Suzanne Moore, transphobia, anger and framing

On Saturday morning, I was woken up by my gentleman companion announcing the news that Suzanne Moore had been bullied off Twitter for "one misjudged word". He read out messages of support from Dorian Lynskey, Owen Jones, and others in the lefty journalist gang decrying the call-out culture which leads people to focus on one word to the exclusion of the rest of an article.

 

This was before I'd read the article, before Julie Burchill weighed in, before every conversation I had that weekend somehow came around to The Controversy. I thought this was about call-out culture and online bullying and all those difficult questions that are vitally important to the state of Feminism On The Internet. I was worried that the hoo-ha around calling people out - the 'focus on one little word' - would get us to a state where we couldn't point out that people were using offensive words/ideas/arguments for fear of being called divisive. Where we were only allowed to cheer unambiguously, or keep silent; where we were required to swallow our hurt and our anger For The Greater Good.

(Funny how it's always women who have to suck it up when the left has important business at hand - just get on board with the Democrats, even as they ignore women's issues, or the GOP will get in and they'll ignore women's issues! And it's always trans people who have to suck it up when feminism has a mission which apparently can't be completed without gratuitous side-swipes at them! Don't rock the boat, it's for the greater good, are you with us or against us?)

Turns out, that wasn't the story at all. It was actually a much simpler story, a sickeningly familiar story which apparently never gets old:

1. Writer uses problematic language
2. Someone politely points out the problematic nature of such language
3. Writer goes on knee-jerk fury, lashes out at anyone who isn't cheerleading their work in its entirety, ramps up the problematic shit to show that YOU CAN'T CONTROL ME, I AM A FREE SPIRIT
4. Entire online social justice universe lines up on one side or the other, form baying mobs
5. Julie Burchill globs onto the scene to resolve the issue by giving all sides something they can agree on: that Julie Burchill is awful.

Actually: I say 'baying mobs', plural, because that's what I've been told happened. All I know for sure is that this happened - and only one side of that qualifies as bullying. (Hint: it isn't the person suggestion that calling someone A Transexual is a bit fucking creepy.) I haven't been able to find the onslaught that's been described (though Twitter's being infuriatingly slow so if anyone has links/screengrabs I'd be very grateful.) - I'm not saying 'it's not there', I'm not saying 'prove it to me', I'm just explaining what sources I have been able to track down in a couple of hours' internet-trawling.

So in response to some very polite questioning of her word choices, Moore chooses to be as rude and cruel as she could possibly be without using the T word -

 - and yet this has become a story about how Suzanne Moore is the victim of online bullying?

How in the name of the black heart of Julie Bindel have we allowed the story to be framed this way? So that instead of talking about Suzanne Moore's transphobia, we're talking about Suzanne Moore's feelings? I'm not trying to diminish the awful power of online bullying. I acknowledge that call-out culture is crappy. I just don't want Online Social Justice to get into a situation where trans folk and their allies are not allowed to express anger at transphobia.

Of course, we're already in this situation, as this little episode has so vividly demonstrated. Anger is the prerogative of the privileged: which, ironically, was part of what Moore's original piece was about. Women, trans people, people of colour or with disabilities or any other marginalised group you can think of, are incorrectly accused of being angry, no matter how moderately we frame our suggestions that maybe the world's a little bit fucked up. And when we are angry, we're chastised for it, dismissed, as if our anger diminishes our argument.

My gentleman companion has said that, if he wanted to write about social justice issues, he wouldn't, because backlashes like this make it too dangerous: he's sure he'd use that infamous 'one wrong word' and be pilloried by the entire internet.

 

I don't think it's actually that hard. Yeah, I spend a lot of my free time reading a range of social justice blogs, so I know The Right Words to use and The Dreaded Words to be avoided, but, contrary to the political correctness myth, it's not about word choice: it's about the attitudes which inform your choices. So, if you use the T word once without realising that many people regard it as a slur, get corrected, apologise, and never use it again - you're probably fine.* If you instead respond by proclaiming YOUR RIGHT TO OFFEND PEOPLE and YOUR RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH and HOW YOU WILL NOT BE COWED BY A CABAL OF SOME OF THE MOST MARGINALISED PEOPLE IN SOCIETY WITH EXTREMELY LIMITED POWER TO ENFORCE RULES OF DISCOURSE... let's be honest, you're just being a dick.  I won't say you 'deserve' abuse in response, because that would make me a dick too, but you're not exactly King of the Moral High Ground.

(*There is the issue that, if you're going to be writing about this stuff, you have an obligation to research the correct terminology first, but anyway.)

 

Framing matters. Call-out culture and online bullying are a pox on all our houses. Transphobia is still bad. It's pretty fucking exhausting to have to reiterate this shit every day.

"I don't know what that means": why media representation matters

Conversation between my gentleman admirer and myself, Tuesday evening:

GA: "The new David Bowie song is amazing, right?"
Me: "Bowie released a new song? Huh."
GA: "You are literally the last person in the Western world to hear about this. My three year old niece has heard about this. Your mum has heard about this. The queen has heard about this. There are people who have been in comas for the last decade who have heard about this."
Me: "I know loads of stuff. LOADS of stuff. If you really want to go for a knowledge-off, what do you know about the First Balkan War, eh? EH?"

...

Conversation between my gentleman admirer and myself, Thursday evening:

GA: "You know that picture of Harry Styles on Richard Branson's island - "
Me: "Who's Harry Styles?"
GA: "Wow."
Me: "FIRST BALKAN WAR FUCK YOU."

...

This is one of many reasons I enjoy the popular television series Bones. In response to almost any pop culture reference, lead character Dr Temperance Brennan (played by Emily Deschanel) replies, "I don't know what that means." She's socially awkward and conversationally inept and overly literal and often offensive and I love her.

She is, basically, a wonderfully refreshing contrast to every character that the other Deschanel has ever played.

It's unusual that stories get better during the transition from book to screen, but I found Kathy Reichs' books plodding and uninspiring - definitely the least thrilling thrillers I've ever encountered - with none of the zip that enlivens that Detailed Science in the TV show.

What's even more unusual is a female character getting more abrasive, less personable, and more cynical in that transition.

Brennan refers to marriage as "an antiquated institution", frequently professes her lack of interest in a long-term monogamous relationship (though her commitment to the single existence begins to shake on the sixth season), enjoys frequent casual sex, is a vocal atheist, refuses to pander to other people's definitions of how she should behave, performs no emotional drudge-work, is unabashed about proclaiming herself to be attractive, genius-level intelligent and extremely good in the sack. Basically she breaks every single rule in the Sympathetic Female Character Handbook - and is still portrayed as lovable.

Her social ineptitude is played for laughs, sure - but in an affectionate way. The joke is in that it is Not Acceptable to be an openly confident woman, but - in contrast to every other female character I can think of whose confidence is a major facet of their personality - this does not make her a Bitch.

...

It's comforting, somehow, to see a character who reflects elements of yourself in fiction. We're always searching for representations of ourselves - for reassurance that we're normal; to fantasise about living different lives; for that sense of well-being that identifying with another person brings.

It's not that we want characters to be us, exactly - to be honest, a drama about a brown-haired knitter who spends 90% of her free time in bed eating cheese and blogs to deliver herself from frustrations and is undergoing a mid-20s crisis due to her Revolutionary Road/Seth in The OC-style "I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO BE BRILLIANT AT BUT I AM SURE I AM, SOMEHOW" mind-gunge would not, actually, be that much of a thriller, and would probably just make me want to tetris myself to death. But recognising points of commonality with other people is sort of the point of fiction (or one of its points, at least).

And the further the character is from your own experience, the harder you have to work to feel that kinship. So, if you are a lady who fancies ladies but never sees lady-gay kissing on TV, you can still slot yourself into fictional romances, but with a bit more effort. If there's one lady-gay relationship on TV (that kiss on Brookside which SHOOK THE NATION), you have to ignore everything about that relationship that doesn't ring true for your own experiences. If there's a hundred lady-gay romances to choose from (The L Word! That thing about Lipstick! But I'm A Cheerleader! A load of others!) - it's a bit more likely you'll find the one that tugs on your specific heartstrings.

And no, this isn't the only point of fiction, obviously. The flipside of the search for commonality is the search for something new: for instance, I will look for fiction which deals with particular societies, groups of people, historical periods (etc) which I'm interested in learning more about, because it's a low-effort way of getting a grasp on a new topic. For areas I'm already familiar with, it adds depth and humanity to drier, more academic research. In this way, I'm 'using' fiction as a way to learn about people/situations/etc which are different from me, rather than looking for ways in which the characters mirror myself.

But when there's just one of you - the only gay in the village, say, or the only socially inept cynic with different cultural reference points to everyone around you - finding a character who shares those traits can feel like a lifeline.

...


I still don't know who Harry Styles is. I'm okay with that.

Edited to correct the location of The Lady Gay Soap Kiss Which Shook The Nation, and Harry Styles' name, which I managed to get wrong in the process of writing a post on how I didn't know who he is. Styles. Not Stars. Still don't really care.

Where have I been? Will I ever return?

Do excuse the quietness on the oldjawjawing front; I'm lost somewhere in that midwinter lull of 'where has all the sunshine gone?' and duvet-craving sulkiness. It's that really irritating side of depression - the one that isn't "stay up all night analysing everything and coming to the conclusion that it's all shit, but having fun anyway", but more "spending twenty seconds analysing the prospect of going to the shop to buy teabags before coming to the conclusion that nothing is more interesting than sitting in bed playing Tetris for the rest of the day".

Basically, I'm in the middle of a two-month hangover, where the very idea that I have to do anything that involves leaving the house, or switching on a braincell, seems like the biggest pain in the arse ever.

Blogging is coming into that last category.

But my feelings aren't actually that interesting, so I will return when I have managed to string together an idea more complicated than 'fuck off, everything'.

The House I Live In: houses no women

I went to a film screening on Tuesday, in an old warehouse in Hackney, feeling unimaginably cool. They served organic popcorn. Arguably, one could even say, more underground than Girls Aloud.

The film was The House I Live In, by Eugene Jarecki. From the website's blurb:

THE HOUSE I LIVE IN captures heart-wrenching stories at all levels of America’s drug war - from the dealer to the grieving mother, the narcotics officer to the senator, the inmate to the federal judge. Together, these stories pose urgent questions: What caused the war? What perpetuates it? And what can be done to stop it?

It is astonishingly good, with a compelling cast of characters; with heartbreaking stories and academic discussion and cutting statistics expertly wielded to argue its point with devastating skill. Imagine The Wire, in documentary form - and fittingly, David Simon is one of its most impressive talking heads.

But I walked out thinking - and I'll be honest, this is possibly my most used phrase - what about the women? How can a film be so intelligent and incisive about the subtle interplay between class and race in the US blithely skim over the third player in the unholy trinity, the Axis of Evil Oppressions that cut through the lives of virtually every person on the planet?

It's not that women are absent from the film - a fair selection are present as academics, commentators, and interviewees sharing their stories. But just filling a quota doesn't mean that you're engaging with the issues that affect women.

There's a moment where two jaded cops are chatting about how to solve The Drug Problem, and one of them goes off on a rant about how addicts should be "spayed". It's a scene which is played for laughs (laughing at them, not with them), but, as I couldn't stop myself from muttering, "That would be hilarious if they didn't actually do that".

There are a number of cases where women convicted of drug charges have been offered reduced sentences if they agree to use contraceptive implants during a probationary period. Chew on that for a second: quite apart from being a violation of their right to a family life, a violation of their right to control their own fertility, and a fairly obvious eugenicsy attempt to stop the 'wrong' people from breeding - it's also imposing an invasive medical treatment on someone against their will. It's not like saying "you must promise to use condoms for three years" - it's saying "you must accept this implant, and the side effects that go with it, for three years - or you will go to jail". (Common side effects include disruption of the menstrual cycle - I know a girl who had one long period for four months straight after getting this implant - along with nausea, weight gain, headaches, mood swings, anxiety, acne, and depression.)

That's just one little way that gender comes into play in the War On Drugs, just one nugget of information I've gleaned from years spent idling my time away on the feminist blogosphere. I'm guessing that there are about a million other ways that it intersects - but this film wasn't interested in exploring them.

Responding to a less coherent version of the above rant on the bus home, the Flat-Boyfriend argued that gender "wasn't the story they were telling" (while conceding that "it never is"). But it is. It's part of your story, whether you tell it or not, because there is no part of our society that isn't touched by the patriarchy in some way. It's just that too many people don't bother to tell it.

People are the same as each other! Also, people are different to each other! Theory is hard.

When saddling up my social justice steed (his name is Binky), I find it helpful to keep two things in mind:

1. People are pretty much the same
People are just people, you know? They sleep and eat and worry and poop and gawp at the stars and try to do good things, not do bad things, and not put socks in toasters. They fret about their loved ones and fight with their partners and try to make their lives better, whether they are Bedouin ladies living in the Jordanian desert*, or my mother.

It's easy to demonise people when you can put them in a little box marked Other, and see them as entirely defined by the thing that makes them different to you - as if all of the man-gays spend literally 100% of their time having massively gay sex up the chuffer, and all Muslims are just 'all pray all the time'.

Basically, if someone seems to be THE EMBODIMENT OF ALL EVIL, or REPRESENTING THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILISATION, think about them making a sandwich.

"This DASTARDLY FORNICATOR will BRING DOWN HUMANITY by his INIQUITOUS PLAN to MARRY SOMEONE OF THE SAME GENDER! GARRR!"
"His name is Jeff. He and his partner Simon just had a terse exchange of emails about whose turn it is to buy loo roll."
"Erm, EEEVIL... no, I've lost it."

* THIS IS SO AWESOME. WATCH IT. IT WILL FILL YOUR HEART WITH WONDER AND JOY.

2. People are not all the same
And yet! The fact that something is true for you does not mean it is true for everyone else on the planet. For instance, the original version of that sentence above was 'They sleep and eat and worry and lust...' before I remembered, hey, asexual people exist! Something which I see as absolutely fundamental to The Human Condition is in fact completely irrelevant to a significant chunk of humanity. A gentleman may be overjoyed at being approached by an alluring stranger in a lift - but with the situation reversed, a woman is more likely to be edging towards discomfort, if not terror, at being hit on by a guy in an enclosed space with no escape route. Just because I imagine I would find wearing a niqab uncomfortable and demeaning, doesn't mean that's how Muslim ladies who choose to wear it feel.

You can fill in your own examples, I'm sure. People are pretty much the same, despite superficial differences! Also, people are different from each other, and you don't know how they feel about stuff until you ask them! Both true. Both important.

Well, little Jimmy, LIFE isn't fair

Me, 1992: "But, mummy, why don't we just get all the money in the world, and take it down to the South Pole, and count how many people there are in the world and how much money there is in the world and divide it equally between them? Wouldn't that be fair?"

This kid is my imaginary spiritual mentor. "Yeah but WHY?"

 To give my wonderful mother the credit she deserves, in response to this question from her six year old daughter - probably while she was trying to mark some homework, or mow the lawn, or get back to sleep after I'd woken her up at two in the morning - she not only debated the merits of my argument, gave me a brief precis of socialism and communism, and told me stories about getting interrogated at the Czechoslovakian border in the 1970s, but she did not once fall back on that old parental staple: "Well, darling, life isn't fair."

Calling something "childish" is the ultimate conversation-stopper: if your line of argument is deemed childish, it's game over, and you've lost. But, actually, a whole lot of this social justice thing is based on that much-derided, undeniably childish complaint: "It's not fair".

Because it's not fair that women earn less than men across the board, for example. It's also not fair that only the uterus-enabled can make babies, but there's not much we can do about that - but the pay gap? Is eminently fixable.

It's not fair that some people are discriminated against and derided and raped and murdered because they're trans. We can't go back in time and magic them into a body which fits their gender identity, but we can stop fucking them over now.

It's not fair that some people are born with a rare genetic disease and some aren't, but fixing that isn't within our purview: making sure that our buildings and toilets are accessible to them is, because holding our meetings up "just one step" isn't fucking fair.

I could go on, but you get the point, right? No, little Jimmy, life isn't fair, but there's a difference between Unfair Stuff we can't change, and Unfair Stuff we can. Saying "well, suck it up: LIFE isn't fair" is a cop-out. It isn't fair. But we can make it fairer.

the old jaw jaw: now endorsed by Richard Branson *

You know that feeling of complete bewildered disconnect, when something so unutterably bizarre happens, when you're sure you've picked up the wrong life at baggage reclaim?

Yeah, well: Richard Branson is wearing a jumper that I knitted. If you were wondering, it's meant to be a lemur; I've been staring at the damn thing for so long that I'm reasonably sure it looks more like a turkey wrapped in tin foil with the gigantic head of a particularly evil cat, but hey.

It's, uh, a long story. Happy Christmas to you all.

* This blog is not endorsed by Richard Branson. Opinions and sweary words all my own.