Wither art thou, Sexism?

I got called a cunt yesterday.

I know! Not really that unusual: we get called that, and worse, every day, for the crime of being a lady and talking about it. And as street harassment goes, it was a fairly unambiguous, not particularly painful episode. A dude was smoking outside the pub on the corner of my road - it's a nice little boozer, serves curried goat and fried locusts, shows football and is the perfect place to curl up with an afternoon Guinness and coddle your hangover - and as I walked up, he started singing at me, something along the lines of "Oo-ooh honey baby, you're so fine you blow my mind I'd like to put my penis in your vagina, yeah yeah". I'm paraphrasing a little, but you get my drift.

He asked for the time. Because this was approximately the fifteen-thousand-and-twenty-ninth time this has happened, I made the snap decision not to engage: you give him the time, he asks your name. You tell him your name, he asks for your number. You refuse, he follows you to the tube. And what then? So no. Just, "no."

"CUNT."

Now, there's something about the instant switch from "you are a sexy lady!" to "BITCHDYKECUNTWHORE", the turn-on-a-dime reversal that happens when you don't simper and giggle at a guy's advances, that somehow never fails to amuse me. In a wry, bitter, what kind of a fucking world do we live in sort of way. So I burst out laughing, and turned round, and mentally flipped through my Dealing With Sexual Harassment Survival Tips garnered over the years - Remain Polite, Name The Behaviour, Do Not Get Angry Or Use Profanity, etc - and went for the ultimate come-back: "well, FUCK you sideways."

"CUNT."

I'm never sure what I think about that word. I never really understood why it was officially ratified as The Worst Word Of All The Words: I've challenged people for using "pussy" specifically to mean "crap and weak, like a woman", but "cunt", when it's bandied about between men, just doesn't make me feel anything in particular. These things are subjective; it's not rocket science.

When it's directed at a woman by a man, though, it feels like a punch in the gut.

"CUNT."

A dear friend once asked me - long ago, before we got close - whether I'd ever experienced sexism. I'd been talking about The Feminism a lot, and I guess he wanted to know if I had some sort of personal stake in it. More than, you know, just being girl. I was utterly floored at the time - what are you asking? Have I been raped? Have I been beaten? Have I lost a job because I'm female? I haven't, but imagine if I had: if I say "no", I lose the argument; if I say "yes" I'm revealing intensely personal information to a pub full of my colleagues.

But also because it was such a ridiculous question. Have I ever experienced sexism? As if Sexism happens as isolated, discrete episodes, and then you go back to living your Normal Life. As if it's not there, all the time, colouring every single conversation you have. It's 10:40 am, and today I have been offered a seat on the tube because I'm a woman, been groped in the queue for the escalator, given up on an argument because nice girls don't answer back and because the dude in question is actually incapable of conceding to a woman, and had my interest in football been ridiculed because girls don't really care. (OH YOU BIG MAN, EXPLAIN THE OFFSIDE RULE TO ME AGAIN, MY POOR LADY BRAIN CANNOT COMPREHEND SUCH COMPLEXITY.) That's just off the top of my head. They're only the most obvious examples. It's ingrained into the fabric of our lives.

But for well-meaning people who don't live with this reality, the big blatant clear-cut Episodes Of Sexism are a necessary introduction. Hollaback and the like are fantastic resources, but you don't go looking for them unless you're already aware of the problem. So today, when people ask how I am, I will be answering:

"Good, ta, new job, new eyes, nearly Christmas, oh but yesterday I declined to give a guy the time, so he called me a cunt."

Back of the net, back of the queue

In episode 2 of A Romantic Comedy About The Patriarchy (title provisional): people go out of their way to show you the sexism. Not in a malicious way, not trying to get a rise out of you (though that happens too, oh joy), but because it's the sort of thing you're interested in and they're trying to help out. Which is fun, usually: you're braced for it, so it rarely hurts that much, but also bizarre: someone who cares about you is basically saying "Look! Someone thinks you're less than human: check it out!"

(I'm guilty of this myself. Memorable example: "Look at this! The racism!" "Uh huh. I don't really want to read that now." "But look! It is racism!" "You're being a dick." "I am? Oh. I really am.")

All of which is a long preamble to an article my manpanion sent me, on today's "sexist man is also pretty cavalier about gay rights" shocker. Yes, that's right, Sepp Blatter's still a dick. WHO KNEW.

This is a dude who's lamented the "modern slavery" of footballers (how hard! it must be! to earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a week! And how totally comparable to other victims of modern slavery!) and who has suggested that we could generate more interest in women's football by introducing "tighter shorts and low cut shirts". And now Captain Sensitivity Training has chuckled away concerns about how unstraight fans are likely to fare at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar - where the gay is illegal - suggesting that they simply "refrain from any sexual activities" during the tournament. If Putin banned all penis-in-vagina sex tomorrow, I'm sure Blatter would be totally cool with frisky fans getting slapped with a hefty fine and thrown in prison for their socially-sanctioned shenanigans in 2018.

Then again, I guess to him it is quite the laughing matter: football is so "macho", after all, so surely gay men won't be interested, and there aren't any female fans, anywhere (as you can learn in one five minute Sky Sports ad break any day you choose), so luckily no one will be required to repress one of their most fundamental human drives for the pleasure of watching a deeply boring England campaign! Score!

That said, I'm a bit wary of features which focus on how crap it will be for foreign fans having to hide their sexuality for the duration of their stay: going to a country where you are officially an abomination would be rubbish. Being an LGBT Qatari person: probably worse.

Oh yeah. And the corruption thing. But if I talk about that it'll be obvious that I'm just a bad loser.

Romance for rich people

No proles here, please: I only date the Queen.

Dawson's Creek and rape culture: the connection they thought couldn't be made

Here's a strange and possibly embarrassing admission: what I'm looking for in relaxation-television is, pretty much, a tragic, star-cross'd, I-love-you-but-we-can't-but-I-love-you type relationship. Whether the dude is best friend of the lady's recently-paralysed boyfriend, best friends with the lady's ex, from the wrong side of the tracks and constantly punching the lady's ex, wrongly accused of murder and best friends with the lady's ex,  or just a vampire, the presence of such a storyline is a major factor in whether I will get hooked on a TV series.

I mean: you are reading the words of someone who paid actual money to own a series of Dawson's Creek. As an adult! If you want to stop reading right here, I would not blame you.

So I was watching Friday Night Lights (oh Higgins, follow Lyla to college, FOR LOVVVE) and it suddenly clicked, in one of those "how was this not blindingly obvious?" moments, that the one thing all these storylines have in common (apart from exes, or often vampires) is: it is always the dude following the lady around saying I LOVE YOU LET'S MAKE LOVVVE, and the lady saying I can't I can't OH WAIT I CAN, because if it was the other way around we would say "damn, pushy lady, get your ensnaring ovaries off that poor guy!"


We frame the male pursuit of women as natural, as sexy; a guy forcing a kiss on an unwilling woman until she relents because she wants it really is shown as hot, not as assault. Bombarding a woman with flowers and impromptu Frankie Valli performances and breaking into her car to leave presents are shown as romantic, "persistent", not as stalking. This dynamic is taken to its logical extreme in Buffy: "I know you felt it. I'm going to make you feel it." And with that one line, the show lays the grotesque underpinnings of this trope bare.


I mean: it's a fantasy. We can suspend disbelief and enjoy it because we accept the internal logic of the storyline, which is that the girl does welcome his attentions, and so whatever the guy does in the cause of True Love is justified: the fact that in reality these would be less romantic gestures and more arrestable offences doesn't matter, because the story of "I love you / no no I can't / I love you, you love me too / I do! I love you too! Let's have lots of hot sex but then break up because the world is against us but I will love you foreverrr" makes for better TV than "I like you / you too / let's get drunk and have sex and after a few months observe that we're feeling a lot less frisky and a lot more concerned with who does the washing up". What we want from TV and what we want from our lives are not the same thing. (Fact.)


I'm not a big fan of policing fantasy; I don't think anyone is, really: I'd imagine we can all agree on the basic ground rules that "if you're not hurting anyone and all your sex-shenanigans involve only consenting grown-ups, then whatever gets you off is lovely, well done". I don't think the fact that I'm susceptible to this particular romantic narrative makes me a bad person, or a bad feminist, or a rape-apologist, and I don't think it's something I need to fix. But I find it interesting to wonder why it has such a pull on me, where it comes from, what it means.


And I keep coming back to this:

Rape culture is regarding violence as sexy and sexuality as violent. Rape culture is treating rape as a compliment, as the unbridled passion stirred in a healthy man by a beautiful woman, making irresistible the urge to rip open her bodice or slam her against a wall, or a wrought-iron fence, or a car hood, or pull her by her hair, or shove her onto a bed, or any one of a million other images of fight-fucking in movies and television shows and on the covers of romance novels that convey violent urges are inextricably linked with (straight) sexuality.

Pursuit, conquest; yielding, submission. They exist on a fictional continuum from Ryan Atwood the loveable rogue (with his complete lack of facial expression - a running theme, perhaps?) to Spike the attempted rapist; the fire at the PG-13 end of the spectrum relies on the ugliness at the other.

Obviously I will still be rooting for those two crazy kids to work it out somehow (but you LOVE EACH OTHERRR), because my love of US-high-school-centric soap operas exists somewhere separate from my intellectual patriarchy-bashing brain: I can be merrily dissecting the troublesome messages purveyed by a show while simultaneously getting swept away by the incredible heart-tugging cheese of it. There are people who refuse to watch TV with me because it can be hard to hear the dialogue over my never-ending mutters of "oh right, so every time you kiss her she pushes you away and says DON'T KISS ME, so obviously the sensible thing to do is carry on kissing her? WHO SAYS ROMANCE IS DEAD".

Then again, these people might just be refusing to watch TV with me because I am watching Dawson's Creek.

Introducing Dr Dickface McBullyo, the NHS's finest

Good gracious, how time flies: you trip, you fall, you get laser eye surgery and a new job, and suddenly it's been two weeks since you've last shared your Very Important Thoughts with the world at large. So what else has been big news in the Feminist House of Alarmist Llamas?

Apparently The British lie to their doctors, for a start: specifically MORE WOMEN THAN MEN (a difference of a whole 6%!) downplay how much stress they are under. Yeah, colour me stunned.

A short story about talking to your GP about stress: to protect my doctor's anonymity, I will call him by the nom de wanque "Dr Dickface McBullyo".

PATIENT: Hi there, medical practitioner. I have been experiencing some abnormal and uncomfortable heart rhythms. Maybe we could check that out?

DR DICKFACE MCBULLYO: I see from your file that you have a history of depression. You're having panic attacks.

PATIENT: No, I have had panic attacks in the past, these are not panic attacks. Also, when the odd heart rhythms are occurring, I'm not panicked, and you'd think I'd notice if I was under so much stress that my body was initiating a fight/flight response, no?

DR DICKFACE MCBULLYO grabs PATIENT's arm and points vigorously at five-year-old self-harm scars.

DR DICKFACE MCBULLYO: What are these, then? You did these yourself, didn't you? You're having panic attacks. I can prescribe some anti-depressants.

Two weeks later, PATIENT ends up in Accident & Emergency having passed out on the tube. Because of an abnormal heart rhythm!

And so begins the medical chapter in a seemingly endless career of being patronised by people who are stupider than I am.

So what have we learned from this particular scene? We have learned that Doctor always Knows Best, especially if his diagnostic process is not hindered by any extraneous information like "symptoms" or "the patient's subjective experience" or even, god forbid, "doing some tests and detecting a fairly common heart abnormality". We have learned that if you have ever experienced mental illness, you are automatically stupid, untrustworthy, and unable to reliably describe your own health - and we have learned that any health complaints you may have in the future are indisputably a result of that mental illness. We have learned that the best 'bedside manner' for such irrational crazy types as yourself is to shout at you while grabbing your body parts without warning or permission. We have learned that your opinions mean nothing, your reasoning is impaired, and your personal space can be invaded at any time.

So yeah, if you're stressed, you should totally tell your GP. That always ends well.

In which Peter Crouch helps me smash biological determinism

Let's talk about sex differences. Again, the Guardian suggests; in response, one commenter sighs, "must we? please! can't we talk about something else? it's boring."


And you know? At the risk of relinquishing my Robofeminist cred...


Small interlude while I share my favourite Google image search result for 'robofeminism':

Who knew?

...I couldn't agree more, actually. It is fucking boring. It would be awesome if we could declare a moratorium on the endless search for Natural! Biological! Unconquerable! Differences between MEN who are from MARS and WOMEN who like KNITTING! and get on with, well, anything else that we could be spending our time on. Like, in my case, knitting.

But as long as people continue banging on about how men are HARDWIRED to cheat, overspend, 'be extreme', ignore their wives, or be masters of orienteering, I feel duty bound to counter the onslaught with Facts, Science, and Eye-Rolling. As Important Activism goes, proffering some alternative viewpoints to "But men and women are different!" (Actual. Quote. Oh, unnamed relative, you slay me with your evidence-based reasoning.) is probably not top of the patriarchy-smashing priority list, but it's the only one I cannot physically stop myself from doing. Every day. You shut up first. No, you shut up first. Okay, we'll both shut up together.

(They started it.)

Tell me a story

So every time someone writes a blog post saying, "Hey, I love this TV series! However, given that it was produced in a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, disableist and class-ridden society, unsurprisingly it has a couple of bits I'm not entirely comfortable with! I shall use this as a springboard to discuss these issues, and the way in which culture is shaped by and plays its part in shaping wider society - join me!" there's always some chump - let's call him Len - who comes along to sulk. Loudly. "CENSORSHIP!", he cries; "PROPAGANDA! IT'S ART! GET YOUR POLITICS OUT OF MY PRIME-TIME SOFA EXPERIENCE!"

Safe to say Len is missing the point somewhat.

I may be naive, but I tend to see feminism as a neutral moral stance, or an absence of cruelty: in the same way that not being a giant racist isn't an achievement as it is the bare minimum level of decency one should be able to expect from other human beings. So what I think of as a Feminist TV Show, and the image that phrase conjours up in Len's mind, are pretty different. Mine is one that passes Bechdel, that has actual female characters, that isn't just populated by a job lot of stereotypes from the Backlash Bad Fiction Warehouse (Ugly nerd! Vapid cheerleader! Embittered career woman! You know the drill). It's a show which doesn't constantly remind us that sex will kill us and trying to have a family and a career is a pipe dream. It's a show that explores characters with disabilities, rather than just gawping at them as a tragic morality tale. It's a show that recognises that gay people are, like, people (shocker!) and trans folks aren't just punchlines. It's a show that's interested in more than just the stories of rich white dudes.

Which, to be honest, doesn't sound like that much to ask. This isn't Political Correctness Gone Mad. I'm not calling for a quota system. I'm just suggesting that there are a lot of tales to tell. And when something comes along that hits some of these shockingly high targets, the point is that Len probably wouldn't notice it: it doesn't require writers to shoehorn in long speeches about how the feminist movement has failed and attacked trans people, or have the main character attend a seminar on the ways poor women of colour have been pressured onto long-term contraception, or basically anything as ridiculously overt and preachy as Len would expect. (Not that such discussions are preachy or boring! They are my favourite thing! But their place is probably not in a teen soap.) Issues which affect the ladies, and the Ells, Gees, Bees and Tees, people with various disabilities and Characters of Colour come up as a matter of course when you're writing a story which features people who - say it with me - aren't all identikit rich white dudes.

Ladies, gentlemen, and those who identify outside the gender binary, I give you: Veronica Mars! (I'm so 2008; I'm so 2000-and-late.) So: it has ladies! Lots of ladies, talking to each other about things that are not boys! Lots of silly villain archetypes as well, sure, but also: the lead character is the most believable and complex lady I have seen written on a teen TV show in many a long year (just ask Sady Doyle). It features people of colour who don't always get reduced to lazy stereotypes! (Sidekick, baller, oversexed bitch; okay, I admit, I'm setting the bar pretty fucking low here. But - Alicia? Carmen? Leo? Jackie, from about halfway through Season 2? Weevil, to an extent? And Wallace may be a sidekick - and a baller, two for one at Lazy Stereotype Warehouse - but he's a whole person too.) It has people with disabilities whose disabilities are not their sole storylines. Taking anti-depressants is normal: you still have to deal with the death of your sister and go to school and fight with your best friend. Being Deaf is just being Deaf: it doesn't have a huge bearing on the fact that you had an affair with a teacher and got pregnant and he abandoned your baby in a toilet cubicle. One episode featured a trans character in a way that didn't make me wince, groan, and throw the nearest projectile at the telly's off button out of sheer fury.

That said, the show also 'punishes' a Bad Man by 'tricking' him into wanting to have sex with a trans lady. Which is funny, right? Haha how humiliating! Funny! Gross! Also: the least sensitive and/or clever thing you could possibly have done, writers.

In tiny, subtle ways, the writing shows you everyday casual sexism ("I don't know which bothers me more: 'foxy' or 'stacked'.") and racism ("Lurking? You mean 'standing while black'?"; "Describe this biker guy to me." "Uh... brown?"); short stories and plot arcs deal with class privilege, child abuse, domestic violence, and, of course, rape.

Rape is everywhere in Veronica Mars. It pervades the show in the exact same way it pervades our lives. And yet we are not subjected to endless supposedly sexy pornified breathy scenes of heaving bosoms and contorted faces.

"[R]ape in movies and books and TV doesn’t focus on what women remember from their rapes because rape is not meant to be depicted as an experience of women, to resonate with women, and to acquire an audience of women ... I do not remember, I do not think about my boobs, or about physical pain, or what my face looked like. I think about his hand on my shoulder. I think about what the trees looked like as I stared out the window. I think about how bright the room was. But I guarantee you, go find some rape scene to watch, and you will have close-ups of boobs and a woman’s face contorted in pain and fear." (Harriet J)

No. It's small, and it's sad, and it's fucking terrifying because of that.

"[Y]ou see a girl passing out, then waking up to realize what has happened ...You see these things through the women’s eyes. You do not, as is usual, see things through the eyes of a voyeur, or a rapist." (Sady, again.)

Plus sometimes, if you squint your eyes a little, it's just like watching Buffy!

And that's always fun.

It's not perfect. That goes without saying. The fact that it reaches such giddy heights at times make its failings even more obvious: surprise, Veronica, you weren't really raped, even though you were drugged and have no memory of the apparently consensual sexy times - it was your boyfriend, and you liked it, so it's all cool! Haha, rape is funny when men are the victims! (However good your 'rape is bad' credentials, once you've accepted the concept of a 'deserved raping' you've really lost the moral high ground.) Surprise, the Angry Feminists totally faked a rape to get attention! (This storyline was even more infuriating given that they dealt so amazingly well with the Abuse Victim Is Making It Up trope in Season 1 ). I mean, I get it; I've read my Agatha Christie and I am familiar with the Least Likely Person plot twist. But, in the cultural milieu in which the series is made, the idea that aquaintance rape isn't really rape, or that Angry Feminists are lying castrating bitches, is hardly the least likely scenario: it's the obvious solution. And every TV show that features these storylines feeds into rape culture, just as every TV show which casts all black people as stupid criminals adds a drop to the big scummy bath of racism we're all wallowing in, and it's boring, and it's so annoying when done by a group of writers who have shown over and over that they are capable of better.

But every time a TV show shows a girl as clever and pretty - or a trans person as a devoted loving parent - or a Latina student as a sweet, academic, law-abiding type whose race is not relevant to her storyline - or a Deaf lady who is not defined by her disability - it chips away a tiny bit of the giant invisible edifice of Instutitionalised People Being Rubbish To Each Other. It puts different stories out there. It reminds us all that straightwhiterichcistabguys are not the default, not the only people who get to do something other than embody the Difference Of The Week. In Veronica Mars, girls can be sleuths and fix their rustbucket cars, skint Latino boys struggle in boring jobs and worry about their grandmas, trans women enjoy classic cars and the work of Kevin Spacey, white guys with epilepsy fight with their parents and run for student council. They're people. Like, y'know, people on this side of the screen are.

So, Len, and writers of every other TV show which treats ladies as nothing but love interests and anyone who isn't straight, rich, white, cis, TAB and male as the Issue of the Week: learn from what you see here and, in the immortal words of Scroobius Pip, get better .