxi driver John Warboys was convicted for a series of rapes that the police had failed to act on, another serial rapist emerges who was left free to attack women for years due to shoddy police work. As with the Warboys case, police believe that dozens more women may have been attacked who have not, as yet, come forward.

I am of the opinion that we barely know how many sex attacks take place every day. I know a number of women who have been raped - and those are only the ones who have told me about it, I am sure there are others amongst my acquaintance who haven't shared their stories with me. They were all raped by people they knew - though not necessarily people they knew well - and not one of them reported the attack to the police. Either they did not wish to relive the experience or they didn't think they would be believed.

Then there is the category of 'sexual assault'. How bad does an assault have to be to be considered a crime? I have no idea. I do know that I've had a number of deeply unpleasant experiences that it would never have occurred to me to report:

1. Walking down the street, a passing man reached over, grabbed hold of one of my nipples, and squeezed. I had the presence of mind to shout at him.

2. While I was in a queue in a restaurant, a man put his hand between my buttocks and pressed his finger against my vagina. I was so shocked and embarrassed that I laughed, and it took me years to forgive myself for it.

3. In a bar, a man pushed me down on a table and, holding me down by the head and the small of my back, proceeded to lick all over my bare back above the top of the strapless dress I was wearing, while the people around laughed and clapped. But hey, I knew him, so that's OK, right? Right? On this occasion I tried to get away but he was too strong, so I just gave in and waited until he'd finished. Oddly enough I had a very similar experience in my first ever job, when a senior producer took it upon himself to lick my sunburnt back. But he was gay, so that doesn't count, right? Right?

4. I was surrounded by a group of young men in the street who made a series of threatening comments about the smell of my "unwashed c*nt". Who knows what they would have done if I hadn't seen a couple on the other side of the road and ran away towards them. This happened in Australia: I told an Australian friend, and she was astonished that I was upset about it. This may have been the most troubling aspect of the whole experience.

5. I interrupted a man masturbating in the street who then chased me.

6. I was flashed at outside my school.

7. As a young child, I was followed by a strange man around WHSmith until I went and found my mum.

Which is not to even begin on the more everyday occurrences of having my bum felt in pubs, clubs and on crowded tubes, of having sexually explicit comments shouted at me in the street on a fairly regular basis, of drunk men grabbing me and shoving their tongues in my mouth for some spurious reason (England scores), and, of course, of being sexually propositioned - though fortunately no more than that - by the very cab driver I was trusting to get me home safe. There seemed little point in complaining about any of it.

I would say that my experiences are by no means atypical. In fact, I would actually count myself as lucky that this is all that I have had to endure. My guess - and it has to be a guess, because this is something which is rarely openly discussed - is that most of the women reading this will have a set of similar stories to share, whereas most of the men will be horrified because they have no idea that this is daily life for women, especially young women.

If we are going to understand rape, and why men like Warboys and Reid get away with it for so long, we need to understand the entire picture of sexual harassment and intimidation, which means that women - and for that matter men - will need to start talking about their experiences of sexual bullying. Rape, sadly, is part of a continuum, and some of the people who get away with this type of lower-key intimidation will carry on to do much, much worse. Equally a woman who has been subjected to a lifetime of minor sexual assaults without anybody - including themselves - taking them seriously may simply not see the point of reporting a rape.

No doubt the Warboys / Reid cases will result in an overhaul of police approaches to rape, but I would argue that it's time consider whether we have the right approach to assaults at the other end of the scale.

Simone de Beauvoir

It's ironic that I should have posted the below in the week of the centenary of Simone de Beauvoir's birth without acknowledging her as the original and greatest thinker of the subject of male norm / female other. So here is a lengthy quote from the introduction to The Second Sex which you are by no means obliged to read, but does rather make the point better than I ever could. Happy Birthday Simone! You'd be glad to know that things have changed, though, sadly, not enough.

A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male. But if I wish to define myself, I must first of all say: ‘I am a woman’; on this truth must be based all further discussion. A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: ‘You think thus and so because you are a woman’; but I know that my only defence is to reply: ‘I think thus and so because it is true,’ thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: ‘And you think the contrary because you are a man’, for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity. A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong. It amounts to this: just as for the ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus: these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it. ‘The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ said Aristotle; ‘we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness.’ And St Thomas for his part pronounced woman to be an ‘imperfect man’, an ‘incidental’ being. This is symbolised in Genesis where Eve is depicted as made from what Bossuet called ‘a supernumerary bone’ of Adam.

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being. Michelet writes: ‘Woman, the relative being ...’ And Benda is most positive in his Rapport d’Uriel: ‘The body of man makes sense in itself quite apart from that of woman, whereas the latter seems wanting in significance by itself ... Man can think of himself without woman. She cannot think of herself without man.’ And she is simply what man decrees; thus she is called ‘the sex’, by which is meant that she appears essentially to the male as a sexual being. For him she is sex – absolute sex, no less. She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.

The Ascent Of Woman

In this week's Time Out, they have a special on the body, illustrated by one of those 'Ascent of Man' pictures where you start on the left at the least evolved and go through to the present day on the right. (A bit like, though not, the one above.)

Now, I studied Archaeology and Anthropology as an undergraduate, so I have seen a lot of these drawings in textbooks, articles and so on, and I have never, ever, EVER seen one where the evolving figure was female*. I am led to the conclusion that women didn't evolve, we are just the same base ape creatures that we have been since the dawn of time. Either that or we came out of the primordial ooze perfect, stopping only to smear it on our faces as an exfoliating masque.

Why is the male the default? Why do we always have to learn about the history of our species entirely through the changes in men? Why are we still living by the notion that what is male is normal and what is female is different? We are the majority, remember, not you, you weird, hairy, penisy, breastless, low-voiced, non-menstruating freaks.

*I will grant you that the third figure from the left is sporting some impressive breasts but I think that they are just ape-man-boobs.