Feminisn't

Kyle Payne

2008-08-29T05:00:00.000-07:00

Kyle Payne has recently been convicted of exposing and filming an unconscious university student in his care. He was, as far as I can tell, a prolific blogger on feminist issues, a supporter of feminism in general and, crucially, a support worker with victims of sexual and physical abuse. Naturally, the feminists have come out in force to condemn him and celebrate his conviction (although there seems to be a general feeling that he got off lightly). This is as it should be. This is a man who assaulted a vulnerable young woman in his care (he was a resident tutor at her hall of residence), his actions were clearly wrong and abhorrent. I am in no way prepared to defend his actions especially given the impact that they may have had on vulnerable women he has helped through experiences of abuse.

However, the reaction to Kyle Payne's confession and conviction has been far more vitriolic than the usual assault story. He has been frequently described as a 'self-proclaimed male feminist' as though his gender precludes him from identifying his politics correctly. Evidently his actions imply that he is not a feminist but they also imply that he is not an empathetic person and that he does not subscribe to global ideals of equality. Are people challenging his ability to self-identify in any way? No, because the issue here is that he is a man and therefore cannot possibly know what it means to be a feminist.

Again we return to the 'Sisterhood'. The assumption concerning Kyle Payne is that he was always an outsider who fooled us 'sisters' into thinking he was any thing less than a misogynist patriarch. If Kyle Payne were a woman would the criticism of him hold such hints of betrayal? Would his statement have been picked apart in such a self-righteous manner? I suspect not. It is in the reaction to his actions that we can see the underlying assumptions that men cannot validate their own opinions on gender; without the 'female experience' they can never subscribe to a position of equality.

Kyle Payne did something horrific. He acted in a way that cannot be excused. Unfortunately, his actions have also exposed the insidious element among feminists that refuse to trust men and would rather denigrate them than open up a discourse on the meaning of equality. This reflects a belief than gender is a fundamental difference and that only women can truly understand discrimination.

“I’ve got girl fans ‘cause I touch a nerve, you don’t have girl fans ‘cause you’re just a perve”

2008-08-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks several acquaintances have informed me (entirely of their own volition) that “girls don’t have good taste in music’ (with a definite implication that ‘girls’ don’t really like music at all). Leaving aside the generalisation and the use of ‘girls’ to mean females, this is a worrying opinion. Perhaps I am a bit naïve but I’ve never really been told this before. The first time I was a bit non-plussed (especially as it was a woman espousing this opinion) but the next few times I found myself wondering what kind of people my friends really were if they could tell me to my face that, due to a quirk of biology, my taste in music was not just unimportant but predetermined as ‘bad’.

This general sense of unhappy confusion was compounded last week when I went to see Roni Size Reprazent. This is quite melodic live drum and bass and so, if you believe the stereotypes, more likely to attract women. We were some way back but still surrounded by pilled-up ravers jumping around. However, right in front of us were a group of children (they were probably about eighteen). Every girl was attached to one of the boys and without exception the boys were jumping for all their under-age little hearts were worth and the girls stood beside them affecting a long suffering expression and occasionally reaching out to their paramours to recall then to the important business of physical affection. These girls appeared to be entirely ambivalent about the music and at one point even decided to hold a mothers’ meeting right in front of me (presumably, even with their youthful hearing, they couldn’t hear a thing any of them were saying).

Anyway, the point is not that I got pissed off at a gig but that this is a common recurrence at drum and bass and hip-hop events. I like hip-hop. More specifically, I like British hip-hop or that which might be considered underground British hip-hop but few of my friends understand this and I’ve never met a single woman who admitted a similar passion. Why don’t women like rap music?

There’s a lot of research literature into the potential power of hip-hop to re-enforce misogynistic attitudes. As far as I’m aware the empirical correlation is weak but this is a plausible reason for hip-hip being notably devoid of women. There’s no doubt that idiots like 50 Cent and Snoop are misogynists whose lyrics are aggressive and unpleasant to listen to if you’re a woman but that’s what makes them bad rappers. If relying on stereotypes and the ‘shock’ value of sexual violence is the best you can do then you’re just a lazy lyricist. There are, however, plenty of rappers who rise above this rubbish and make intelligent quality music (Jehst’s Extra Sensory Perfection is a particularly good evocation of the tensions between a man and his girlfriend).

So there is decent hip-hop out there. There are rappers who can rhyme about their everyday lives eloquently to decent beats and bass. Perhaps women aren’t being drawn into these audiences due to a lack of exposure. Unfortunately tuneful misogynistic ‘gangsta’ posturing is what sells and a lot of the best rappers in the UK are struggling to keep their heads above water. There’s probably a better reason why more women don’t listen to hip-hop, there aren’t decent women rappers. I realise that this is bit of a generalisation and I obviously haven’t heard everyone out there but there is a distinct dearth of women rappers. Leaving aside a very small collection of female freestylers, the most obvious female ‘presence’ in UK hip-hop is Lady Sovereign a grime MC whose output is at best unimpressive (commercial to the hilt). If the only women represented in hip-hop are formulaic posers or, worse, only known for songs full of sexual epithets then women are naturally going to be put off. I’m not saying this is right. I wouldn’t necessarily say that there’s a ‘female narrative’ that’s missing from UK hip-hop but the lack of good female rappers looks like a systemic inequality. What’s going on that stops women becoming struggling rappers? I don’t really have an answer for this but I suspect that it lies in the insidious notion that girls don’t like music (good or otherwise).

Finally on a happier note, a few years ago I was at the front of a crowd waiting for an act to begin when I found myself next to two women who were easily as old as my mum. They were talking about how much they had been both looking forward to the guy we were about to see. They seemed like exactly the kind of mumsy women I am more used to running into at knitting events (it transpired they both worked for Oxfam although I never asked about the knitting…) except that we were there to K’naan the Somali rapper and they were jumping around and clapping along more than I was.

Mental Health Foundation report

2008-07-15T00:58:00.000-07:00

Girl guides and the Mental Health Foundation have today released a report on the stresses facing young girls today (specifically those aged between 10 and 14 years). The report itself is even-handed but inevitably the reporting of it has been a bit sensationalist. Naturally a large number of the concerns of these girls focus on sex. This is the period during which they are becoming sexually aware (both in their own feelings and through formal education). What else are these girls going to be thinking about if not their own sexual development?

The report highlights the amount of negative emotions that their participants reported experiencing. These are fairly high statistics – 52% of girls polled feel anger some of the time – but all people of this age are, to some extent, emotionally volatile. The teenage years are when children become aware of the extremity of negative emotions. Often this is the time when they begin to gain a full appreciation of concepts such as grief and social exclusion. It is not surprising that these girls are reporting negative emotions because they are at an age at which they are exploring their emotional limits and what exactly it means to say you are experiencing these emotions.

During a cued focus-group discussion girls discussed the kinds of triggers that could lead to ‘mental health problems’. The most worrying of these (from a feminist perspective) is that there is a checklist of ‘ideals’ that girls feel they must embody. Without access to the transcript of the focus group or the materials used to stimulate this discussion I don’t really feel able to comment on this finding. The quantitative data that is presented suggests that the physical expectations of girls is a considerable concern (two fifths of girls polled felt bad after looking at pictures of models, pop stars and actresses) but that the media presentation of young people in general was at least an equal preoccupation.

I’m not saying that there aren’t things in this report which are of concern but I don’t feel that this is further evidence of our decaying society. This isn’t drum-banging, “look what the men have done to out precious little flowers” sort of stuff. Although this report focuses on girls there is nothing in here to indicate that girls are especially vulnerable to sources of stress (that’s not to say that this isn’t true, just not supported by this data). The main thing to be gleaned from this study is that it is rough being a teenager and that stable emotional support during adolescence is very important.

Finally, by far the most worrying sentence in this report is

“Despite the mounting pressures they described, it was revealing that few girls were aware of the term ‘mental health problems’ or understood the kinds of feelings or behaviour it encompasses.”

In a country in which one in four people are currently experiencing ‘mental health problems’ it is unthinkable that young people should be so unimformed. The best way to protect young girls from the trials of being just that is to foster awareness of their own mental health and create a society in which they can be frank and comfortable with their emotions. Campaigning against the sale of Playboy merchandise will not achieve this.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light”

2008-07-11T08:37:00.000-07:00

Feminists are angry people. This isn’t meant pejoratively. How can you believe in equality between genders and not be seriously pissed off by the obvious lack of this equality throughout the world? Most of my life is spent trying to control my incandescent rage (largely because I give far too much attention to the opinions of idiots). Anger is a normal human emotion. We all remember the parable of little Ned Flanders who was never angry and eventually went mad (and then became sane again… it all works out in the end). Angry people have driven political movements and forced change and while I may not always agree with their methods you have to admire their conviction.

So, anger is useful and feminists are angry. Therefore, feminism should be a dynamic, driven movement but it’s not. It has become a turgid, sprawling ill-defined thing and this is for two very simple reasons. Firstly, feminism is interested in promoting the equality of the genders and in almost all circumstances this is to the benefit of women (no matter what these people say). This means that we have a movement which acts in the interests of half of the world’s population. That’s over three billion people to get involved and argue over how they want their equality. That’s a lot of opinion and inevitably there’s almost no consensus. This is an inbuilt flaw of feminism and irrelevant to a discussion of anger.

The second reason why feminism is currently so lethargic is that all the anger that women feel at their ‘second-class’ status in the world is actively destructive to the main cause of feminism. Anger, by its nature, has to be directed at someone in order to be productive. Anger without a focus is just a cause of unhappiness (or a sort of existential paralysis thing). So when feminists (in general) get angry about Iranian rape laws for example they look around and think, ‘who could be causing this gender-based discrimination?’ Of course, there’s one very obvious group to whom these things can be attributed: Men. This is especially true of the concerns of Western feminists who are trying to combat less tangible issues such as the physical norms women are expected to subscribe to. When there is no clear group of people trying to deny you equality it always easy to blame the people who benefit from your inequality (yes, men benefit from the patriarchy, it’s not a surprise).

The moment that feminists start blaming all men for gender discrimination they’ve lost their moral high-ground. If you believe in equality you have to believe that the motivations of men and women are equally complex and just as women make decisions based on what they want so do men. Men aren’t getting together in underground bunkers in order to conspire against women, they are simply acting in ways that they believe are right (in terms of their own lives and morally-speaking) just as women are. To assume a male conspiracy is to immediately label an ‘out-group’ and therefore to demonise a lot of people. Being angry about discrimination is fine. Being angry at men isn’t. It’s terrible to be angry at someone because of their gender and for that anger to be caused by gender discrimination makes you a hypocrite and invalidates all your subsequent arguments. Feminists (especially here in the UK) need to get angry again but they need to be very clear who they’re getting pissed off at and why.